For the first time in her life, Gypsy Rose Blanchard has plans of her own. It’s 2015 now, and as The Act resumes for its fifth episode, she’s dressing up in provocative clothing to have cybersex with her internet boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn. She does this several times throughout the episode. It’s all kinds of blackly comic given Nick’s woeful lack of proficiency with regards to the dom-sub power exchanges the two enjoy. (In Gypsy, a woman whose entire life has been defined by her Munchausen-by-proxy mother and Disney movies, Nick, a man who blows his promotion at a pizza parlor, may have found the one person on earth he could convince to call him Daddy.) And since we know where it’s all headed, it’s sinister too.

I reviewed the fifth episode of The Act for Vulture.

When I love a horror film, I want to live in it. I mean this as a physical proposition. If a horror movie I adore has a great scene set in a memorable enclosed space, my instinct, no matter how awful the things that happen in that space are, is to walk right into it. I’d like to be in Leatherface’s bone room, in the Overlook Hotel’s elevator lobby, in the bare wooden attic where the Cenobites kill Frank Cotton, in Scarlett Johansson’s black liquid void. I want to feel the walls, tap the floor with my foot, smell the viscera. You know, make myself at home.

I’d eventually like to leave again, of course, which is usually what separates me from the people who do visit those places within the movies themselves. But there’s weird, cold comfort in those spaces. They’re inviting, to me anyway, and it is not my custom to go where I am not wanted.

From the Red Room in Twin Peaks to its blue counterpart Club Silencio in Mullholland Drive, David Lynch has created many of these spaces. As a director, Lynch is to ambient room tone what Martin Scorsese is to gangsters listening to “Gimme Shelter.” Evoking a sense of space, and what it’s like to be within four particular walls (curtains optional), is a major part of his project.

In one such space, he even threw a party.

I wrote about the Mystery Man scene from David Lynch’s Lost Highway for The Outline.

That’s another thing that sets The Act apart, maybe more than anything else: It’s a show almost exclusively about women, written mostly by women, directed mostly by women, with a woman co-creator and co-showrunner, who’s also the woman who wrote the article it’s based on.

Dean: It has a slightly different feel. “Intimate” is the word I often hear, like, around our world of executives. [Laughs.] It was a very conscious choice, in part because of the nature of the story.

Antosca: We took it from real life. It’s two women, in a house, for many years — that’s the core of the story. And their neighbors were mostly women — the Chloë Sevigny and AnnaSophia Robb characters are composites of neighbors who lived throughout the community. It was important to have a mother-daughter counterpart to the Dee Dee and Gypsy story.

Dean: The nature of the story is about mothers and daughters, and there’s a specificity to that experience — especially this idea that mothers dress their daughters up as kind of their dolls, which a lot more people than Gypsy would report that as being their experience, right? And also, some things about the tropes of good mothers that trapped Dee Dee.

Antosca: When I read Michelle’s article, I didn’t take away from it, “Oh, this is a lurid true-crime story.” I took away, “This is a powerful story about a young woman discovering who she really is and doing whatever she can, using the only tools she has, to escape the prison of lies she’s been trapped in.” Imagine how unstable your identity would be, how your sense of self would be destroyed and malleable, if you were raised like that and shaped like that — a case of long-term medical child abuse and radical gaslighting.

Gypsy is such a complicated character. She’s deceiving the world along with her mom, but she’s deceiving herself too. Ultimately, she’s using the skills of deception that her mom taught her, which are the only thing she knows at that point, against her mom. She had access to countless drugs, so she could have poisoned her mom. Or she could have stabbed her herself. But she couldn’t do it, because she loved her mom. So she had to use the skills that her mom gave her to reach into the outside world and bring somebody else in to kill her.

Dean: When I interviewed her she would always say, “My mom was my best friend.” Which is really sad. The protective impulse that is still in her, and the ways in which it trapped her, is something I think about a lot.

I interviews showrunners Nick Antosca and Michelle Dean about their extraordinary show The Act for Vulture.

This week’s episode of Nick Antosca and Michelle Dean’s extraordinary true-crime series begins with bodies. The body of the landscaper Gypsy Blanchard sees through her window and lusts for. Gypsy’s body — Gypsy’s adult body — as she submits meekly to Dee Dee’s infantilizing bathing routine. (Gypsy’s menstrual cycle rebels, at least, much to Gypsy’s delight.) Dee Dee’s body, rebelling against her, as she is diagnosed with diabetes — though Dee Dee snatches victory from the jaws of defeat when she realizes the care she’ll require will force Gypsy into even tighter enmeshment with her. “I’m gonna need you now,” she drawls to Gypsy, “every…single…day.”

