If you’re a horror person, it’s as fun (“fun”) to watch as anything; it wouldn’t have made major bank at the domestic box office if it weren’t. But at heart, it’s a film about suffering, about our compulsion to inflict it in ways both large and small, political and personal, extravagant and intimate. If it is indeed torture porn, it’s not here to jerk you off, metaphorically or otherwise. Hostel has a lot to say, as long as you have the stomach to listen.

I wrote about Eli Roth’s Hostel for Take 2, Decider’s series on films that deserve a second look.

And that, sigh, is where Wheels come in. He’s the leader of a secluded but benevolent underground community in the tunnels beneath Grand Central Station, a multi-racial gender utopia that is functionally identical to a hippie commune from a circa-1970 off-Broadway musical. In New Orleans-accented dialogue laden with absurd beatnik wordplay like “electrickery” and “ain’t no people higher, in both senses of the word,” he introduces Emma to this improbable community of “mole people” straight out of an urban legend.

Frankly, I wish they’d stayed there. Once, not very long ago, this was a show about a mother driven to psychosis by the belief her baby is not human, and the horrified husband left behind to deal with the fact that the woman he loved more than anyone murdered their child and nearly murdered him as well. The horror stems from that, and from the uncertainty of the role of the supernatural in it all — the fear that the mother was right all along, and what that means about the world. It does not stem from a visit to the Age of Aquarius, featuring Tom Bombadil narrating a Zatarain’s commercial.  

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Changeling for Decider.

All of this is engrossing and effective, powered by the raw and lively performances of LaKeith Stanfield, Clark Backo, and Samuel T. Herring. (Jane Kaczmarek I’m a little cooler on, though I think that’s more the character than the acting.) Yet I find it difficult even now to give myself over to The Changeling completely. 

Despite what wrestler Bret “Hitman” Hart might refer to as its excellence of execution, it still can’t shake my distaste for modern/urban fairytales, for one thing. It’s an inherently twee genre, its dark magic too cute at its roots, as decade after decade of Neil Gaiman knockoffs have demonstrated. (To say nothing of Gaiman himself. No, I still haven’t forgiven anyone involved for American Gods.) 

I feel similarly about benevolent witches, same as I feel about benevolent vampires, benevolent werewolves, benevolent giant spiders, whatever. You know me, Marge: I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my Draculas eeevil. 

Most of all, there’s my lingering suspicion that The Changeling will eventually have some big obvious gloopy moral: the power of family, the magic of storytelling, the need to Believe Women, whatever. (Please note that we do in fact need to believe women, but believing people exhibiting every symptom of a psychotic break is a different matter entirely, and the two should be conflated.) Maybe it’s all that amber lighting, but there remains a syrupy warmth to this show I distrust. With few exceptions, I like my horror cold as the grave.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Changeling for Decider.

When I say LaKeith Stanfield is the star of The Changeling, I mean it: LaKeith Stanfield is the star of The Changeling. So much of what makes the show work stems directly from his performance, which takes a single note — grief — and turns it into a symphony. 

I reviewed today’s episode of The Changeling for Decider.

Oddly, this is the second week in a row that a dark fantasy show from a major tech-platform streaming service debuted with three episodes because they were clearly saving the best for last; the same thing happened with Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time just a few days ago. Lord only knows why streamers do what they do (beyond screwing writers and actors to save a buck, I mean), but it’s hard to question the wisdom of packaging The Changeling this way. From “promising but a bit treacly” to “okay, now we’re going somewhere” to “Jesus Christ make it stop” in three episodes is the kind of trajectory that shows a horror series is being made with thought, skill, and a willingness to go there. I’m both dreading and excited for where it goes next.

I reviewed the third and final episode of The Changeling‘s three-part premiere last week for Decider.

Humor aside, the project this episode brings to mind more than any other — and not just because they share a composer, Baltimore musician Dan Deacon — is Unedited Footage of a Bear, the terrifying 2014 Adult Swim Infomercial whose drum I never stop banging. (I’ve probably talked more about this short film than the filmmakers, Alan Resnick and Ben O’Brien, have themselves.) The slow descent from happy parenthood to isolated misery; the emphasis on how mothers in psychological distress often go un- or under-treated; the portrayal of severe mental illness as something so close to the supernatural stuff of horror that it’s a distinction without a difference; the use of both the family and the phone as vectors for fear — it’s all there. I don’t mean to imply this is a rip-off, because it isn’t by any stretch of the imagination. I do mean to imply, however, that this episode is eerie enough to merit comparison to one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen on television.

