Instead of a haunted house, what if there were a haunted city? What if the troll lurking under the bridge hid beneath the entire municipality? What if small-town America’s racial, sexual, gender and class divisions could be exploited by a billion-year-old cosmic shape-shifter that has taken the form of a child-eating clown?

These propositions are fundamental to “It,” Stephen King’s 1986 doorstopper of a horror novel, which for my money is his most frightening book. Derry is not just a setting, it’s a secondary antagonist. The real horror of “It” is that the presence of the evil entity beneath that quaint Maine town has warped the place’s inhabitants.

No one in Derry ever seems to notice when bad things happen — when outcasts are bullied, Black people tormented, L.G.B.T.Q. people bashed, women assaulted, children abused. The good people of Derry stare, dead-eyed, and do nothing. The second episode of “Welcome to Derry” conveys this pervasive sense of wrongness by fleshing out the city, with the Main Street shopping district, the Black side of town and the nearby air base all taking their turns in the spotlight. Derry feels like a real place, where real children live and grow and, frequently, vanish.

I reviewed this weekend’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

That The Lowdown, like Andor before it, can now be called “a show for our times” is mightily depressing, at least if you are predisposed to care about the kinds of things it cares about. (If you’re not, why are you reading this?) It’s a show for people who see that bad things are happening and just kind of instinctively react against it, the way your body rejects poison. It’s about someone who goes beyond shuddering and vomiting, and tries to turn himself into a one-man vaccine.

“If I see an injustice, and I don’t do anything,” Lee says to his one-eyed editor Cyrus’s lawyer cousin, “what’s that make me?” You know what that question is? The sound of a functioning conscience. Some people still fucking have them in this country! 

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

It should be noted here that Sheila White, the beautiful actor playing Messalina, is frequently shown nude throughout this episode, as are her male lovers. Her fuckathon battle with Scylla is described with shocking frankness, and when you see the aftermath – Scylla, her hair mussed, her chest slicked with sweat or saliva or, well, you know – there’s no question what has taken place. I kept reacting like Tim Robinson in that one I Think You Should Leave sketch: “I don’t know if you’re allowed to do that.”

I reviewed the penultimate episode of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. Gift link!

Full disclosure: This episode made it hard for me to get a good night’s sleep. There are horrific images, excruciating moments, and an overall tone of queasy cruelty in this hour of television that I simply couldn’t shake. To me, that’s the mark of great horror.

I recall getting that feeling from reading the 1986 novel “It,” Stephen King’s epic portrait of a small town in Maine called Derry that is haunted by a demonic, shape-shifting, child-eating clown. I first read it in middle school, when I was the same age as its young protagonists — I’m closer in age to their adult selves now — and it hit me like a possessed car. Beyond being King’s scariest book, and his grossest, it is also his cruelest: a nightmare dive into the horrible realities of child abuse and small-town closed-mindedness, transmuted into the supernatural.

I did not get that welcomely awful feeling from the two films to which this series serves as a prequel, “It” (2017) and “It Chapter Two” (2019), both from the director Andy Muschetti. Which is why I’m happy, if that’s the right word, to report that the first scene of this first episode of “It: Welcome to Derry” is scarier and more disturbing than everything in the two movies combined. With Muschetti once again behind the camera for the premiere, he and the showrunners, Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane, serve up a perfect nightmare of mounting panic and terror.

I reviewed the series premiere of the It prequel Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Watching this episode in October 2025, when there are open Nazis and Christian Nationalists at the highest levels of government and the rule of law is being rewritten to favor white people and punish everyone else more or less openly, is…bittersweet. Nevertheless, it is bracing and necessary for art to address these people for who and what they are. Lee Raybon and his compatriots are up against people who prattle about an imaginary America, even as they attempt to replace it with the Confederacy, Jim Crow, the Third Reich. A story in which fractures in the right-wing coalition can be exploited like rap beefs until, hopefully, someone emerges from the fascist cipher a clear-cut loser is a story worth telling.

