Part of the problem with Before’s barely-half-an-hour run time and the resulting pacing of the storytelling is that you feel like you might have covered just this much ground in, like, an episode and a half of an hour-long drama about the exact same topic. However, now that we’ve got enough of the show under our belt, the vision is becoming more apparent. I still can’t say Before is scary, and that’s the biggest knock on it; horror TV shows should frighten you, full stop. But I do find the supernatural mystery becoming more compelling as the wriggly, wormy shape of it comes into focus. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

One thing I’m realizing is that keeping us guessing like this is an artifact of the show’s running time. An unusual half-hour drama — I don’t think Apple TV+ will be submitting this one for Best Comedy, The Bear–style — it’s also an even more unusual half-hour supernatural mystery thriller. What this means is every thirty minutes or so, it’s got to end on a cliffhanger that raises more questions than it answers to keep us moving through all ten episodes, instead of doing so every sixty minutes or so to move us through the same number of episodes or fewer. 

In other words, writer-creator Sarah Thorp all but designed Before to deny us answers. The mysteries add up one on top of the other until it’s tune in next week, same Before-time, same Before-channel. For a while, anyway, we’re gonna be as in the dark as Eli. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

In the meantime, the show is most artistically successful in Eli’s dreams. Whatever else you think of what is going on, and whatever you think of Crystal’s performance (I like it but I don’t feel he’s had the chance to do much nuanced work with this material yet), the man repeatedly dreams of being maimed and killed — by Noah, by Lynn, by himself. That’s the depth of desperation and darkness beneath the surface-level warmth everyone seems drawn to in Eli. I wonder how much Noah and the phenomena surrounding him will drag up to the light.

I reviewed the second episode of Before for Decider.

But the focal point of the episode remains Eli’s attempts to figure out what’s going on with his patient. A harrowing MRI goes awry when the boy hallucinates one of those black-goop tentacle-worm things, a tiny one this time, extruding from the top of the chamber and slithering into his IV wound. I so wish they’d taken the time to use practical effects for an image that inherently squirmy and uncomfortable; the CGI just doesn’t feel viscerally frightening and gross the way it needs to. (Being more creepy than actually scary is a consistent problem for the show.)

I reviewed the second episode of Before for Decider.

Weird kid. Dead wife. Bloody bathtub. Black goop. Creepy tentacles. Recurring nightmares. Scary drawings. Cursed cabin. The series premiere of Before, the new psychological-supernatural thriller from writer-creator Sarah Thorp, feels a little like it went into the horror store and said “I’ll take one of everything.” With nine half-hour-or-so episodes to go after this one, there’s only one question to ask: Will the whole add up to more than the some of its parts?

I reviewed the first episode of the new Billy Crystal/Judith Light supernatural/psychological thriller Before for Decider.

Shelley Duvall had some of the most beautiful eyes in Hollywood history; Bette Davis eyes, Ella Purnell eyes, Emma Stone eyes, Anya Taylor-Joy eyes. Indeed many of her early roles counted on the sex appeal those eyes radiated. But by taking on Wendy Torrance, Duvall showed she was fully aware of her physical instrument’s full range of capabilities. The same eyes that seduced half the male cast of Nashville, say, could also be used to convince an unsuspecting audience that your son was communicating with the spirit world, that your dry-drunk husband had gotten into a spectral bottle and grabbed a weapon to wield against you, that things had gone so wrong that the world itself is bleeding. That’s a special gift, one without which — without Shelley Duvall —  the greatest horror movie ever made would be measurably less great. 

I wrote about Shelley Duvall’s tremendous performance as Wendy Torrance in The Shining for Decider.

As a screen presence, Santiago needs that kind of ammo. He has to hold his own with the “big four” members of the show’s emotional quadrangle, Louis, Lestat [Sam Reid], Claudia and Armand [Assad Zaman], even though he’s not romantically or emotionally involved with any of them.

[Smiling] Is he not?

Well, well, well!

This was one of the first jobs I’ve ever done sight unseen, just because it meant working with Rolin. From the outset, Rolin called up and said, “Listen, are you OK if we don’t make Santiago queer?” I was like, “Yeah, I can sort of see it.”

But as the script started to come in, I thought the only way this level of vitriol that he has works is if he’s in love with Armand. There is this extraordinary psychological term called reaction formation, which is what Iago has for Othello. It’s a defense mechanism whereby your impulses are so unacceptable to your ego that they’re replaced by this opposite, exaggerated behavior.

Santiago finds Louis incredibly attractive. Because Armand killed Santiago’s maker — who I think he was in love with too — and also finds Louis attractive, the whole thing must be destroyed. It gave such a drive to his hatred. It was just something ruminating in myself that drove him forward in a very aggressive, mad, extreme way.

