There’s something in the zeitgeist. 2020 has been…well, let’s say a difficult year, and now not one but two effects-heavy science-fantasy HBO shows have tapped into an antecedent for so much of the trouble we’re now in: the Tulsa Race Massacre, the violent slaughter of hundreds of Black people and the destruction of their prosperous town-within-a-town by white attackers in 1921. First Watchmen used it as a retconned origin story for Hooded Justice, the first masked vigilante in the show’s universe. Now, Lovecraft Country returns to the atrocity as part of a time-travel storyline. I wish I could say the journey was worth it.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

One thing that is clear? The Third Day has not missed a step despite the creative changeover. (Series co-creator Dennis Kelly remains aboard, it should be noted, co-writing the episode with Kit de Waal and Dean O’Loughlin.) The causeway is still an evocative visual signature for the show. John Dagleish’s Larry is still an intimidating heavy; somehow he’s even scarier being friendly than he is being surly. The Martins remain maddening and menacing despite their surface friendliness and their ability to explain away every weird thing that happens—your missing car? Stolen, not towed! The screaming woman? She’s gone into labor! The abandoned house with a fully equipped operating theater? It’s for the birth, since the woman refuses to go to the mainland! The frightening iconography you see everywhere you look? “We’ve had our customs for years,” says Mrs. Martin; “They ain’t pretty, but I’m not fucking apologizing for them.” See? There’s a too-perfectly logical explanation for everything!

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. A fine start for the folk-horror series’ second half.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Lovecraft Country used Emmett Till’s murder as an in-story plot motivator and I…I just don’t know.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. I really struggled with it.

Moreover, what I said in my review of the series premiere remains true: Jude Law’s face alone tells the story. His pores are choked by dirt and grime. His temple is caked with blood, both dry and wet. His cheeks are streaked with tears for himself and, eventually, for his son. There’s something … I dunno, almost thrilling about seeing a handsome male actor subjected to the final-girl indignities of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens or Marilyn Burns’s Sally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Florence Pugh’s Dani in Midsommar. To watch someone so beautiful be physically and emotionally broken down is like witnessing a human sacrifice of a sort.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture.

Lovecraft Country, I’d now venture to say, is pretty good. Which is not to say I don’t have problems with it still. The CGI effects are still often shockingly poor—there’s an outrageously fake-looking digital blood-spread across a decapitated Confederate’s shirt that’s particularly egregious; meanwhile, imagine how much more impressive last week’s episode would have been if Ji-ah’s tentacular tails had been practical effects a la John Carpenter’s The Thing and weep for what might have been. And there’s an innate corniness to some of the proceedings, like the math equations superimposed over Hippolyta as she crunches the multidimensional numbers; how has this particular device survived years of ruthless memeification?

But it should hardly need saying that a mainline injection of Afrofuturism in the form of Seraphina and her world-warping technology—not to mention a Sun Ra voiceover describing Black people as living myths, or the massacre of the Confederacy’s protofascist infantry by Black women with swords—is something of a balm in these troubled times. Aunjanue Ellis, meanwhile, is expected to dance like Josephine Baker and swordfight like Wonder Woman in the space of a single episode, which she does with fearless aplomb.

I still don’t find Lovecraft Country scary, except insofar as it chronicles racist realities, rather than horrific fantasies; the two have yet to properly meld. But I do find it engaging, for three episodes in a row now. It’s a start.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

I promise you there’s a good reason so much of this review is just the breathless recitation of the plot. It’s like that because the plot has reached that magical point that horror movies, the good ones anyway, arrive at midway through. So much is happening, so many threats are emerging, so many false leads are being tried and rejected, that the resulting feeling borders on intoxication. Your heart and mind race even as you remain glued to the spot, trying to keep up, trying to identify the danger — and worrying, on some lizard-brain level, that the danger has the ability to reach out and identify you. This is thrilling filmmaking, raw and weird and alive, like the rituals it chronicles.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. If “The Wicker Man, starring The Young Pope” appeals to you in any way, you need to watch The Third Day.