I reviewed episode four of The Act for Vulture.

1. To Serve Man
A seemingly benevolent alien civilization solves all of Earth’s problems. Then the visitors invite the grateful public to travel back with them to their home planet, brandishing the titular book as a combination bible and instruction manual. A pair of cryptologists (Lloyd Bochner and Susan Cummings) manage to decipher the name of the tome, but it’s only when the former has already boarded the ship does his partner discover the truth about what’s actually inside the covers. We then get the most famous black-comedy punchline in The Twilight Zone‘s hallowed library, with a twist like a diamond in its simple perfection. No doubt that’s why the episode is so fondly remembered — after all, it’s not like millions of Americans would ever blindly follow someone who’s promised to solve their problems but is actually determined to make those problems worse, right? But it also exemplifies what Serling’s groundbreaking show did best: take a fantastic premise, add equal parts existential horror and irony, then marinate it all in metaphor and let the whole thing simmer. Suggested serving portion: an ever-growing legion of satisfied fans.

I wrote about several of the best Twilight Zone episodes of all time for Rolling Stone.

[Batman TV voiceover] Dee Dee and Gypsy, putting the con in “comic con”? Looks like our Dependent Duo are cosplaying with fire! Will the “Two Wolverines” who give our adventure its title sink their claws into these lovely lawbreakers? Will the Blanchards blanch at forming costumed connections with their hirsute suitors? Find out next week — same Act-time, same Act-streaming service!

I reviewed episode three of The Act for Vulture.

Genre art uses spectacle to convey in images what words alone can’t. That’s baked into the premise of genre from the start. In real life we’re not going to be eaten by a zombie horde, burned by a swooping dragon, abducted by alien spacecraft, or caught up in a major musical number. Nevertheless, zombies and dragons and aliens and big song-and-dance routines that end with an entire street full of people doing jazz hands toward a crane-mounted camera help us articulate the big ideas and emotions we do experience in real life — terror and awe and rage and passion and joy — but lack the commensurate vocabulary to describe.

I reviewed the second episode of The Act for Vulture.

“I like you special.” In an hour of television that includes the aftermath of a murder, the possibility of a kidnapping, and the evidence of year upon year of medical child abuse, these four innocuous words are the most frightening thing we hear. Dee Dee Blanchard isn’t lying when she says them, either. She treasures Gypsy, her frail and charming daughter. Dee Dee loves Gypsy for the things anyone would find lovable about her: her cheery disposition, her reassuring optimism, her own love of all things bright and beautiful. Dee Dee also loves Gypsy for the what others might find burdensome: a bottomless cocktail of illnesses, including epilepsy, paraplegia, a heart murmur, anemia, a lethal sugar allergy, a condition that required the surgical removal of her salivary glands, her need to be fed through a tube in her stomach. Gypsy’s suffering, and her endurance of it, are a part of what make her special, and just as she says, Dee Dee likes her for it. That Dee Dee also manufactured this suffering makes what she’s saying no less true. It just makes it horrifying. Like the little pink house after which this episode, “La Maison du Bon Rêve” (The House of Sweet Dreams), is named, “I like you special” is a prison in disguise.

When that one-eyed man popped up at Amelia’s book reading in “Hunters in the Dark,” disruptive and distraught, perhaps complicit in the central crime in some tangential way but seemingly remorseful and also very obviously disturbed by his own experiences, I didn’t think of the Black Lodge or the Red Room, Norma Jennings and Dougie Jones. I thought of Russ Tamblyn’s Dr. Jacoby, the eccentric psychiatrist who had an unethical relationship with his teenage patient, snapped when she was murdered, and wound up a conspiracy crank in the woods.

There are so many people like that in Twin Peaks, people driven to the margins of the idyllic small-town society by abuse, poverty, mental illness, drugs, or their own bad actions, never to return. Harry Dean Stanton’s Carl Rodd, wise and sad in his trailer park. Alicia Witt’s Gersten Hawyard, a onetime child prodigy clinging to her suicidal and abusive junkie lover. Lenny Von Dohlen’s Harold Smith, the shut-in with the lonely soul. Catherine E. Coulson’s Log Lady, whose prophetic gifts couldn’t save her from dying of cancer like anyone else. Addicts, adulterers, crooked cops, scheming hoteliers, lonely gas station operators.