As was the case with Unedited Footage, the lead performance is the load-bearing structure here. Like twin actors Kerry and Jacqueline Donelli in that earlier project, Clark Backo transitions so seamlessly from perky, fun mama to glassy-eyed, sallow-faced living zombie. Her paranoia and dread, which either bring on or are brought on by her sleeplessness, have turned her into something less than herself — a being one macabre half-step out of sync with the world around her, like a mirrored reflection that somehow begins moving a brief but unmistakable moment after you do. By episode’s end, you too want to keep this poor person and her poor baby away from each other, for both their sakes.

LaKeith Stanfield’s assignment in this episode is a comparatively easy one: Be normal, be a good dad, be a pretty shitty friend, and be ready willing and able to distance yourself from your obviously sick wife after months of this shit have you at your wits’ end. But in a horror series, playing the character who doesn’t realize something is capital-W Wrong actually is hard work: You have to keep the audience caring what happens to you even as your ignorance or unwillingness to see what’s happening drives us away. Stanfield’s not doing the gangbusters work Backo is in this ep, but what he is doing is impressive in its own right.

I reviewed episode two of The Changeling for Decider.

Even if the show hasn’t yet gone far in either direction — it’s difficult to make a big point about The Power of Family when your scariest image is of an estranged father kidnapping his son — it does lean awfully hard on another kind of storytelling: meet-cutes, first dates, a library courtship straight out of The Music Man, a magical rooftop wedding, a quirky “we’re having a baby” announcement straight out of an Alexa commercial, a rapturously scored sex scene, a “the baby’s coming now” scene…romance, in other words. Big Hollywood romance. 

I’m not here for this either. It’s not that I don’t like romance as a genre…okay, so it is like that. But I could be convinced, I’m pretty sure, and if anyone could do the convincing it’s likely a pair of actors as charming and photogenic as LaKeith Stanfield and Clark Backo. 

The real problem is that I don’t see how you get from all that mushy stuff to a place capable of actual horror. It’s not just the nature of that narrative that’s an issue here, it’s all the techniques used to depict it, like the overactive score by Dan Deacon. I found myself pining for moments of silence in which I could decide for myself how to feel about the sweet or scary things on screen. As it stands, you can certainly deliver the occasional terrifying jolt — the faceless-father dream sequence is proof of that — but you’re not going to be able to build up the atmosphere of unbearable mounting dread that great horror generates if you’re constantly working at cross-purposes with it by telling everyone about twoo wuv. There’s a time and a place for that, and that time and place isn’t Spooky Season. 

I’m covering The Changeling for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere (the first of three episodes that debuted this past weekend).

If I’d blinked I might have missed it, and this was Friedkin’s intent. He meant for the shot to be nearly subliminal, and he would come to rue the technology that allowed people to rewind and freeze-frame on that ghastly visage. After all, it’s just Ellen Dietz, Linda Blair’s stand-in, wearing some corpse paint — a rejected design for how Regan herself would look when possessed, created by the film’s makeup-effects genius Dick Smith. 

I didn’t know any of this as that terrified teenager. All I knew were two things. This was the scariest thing I’d ever seen, and I needed to see it again immediately.

So I rewound that VHS tape. I watched the dream again. And I forced myself to look as that eighth-of-a-second view of the face of pure evil popped back up on my screen before disappearing back into the unnerving expressionism of Karras’s dream. 

To this day I couldn’t tell you exactly why, except to insist, contra Friedkin, that it was not to conduct aversion therapy on myself. This wasn’t a situation where I thought repeated viewings would leech the Face of its power. The exact opposite, in fact. I knew it would scare the living shit out of me all over again — like, real fear, not roller-coaster fear, not spilling-your-popcorn fear, but heart-bursting adrenaline-dumping fear — and I did it anyway. 

I wrote about William Friedkin, The Exorcist, and the scariest shot in movie history for Decider.

Time and again, Reubens and company picked up on the kinds of incidents that would haunt little minds well into adulthood. Think about it: However old you are now, do you not remember suffering a humiliation as mortifying as a whole crowd of tourists laughing at you because “There’s no basement at the Alamo”? I sure do! In my case, it involved mistaking a “Chinese yo-yo” on a Memorial Day fair prize table for a bottle rocket, only for an adult I didn’t know to sneer “Firecrackers are illegal!” at me, Jan Hooks–style. God, how I hated that for Pee-wee! How I wanted there to be a basement at the Alamo after all!

