Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

CREEPSHOW

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The Shudder series CREEPSHOW pulls together an anthology of horror tales. I’m caught up to the first four episodes (eight stories), and while overall it’s not as strong as I was hoping, it has some real gems, and I was happy to see the series creators pull stories from some of today’s greatest horror fiction authors.

For me, the challenge of this type of series is whether to follow the dark gotcha formula of the original comics, or use the dark justice themes and medium to create something fresh. The majority of the stories go the former route, creating spot-on CREEPSHOW stories that would have been brilliant in the original comics but in some cases felt a bit shallow and fell flat for me as a viewer of today.

For me, two of the stories really stand out. The first is THE MAN IN THE SUITCASE, in which a college student with low ambition winds up taking a suitcase home from the airport with a brutally contorted man stuffed inside. The thing is, if the man feels pain, he spits out golden coins, creating a moral choice: help the man, or milk him to get rich? The simple moral choice in the story skims both horror and dark humor, with a classic horror justice-style ending.

The absolute best story in the anthology so far for me, however, has to be Josh Malerman’s THE HOUSE OF THE HEAD. While the ending didn’t quite pay off for me, the story itself and how it’s told is extremely tense, weird, and creepy. In this story, a girl with an amazing dollhouse discovers a strange little severed head in the living room. The family of dolls in the house appear to react to the strangeness with dread and steadily mounting horror. The girl buys more dolls to try to help the doll family, but things just get worse. I found this story to be extremely titillating and clever while showing a fresh horror sensibility. I’d love to see more like it!

Looking forward to Thursday, when the next episode airs, with stories by Joe Hill and John Esposito. And especially looking forward to John Skipp’s story in the final episode.

MARIANNE (2019)

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MARIANNE, a French horror web TV series now airing on Netflix, is one of the best horror stories I’ve ever seen on a screen, pushing every element of visual storytelling and every advantage of the medium to the max to deliver a superb horror experience that never feels cheap or unearned.

The story introduces us to Emma, a brusque and selfish literary star promoting the final book in her Lizzi Larck series about a girl entangled with an ancient witch. A childhood friend visits her and tells her that her mother is possessed by the very witch she’s been writing about. This leads Emma to return to Elden, her hometown, and a duel with a very real Marianne. Did her writing produce Marianne, or did Marianne influence Emma to write about her?

Along the way, we meet her long-suffering assistant, childhood friends, and estranged parents, along with a quirky police inspector and an irascible priest. Through Emma’s interactions with these people, we learn the source of her past trauma and pain that led to her becoming who and what she is. She gains support from them in her fight with the witch, though they’re weakly matched for what they’re up against, as is she for the most part.

While some lighter moments and mild touches of humor are seeded into the fast-paced narrative, the horror rarely flags, and it’s almost always effective. Not a single punch is pulled. Very clever camera work, effects, and spooky situations provide genuine scares without cheap jump scares and other tricks. The acting, particularly among those influenced by Marianne, is terrific. An enormous care and not a little artistry went into every scene to create just the right effect here, the right transition there, the right pacing, atmosphere, and level of tension.

Overall, I liked it far better than most American horror shows. While the ending suggests a second season is in the offing, I don’t think the show needs it. It’s excellent just as it is, and I ended the first season completely satisfied with the story.

MINDHUNTER Season 2

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In the second season of MINDHUNTER, FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), along with psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), interview another round of notorious serial killers before putting their theories to an extreme test in the Atlanta Child Murders case. It’s not as interestingly wonky about psychology as the first season, and there are fewer riveting serial killer interviews, but overall I thought it was gripping, realistic, and excellent.

In this season, Bill and Wendy get as much if not more screen time than Holden, fleshing out the story and making it more about the unit than Holden’s journey. An interesting development is that the FBI is now completely supportive of the new Behavioral Sciences Unit, giving it resources, embracing its thinking, and expecting results. Holden and Bill revisit Ed Kemper (brilliantly portrayed by Cameron Britton) and interview Charles Manson (a fantastic scene) and David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer. During the Atlanta Child Murders, the agents are challenged by applying their theories in the real world, faced by accusations of prejudice (for profiling), local politics, bureaucratic incompetence and red tape, and a very savvy killer. Nothing is gained in this show without there being a personal or professional cost.

MINDHUNTER is great TV, and I’m excited about the third season, which I hope doesn’t take as long to air. It took an overworn trope–the FBI agent who puts himself in the mind of a serial killer–and completely reinvented it as something fresh and more than fresh, something real and believable. It also shows us once again how a smart show can be fantastic entertainment, following other great TV shows in raising the bar.

STRANGER THINGS Season 3

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Season 3 of STRANGER THINGS (Netflix) flirts with jumping the ’80s nostalgia shark but doesn’t, focusing on great characters, great storytelling, and fresh themes to produce another winning season.

