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.

In short, this is good stuff, written and acted and directed (by Hiromi Kamata) by people who believe this goofy science-fantasy universe can be used to tell human stories that are actually compelling, not just quote-unquote human, and who work with full commitment to this idea. I’m not ready to use the A-word as an overall comparison just yet, but no doubt about it: That’s Andor-coded behavior.

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

Sometime last week my wife returned home from an appointment to find me sitting on the floor in front of our open refrigerator, surrounded by the groceries I hadn’t finished putting away, sobbing into my hands. I was crying, hard, because I was listening to the song “Last” from Naoki Sato’s score for Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, released the weekend prior. I was crying because the song is a sonic last stand, the musical expression of a distant final hope for the survival of some beautiful doomed thing. In Yamazaki’s film the beautiful doomed thing is the population of World War II era Japan — fed into a meat grinder by a government so indifferent to their lives it had an entire program dedicated to killing its own pilots on purpose, subjected to the fires of creation itself by their swaggering conquerors, horrifically traumatized by what they saw on the front and what they survived in the rubble of their homes. An enormous monster that kills everything it sees is on its way to add more misery, destroy more families, rain more pointless death upon an exhausted people. And some of those people will give up their lives — instantly, reflexively, without thinking — to save the lives of others.

I’m pleased to be making my full-fledged debut at Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World with an essay on Godzilla Minus One, one of the best films of the year, and on Godzilla in general. The piece is for subscribers only, but great news: Luke has been generous enough to donate 7-day free trial coupons for anyone who wants to read it.

Now look here, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: I came here for giant monsters. What gives you the right to spring a Mad Men–style storyline about explosive romantic chemistry in the workplace and the way desire can cause us to lose the things we hold dearest? On top of a bunch of totally awesome shots of Godzilla doing cool shit? At least give me a heads up next time!

I reviewed this week’s terrific episode of Monarch for Decider.

That’s the other thing: The whole concept of people who go into the ruins, collect photos and stuffed animals and other personal effects rather than valuables, and attempt to contact their owners to return them is just one of the artifacts of post-Godzilla life that crop up tantalizingly this episode. There’s the airport signage admonishing travelers to “respect the authority of ALL first responders,” the kind of uptick in low-grade authoritarianism you might expect in the aftermath of a literal monster attack. There are the underground bunkers for rich “tech bros” our heroes see advertised on airport TV. There’s the economy of state violence and military graft that determines who can and can’t trespass in the forbidden zone. There’s the constant drumbeat of denialism, of people who think it’s all a hoax to “burst the real-estate bubble,” as one kid puts it.  It’s all thoughtful, even provocative stuff.

Then there’s my favorite moment of all, one of the scariest split seconds of television in a long time. After an administrator admonishes Cate to take the warnings about the titans seriously and then departs, another woman is briefly seen running down the hall just before we cut away from this flashback. We know why: She’s seen what’s coming, and she’s about to tell a classroom full of children that their death awaits them. The show doesn’t lean on this at all, doesn’t even draw your attention to it. It’s just…there, hidden in the background by director Mairzee Almas. 

It’s a little uncomfortable texture in a world that, based on this episode, benefits from uncomfortable textures greatly. If Monarch can get to the Andor point, where you don’t need to be bombarded with capital-F Franchise stuff to feel what it’s like to live in that Franchise’s world…well, let’s not count our MUTOs before they’re hatched.

I reviewed today’s episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

I can’t remember who, but someone once said that a title like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is more than a title, it’s a promise. In that light, I expect a show called Monarch: Legacy of Monsters to do certain things. So I’m really not sure where I come down on “Parallels and Interiors,” the show’s knowingly pretentiously titled fourth episode. On the one hand, you have an effectively sketched-out romance between characters with believable chemistry. On the other hand, there’s only one monster, and it’s not even a new one or a famous one. I’m not sure that’s a trade I’m comfortable making.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider. The inclusion of a strong, sexy, convincing romance storyline marks a turning point for the season, though I didn’t know this at the time I wrote the review. Stay tuned!

It can be a cheap trick for a popcorn flick or its TV equivalent to mine real-world tragedy for pathos. It’s so easy for the relative tastelessness of that kind of entertainment, much as I love so much of it, to read as defilement of something that should be held sacred. When it goes wrong, it does so in spectacular fashion: Marvel attributing the authorship of Hiroshima to one of its Eternals, say, or Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” playing over the memorial for Emmett Till in Lovecraft Country. 

These are not accusations you can level at any project in the Godzilla franchise. Godzilla is inextricably linked to the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically, and to the threats of nuclear war and environmental devastation generally. So when the third episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters depicts a Japanese woman trying to physically stop the detonation of a nuclear bomb while screaming in terror and grief, all I can do is respect it. With a paraphrase of “My God, what have I done,” writer Andrew Colville and director Julian Holmes underline what’s really going on here, though they respect you enough to catch it without anyone bringing up Dr. Keiko Miura’s nationality. In this franchise, they shouldn’t have to.

