Halloween falls on Saturday this year, which is traditionally the least watched night for television. Perhaps this is appropriate. In 2015, TV can be many things that are appropriate for the party: shocking, terrifying, sticky-sweet, overcommercialized, and deeply, deeply gross. But one thing he always struggles with is fear. Don’t you believe me? Take a moment to consider: What is the last regular TV show that was actually scary? I don’t mean scary in bits and pieces, like one of Leatherface’s victims. I mean a show that is scary from top to bottom, from start to finish. And I mean a show other than, say, The dads.
This is not a criticism, but a fact of life. Movies, with their contained running times, are especially good at sustaining mood. When you take your seat for a horror movie, you essentially agree to be on the edge of it for 90 to 120 minutes. TV, by its very nature, demands a diversity of pitch and tone. Viewers cannot be asked to hold their breath for eight, 10, or even 22 hours per season. Try and they will be dead even before your show. Instead, traditional TV has had to play on the margins of horror, building entire series out of the generally underappreciated scraps and scraps from the Fangoria crowd: the slow and agonizing accumulation; the stolid, yeomanlike investigation; the long denouement is painful. (Or, as in the case of Fox’s smarmy Scream Queens, the idea that a sneer can hurt deeper than a knife.) A scary movie is a tour through a haunted house. A scary TV show is more than a haunted time. There should be at least occasional nods to amenities like comfort and humor because, let’s be honest, you’ll be here a while.
If someone is going to crack the horror code on TV, I’d expect it to be a pay service like HBO or Netflix, with their unlimited makeup budgets and the freedom to micro-target audiences with the precision of a serial killer. But the two most successful series to challenge the primacy of horror cinema are both from the diabolical Jigsaws on basic cable. FX American Horror Storystill killing the ratings in its fifth iteration, it’s probably the closest TV has ever come to the specificity and sustained insanity of the film. Part of that is due to the show’s creative casting and unquenchable thirst for extremes. But let’s be honest: The most noteworthy aspect of AHS it’s not the bearded woman, it’s the length of each season. By limiting each cycle to 13 hours and a single story, the discordant note of the show can sound like a symphony. One does not look AHS as much as one he commits himself to him
AMC The walking dead is even more noteworthy. It’s not just television far and away most popular show Among the highly coveted 18 to 34-year-old demographic, it pretty much just confirmed every idea laid out in my opening paragraph. Where most serialized dramas create a world and, over time, expand into it, adding characters, nuances and layers, The walking dead it has a guillotine where the engine of the story should be. He has no interest in saving the world or curing the zombie outbreak. Instead, it sets the base camp at the crushing moment when most dystopian films end, plunging into heartbreak, violence and loss. “It’s all fucked up” isn’t a traditional TV starting point, but then again, The walking dead it is not a traditional series. His remarkable expertise in areas often considered ancillary – sound design, visual effects, editing and casting – helped sustain him, even when the plot veers decidedly into a sort of sadistic nihilism. And, in a perverse way, the blurred consistency of The walking dead – no matter what happens, someone is bitten every week – that’s precisely what saves it as a TV show. At this point, the constant, gruesome suffering has become as reliable as a laugh track.
Gene Page/AMC
This Sunday’s controversial episode really cemented it further The walking deadthe connection with the rest of the TV. In the era of Jon Snow, beloved shows have far exceeded the limits of their time slots. Fandom is a full contact sport that runs around the clock, season be damned. This showrunner Scott M. Gimple he had to qualify a major death – and thus put on his own dramatic narrative a few minutes after putting in motion – was further proof that the eye of the game no longer works in a world where everyone plays at such a high level. Hon The walking dead, man can only be a great companion for the zombie masses. But in reality, these characters are intimate, welcomed into our home every week. A modern showrunner can, and should, screw it up. But we must remember to respect them.
Despite this misstep, my main takeaway from “Grazie” was admiration. Although there are still plenty of lenses to choose from The walking dead, I am very impressed by the show’s ability to exploit difficult and fast emotions such as anxiety, stress, and despair, and corral them within the limits of a weekly series. The panicked, almost drugged state of flight Nicholas fell into as an impossible horde of zombies surrounded him was contagious. I’m not saying I can relate to the choice he made in that moment – but, God, who could blame me? Again and again, I found the sheer scale of this season of The walking dead deeply disturbing; Death has long been ever-present, but rarely so monumental or, apparently, inevitable. This relentlessness is radical for television, and especially for Sunday night television, which has long been the focus of the country’s viewing week. It’s a pivot that helped The walking dead it becomes the scariest show on TV in more than a literal sense; it wreaks havoc on the emotions now, not just the guts.