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

It’s so easy to write of the wrong done to others as just that, wrong done to others. But evil doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every stone thrown at goodness and justice and love has ripples that spread out over the surface of the whole of society. This is what makes living in times like these so agonizing: So many are suffering, and so many more will suffer because of that suffering, and there’s so little any one of us can do beyond stilling the waters that directly surround us. Brad Ingelsby’s project is dramatizing this ripple effect in the form of cop thrillers set in Pennsylvania. After this engrossing, moving season of television, it’s a project with my full support. 

I reviewed the finale of Task for Decider.

In retrospect, there was one clear warning sign. Yes, Messalina, the sweet, beautiful, precociously competent and intelligent teenage girl to whom Claudius was forcibly wed by his demented uncle Caligula, makes the newly crowned emperor happy. Yes, she helps him immeasurably in his work. Yes, she’s the mother of first one, then two children by him. Yes, it seems like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

Until she says this: “My darling, I want to be Livia to your Augustus!”

Oh dear.

I reviewed the eleventh episode of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. Gift link!

There are two sides to every story, and that’s certainly the case with this week’s episode of The Lowdown. Side A: a raucous road-trip one-crazy-day buddy comedy, starring Ethan Hawke and Peter Dinklage as two very different flavors of aging radical brought together in the memory of a fallen comrade when hijinks ensue. Side B: a terrifying journey into the rage and licentiousness of contemporary law-and-order fascism, in which men who threaten women preside over lawless gangs protected by a badge. In other words, it’s of them half-empty, half-full type of glasses we’re drinking from today.

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

Eighteen minutes of cat-and-mouse action open this episode of Task. Actually, it’s more like cat-and-mouse-and-cat-and-mouse-and-cat-and-mouse-and-cat-and-mouse action. Working from creator Brad Ingelsby’s script, director Salli Richardson Whitfield expertly maneuvers a dozen armed and dangerous players through dense woods and empty cabins as they chase each other down, beat each other up, blow each other’s brains out, stab each other’s guts out, and run each other down in the road. Two of the show’s kindliest characters don’t make it out alive — but man, what a run.

I reviewed this weekend’s Task for Decider.

It is, of course, the last hurrah of the spectacular John Hurt as Caligula, which means it’s the last time we’re going to hear one of the most distinctive, melodic, terrifyingly powerful voices in the history of cinema. The way Hurt lets his raspy delivery sink into a purr, flitter into flights of laughter, or rise in volume and intensity until it sounds like he really is an angry god, is all-timer work on a show full of all-timer work.

Will I miss him? Oh, absolutely. But I also missed Augustus, Julia, Livia, Livilla, Sejanus, and Tiberius, and we’re getting along fine without all of them, aren’t we? I’ve never seen a show that goes through its core cast at this rapid a clip — Claudius is the only character in this episode who appeared in any of the first five — and never suffer a drop in quality, or the sense that the writing is flailing around looking for the next thing to do. I don’t see any reason why Caligula’s death should deal more of a blow to the show than any of the others, Livia’s in particular.

I reviewed the tenth episode of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. Gift link!

In a sequence that dropped my jaw with its sheer audacity, a dying Ed is wheeled towards the light down a corridor full of people from the hospital, along with a gaggle of mass murderers — Speck, Brudos, Ed Kemper, Charles Manson. While the killers express their admiration and the onlookers cheer Ed on, nurses and orderlies and doctors dance to, of all things, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes. (It was the song playing on MTV when he lost consciousness. Yes, Ed Gein wanted his MTV.)

So here’s the thing. I adore that song. I adore a novel use of it that doesn’t simply signify “Hey, it’s the 1980s!” I adore dream dance sequences, especially ones accompanying a person’s final moments — see also All that Jazz and the seventh season of Mad Men. And while it’s been many years since I was really in that dark place, I know an awful lot about those awful men. Seeing them as part of this joyous sequence is the exact note of discord it needed. There’s something awesome and terrible, in the old-school senses of those words, in watching Ed transcend in this way. It reminds me of how the show aims straight for the most indelible images from the three films it references: the shower scene, Leatherface twirling with his chainsaw, Bill in front of the mirror — just going right for it. I fucking loved it.

I reviewed the finale of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider. I thought this was a very impressive and troubling show.

“It’s like your mind is a mirror that somebody dropped on the floor. So everything you’ve ever seen or heard or read or imagined — there are all these shards reflecting back at you, and you can’t tell what’s real and what’s a fantasy.”

