But the most compelling aspect of BNCF is its refusal to hold the audience’s hand. Tried-and-true TV tropes such as, you know, likable characters and relatable protagonists are largely swept aside; in their place are people who grow and change and run wild like the overgrown vine that gradually takes over Lisa’s apartment. Characters lie, they obfuscate, they hide their true origins and intentions. The “good guys” are difficult and often dangerous; the “bad guys” reveal hidden depths of genuine emotion; innocent people live or die — well, they mostly die — for no good reason at all. Lisa and Boro are the trickiest of all: The former shape-shifts from a wronged ingenue into a bloody force of nature, while the latter seems to follow none of the codes of behavior that typically govern witches in fiction. It’s impossible to predict what either will do from one moment to the next, let alone from episode to episode.

And everyone — seriously, everyone — is amoral when amorality suits them. That amorality, that sense that deep down in its bones BNCF is decidedly sleazy, is a breath of fresh fucking air. We live in a cultural climate that increasingly demands that its fiction be easy-to-grasp morality plays with protagonists who model good behavior and antagonists who get what’s coming to them. BNCF devotes far more time to watching characters vomit up kittens than learning lessons.

Maybe that’s the real magic of BNCF: All the characters do things that make them “deserve” comeuppance, but when the comeuppance comes, it’s virtually always worse than what they deserve. You can’t make sense of it because, in its hallucinogenic horrors, there’s no sense to be made. There’s no moral to the story beyond what you make of it. During this spooky season, that’s a flavor worth savoring.

I wrote about Nick Antosca & Lenore Zion’s wonderful horror series Brand New Cherry Flavor for Vulture.