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

What a difference a dragon makes, huh? There’s a lot I find misjudged and misguided in Apple TV+‘s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters at this early stage, but they got at least this much right: They ended their two-episode series premiere with a huge berserk reptilian creature emerging from the wreck of a sunken World War II battleship that’s now on land for some reason. After all, this is not Monarch: Legacy of America’s Next Top Best Friend. There’s a promise the show makes with its very title, and it knows it has to deliver.

I’m not sure it’s delivering on much else at the moment, unfortunately. Once again written by co-developer and showrunner Chris Black and directed by Matt Shakman, this episode (“Departure”) is not, as I’d hoped, all delivery after the first episode’s setup. It’s basically more of the same.

I reviewed the second episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

The MonsterVerse is a mixed bag. As an official welding together of the big screen’s two biggest giant-monster icons, Godzilla and King Kong, it mostly does what it needs to do, i.e. toss giant monsters at each other and get out of the way. But there’s a pretty wide range of quality in terms of the movies surrounding those monster fights. Kong: Skull Island is a charmingly berserk adventure-movie throwback, with a fun cast of memorable little characters. This puts it head and shoulders above the three Godzilla-led entries in the series, in which the characters range from inert to inane. But there are some truly awe-inspiring, almost cosmic monster visuals in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong has the lizard/ape action you crave. 

The biggest disappointment in the series is its opening entry, 2014’s Godzilla, for two reasons. First, it hides its monster effects by staging its fights at night, an annoying maneuver also employed by Pacific Rim. Second, it fails completely to deliver on the horror promised by the Bryan Cranston–heavy trailer (not least by killing off Bryan Cranston after the second reel). One of the reasons the subsequent entry, Kong, feels so strong is because it does just the opposite: It focuses squarely on its best actors, roots itself in horror with genuinely gruesome kills, and shows us its titans clashing in glorious broad daylight.

So there’s a template to be followed for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the new TV show set in the MonsterVerse — a set of Giant Radioactive Do’s and Don’t’s already established by the franchise. What approach will showrunner Chris Black, who developed the show with Matt Fraction, wind up taking?

I’m covering the new Godzilla TV show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider, starting with my review of the first episode. It has its moments.

It’s unlike me, but with Monarch I banked all the reviews I could in advance, so I’ve seen and reviewed the first eight episodes. My initial reviews won’t reflect it, but the show does get much better as it goes. The material centered on romance and on Godzilla himself is very strong by the end. The Russells are as good as you’d expect and Mari Yamamoto is really something.

Spectacle is the language through which art communicates when the vocabulary of the everyday fails us. Fantastic fiction, an inherent trafficker in the unreal, says as much through spectacle as any art form this side of musical theater, in which excesses of emotion transcend dialogue and emerge through the eruption of song and dance. That Act Two showstopper speaks to us (or rather sings to us) because we recognize what it is to be so in love; so enraged, so bereft, so drunk on the possibilities or vicissitudes of life that mere spoken words could never capture it. Only an explosion of sound and movement will do.

So it is with genre. The dragon, the android, and the vampire embody fears and dreams either too delicate or too overpowering for realism to express. Ratcheting up the scale and stakes of ideas and imagery like these to the level of spectacle renders them capable of handling even more intense feelings and fantasies. A trip beyond the infinite, a monumental horror-image like a wicker man aflame, a last terrible battle between good and evil: Such spectacles describe our desire and capacity as people to do things so great or terrible—or so great and terrible—that they stagger the mind.

Before they assayed updating a country’s biggest pop-cultural icon and helming the first large-scale battle on what was rapidly becoming television’s biggest show (respectively), Hideaki Anno and Neil Marshall were past masters of this technique. Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion pitted giant robots against increasingly bizarre godlike beings in battles that directly reflected the titanic scale of its protagonists’ adolescent angst. Marshall’s The Descent plumbed the depths of its heroine’s grief in a literal bloodbath.

Importantly, they each recognized the role of beauty in such spectacularly grim visions. From Anno’s awe-inspiring animated angels to the firelit scarlet of Marshall’s subterranean charnel pit, the gorgeousness of it complimented and enhanced the terror rather than canceling it out. Beauty is the sea salt in the caramel of horrific spectacle.

Both filmmakers applied these lessons to the biggest assignments in their careers. In 2012, “Blackwater,” his directorial debut on David Benioff & D.B. Weiss’s blockbuster fantasy series Game of Thrones, Marshall depicted the horror of war with an explosion that beggars anything seen on television before, and most of what has come since. In 2014, Anno and co-director Shinji Haguchi’s satirical but harrowing update Shin Godzilla destroyed Tokyo with an alien dispassion that reignited all the majesty and menace felt by filmgoers when the king of the kaiju first emerged decades earlier. And despite their differences, the techniques used by each to convey the magnitude of these unnatural disasters and the people they befell are strikingly similar.

I wrote about Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, Neil Marshall’s “Blackwater” from Game of Thrones, and the horrible beauty of spectacular violence for Blood Knife.