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Posted on May 4, 2018

10 Tales from the Crypt Episodes Every Horror Fan Should See

Ask any horror fan of a certain age their favorite scary anthology series and odds are they are going to reference Tales from the Crypt. Because the show originally ran on HBO, no content was off the table which meant that gore, nudity, and profanity was in ample supply. This led to varied storytelling that incorporated all the major subgenres of horror while also providing a running through line of satire, largely courtesy of the show’s sarcastic mascot Cryptkeeper (voiced brilliantly by John Kassir).

Awhile back, I started a rewatch of the series in anticipation of M. Night Shyamalan’s expected reboot for TNT. And while, sadly, that revival never got off the ground, it did provide me a perfect excuse to revisit a childhood favorite. All seasons of Tales from the Crypt are now streaming on Amazon – and specific links are below. Read more

Posted on March 11, 2018

Horror Visits Little House on the Prairie

Elizabeth Erwin

Ask anyone who grew up watching Little House on the Prairie what is the most traumatizing image they recollect from the show’s run and you’re likely to get a surprisingly wide array of answers. From Caroline almost taking a knife to her leg while in the throes of a fevered infection to Alice screaming and trying in vain to shatter glass as she and baby Adam burned in a fire, the show contains more than a few moments that call into question its cultural legacy of family friendliness. These moments aside, however, the show never delved into explicitly horror territory until its seventh season when a two-part episode entitled “Sylvia” leveraged the genre’s tropes to completely rewrite audience expectation. Read more

Posted on June 3, 2016

Outcast: “These things are all around us”

Dawn Keetley

Airing on Cinemax on Friday June 3, the first episode of Outcast promises a thoroughly compelling new television series, the most compelling I’ve seen in a while.

Based on the comic of the same name written by Robert Kirkman (and in this opening episode, at least, the series is quite faithful to the comic), Outcast is not unlike Kirkman’s better-known epic, The Walking Dead—although the bleakness of Outcast seems more unrelieved, the characters and landscape more monochrome. Even though the world as we know it is not actually over yet in Outcast, the desolation seems more palpable—perhaps because the world is ending in a way that cuts a bit closer to home than the zombie apocalypse. Despite that difference, Outcast and The Walking Dead are similar in that each takes a violent and easily sensationalized horror subgenre (exorcism, zombies) and weaves it into the fabric of everyday life, creating a horror narrative that relies on realism to induce dread.

At the center of Outcast is Kyle Barnes (played brilliantly by Patrick Fugit). Kyle is the titular “outcast,” although the first episode ends without shedding light on what exactly that means. Kyle has returned to Rome, West Virginia, and is living alone in his childhood home on the outskirts of the dying town. Read more

Posted on July 13, 2015

AMC’s Humans Review: The 21st-century Stepford Wives?

Dawn Keetley

Having watched two episodes of AMC’s intriguing new series, Humans (on Sunday nights at 9), I have been struck with how eerily similar it is to the 1975 horror-thriller, The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes). Humans is a British-American co-production, running for eight episodes, and based on the award-winning Swedish drama, Real Humans. It is, on the one hand, obviously sci-fi, yet it also partakes of horror, I argue, in that is fundamentally about the dread of an uncertain identity and the terrifyingly tenuous boundaries of the human. Who are we? Who are those around us? Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) famously took up these questions—and, more recently, so did The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012). As Marty (Fran Kranz) says, “We are not who we are.” The larger question horror asks is: Are we ever?

Posted on June 5, 2015

NBC’s Hannibal Review: Visual Horror at its Finest

Elizabeth Erwin

Season 3, Episode 1

Episode Title: “Antipasto”

Prior to this season of Hannibal, creator Bryan Fuller promised that the first few episodes would serve as mini films designed to reset the series. Last night’s foray into Hannibal (Mads Mikkelson) and Bedelia’s (Gillian Anderson) life on the run in Europe certainly fit the bill as we spent the entire hour with the two and heard not a peep from anyone remotely affiliated with the FBI. The decision to hone in on the couple and their complicated relationship helped to solidify the evolving nature of these two characters while also suggesting that the coming season will upend our expectations as to where the true horror of the series resides. With its hallucegenic quality and its languid plotting, “Antipasto” is easily one of the show’s finest hours.