Some are closely connected, in one way or another, to murdered high-school student Laura Palmer — herself pulled in a million different soul-damaging directions long before her murder and quite apart from the demonic forces feeding off her misery. Others have no connection at all except geography. All of them float around in the dark and icy waters of the American underclass. In Twin Peaks, Laura’s tragic murder is the crack in the ice that allows us to observe the sea of suffering underneath.

That’s what I think of when I think of True Detective season three, not Matthew McConaughey’s twitchy nihilism, nor Colin Farrell’s thousand-yard, eight-beer stare. Wayne Hays, Amelia Hays, and Roland West may well be the truest detectives we’ve met yet. But from Agent Dale Cooper on down, not even the best investigators have ever truly seen an open-and-shut case, one they could comfortably solve and file away forever. The forces that made life so hard for the Purcells and the people around them, that empowered their community’s worst elements and discarded otherwise decent people like corpses at a crime scene, will be there even if Will and Julie’s attackers are taken down once and for all. Who killed Laura Palmer?was the start of a discussion about what we do in the face of endemic pain and injustice, not the end of it. If True Detective season three wraps up with the same strengths it has displayed so far, it will ask a similar question, and offer just as challenging an answer.

I favorably compared this season of Nic Pizzolatto’sTrue Detective to David Lynch & Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks saga for Vulture.

46. Paul Giovanni – The Wicker Man (1973)

The Wicker Man is never what you expect it to be. Like its hero, a Scottish police sergeant trying to find a missing girl in a pagan community, the New York musician Paul Giovanni was a stranger to the old Celtic folkways he was hired to investigate for Robin Hardy’s haunting horror film. His outsider’s ear for both the then-booming British folk scene and its ancient antecedents made the music he composed the ideal mirror for such a twisted journey. The opening song is a tightly harmonized adaptation of Scottish poet Robert Burns’ “The Highland Widow’s Lament,” nearly abrasive in its mournful mountain-air beauty. Sex is a frequent topic for the film and music, rendered in forms both profane (the absolutely filthy drinking song “The Landlord’s Daughter”) and sacred (“Willow’s Song,” the set’s dirty-minded but gorgeous standout). Rousing community singalongs and sparse hymns of ritual sacrifice weave conflicting narratives of their own. It’s a soundtrack that casts strange shadows and remains ungraspable, like a tongue of flame.

I reviewed the soundtracks for The Wicker Man, GoodFellas, and This Is Spinal Tap for Pitchfork’s list of the best soundtracks of all time.

With Kingdom, no one is tuning in tomorrow, same Chang-time, same Chang-channel. Gratification must be delayed until Season 2. And while the show is to be commended for steering the genre away from The Walking Dead‘s reactionary “us against them” politics in favor of a story where the real heroes are those who risk their own safety and comfort to defend the lives of the less fortunate, what are you really gonna get in the second go-round besides a mashup of your favorite genre franchises but with very nice robes. In the end, that’s Kingdom for you. Decent politics and lovely wide shots aside, it never delivers more than the minimum it needs to.

I reviewed the season finale of Kingdom for Decider.

Kingdom is doubling down on its The Lord of the Rings vibe. Does this shot of three heroes running across the fields in pursuit of their quarry look familiar to you, for instance?

How about this supreme badass hacking his way through the monstrous hordes arrayed against him?

Or perhaps the giant column of heavily armored warriors marching toward a fortified location to seal the doom of everyone inside?

And that’s not all! There’s starving peasants, flaming arrows, last-minute rescues by wise men with beards, a kingdom overthrown from within by an evil advisor, a descendant of royalty who’s prepared all his life for one final confrontation with his arch-enemy. If you ever wanted to know what The Two Towers would look like if everyone had better hats, Kingdom has you covered.

There’s no reason to believe this isn’t sincere admiration on the part of the filmmakers, if indeed it’s even deliberate. (I have a hard time believing the beacon-lighting thing that’s appeared in two episodes is the handiwork of people who haven’t watched LotR, but I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my arm, so my mind tends to go there regardless.) But there’s still a whiff of cynicism to the whole thing. Like Stranger Things before it, Kingdom is a mash-up of the world’s most popular entertainment. It’s a layup.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Kingdom Season 1 for Decider.

