Channel Zero (2016-2018)

There are more scares packed into the first scene of the first episode of the first season of showrunner Nick Antosca’s exceptional horror anthology series than most horror TV shows can muster in their entire run. Amazingly, it only gets better from there. Each surreal standalone season of Channel Zero loosely adapts a famous “creepypasta” from the internet — the subjects include a cursed children’s television broadcast, a Halloween haunted house with a dark secret, a family of wealthy cannibals, and a woman haunted by her imaginary friend — and uses a different talented director. This gives story a different feeling, look, and tone, with one thing in common: All four are legitimately terrifying. The episodes and seasons are short, too, making each one a perfect weekend afternoon binge. And if you feel like the series ends too soon, don’t worry: Antosca has since co-created a quartet of killer streaming miniseries about murder and madness — The Act, Brand New Cherry Flavor, Candy, and A Friend of the Family — that are just as distinctive and chilling.

For Decider, I wrote about ten of my favorite horror television shows since 2016.

9. Interview With the Vampire

“Home Is Where You’re Happy” by Charles Manson

“Look, Charlie Manson wrote a couple of beautiful songs. Still, he was Charlie Manson.” Controversial, Daniel Molloy! The conductor of this vampire drama’s titular interview, played by Eric Bogosian, has very little patience for the bloodsucker in question, Louis de Pointe du Lac, and even less for Louis’s psychotic, pubescent protégé, the teenage vampire Claudia. It’s her Molloy compares to Manson, the cult leader who defined the death of the Age of Aquarius … and much to my everlasting surprise, it’s Manson who soundtracks the end of this episode. Molloy is right: Manson could be a talented songwriter in very limited doses, as his buoyant ode to personal freedom, “Home Is Where You’re Happy,” makes clear. It’s just hard to hear that happiness when you recall the fate of Sharon Tate, which is what makes the song a strong choice for the soundtrack of a show about magnetic mass murderers, even when they’re of the supernatural variety.

I wrote about ten of the best uses of popular music on TV this year for Vulture.

But like I said, this is the climax, and it’s okay to get a little less nuanced and more bombastic overall. Creator Rolin Jones has constructed a remarkable show regardless, one that captures the essence of Anne Rice’s work while improving upon it, for its new era and medium, with every change it makes. I don’t know what I expected of Interview with the Vampire beyond “I hope I have a good time watching the sexy vampires,” but it delivered in every way I could have wanted, and many more I didn’t know I wanted till I got them. Interview is a beautiful and sparklingly intelligent show. It’s going to be hard to wait until next year for Season 2, but I know a vampire who could tell you a thing or two about the beauty of delayed gratification.

I reviewed the season finale of Interview with the Vampire for Decider. It’s up a week early online!

The only problem with Interview with the Vampire is that at a certain point you simply run out of superlatives. Like its contemporaries Andor and House of the Dragon, IWTV provides proof week in and week out that genre television rooted in nerd-beloved source material can be as smart, incisive, surprising, and rich as any of its more traditional prestige-TV counterparts. 

I reviewed last night’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

“I’m trying to think of something more fucked up than this.” Me too, Daniel Molloy, me too. Titled “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart” with the show’s typical baroque brio, the fifth episode of Interview with the Vampire is a troubling hour of television. It chronicles first the disintegrating sanity of the young vampire Claudia, then the traumatic event that forces her back home, then the final collapse of her surrogate family via the abusive tendencies of its miserable patriarch. It does all this while sacrificing none of the richness that has made the characters, and the show, so vivid and surprising all this time. 

I reviewed this week’s excellent episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

I think that’s the key thing about this episode, written by Eleanor Burgess and directed by Keith Powell, and about the show in general. Its ability to balance the thrills and chills and sex and blood and comedy of an over-the-top Gothic vampire romance with serious observations about race, wealth, addiction, unhappy relationships, and now de facto child abuse and the misery of teenagers is hugely impressive. It manages to deliver pretty much everything you’d want from a vampire show, and more besides. And now we have four core performances that are funny and empathetic and nasty and brilliant, from Bailey Bass as well as from Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, and Eric Bogosian. 

Between Interview, Andor, and House of the Dragon, those of us who hunger and thirst for legitimately sophisticated nerd-genre storytelling are eating very, very well this Halloween season.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

The best way I can sum up Interview with the Vampire so far is that, like House of the Dragon and Andor, it’s what I once imagined nerd cultural hegemony might be like: smart, sharp, horny, campy, and at least a little bit unpleasant and disgusting — everything you might have wanted before mighty corporate machines figured out how to produce the stuff like they produce breakfast cereal. 

I reviewed last night’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

The sense of humor brought to this fine adaptation of Anne Rice’s goth classic by showrunner Rolin Jones, writers Jonathan Ceniceroz and Dave Harris, and ace TV director Alan Taylor is undoubtedly a pleasant surprise, but it’s one of many. Simply put, this show is a cavalcade of delights, some dark and some less so. Blood and horror exist on the same plane as sex and sensuality; flashes of piercing insight into the human condition rival those into the inhuman condition; sharp commentary on race, sexuality, and even the grim toll of the pandemic is there to be found alongside jokes about eating babies. In other words, this is good, good shit.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

All in all it’s a marvelously melodramatic production. The prose of creator Rolin Jones’s script is defiantly purple. The costumes and sets are lavish and decadent. Anderson and Reid are mesmerizingly attractive, a key component of Rice’s legendarium. Director and Game of Thrones vet Alan Taylor knows his way around torchlit period pieces, that’s for sure. Daniel Hart’s score is like something out of Old Hollywood. Hell, they even put ominous thunderclaps in the background during Lestat’s assault on the church and conversion of Louis into the undead. 

Of course, you have to be willing to go with all that kind of stuff to get anything out of the show. Which, I think, is a price of admission worth asking for, if not paying. Any show that’s really intent on adapting the vibe of Anne Rice’s sublimely arch, hypersensual books — even if it’s changing the time frame and, rather crucially to the story, the race of one of the protagonists — has to be willing to go there, to leave taste behind and go over the top with, well, pretty much everything. You can either stomach that sort of thing or not.

I certainly can. I’m excited to see a vampire show made with such evident craft and care, instead of the umpteenth show about teenage vampires trying to make it through Vampire High or whatever. I’m excited to see a vampire show that presents vampires as both thoroughly awful — whatever else he is, Lestat is an egomaniacal dickhead murderer — and completely irresistible once they have you in their clutches. I’m even excited to have a horror show on TV that is more about vibes than raw terror or pitch-black bleakness, one more indebted to Bram Stoker’s Dracula than 28 Days Later or Under the Skin. And I’m excited to see any show this relentlessly, bombastically horny. These are notes worth playing, and based on this performance, I’m willing to listen.

I reviewed the delightful series premiere of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.