On Saturday night, just when most kids will be home counting their candy, two fresh and raunchy series will premiere, each trying to keep the jack-o’-lantern lights on until November . Although SundanceTV The Returned is back for a second season – I loved the first – it’s Starz Ash vs Evil Dead which is really the more familiar of the pair. That’s because it takes a baggy story that first began in 1978, when two frustrated Midwestern drama dorks named Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell filmed a bloody short called. Inside the forest. From that splattery fragment came a cult empire: a trilogy of beloved moviesplus a bunch of video games, comics, and unlimited opportunities for cosplay. The only connective tissue between it all: Raimi’s inimitable aesthetic and Raimi’s inimitable aesthetic and Campbell’s performance as Ashley “Ash” Williams, a one-handed Everyguy in possession of a spirit-summoning. Necronomicon. When the ghouls come calling, Ash is usually there to dispatch them with a one-line fusillade and shotgun shells. No more mountains to climb on the big screen (a cinematic reboot fizzled in 2013) and no more Spider-Man ballroom dancing to choreograph, the two took their trademark chainsaw to their only remaining frontier: the small screen.
Here’s the thing Ash vs Evil Dead: That’s good. Better yet, it’s fun in a goofy, infectious way that’s the polar opposite The walking deadhe faces her with a frown. You don’t need to be familiar with the franchise’s history or humor before tuning in. I will say that the opening montage of Campbell, now 57, trying to tighten his belt is a nice introduction, as is the scene in which a Michigan detective (Jill Marie Jones) is attacked by a poltergeist who he twists his neck as his head finally explodes with the force and speed of the liquid of one of Gallagher’s overripe melons. What is great Ash vs Evil Dead It’s not that he doesn’t take himself seriously – but, come on, he doesn’t totally. He picks and chooses very carefully the details should to take it seriously. So Campbell—still the Iberico de Bellota of B-movie jams—thinks about Ash’s Chaplinesque pratfalls as much as he does the chainsaw swagger. And Raimi, who directed the first hour and co-wrote or produced the remaining nine, imbues each high-jumping, thrashing demon with gravitas and intelligence. With its severed limbs and references to Shabbos dinner, this is not your father’s horror show. It’s your crazy uncle. And I thank God for that.
At the complete other end of the spectrum is The Returned. If Ash vs Evil Dead is a spouting artery of joyful gore, the French series is rigor mortis itself. In the first season, the inhabitants of a remote mountain town were unsettled when their dead relatives suddenly came back to life, seemingly untouched and frozen at the age they had expired. So: a teenage girl is suddenly connected to her teenage twin, a young mother is visited by her boyfriend who committed suicide while she was pregnant, a bar owner who happily buried his murderous brother years ago must find a way to accept his orbit again. It’s a bold premise, to be sure, and a lesser show would have buckled under the pressure to provide answers. But the beauty of The Returned it was the uncomfortable way in which he asked his heavy questions, the way that allowed his impossible dream of a premise to curdle, subtly and slowly, into a harsh nightmare.
In season 2, The Returned it still remains puzzling and elliptical. Few shows are so beautifully beautiful; its palette of ghostly grays and a harsh, metallic light suggests the work of an impressionist T-1000. And the music, once again composed by Scottish noise poets Mogwai, is subtle and devastating. A flood washed away the city, and the dead set up their own society in the mountains. The imminent arrival of Adèle’s (Clotilde Hesme) child – she was impregnated last season by the dead Simon (Pierre Perrier) – is what drives the plot, but, the truth is, the plot seems almost secondary in a such a strange landscape. In truth, The Returned it’s not scary so much as haunted. In a show like this, it’s the living who slowly drop their masks to reveal the scarred monsters that lie beneath. The supernatural is really only a mirror for the frightening possibilities of human nature. It’s this psychological dismemberment, not the bloodier, more literal kind, that television has historically excelled at. That’s because, when a movie ends, you can quickly walk out of the theater and retreat to the tranquility of the house. On TV, the scariest sights always come from within the house