This is how the psychiatrist (Randall Newsome) treating Ed Gein at the mental hospital where he has been institutionalized describes Ed’s condition. It’s schizophrenia, he says, and it’s caused him to remember commiting crimes he never committed — like killing the new head nurse for bullying him, in a scene that may or many even have been real itself — he didn’t do, as well as forget ones he did — like killing Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, the latter of whom at least he considered a friend. (He does eventually remember killing Bernice and Mary, the only two victims every officially linked to Gein, and he’s devastated to realize it.)

It’s also writer-creator Ian Brennan’s approach to this material. The titular story is only partially about Ed Gein the man; it’s largely about Ed Gein the myth. Covering both his official victims and those he is suspected of killing, it’s working through the entire American Gein gestalt. As such it ricochets back and forth from the past to the future, from fiction to reality. 

I reviewed the seventh episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider.

What did Ed Gein know, and when did he know it?

It sounds like a ridiculous question: Unlike Richard Nixon, who did not conduct the Watergate break-in himself, Ed Gein did a whole bunch of crimes and violated a whole bunch of corpses. But when he is inevitably discovered, arrested, and brought in for questioning, he passes a polygraph test with flying colors even when asked about crimes there is zero evidentiary basis to believe he didn’t commit. But even in the case of Bernice Worden, whose mutilated corpse is found trussed up and decapitated in his barn, Ed sounds like a defendant in the Iran-Contra scandal: He just doesn’t recall.

Is he lying? Boy, it sure seems like it, doesn’t it? Now that he’s busted, that aw gee aw shucks dag nabbit cheese and crackers demeanor sounds not just out-of-place but disingenuous, even smug. This sick son of a bitch thinks he can please and thank you and may I his way out of multiple homicides and a charnel house of human remains that will ring through the ages as one of the worst-ever places to set foot?

But that’s just it: Maybe he does. Monster: The Ed Gein Story writer-creator Ian Brennan has been consistent in his portrayal of Ed as so deep in the grips of delusion that he can dissemble easily one second, then invite the literal police to go see the dead body he has in the upstairs bedroom the next. He seems to have no idea why some people who find him agreeable eventually get squicked out. For god’s sake, when he’s getting the living shit beaten out of him by Deputy Frank Worden (Charlie Hall), Bernice’s loving but lonely son and the poor bastard who discovers her body, Ed seems genuinely confused and upset. They’d always gotten along before, you see.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Monster for Decider.

If there’s a throughline that connects every aspect of this episode — which is Adeline’s more than it is Ed’s — it’s misogyny. Adeline flees her hometown because its only future for her is as a housewife and mother. The women’s circle is a punishing group of judgmental hypocrites who question Adeline’s womanhood even as they make excuses for their rapist sons. She’s half-forced, half-intrigued into indulging Ed’s blue balls like they’re a matter of life and death, going so far as to help dig up a corpse to take care of them.

After Weegee indulgently looks at Adeline’s photography, he first mocks her as a no-talent, then makes crude sexual comments about her until she flees. Even the landlady she savagely beats suggests finding a man is her main option. When she finally returns home, her mother — in a magnificent monologue by Weigert, one of our very best — viciously berates her, suggesting Adeline’s in some way defective because she threw herself down the stairs multiple times in an effort to end the pregnancy. 

The legal lack of reproductive freedom, like contemporary anti-trans measures that seem a million miles removed from the friendly newsreel footage of Christine as a compelling curiosity, is the ultimate state expression of woman-hatred, turning women against one another in the process. In many ways this is the most grim thing about watching The Ed Gein Story right now. Across the country, and at the highest levels of government, men are working to return the country to the benighted state it was in when Ed and Adeline went insane because of it. 

I reviewed the fifth episode of Monster for Decider.

Now, obviously, “Ed Gein, Babysitter” is a world-historically awful idea. To paraphrase The Big Lebowski, say what you will about John Wayne Gacy, but at least the man was a semi-professional clown. Ed’s idea of a magic show is to take the children he’s babysitting — with Adeline’s strong recommendation — to his house of horrors. There, he plays a game of three-card monty with skulls and a human finger. He tells the kids he can change into a lady, then hides his head in his flannel shirt and puts a woman’s severed head on top of his own. When the kids protest that it’s stupid and fake, he pops his real head out, revealing a mask of human skin.

