When I think about Stephen King’s The Stand, which I have done with some frequency since I first read it in 1994, there’s one passage that always leaps out at me. It’s a description of the novel’s villain, Randall Flagg, a bad guy with such a magnetic presence that King would reuse him across nearly a dozen other books and stories in various guises. In The Stand he’s effectively the Anti-Christ, an ancient, grinning, denim-clad psychopath with magical powers. With little or no knowledge of who and what he really was, Flagg wove in and out of 20th Century America’s violent fringe movements — he was a member of the group that kidnapped and brainwashed Patti Hearst, for example — before emerging to lead a totalitarian nation-state based in Las Vegas (!) after a weaponized flu virus wipes out over 99 percent of the world’s population.

It’s during this phase of his life, which we experience in the pages of The Stand, that Flagg takes unto him his bride, a schoolteacher named Nadine Cross, who for reasons unclear (to her, him, and the reader) had been destined all her life to wind up in his clutches. During the grotesque and violent consummation of their relationship, his human shape melts away, revealing the demon beneath. This shatters Nadine’s sanity, but it also provides her with piercingly clear vision of this supposedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful entity’s chief limitation: He’s a moron.

…and now it was the shaggy face of a demon lolling just above her face, a demon with glaring yellow lamps for eyes, windows into a hell never even considered, and still there was that awful good humor in them, eyes that had watched down the crooked alleys of a thousand tenebrous night towns; those eyes were glaring and glinting and finally stupid.

Forgive me for the oft-repeated comparison I am about to make — I am but a writer of thinkpieces, and such is our lot — but does that sound like anyone you know?

I wrote about Stephen King’s The Stand and Our Present Moment for the Outline.

Listen to me try to convince my Boiled Leather Audio Hour co-host Stefan Sasse that horror movies and pro wrestling are worth watching in the latest episode of the patreon-exclusive Boiled Leather Audio Conversation podcast!

Horror is a genre of worst-case scenarios, narrowly avoided or not. The monster must feed, the slasher must kill, the demon must possess, the alien must infect, and we mortals, we normals, must defend and escape or die trying. There’s a reason that one of the most recently popular and influential movies in the category named itself after this imperative, boiled down to two simple words: Get Out.

Not all horror stories work that way. In some, the protagonist does not escape from or kill the beast, but nor is she simply killed in turn. In these stories, the protagonist enters into a state of communion with the very horror that has spent the rest of the movie threatening her life and her sanity. The process may be voluntary or not. The embrace of the evil may be gleeful or reluctant, and the outcome may be triumphant or tragic. But in the end, the dangerous, deranging, demonic forces at work are greeted not as destroyers, but as liberators, freeing the human protagonist from his human concerns once and for all, the life he once led forgotten in favor of a supernatural, superhuman new state of existence.

This is transcendental horror: stories that climax with the protagonist entering a state of ecstatic or enlightened union with the source of the horror they’ve experienced.

I wrote about a phenomenon I’m calling Transcendental Horror for The Outline. It’s extensively spoilery, but if you’ve enjoyed any recent horror movies it’s worth taking a peek!

Now here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write today: The season finale of The Terror: Infamy moved me to tears.

Wait, what? We’re talking about the same The Terror: Infamy that squandered its predecessor season’s goodwill by shoddily cobbling together warmed-over J-horror with real-world historical atrocities? The one that employed a central supernatural metaphor that appeared to place the blame for Japanese Americans’ political predicament on Japanese Americans themselves rather than their racist captors? The one that was haphazardly plotted, jerking from location to location and time period to time period with seemingly no sense of narrative balance or emotional logic? The one where the main character chose the moment when he and his family are rounded up by the American government as potential traitors to tell his mom that he got some lady in a family way? That The Terror: Infamy?

Yes, that The Terror: Infamy.