In honor of Paul Reubens I wrote about the horror of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure — of its exploration of children’s fears both real and imagined — for Decider. This piece is for former kids who were scared by both Large Marge and the prospect of a bunch of adults laughing at you because you didn’t know there’s no basement at the Alamo.

I came into the Yellowjackets season finale expecting it to be brutal. Well, it was brutal alright, just not in the way I hoped it would be. Folks, we need to talk about needledrops, specifically all the ones on this show. Simply put, Yellowjackets has the worst music supervision on television, and it’s fucking the rest of the show up, bad.

Seriously. “Zombie” by the Cranberries as everyone staggers back to the cabin with Javi’s corpse in tow, eyes glassy, completely drained, shuffling around like, you guessed it, zombies. “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” by Radiohead as Natalie hallucinates being back on the crashing plane as she dies from an accidental lethal injection by Misty before, you guessed it, fading out. “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen, one of the most overused music cues of the past two decades (which should have been retired after its pitch perfect usage by Richard Kelly in Donnie Darko), as the surviving kids stand outside their burning cabin, looking forward to a future of, you guessed it, killing people under the moonlight. 

Every song is hugely famous already, carrying tons of preexisting emotional weight, and used to the most literal effect possible, like a sort of musical Cliff’s Notes for what’s happening and how we’re supposed to feel about it. It’s all so blunt, so artless. It makes Stranger Things sound like The Sopranos. (Nora Felder, who took over from Euphoria’s Jen Malone on music supervision duties this season, also handled Stranger Things, to which I can only say no shit.)

I reviewed the season finale of Yellowjackets for Decider. Woof.

This is all terrific stuff, frankly. (Kudos to writers Sarah L. Thompson and Liz Phang; writers are responsible for all your favorite shows and deserve fair treatment and fair pay!) It really, really is about time that Yellowjackets got around to portraying its teenage characters as feral cannibals in the making; as I hoped and predicted, the combination of Shauna’s baby dying in the past and the whole gang reuniting in the present has marked a turning point for the show. None of them will ever be able to walk back what they were planning to do, and what they’re going to do instead. It’s the hidden shame beneath every interaction the adult characters have had.

I reviewed today’s episode of Yellowjackets for Decider.

New theme song! Gutting secret confessions! Intense grief! Thwarted suicide attempt! Hallucinatory parrot-based musical theater interlude! Multiple total breaks with reality! Savage Fight Club–style beatdown! Gahhh, there’s so much to talk about in Yellowjackets Season 2 Episode 7…and it’s thanks to the work of writers Rich Monahan and Liz Phang that we get to watch and talk about any of it at all. The union writers of the WGA deserve to be paid and treated fairly by the major studios — surely not even the Antler Queen herself would be evil enough to disagree with that!

At any rate, last week I speculated that in simultaneously reuniting all the known survivors in the past and killing Shauna’s baby in the present, Yellowjackets may have reached a major inflection point, moving from being one kind of show into being something else. I think the new version of the theme song — quieter, more somber, and performed by Alanis Morrisette — may be an indication that creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and showrunner Jonathan Lisco agree. You can’t do either those things and then go on as if two major, major milestones haven’t been reached, and now passed.

I reviewed the most recent episode of Yellowjackets, which I thought was pretty darn good, for Decider.

It feels like Yellowjackets is about to change, and for the better. In fact, maybe it’s already happened. In Season 2 Episode 6 (“Qui”), momentous events take place in both the present and the past. In the former, the gang’s all here: Shauna, Taissa, Misty, Natalie, Van, and Lottie end the episode face to face for the first time in 25 years, each bearing the weight of her own secrets and regrets; the unspecified terrible things they did in the woods loom over them like a threatening wave. 

And in the past, the moment the survivors have waited for for months has finally arrived: Shauna gives birth. A full episode passes before we really learn how that birth turns out. It’s another point of no return.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Yellowjackets for Decider.

In short, the show is about pregnant women, and the legal, medical, ethical, moral, and political issues that swirl around them. Needless to say, this significantly shifts the framework of the original. Jeremy Irons’s Mantle twins are misogynists who see women as both sexual playthings and medical tools against which they can sharpen their genius. The misogyny present in Rachel Weisz’s Mantle twins, as well as in characters like Rebecca and her ghoulish circle of rich women, is internalized, though it’s no less present for that.