The sequence works as black comedy, however, because at no point does it seem like Ed is actually going to hurt these kids. That’s the weird thing about Ed: When he’s being sweet and good-natured, he kind of means it? Gein lives fully in the grips of delusion, one with no real seams between the everyday world of saying hello to neighbors and the nightmare world of having a house full of human body parts. This is how he can easily lie to the sheriff one second, then make the insane decision to invite him inside to meet Mother the next. Fortunately for Ed, the sheriff declines.

I reviewed the third episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider.

The irony is that Psycho really doesn’t make people “look at something like this.” It seems like it does, people feel like it does, opening-night audiences have a series of health scares in this episode because it does, but it doesn’t. There’s no nudity, for example, but the shower scene and the peeping-tom routine by Norman Bates that precedes reveal nothing. (A dark sort of credit here belongs perhaps to Hitchcock’s own penchant for peeping: He’s shown spying on an actress getting changed earlier in the episode, just as both Norman and Ed do.)

There’s no graphic violence in the mother of all slasher films, either. The knife wielded by Norman Bates dressed in Mother drag never visibly pierces the naked flesh of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane. It’s all movie magic — the foley art of a knife sinking into a melon repeatedly, the meticulous storyboarding of title designer Saul Bass, George Tomasini’s precision editing, the famous screeching strings from composer Bernard Hermann, Leigh’s panicked performance, Hitchcock’s near-peerless mastery of filmmaking’s dark arts.

So Winkler and writer Ian Brennan do what they’ve been doing across both episodes, right down to a lengthy look at the fake vulvas: They make you look at it.

With Suzanna Son’s Adeline standing in for Leigh and Marion, and Ed dressed as his own mother rather than Norman Bates as his, the episode cross-cuts immaculately between the shower stabbing and the opening-night audience’s horrified reaction. This time, however, you see the knife stab and slice away at the victim’s naked body, over and over and over again. 

The brilliance of this move lies in how it relies on you, the viewer, to help make it work. That sounds wrong — it’s all right in front of you — but the better you know the original shower scene, the worse the scene is for you. You can probably already hear those horrible knife-in-melon squelching sounds, hear Marion’s gasps and cries and grunts, see the knife rising and falling, see the blood running endlessly down the shower drain. Your brain has already conjured that horror, however many times you’ve seen the movie. 

Once it becomes apparent what the show’s incredibly gutsy, borderline blasphemous act of revealing the violence carefully hidden within Hollywood’s most famous murder is doing, it dawns on you: Oh my god, I’m going to have to see the whole thing. I’m going to watch this man butcher this woman for half a minute. As the dream-Hitchcock says to Perkins during that strange hallucinatory sequence in the fake Gein house, “You’re the one who can’t look away.”

I reviewed the remarkable second episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider.

I just want to state for the record that the least interesting thing you could possibly talk about regarding Task is the accents. Are they good, bad, indifferent? I honestly can’t imagine caring! Think of how many shows set in England or some fantasy equivalent thereof you watch, with actors from America and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and Ireland or just other regions of England on them. You think all of them are constantly nailing it? I doubt it! But if you made me list the 300 most interesting things in Game of Thrones, “Peter Dinklage’s accent was so-so” wouldn’t make the cut. Believe it or not, they’re not actually stabbing each other with swords either. Go with the flow a bit!

What is more interesting to talk about than that? Oh, I don’t know. Robbie insisting they listen to the radio during an abduction. Perry slamming the door in his girlfriend’s face to hide the wounds he incurred during the struggle with Eryn hard enough to give her a lump on the head. Director Jeremiah Zagar spotlighting some of the local flora and fauna like this is a season of The White Lotus set in Delaware County.

The grin on Freddy Frias’s lying face. The way Tom poorly fakes peeing by pouring the remnants of a half-drunk can of Pepsi into the toilet, one plop at a time. Robbie pulling over to piss in an echo of the earlier scene. The closeup on Eryn’s eyes as she sees Jayson come home covered in blood. Everyone, including the bad guys, seemingly genuinely interested in making sure Sam doesn’t get killed. Kath pigging out during the hunt for Tom, getting called on it, and claiming to be “an emotional eater.”