Written by co-creator and showrunner Alexander Woo and directed by Frederick E.O. Toye, “Into the Afterlife,” the final episode of the AMC anthology series’ second season, is an extended grace note for a story that up until now had just been banging on the keys at random. Attentive to the historical import of the time period it chronicles, generous in spirit toward its characters both living and dead, and driven in large part by the season’s most effective and poetic imagery, it nearly makes up for all the dross that’s come before. It left me imagining a season that had lived up to this standard from the start, and wondering how much more impact a finale like this would have had if it had.

I reviewed the shockingly good finale of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

“Government property, in the middle of New Mexico???” You had to know this was coming, even if Chester Nakayama and his family did not. The moment—the moment—Yuko the yureiescaped the fire Chester set in that cabin in the internment camp a few weeks back simply by showing some hustle, I thought to myself “You know what kind of fire she won’t be able to escape?”

Sure enough, we’re now in the Summer of ’45, the Nakayamas are in a bunker in the middle of the New Mexico desert, a random British guy with security clearance is wandering around drunkenly celebrating mankind’s conquest of the laws of nature, and a certain vengeful spirit almost certainly has a date with nuclear destiny. You didn’t think a series as heavy-handed with history as The Terror: Infamy would let the specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pass by unmolested, did you?

I reviewed the inevitable penultimate episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

“They will not fail!”

The deluded denialism of Lord Summerisle and his people is made terrifyingly clear. In the nobleman’s piercing, clarion voice you can all but hear him clinging, white-knuckled, to the edifice of ideology he himself helped construct and enforce. He cannot admit that he’s wrong, can’t even brook the possibility. He’s telling himself the sacrifice will be accepted and the crops will return as much as he’s telling Howie or the assembled islanders. He’ll commit murder, doom his community to collapse and his people to starvation, before admitting the truth.

I think about those four words, and Christopher Lee’s perfect delivery of them, a lot. I hear an entire mindset, the complete conservative worldview, in those four syllables.

I wrote about my favorite line from The Wicker Man and why it’s the key to so much that’s wrong with our world for Polygon.

I’ve gone easy on The Terror: Infamy. No really, I have. As you fine A.V. Club readers and commenters have pointed out to me, last week’s installment, with its slapdash approach to how its characters handle for-certain knowledge of malevolent spirits, probably deserved worse than the C- I awarded it. As a horror guy, I can be swayed by shows that show a little bit of effort in that regard, and as such the gruesome opening skin-graft sequence was the episode’s saving grace.

This week’s opening sequence? It ends with a jump-scare crash-cut the moment Yuko the yurei opens her eyes—huge shock, I know, considering how we’ve watched this same undead woman skulk around, eyes wide open, everywhere from Oregon to Guadalcanal. Is it possible to telegraph a moment you’ve already delivered to the audience in triplicate? Apparently so, if you’re as misbegotten a series as The Terror: Infamy.

Speaking once again as a horror guy, something about that moment really…well, almost insulted me. Are we supposed to be that stupid, we horror fans? Are we supposed to be scared just because what we’re being shown has assumed the scare-shape of a moment that’s frightened us before in other, better work? The unexpected eye-opening resurrection beat is a bit that’s been done to death (no pun intended); are we supposed to jump out of sheer Pavlovian conditioning?

I no longer really care what we’re supposed to do, not in The Terror: Infamy’s case at any rate. Titled “My Sweet Boy,” the series’ eighth installment is a hodgepodge of moments that make no more artistic or narrative sense than expecting us to be scared when the undead character reveals that, yes, she is in fact still undead. It’s a trite, lazy, condescending mess from start to finish.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

“Your people made this mess. Now you gotta live with it.” Admit it: When you first sat down to watch The Terror: Infamy, billed as a historical horror story set in World War II–era internment camps for Japanese Americans, you didn’t expect the show’s thesis statement to come from the narcissistic bigot who serves as camp commandant. But there’s really no way around it. Major Bowen’s assessment of the evil presence stalking the camp is entirely accurate. Yuko the yurei is not the product of American jingoism, springing instead from the superstitions and beliefs of the Japanese community she menaces. I don’t think the makers of this show set out to imply that these poor people brought it on themselves, but how can the work they’ve produced be read any other way?