In both versions, the female body is a commodity to be experimented with, and on, but changing the gender of who’s doing the experimenting changes almost everything else. But only the TV show expands this into a multifaceted feminist critique of the economic and political forces surrounding the issue: America’s murderous for-profit healthcare system and the women who’ve girlbossed their way to its apex; racial and class discrepancies in maternal healthcare outcomes; the fascist anti-abortion movement’s pas de deux with advances in care for premature infants; the objectification and infantilization of women during the process; and probably more I’m missing. All of this emerges naturally through story and character, which is a pretty staggering achievement in itself.

I compared the David Cronenberg/Jeremy Irons Dead Ringers film to the Alice Birch/Rachel Weisz Dead Ringers TV series for Decider.

So yeah, I worry that the show’s eyes are too big for its stomach. You can really feel the creakiness around some of these storylines, and because of their sheer number and variety, the creaky storylines are going to vary from viewer to viewer. Some people don’t give a shit about the survival horror or the supernatural stuff, while for others that’s the main draw. Some don’t care about the adult stuff compared to the teenage stuff, while for others the draw of the legendary ‘90s stars as grownups will outweigh the young unknowns. Some will like the comedic bits, some will think they’re in the way. Everyone will find certain characters more compelling than others. Everyone will prefer certain casting decisions (Lauren Ambrose as Van is dynamite) to others (Simone Kessell has none of her younger counterpart Courtney Eaton’s damaged, blank-eyed magnetism as Lottie). Some people adore the big obvious ‘90s needledrops (4 Non Blondes! Danzig!), while others think the whole I Love the ‘90s thing is, ahem, overblown. 

Me, I found myself spending a lot of time thinking I wish the hyperactive score by Theodore Shapiro, Craig Wedren, and Anna Waronker would just shut the fuck up for a few minutes, allowing the tension, the dread, the quiet isolation of the woods to build. And that’s a decent stand-in for my problem with the whole thing. Pare back. Let stuff breathe. Let stuff be.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Yellowjackets Season Two for Decider.

In all honesty, I prefer being a little bit confused. Elliot is what Beverly and Genevieve’s relationship has been about from the start — Genevieve says so herself. She’s what Beverly’s whole life has been about from the start — as the younger sister she has never known a second of life outside the womb without the other. Even when they’re apart Ellie is the constant buzzing of an unanswered phone, everywhere, at all times, inescapable, even in the audience you just want to turn the goddamned thing off it’s so fucking anxiety-inducing, but you can’t any more than she can. She seeps through cracks, around corners, over boundaries, until she’s all that’s left. If that clouds how we read the actions of the women closest to her, Beverly and Genevieve and Rebecca, well, that’s Elliot for you.

Even on a narrative level, the Mantle twins cannot be separated. After watching this exceptional show, I’m going to have a hard time separating them from me.

I reviewed the finale of Dead Ringers for Decider. Holy shit, what a show.

With only one episode to go, there’s no sign Dead Ringers is content to keep its head down and its guard up during the final rounds. Nope, it looks like this is a show that’s swinging haymakers until the final bell rings.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Dead Ringers for Decider.

All told, despite being the least spectacular of the show’s episodes to date, it’s the most momentous. So much has been dragged out into the light, with the promise of more life-upending revelations to come. The episode begins with an exterior shot of the twins’ nightmarish birthing and research center, but I suspect the Center cannot hold.

I reviewed episode four of Dead Ringers for Decider.

It all goes to what Agnes, the woman who lives in the alley outside the Mantles’ apartment and who storms the place after Ellie rains down debris on her from several stories up, says to Elliot in her fucking unbelievable rant on the rooftop. There’s really no way I can overstate what writer Rachel De-Lahay and actor Susan Blommaert accomplish here; it’s like watching some swift, muscular predator with claws the size of your middle finger tear a slow-moving gazelle to shreds. 

I reviewed episode three of Dead Ringers for Decider.

How good is Dead Ringers the TV show? I’ll tell you how good it is: While watching this second episode of the show, the first comparisons that sprang to my mind were Mad Men and The Terror. The two shows with the most precise, lacerating dialogue and character work in the past 15 years? Two shows obsessed with class, status, and the creation and severing of intimacy? Two shows with absurdly stacked casts of actors given their best material ever? Two shows that had me dying to see what happened next with every episode? That’s probably a good sign for Dead Ringers, right? 

I reviewed the incredible second episode of Dead Ringers, featuring one of the very best television scenes ever aired, for Decider.