My favorite? Tom literally finding his way out of the woods and back to civilization. No, not civilization — community. What he finds at that beach are families and couples laughing, playing, enjoying nature and each other. When you abandon your calling for love, then that love is ended by your own adopted son, then you find solace in a bottle, then you’re called out of semi-retirement to find a missing kid, then you’re held at gunpoint fully expecting to die — when all that happens, imagine how hard the sight of a child laughing in her mother’s arms in the sunlight would hit. Because Task is the show it is, you don’t really have to imagine.

I reviewed last night’s Task for Decider.

Fans of Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin’s source novels A Song of Ice and Fire, no doubt, see plenty they recognize about Westeros and its inhabitants in Caligula and his macabre misadventures. Caligula has the pale blond hair of House Targaryen, a dynasty that, as Herod says of the Claudians, produces either great men or madmen. He’s in an incestuous, blasphemous relationship with his sister Drusilla (actually the other sisters too), another hallmark of the Targaryens and their native Valyrian culture. A blonde queen fucking her brother immediately puts one in mind of Cersei and Jaime Lannister, too. Caligula himself, of course, is the archetypal Mad King.

Anyone, however, can recognize the prodigious gifts of John Hurt, whose Caligula is one of TV’s greatest villains, on a show that’s given us one already in Livia. Indeed, it’s worth reflecting that with the deaths of Tiberius and Antonia, Herod and Claudius are the only characters left alive from fully the first five episodes. In many ways we’re watching a brand new show, and for now at least, it’s a one-man show at that.

I reviewed episode nine of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. Gift link!

When a crime is so monstrous it defies imagination, imagination sometimes strikes back. To understand the calamity that has befallen the world, to process it in such a way that the mind can move forward, it can enlarge the problem, embellish it, twist it into even more lurid and fantastical forms. Thus the obscene horror of the Holocaust is transmuted into taboo sexuality in the form of Nazispolitation, BDSM-themed books, comics, and movies in which blonde-bombshell SS officers sexually torment their prisoners. And thus fully three of, conservatively, the 20 best horror films ever made — Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs — can be said to originate from the same single, sad, sordid source: Wisconsin farmer and necrophile Ed Gein.

Work as extreme as what Ryan Muphy and creator-writer Ian Brennan have been doing across the Monster series — its first installment tackled Jeffrey Dahmer, its second Lyle and Erik Menendez and their abusive parents — is rare on the small screen. Seeing it done this well is rarer still. Between the two Monster/s seasons and the American Crime Story seasons on O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan, Murphy, whatever his other faults as a filmmaker and impresario, has brought us the four best true-crime dramas I’ve ever seen. Will Monster: The Ed Gein story give us more of the brutal, vital same? 

I’m covering the new season of Monster for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

But beyond that, what’s the meaning of Alice in Borderland’s finale? Love. That’s always been the meaning of this show. While there are many dystopian life-and-death game shows and movies out there — from Squid Game to The Running Man to Battle Royale to The Hunger Games — they typically stand as commentary on a malevolent force at work in our own world: capitalism, fascism, conformity, the class system, culture-wide callousness towards suffering and death. 

Alice, by contrast, has never struck me as political in this way. The meaning of this show has long been that people should love one another and take care of one another, because it’s the right thing to do. Time and again, people who’ve only just met put their lives on the line, often sacrificing them, for each other. Arisu is granted his final “win” because he volunteered to stay behind so that others might live. 

Since we now know all of this is taking place on the border between life and death, the Borderland now really does feel like some kind of final testing ground for people’s character. Are you gonna go feral and launch a one-person war against everyone in your quest for victory? Or are you gonna create a real community and help it survive? Even the games are structured so that cooperation is key. The Borderland is a harsh judge, and an unfair one, but in its own weird way it’s enforcing the Golden Rule. The basic human dignity of the people around you is worth fighting for, even dying for.

Huh, maybe this show is political after all.

I wrote a servicey piece explaining the Alice in Borderland Season 3 finale for Decider, and as usual I get a little philosophical.