I reviewed the latest misfiring episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

Perhaps by now you’ve seen the problem with all this: The allegory at work here is an absolute muddle. The prisoners in this internment camp are being stalked not by some punishing avatar of the crimes of American empire or even those Imperial Japan, but by…a spiritual representation of their own community’s small-mindedness and provincialism, derived from their own mythology and belief system. Horror logic does not have a strict one-to-one relationship with reality—and you shouldn’t trust any polemical horror story that does—but essentially, they brought this particular horror on themselves. Why set the story in an internment camp when you run the risk, unintentional but still very much a factor, of implying that internment is punishment for some original sin?

Indeed, by divorcing the central supernatural premise so totally from the show’s sociopolitical framework, The Terror: Infamy effectively argues itself right out of its historical context. After all, had Japanese Americans never been rounded up and held in concentration camps, wouldn’t Yuko still have risen from the grave to seek Chester and extract revenge against those who wronged her? She’d be just as much the ghost of his suicidal mother if the war never broke out and they were all back home on Terminal Island happily fishing, or even if they’d been permitted to get on board with the war effort like every other American subculture instead of being treated like the enemy within. Why bother with the internment camp setting at all?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club. Despite showing some life in the supernatural department, it’s a mess.

It always feels small-minded to go all Cinema Sins on fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Such stories depend on the impossible occurring, and the impossible requires a few leaps or gaps in logic. It’s only when the surrounding story falters that those gaps become distracting. If Chester’s supernatural misadventures were better scripted and better acted, or if the monster at their center felt more conceptually sound, I doubt I’d be wondering why no one on the transport plane smelled the rotting zombie in the new translator’s rucksack.

I reviewed the latest episode of The Terror: Infamy, which is still not very good, for the A.V. Club.

War is hell, particularly when you’re reasonably certain a demon has followed you to the front. Such is the predicament facing Chester Nakayama in “The Weak Are Meat,” the strongest episode of The Terror: Infamy yet. It’s far from a perfect episode: The voiceover narration, taking the form of letters sent between Chester and his pregnant girlfriend Luz back home, is frequently creaky, and the nature of the horror facing the characters is irritatingly amorphous. But it’s the first installment to deliver on the core promise of any show calling itself The Terror: It’s creepy.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club. This was an improvement for sure.

We open in the Wild West, where everything is black and white and the cowboys speak Japanese.

We’re watching a movie screening in the internment camp where Chester Nakayama and company are being held prisoner by their government for the crime of their ethnicity. The star is John Wayne, but the voices and sound effects (a tambourine doubles for the jingle-jangle of spurs) are being provided live and in person by other residents of the camp. But it’s a strange effect, seeing this bit of American mythology remade by the circumstances of ugly American reality.

And it gets stranger when the Duke starts speaking directly to a member of his audience. “You have to go, Chester,” his dubbed voice proclaims. Now the footage of a shootout in the town square transforms into a black-and-white replay of the death of Chester’s family friend Mr. Yoshida, who himself warned Chester to go before he charged the guards and got himself gunned down.

Taking the advice perhaps too literally, Chester gets up and leaves the makeshift theater to relieve himself. As he does so, one of the camp’s blinding and intrusive searchlights sweeps over him, like the light from a movie projector. It renders him momentarily as ghostly and unreal as the phantasmagorical cowboys themselves.

This opening sequence proves that there’s a smart, restrained work of horror residing somewhere deep within The Terror: Infamy. Peel away enough corny dialogue and spooky clichés and you can work wonders with this premise and setting. But it’s the exception that proves the rule, and the rest of this episode (“Gaman,” which translates to “Persevere”) is more of the wearying, disappointing same.