In Season 3, the kids are older and leaving childhood (and their dark past) behind, while the small town of Hawkins is undergoing its own change as the new Starcourt Mall ravages local businesses. Unfortunately, strange things are once again afoot, this time by the Soviets, who are trying to build their own dimensional gate. The rift has already allowed enough of the Mindflayer to get into our world to begin infecting local townspeople toward an apocalyptic end. Now it’s up to Hopper, Joyce, and the kids to band together to save the world once again.

This season was a real delight, as the show is evolving to revisit old themes while providing fresh material and character development. Everything about the show has great integrity to it, even the heavy ’80s references and nods to films like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and THE TERMINATOR. The kids are cute but this isn’t overplayed either, thank God. (It’s weird how well the Duffer brothers write kids, as in interviews with them and the child actors, they are super awkward around actual children.) The three main story lines are each enjoyable on their own and come together perfectly at the end in a show that is an example of textbook storytelling.

Then there’s Robin, played by the beautiful and hilarious Maya Hawke (Ethan Hawke’s daughter), who along with Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) steal the show as kids working an ice cream shop who crack an intercepted Russian code and discover the Soviet base. Their scenes were the best part for me.

Overall, two thumbs up for this season of STRANGER THINGS, and I’m looking forward to the big finale next year.

THE DARK Season 2

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I enjoyed season 1 of THE DARK and looked forward to the second season of this German science fiction thriller series watchable on Netflix. Where the first season sets up all sorts of spooky plot questions based around a time travel portal in the woods near a small town, the second season answers much of the mystery while going for broke on the premise. The result is engaging and fun, though it comes close to flirting with the ridiculous extremes of LOST and feeling at times like a sci-fi soap opera.

The second season picks up where the first left off, with various characters trying to understand the connection between disappearances in the town now and 33 years earlier, or becoming time travelers themselves and players in a contest between two warring sides. One side wants to end the cycle of time loops that culminate in the apocalypse, the other wants the apocalypse to occur but save a certain portion of humanity. I think that’s the case, it’s actually not clear, nor is it entirely clear who the good and bad guys are.

The show is a real workout for the brain. Because the time travel occurs in 33-year jumps, the story plays out in 1920-21, 1953-54, 1986-87, 2019-20, and 2052-53, after the end of the world. As a result, you see characters at different times in their life–as children, adults, and seniors. There are numerous characters and family relationships to track. Then you have the mystery of the time travel itself, how it works and its influence on events.

A great deal of the fun of the show is in the bootstrap paradox. This is where time travel reverses cause and effect such that events seem to create themselves with no discernible origin. For example, suppose you’re about to die, but future-you comes back and saves you in the nick of time. The paradox is that in linear time, you should have died, so future-you would not exist to save you. ARRIVAL plays with the same idea. The concept is milked to full effect in THE DARK, which I found as frustrating as fun if not more so, as it eliminates cause and effect, and the show starts to rely on constant emotionally heavy, paradox-based reveals until every character is heavily involved in the time travel and the plot starts to become meaningless while producing yet another paradox. Time travel changes everything, but everything must happen as it always has in the loop.

In the end, THE DARK is a fun ride. The characters are likeable, the science fiction aspect and its mystery are compelling, and the writers tease out a good combination of mystery and reveal.

THE TERROR (2018)

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Based on the novel by Dan Simmons, THE TERROR, which originally aired on AMC and I caught on Amazon Prime, offers a horror take on Captain Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic in 1845–1848. Driven by strong characters and a powerful cast, the show brilliantly combines a supernatural monster element with actual historical events rendered with rich accuracy and realism.

The show begins with two British warships, which have been converted into the most technologically advanced exploring vessels of the age. Their mission is to explore the Arctic in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, which would offer a dramatically shorter trade route between the United Kingdom and China. Leading the expedition are Captain Crozier of the TERROR (Jared Harris, rapidly becoming one of my favorite actors), Captain Franklin (the great Ciaran Hinds) of the EREBUS, and Franklin’s second, Commander Fitzjames (the solid Tobias Menzies). We also get to know many other crew members, all of them distinct and likeable or detestable.

Franklin is out for glory and rashly commits the ships to a route that freezes up and leaves the ships icebound, against the advice of Crozier, who is the more practical of the two but also haunted by his failings to the point of struggling with a drinking problem. Things are bad enough as the crew is forced to winter in the Arctic, but after a local native is killed, a strange creature appears and begins hunting them one by one.

The real horror element isn’t the creature, however, but the cold, the refusal of the ice to thaw, the deteriorating rations, and the resulting madness and starvation that slowly tears the crew apart and turns them from honor- and duty-bound Englishmen into savages. Fear in all its guises is on full display in this show, as the men continually face an impossible and steadily worsening situation and struggle to maintain duty and compassion. The result is powerful, heartbreaking drama.

In short, the show is brilliant. While it decisively concluded as a miniseries, based on its popularity, its makers are turning it into an anthology show, with the second season set in a Japanese internment camp during WW2. I highly recommend it.