It’s a note of anti-climax, to be sure, and in a series that has had its problems with figuring out how to end episodes. But it’s everything that came before that impressed me: the weird complexity of the Ji-ah character, who’s part starry-eyed romantic, part dutiful daughter, part fish out of water, and part tentacle monster; the no-bullshit approach to Atticus’s ghastly conduct during the war; the implicit comparison between the lynching of communists in Korea and the similarly brutal treatment of minorities in America; the way Ji-ah both is and is not the daughter of a woman who’s trying her best not to become fond of the spirit she has called forth, since helping that spirit devour souls is the only way she’ll get her real daughter back, and so on. The emotional valence of the episode is constantly shifting, even at the risk of making it harder to root for the show’s hero, and that’s admirable.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country, the second in a row I’ve enjoyed, for Decider.

The Third Day doesn’t star Jude Law so much as Jude Law’s face. Expressive, careworn, and, in the words of The Young Pope, “incredibly handsome,” Jude Law’s face weaves in and out of focus as he makes a frantic phone call to his wife while in a panic over a burglary at his office (which winds up costing him 40,000 pounds meant to bribe an official). Jude Law’s face peers through the windshield of his car, mouth slightly agape with concentration as he wends his way across a twisty, waterlogged causeway. Jude Law’s face is swollen with the tears of uncontrolled grief. Jude Law’s face stares with narrowed, disgusted eyes at the carcass of a brightly colored cricket stuffed with dozens if not hundreds of tiny black beetles. Jude Law’s face beams with boozy delight as he and his fellow pub patrons, thrown together by circumstance, party the night away. Jude Law’s face stares at itself in the mirror, all the fun of the evening drained out of it as he realizes just how lost he is emotionally, let alone physically. Using a script by series co-creator (with Felix Barrett) Dennis Kelly, director Marc Munden knows what an incredible instrument his leading actor has, and he composes the whole episode around it like a symphony.

Somehow I forgot to mention that I’m covering the new Jude Law/Naomie Harris folk-horror drama The Third Day for Vulture! Here’s my review of the premiere.

If there’s two things I like about television drama, it’s a sudden uptick in quality I never saw coming, and a shocking twist that in retrospect I should have seen coming but didn’t. “Strange Case,” the strongest episode of Lovecraft Country so far and by far, presented me with both scenarios, and I couldn’t be happier.

This week’s episode of Lovecraft Country was the first one I really liked, and I really liked it. I reviewed it for Decider.

In some ways this is Lovecraft Country‘s most effective use of genre to date. Largely stripped of horror’s mandate to terrify—this is comfortably the least Lovecraftian of the four episodes so far—it’s free to have some fun with swashbuckling, treasure-hunting tropes instead. These date back to the same period of pulp fiction as Lovecraft, or even before to the likes of Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo, but being a citizen of turn-of-the-21st-century America I recognize more modern sources of inspiration: the Indiana Jones series (booby traps, perilous bridges, stolen artifacts, a beam of light revealing a treasure’s location), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (more perilous bridges, moonlight revealing a secret, a choice between subterranean tunnels), even stuff like The Goonies (the madcap energy of much of the episode, the watery tunnels). It’s not the most exciting use of this stuff, I guess, but it’s still a fun way to spend some time.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. At least this one isn’t really even trying to be scary?

So, it’s a monster of the week show.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I suppose. Episodic storytelling has been a mainstay of genre fare since television’s early days. You can rattle off a perfectly respectable list of shows ranging from watchable schlock to deliberate camp to proto-prestige that used this format: Lost in Space, the Star Trek franchise, Batman, Kolchak, Doctor Who, The X-Files, Buffy, Supernatural….Some have more connecting tissue between their adventures than others—The X-Files famously vacillated between the long-term storytelling of its mythology episodes and the short-term payoffs of its one-offs—but that’s the deal that fans of genre TV have made for decades.