I reviewed the third episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

“Ma,” says Chester Nakayama to his mother, “this may not be the best time to tell you this, but I’ve been going with someone.” All around them, Americans of Japanese origin or ancestry are being frog-marched by armed soldiers. “Her name is Luz.” These soldiers, or soldiers like them, had previously forcibly evicted all these people from their homes, and now they’re being forcibly evicted again. “Her name is Luz Ojeda.” The troops had already taken all men born in Japan and whisked them away to parts unknown. “Ma, look at me.” Everyone with so much as “a drop of [Japanese] blood” is subject to this discriminatory relocation regime. “Luz is pregnant.” Chester and his mother and everyone they know who hadn’t already been disappeared by the government are now being herded onto a racetrack. “She’s going to have my baby.” They’re going to live in horse stables.

Yeah, Chester, this may not be the best time to tell your mom all of this. Actually, let me put it a different way. Yeah, makers of The Terror: Infamy, you were right, this is most definitely not the best time to have your main character tell his mom all this.

Unless the point is to demonstrate why this iteration of AMC’s anthology series isn’t working, in which case the timing is perfect. Titled “All the Demons Are Still in Hell”—it’s taken from a characteristically stiff line about evil spirits, which in context indicates the opposite of what isolating the phrase as the title implies—the second episode of The Terror’s second season is a lot like the soldiers in that ridiculous scene. It marches the characters from place to place, forces them to make various declarative statements, and then whisks them onward for the next round. Subtlety, nuance, and (god forbid) scares are all in short supply.

I reviewed the second episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club. What a bummer.

As Mindhunter Season 2 winds down—as Bill returns to an empty home and finds his wife and son have moved way without him; as Wendy throws out her ex-girlfriend’s trashy magazines; as Holden tends to a spaghetti stain on his shirt while Atlanta officials officially close the book on the so-called Atlanta Monster; as BTK poses for masked bondage photos with his souvenir gallery on full display—I feel it tried to do those 29 murders, those 29 victims, justice. It had to work as an engaging television story to do so, not just a current-events report or a Wikipedia article. And it did.

I reviewed the season finale of Mindhunter for Decider. This season was a tremendous step up from its predecessor.

Did you know: This season of Mindhunter is just nine episodes long. If you’re reading this, it means the chances are good that you’ve just watched the penultimate hour of that season. Did it feel penultimate to you? Have things been building to a head? Or is it more like, I dunno, you followed a whole bunch of false leads and wash-out strategies, only for the climax to fall into your lap pretty much out of nowhere? If you’re like me, it’s the latter scenario. That tells me Mindhunter Season 2 is doing its job very well.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. I really think this show has turned around.

If you’ve been reading these reviews of Mindhunter Season 2, you know one of my main (or really only) complaints about this season has been the lack of interesting things for Nancy Tench to do. Not the lack of interesting things done with her—when your little boy crucifies the dead body of another little boy in hopes of bringing him back to life, you’ve got a lot on your plate, to understate the case to an absurd degree. But her reaction has consisted mostly of fretting that everyone else, from his case worker to his father, is doing more harm than good, and only she can see it. My term for this character type is “mama bear,” and my go-to example of the syndrome is Catelyn Stark during the first season of Game of Thrones. (The book version of the character was far livelier and slipperier.)

I’m not leveling this complaint anymore, not after this episode. For one thing, Nancy is evincing unspoken feelings at last, when she is clearly but (and this is key) not vocally perturbed that even the goddamn caseworker investigating her child’s welfare after a goddamn killing is as spellbound by hubby Bill’s stories of serial killers as your average small-town cop or D.C. bigwig.

But more importantly, she denies the mother of a victim closure, and we’re made to sit with this decision, and we’re forced to live with it. I can’t tell you how much good it does a show to have this kind of faith in its audience, to let a character do something seemingly unsympathetic and ask you to sympathize anyway.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider.