Goddammit, they’re still killing kids in this thing. And I just…I just don’t think the material quite justifies the extremity.

[…]

I’ve listened to multiple little girls scream in terror about their impending death, and I’ve seen an adorable kid lie dead with an arrow in her back from a government soldier and then get gently laid to rest by the woman she spent about one day viewing as the replacement for the mother she watched eat her sister alive. And for what? A six-episode Netflix zombie thriller? Doesn’t The Walking Dead abuse serious tragedy for cheap sentiment in much the same way? You can count apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic stories that put the suffering of children at the center and deal with it in a worthwhile way on two hands,maybe. Could Kingdom possibly be headed anywhere worth that journey?

I reviewed the fourth episode of Kingdom for Decider.

A few seasons into the run of Mad Men it was briefly voguish to speculate that one of Don and Betty Draper’s children would die. (People also thought that about Megan Draper, and Roger Sterling, and Don himself I believe. They also thought Don Draper was legendary airplane-heist perfect-crime architect D.B. Cooper. TV criticism gets weird sometimes.) I can never find the quote when I’m looking for it, but creator Matthew Weiner said something in response that has stuck with me for years. He said he’d never kill off a child on Mad Men, because any show in which children die must, in the moral-imperative sense, become a show about children dying. Anything less, he argued, is not commensurate with the life-remaking magnitude of such an event on the survivors. To do it for shock value, or for an individual story arc in a show that remains about, like, advertising or working in an office or whatever, is insufficient justification.

Weiner, it should be said, has not always taken his own advice on ethical issues, but on this one at least he practiced what he preached. In the episode of The Romanoffs that came closest to centering on such an event, in which an American couple had to decide whether to adopt a promised Russian infant who turned out to have severe developmental disabilities or abandon her to the orphanage system, was about the momentousness of that choice, and the cruelty of a world that makes such choices possible. To the extent that series ranging from Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones have involved the murder or attempted murder of children, the specter of those crimes informs everything that comes afterward. They are meant to demonstrate the inhumanity against which such stories warn us.

Whatever noises Kingdom makes about the evils of the aristocracy or the cruelty of the class system—and in this episode it makes plenty—are seasoning, not the main ingredient. The rich and powerful villains are so feckless and cowardly as to serve primarily as comic relief; their maltreatment of the poor is sledgehammer-subtle. What Kingdom really is is a show in which zombies eat people and people behead zombies with swords while wearing cool costumes, because these things are exciting and fun to watch.

You know what’s not exciting and fun to watch? You know what’s the kind of thing your period-action-horror-fantasy swashbuckler shouldn’t do unless it plans to dig way, way deeper into the subject that it clearly has any intention whatsoever of digging? Putting a terrified little girl on camera and having scream “Mommy, what is wrong with you? You’re scaring me! Stop it!” before her mother eats her alive.

I reviewed the third episode of Kingdom for Decider.

A six-episode season is too short to delve deep into character and give them room to breathe, the way a longer run would allow; and it’s too long to get away with having slight, sketched-out characters (likeable or loathsome though they may be, as befits their status as faces and heels). Without getting to know them all—and I mean see how they act when the cameras are off, so to speak, not just “here’s a scene where they have some camaraderie, now here’s a scene where they argue, etc.” With all-out zombie warfare on the horizon, I don’t see the show pulling that off. In addition to human flesh, zombies devour screentime.

I reviewed the second episode of Kingdom for Decider.

If you like this sort of thing, here’s the sort of thing you’ll likehas been Netflix’s mantra for a minute now. It’s not just the original programming that works this way, either. When ’80s nostalgists run out of Stranger Things or ’90s nostalgists run out of Maniac or people who love Pablo Escobar run out of, like, five different shows about Pablo Escobar, they can always watch the Big Red Machine’s library of the most popular shows on broadcast network television from the past couple decades, which not coincidentally are also the majority of the most popular shows on Netflix.

I’m not saying this approach never pays off creatively. Narcos is a fun show with a great theme song, a great performance in Wagner Moura, and an occasional Great Episode. The troubling German science-fiction show Dark snuck in on a wave of “It’s kinda like Stranger Things” early press (tonally they’re worlds apart but plotwise, yeah, a bit) and became its own engrossing thing. The Punisher, the best of the Marvel/Netflix shows, is a direct Daredevil spinoff from a line of six interconnected series set in the most popular franchise of all time. Still, if you’re looking for something to kick down the doors the way The Sopranos did…well, here are some cooking shows!