Here’s a gift link to my interview with the magnificent Ben Daniels about his delightful work as Santiago on this season of Interview with the Vampire. He was extremely gracious and generous with his time and emotion, as you’ll see. It’s one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done.

I’ll note here that Deborah Ayorinde has delivered one of my favorite performances of the year, amid competition that’s already very stiff. The dynamic range of emotional intensity she can convey with the way she holds her eyes, her nose, her mouth alone is astonishing, all the more so for how simple she makes it look. At the drop of a hat she can be a mother driven to reckless anger, an abuse survivor seeing the true story of her young life play out, a doppelgänger embodying only her worst qualities, a horror-movie character watching as a malevolent creature slowly approaches.

I reviewed the finale of Them: The Scare for Decider.

Whatever else it is, the penultimate installment of Them: The Scare is one of the most visually accomplished episodes of television to air this year. Directing a script by Scott Kosar, creator Little Marvin employs a variety of striking visual techniques to create the sense that for Dawn Reeve and her family, the walls are closing in; Marvin makes this all but literal by adjusting the frame to the comparatively claustrophobic dimensions of an old TV screen. 

But limiting the characters’ room to maneuver is just one of Little Marvin’s tricks. He tints the screen blood red for the characters’ nightmarish visions. He breaks out a split diopter shot straight out of classic Hollywood to heighten the painful melodrama between Athena and Dawn. He uses dissolves, overlays, and slowly spinning images to fade us from one image and scene to another in a hypnagogic rhythm. There’s a Vertigo shot, a camera attached to a car door, static horrors placed at the center of the frame in  monumental horror-image style. Why settle for just being scary when you can be scary and gorgeous, too?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Them: The Scare for Decider.

When the showdown comes, who will be there? Who can you count on to have your back? In episode six of Them: The Scare, our heroes find out the hard way. 

I reviewed the sixth episode of Them: The Scare for Decider.

In the season’s riveting fifth installment (“Luke 8:17”), the riffs come fast and furious. A sequence involving Edmund ringing the doorbell and Dawn answering it deceptively cross-cuts between two separate incidents to make them seem like they’re the same scene when they aren’t, as Jonathan Demme did in The Silence of the Lambs. Edmund’s Raggedy Andy doll talks to him in voice that’s somehow both absurd and incredibly menacing at the same time, the way the neighbor’s dog talks to David Berkowitz in Spike Lee’s overlooked Scorsese-style serial-killer drama Summer of Sam. A supernatural killer who stalks the sleeping, folds children up in their beds, and kills while invisible to everyone but his victims is on the loose, like no less august a slasher than Freddy freaking Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. A murderous asshole beats a man to a pulp in the middle of nowhere as he begs for mercy, then ditches the battered and mutilated body, like something out of Scorsese’s own Casino — a gangster flick, sure, but one that dips deeper into horror than all but a few of the modern master’s movies.

The reason all of this actually works, rather than feeling like someone’s horror Pinterest board, is because creator Little Marvin, director Guillermo Navarro, and writer Tony Saltzman are filtering all this previous work through a sensibility and a story very much of its own. Folding the aesthetics of Demme, Lee, Craven, and Scorsese — the horrors of Buffalo Bill, Son of Sam, Freddy Krueger, and Frank Vincent — into the framework of turn-of-the-‘90s Black Los Angeles culture makes a powerful statement. It’s a way of wresting existing culture into a shape of one’s choosing, which is what the greats do.

I reviewed episode five of Them: The Scare for Decider.

In an episode that involves the discovery of a vast network of Nazis inside the LAPD and the birth of a bone-mangling serial killer in the back of a Chuck E. Cheese, I’m not sure how much attention anyone will be paying to needle drops. But under the dreamy direction of horror specialist Axelle Carolyn and the superb music supervision of Christopher T. Mollere, a crate-digging music cue provided the backdrop for my favorite shots of the Them: The Scare Episode 4. The song is “Free” by Deniece Williams, and as its gossamer introduction floats over the soundtrack, the faces of Dawn Reeve and Edmund Gaines as they drive through the lights of the Los Angeles night fade in and out, to and fro. It doesn’t advance the story. It isn’t scary. It’s merely beautiful.

I reviewed episode four of Them: The Scare for Decider.

The way I see it, there are three theories as to who, or what, is killing people in Them: The Scare, and all three get a turn in the spotlight in the season’s third episode.

I reviewed episode three of Them: The Scare for Decider.

On a completely different note, Reeve is a character with some zip to her. There’s a marvelous moment in the first episode where she throws away a birthday card from her ex-husband, the father of her kid, without reading it. She doesn’t seem furious or jilted or anything like that. It’s more that she’s like, well, okay, he remembered my birthday, that’s nice, it’s the thought that counts, I’ve now acknowledged the thought, let’s move on. She’s neither a pushover nor a grudge-holder. She’s just living her life.