If there’s a chink in Mindhunter‘s armor right now, it’s Nancy Tench. That’s not the fault of actor Stacey Roca, mind you; her performance is sharp and vibrant. But between Catelyn Stark–style “You have a choice, and you’ve made it” dialogue, shopworn stage business like lying secretly awake with her eyes open as her husband climbs into bed, and a relationship with the two other characters with whom she comes into contact, Bill and Brian, that consists solely of reprimanding them, she’s a reactive and predictable character. A type, even.

Being a concerned parent, or a concerned mother specifically, doesn’t suddenly rob you of the potential for a rich emotional life—it might even enhance it—but you wouldn’t know it from watching this. Where’s the Behavioral Science Unit when you need it?

I reviewed the sixth episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. It’s not perfect.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m finding all of this rather compelling this time around. Without that weird clipped dialogue from last season dragging it down, Mindhunter is able to live its authentic self: a smart period crime drama asking questions about human behavior that its characters don’t have the answers to.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Mindhunter Season 2, which feels almost like a new show, for Decider.

Even as Bill investigates a series of child murderers, the investigation of the child murder that was discovered in his wife Nancy’s real-estate listing takes a disturbing turn. Their son Brian, it seems, was part of a group of children who killed their toddler playmate; it was he who found the key to the vacant house, and he who suggested arranging the boy’s body on a makeshift crucifix. The episode ends almost the moment the disconsolate Nancy reveals this information to her husband, as it probably should. Nothing more can be said.

Except that the real-life Bill Tench, Robert K. Ressler, never went through this with his own son. By all accounts, the show made this storyline up from scratch.

The question is whether this large a leap from the reality of the situation is worth the effort. It wasn’t on, for example, Masters of Sex, a similarly high-minded period piece about cutting-edge research on human behavior. Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan’s Masters & Johnson had their family lives changed around to give them obnoxious teenagers with screentime-devouring personal problems, an infamous prestige-TV pitfall the show actually went out of its way to create for itself.

We’ve already sat through a season-plus of Dr. Wendy Carr, Lesbian, with minimal difficulty. Her queerness is a solid method for establishing her as different from the straight and narrow (in every sense of the words) FBI world, and the pathologization of homosexuality commonplace at the time is a way of demonstrating the blowback bad research can have on innocent people; both of these are important aspects of the BSU for the show to tackle. Plus, it simply gives Wendy, and actor Anna Torv, a bit more to do than show up and be smarter than everyone else—nice work if you can get it, but hardly enough to make a character out of.

The situation with Bill’s son strikes me as very different, and potentially very detrimental. If it turned out that one of the founders of the serial-killer concept had a child murderer for a son—well, that would come up in virtually everything every written about the study of serial killers, right? America’s Most Wanted founder John Walsh’s son fell victim to serial killer Ottis Toole, and that gets talked about every time Walsh and his program are discussed, to cite a comparable situation. There will be a marked drop-off in verisimilitude unless this is made central to the saga of the BSU going forward.

Perhaps even more crucially, it has to be central to the show as drama. Maybe this is just me repeating my oft-cited principle, via Mad Men‘s Matthew Weiner, that when you kill a child on your show, your show must then be about that death, since life itself would be, too. This has to go double if the child is killed by another child, triple if that child is the son of your main character, quadruple if your main character studies killers. Anything less would throw off the emotional machinery of the entire show.

A good procedural needs to be taught, tight, and relentlessly logical in how its characters think and act. Is Mindhunter Mach 2 a good procedural? We’re about to find out.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. This is an unusually long excerpt because I think everything it discusses is vitally important.

This isn’t wisdom from on high, doled out to us in the audience by mad-genius investigators. It’s more like seeing Bill and Holden and Wendy slowly clean out a messy room until only the important things remain. Watching the hard work and leaps of intuition that go into what we now take as common sense is what sets Mindhunter apart from the rest of the procedural pack.

I reviewed episode 3 of Mindhunter for Decider.