But you’ve gotta hand it to them with Kingdom, this sweeping new original Korean-language series. Plenty of networks and plenty of shows have tried and failed to capture the magic of Game of Thrones, the show on TV that is the sort of thing the most people like out of pretty much all the shows on TV at this point, and bellyflopped. (MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles, anyone?) But for whatever reason, none of them isolated one of the most instantly appealing elements of George R.R. Martin, David Benioff, and Dan Weiss’s baby, a concept so brilliant in its simplicity that it shows up before the opening credits of the pilot even roll and will be the subject of the entire final season. Yes, Game of Thrones is “The Sopranos with swords,” as the early buzz hailed it. But it’s also, and on a much larger and more immediately, nerdily impactful scale, The Lord of the Rings with zombies.

Kingdom has cracked the case.

I reviewed the series premiere of Kingdom for Decider.

(NOTE: These review summaries will be brief while I play link catch-up. Just read the reviews!)

Starting with 2008’s sprawling collection of instrumental work Ghosts I-IV (released under the Nine Inch Nails aegis) and accelerating with 2010’s Oscar-winning score for David Fincher’s The Social Network, the instrumental side of Trent Reznor has effectively shared equal billing with the more traditional industrial rock that made him a superstar. Never one for half measures, Reznor clearly sees the film-soundtrack work done alongside his longtime composing partner Atticus Ross as a chance to flex. “We aim for these to play like albums that take you on a journey and can exist as companion pieces to the films and as their own separate works,” Reznor wrote recently. He’s not kidding: The duo’s score for Fincher’s 2011 film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for instance, is 15 minutes longer than the movie itself.

In announcing the release of Bird Box, the score for Netflix’s treacly Sandra Bullock survival-horror film of the same name, Reznor described it as a way of presenting the audience with “a significant amount of music and conceptual sound” that didn’t make the film’s final cut. Even then, that “Abridged” parenthetical in the title points toward “a more expansive” version of the album due later this year. It’s just as well since what Reznor and Ross have created is better than the movie they created it for. It does exactly what good soundtracks are capable of doing, and what they expressly intend for it to do: Emerge as a rewarding experience in its own right.

I reviewed Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’s Bird Box score for Pitchfork.

We had a small, very passionate writer’s room, and everybody in it brought their own fears to each story. And we just we had certain guidelines: Keep it personal. Draw from character. If something feels right then explore it, even if you don’t know what it means right away. That, to me, is what great horror does. It makes you dig deeper, makes you explore the parts of yourself that you’re afraid of, that you’re traumatized by.

I was thrilled to conduct a deep-dive interview on all four seasons of Channel Zero, one of the most frightening TV shows I’ve ever seen and as good as anything in the recent horror renaissance, with creator Nick Antosca for Polygon.

I wrote about 28 Weeks Later… in the context of Bird Box and A Quiet Place and survival-horror films with children at the center for the New York Times’ free Watching newsletter, which you can subscribe to here!

Polygon: The first scene of the first episode of the first season of your show scared me more than other horror shows have during their entire runs.

Nick Antosca: You mean the interview at the beginning of Candle Cove? Sooo frequently, we were told to cut that scene. I’m not going to disparage, at all, the people who’d give us notes; we have a really supportive network and studio. But every round of notes on that, we were told “Cut that scene, cut that scene, it’s bad!” I knew that we were going to be asked to do that when I wrote it, so I put all of the exposition that would be necessary to understand the show in that scene so you couldn’t cut it.

The scene is like the opening of David Cronenberg’s The Brood, when Oliver Reed is having that weird therapy session onstage. Everything is dark and you have no idea what’s going on.

Antosca: You know, our show references The Brood in multiple seasons in other places, but that was not a deliberate reference to it. In the script, that was written as being interviewed by Dr. Phil at one point, then it was written as being interviewed by Charlie Rose and then Matt Lauer. We asked them both to do it and they wouldn’t do it. Thank God.

As frightening as that first scene was, the series basically never lets up.

Antosca: The idea of the show was always to capture a sense of dread, and we felt it was very important to establish that in the first scene, in a way that was different from other horror shows that I’m familiar with.

I interviewed Nick Antosca about his phenomenal horror anthology series Channel Zero for Polygon.