I reviewed episode two of Them: The Scare for Decider.

There’s an old maxim about how only the very rich and the very poor can afford to make great art, since they’re the only ones with nothing to lose. Perhaps that’s why Amazon’s Prime Video, the creative fiefdom of the richest man in show business (or any business), is the most adventurous streamer out there when it comes to original programming. In shows like Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad; Ed Brubaker and Nicholas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young; Leonardo Fasoli, Mauricio Kartz, and Stefano Sollima’s ZeroZeroZero; and Alice Birch’s Dead Ringers, Prime has pushed the content envelope farther than I ever thought it would go on television. These shows have more in common with arthouse or extreme cinema than they do with Succession. They are challenging viewing, but for viewers who love a challenge, they’re a godsend.

To this group we can safely (if anything about this show can be said to be safe) add Them. Conceived of as an anthology series by writer-creator Little Marvin, the show debuted in 2021 with a season subtitled Covenant and bristling with some of the most harrowing and horrific violence ever aired on TV. Since almost all of the terror, even the supernatural elements, comes heavily freighted with anti-Black racist animus, Them is doubly upsetting. Watching that first season is like fighting a battle wielding a sword without a hilt: You can emotionally survive it, but not intact.

I reviewed the season premiere of Them: The Scare for Decider.

The idea that we hoi polloi see the ruling class who lord over us as louche, overindulgent, perverse, and dangerous is nothing new. It is, after all, as clear how Edgar Allan Poe felt about Prince Prospero and his revelers as it is how Mike Flanagan feels about Prospero Usher and his. But in the main, television’s swipes at the ultrarich have been satirical and visually straightforward, and have preferred to keep violence to a sanitized minimum. Succession is a very nice-looking show, as is The White Lotus (2021– ), but they don’t feel as though the depravity of the characters has seeped through into the stuff of the filmmaking itself.

The New Lurid, by contrast, gives television auteurs and viewers alike a new narrative and visual vocabulary, one commensurate with the degeneracy of our overlords as represented by the characters to which they often directly correspond. Like a televisual vanitas, it is sensual but death-haunted, lush to the point of rottenness, like a once-magnificent family finally, terminally, gone to seed.

I wrote about Copenhagen Cowboy, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Idol, Dead Ringers, and a genre I like to call “The New Lurid” — overheated, oversaturated, oversexed tales of depravity and violence among the entropic elite and its interlopers; think “Saltburncore” — for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The real reason I don’t want True D S3 to go for broke in that direction is this: I don’t think this show has the chops to be genuinely frightening. It’s jumpscared me a few times — the mystery man still running around the station at the beginning of episode 1, the first appearance of Travis (Erling Eliasson), the car crash, various characters pulling jumpscare pranks on various other characters, and of course the fact that one of the frozen scientists turns out to be alive and screaming. But to dig deep into the true black, the cosmic void, the annihilating evil at the heart of all truly great supernatural horror? I don’t see The Exorcist or Under the Skin or The Shining or The Blair Witch Project or Skinamarink in here. I don’t see Twin Peaks or The Terror or Channel Zero here — or True Detective Season 1, for that matter. I don’t think this season’s horror, such as it is, is going to horrify me, and that’s important.

I reviewed this week’s episode of True Detective for Decider.

The Siegel house, intended to evoke comfort, safety, and the capital-G Good life due to its fancy pants and ultimately pointless “passive house” environmental certification, is where you feel that malevolence the strongest. The place the Siegels themselves designed to make them feel their safest and best is where they are most keenly and cruelly observed by the camera, and where they are, in the end, most harshly punished by whatever force exists to do so in their world. The family home is central to the middle-class dream; it is just as central to the nightmare of surveillance cinema.

I wrote about the “surveillance cinema” of Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, and Alan Resnick’s This House Has People in It for the Welcome to Hell World newsletter. Scroll down to read it!

My illustrious co-host Stefan Sasse and I will be covering each week of True Detective Season 4 in our latest subscriber-only review series for the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. Check out our thoughts on the premiere!

Some of the best, sweetest, sexiest, most convincing romantic storytelling being done on TV this year is happening on — get this — Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I know! I didn’t see it coming either! But first with May and Kentaro, then with Kei and Lee, and now with Kei and Billy, this show has given the blossoming of romance the kind of casual intimacy and heat that makes you crave the stuff in the first place. That this week’s expert demonstration of yearning and desire involves the younger version of a crackpot character played by John Goodman and eaten by a monster in a film called Kong: Skull Island is part of the fun.

I reviewed this week’s Monarch for Decider.