I just expected Lovecraft Country to be something more, is all.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

Courtney B. Vance is one of the most watchable actors on television. And listenable, too: His voice is a mellifluous thing, waxing and waning with his emotional tide. Lovecraft Country boasts a compelling lead in Jonathan Majors, and a high-energy co-lead in Jurnee Smollett, but Vance is where the show’s gravitas and its primary human interest comes from. You believe this guy is a guy, a fully dimensional person. You want to see what happens to him.

So naturally, they kill him in the second episode.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

Lovecraft Country is about a horde of ravening, bloodthirsty white monsters who prowl the backwoods at night, terrorizing the innocent. Also, there are some multi-eyeballed Lovecraftian entities in it.

I reviewed the series premiere of Lovecraft Country for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show all season.

Money moves the plot of Spielberg’s Michael Crichton adaptation at an almost molecular level. Both the arrival of outsiders to Isla Nublar and the escape of the dinosaurs are motivated by cold, hard cash. After a velociraptor kills a worker in the opening scene of the film, his family launches a $20 million lawsuit against parent company InGen. We later learn from the park’s mousy lawyer, Donald Gennaro, that the incident gave the park’s insurance company and its investors second thoughts about backing the project, prompting the hiring of outside experts Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm to inspect the park. Without the concerns about continued cash flow, our favorite paleontologist, paleobotanist, and mathematician would never have felt a single tyrannosaurus-foot impact.

“Spared no expense”: I wrote about Jurassic Park‘s carnivore capitalism for Polygon.

2. ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)

DIRECTOR: Jonathan Demme

CAST: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine

RATING: R

From the perspective of the Oscars, this is the most acclaimed horror movie ever made. From the perspective of a horror fan, the statuettes are well deserved. Anthony Hopkins is a monster par excellence as Hannibal Lecter, the refined cannibal killer whom Jodie Foster’s FBI trainee Clarice Starling consults for help in catching another serial murderer, the virulently misogynist and transphobic “Buffalo Bill.” The Silence of the Lambs is sad, in the way any film that’s seriously grappling with the reality of serial killers must be; it’s white-knuckle thrilling, like any good cat-and-mouse thriller; and it’s a parable of living as a woman in a world dominated by the male gaze. In other words, it’s as good as you’ve heard.

I wrote a quick and dirty guide to horror on Netflix this month for Decider.

Grappling with the big questions?

Try The Young Pope and The New Pope (HBOGo/HBO NOW)

Here’s the deal: Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s outrageously bold pair of series take on the iconography and ideology of the Catholic Church with a sly sense of humor and a knack for surreal visuals. The Young Pope stars Jude Law as Lenny Belardo, an “incredibly handsome” American elected Pope by his brother cardinals, whom he comes to rule with an iron fist. The New Pope, which is simply The Young Pope Season 2 by a new name, introduces John Malkovich as Belardo’s successor, the dandyish Englishman Sir John Brannox. Fully loaded with eye candy, both shows grapple head-on with the power of faith and the mystery of love—or is that the other way around? Your jaw will drop even as your mind expands.

I wrote a guide to 10 off-the-beaten-path shows to binge-watch during quarantine for Decider. This one was a long time in the making—I hope you dig it!

Dredging up Nightbreed from the depths of my personal canon at the present moment — imagining us in the place not of the pitchforks-and-torches humans but the gloriously bizarre creatures they choose to persecute — has given me unexpected solace. The post-coronavirus society in which I wish to live is one of herd immunity and mutual aid, one where workers whose vital services we take for granted are justly compensated for their indispensable labor, one where the art that sustains our spirit is created by artists we strive to support, one where health care and housing are recognized as universal rights.

I wrote about the Clive Barker film Nightbreed and our need to reimagine the post-apocalypse for the Outline.

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!