Five-Legged Iguana

10 Slots for the Best Horror I've Seen in the Past Year
[8 of 10]
The TV Horror Slot

And it's a tie!!!

CHANNEL ZERO: NO-END HOUSE

(September 2017)

"God! I keep... waiting for one of you to understand how magnificent this place is!

"All the gifts that it can give you! Because memory is a disease!

“And then this house is the cure! How can you not see that?!”

One of the most amazing things about Channel Zero’s sophomore season is that, though it still fundamentally feels like a Channel Zero story (in so much as the Channel Zero logo doesn’t look out of place in the opening credits), it does so despite the fact that it has a different kind of horror at its core, compared to the horror of Candle Cove.

With its central themes of memory and loss and instinct and co-dependency, No-End House is also surprisingly moving, balancing out the horror with genuine emotion, thanks in no small part to a commendable cast, which includes the excellent John Carroll Lynch.

CHANNEL ZERO:
BUTCHER'S BLOCK

(February 2018)

“... this is the city I come home to.

“When I walk here, I’m in two worlds at the same time. The one you see, and the one I remember.”

With both No-End House and Butcher’s Block making the cut this year, it has become pointedly apparent that Channel Zero is where the best of current television horror can be found.

“You were so scared of losing your mind and then you just gave it away…”

With the insidious spectre of mental illness and the desolation of sacrifice zones some of its preoccupations, Butcher’s Block is “… particularly inspired by Argento films, by Candyman, by Nicolas Roeg films” (in the words of Channel Zero’s creator and showrunner, Nick Antosca).

Directed by Arkasha Stevenson (who brought Lynch to the, ahem, table), Butcher’s Block makes it three for three for Channel Zero, and, once again, the ante is upped for its next season, The Dream Door, directed by E.L. Katz, no stranger to these parts due to Cheap Thrills.*

With reversals, a motley crew of protagonists, and a steady, occasionally hallucinatory build to a Grand Guignol climax, Antosca, Stevenson, and company have brought us a “… particularly bizarre flavor” of horror in Butcher’s Block.

Oh, and did I forget to mention?

Rutger flippin’ Hauer is in this one!

“You know, if you don’t eat enough protein, the body just starts to eat itself. Yeah, I read that in a Reader’s Digest.

“You just get so hungry, your heart will just up and eat itself! And then it moves on to your brain, and then it goes down to your spine, and suddenly, you’re just dead!

“Happens to vegetarians all the time.”

(Channel Zero: No-End House OS courtesy of impawards.com; Channel Zero: Butcher’s Block OS courtesy of dreadcentral.com.)

*Katz also directed “A is for Amateur” for ¡Qué horror! 2015 title, ABCs of Death 2, and was an associate producer on Adam Wingard’s A Horrible Way To Die, one of the Serial Killer Thriller runners-up on the 2012 rundown.

He was also co-producer on the non-¡Qué horror! title, The Aggression Scale, so, yeah… Katz has been ‘round these parts a lot, even when he wasn’t fronting a film.

Here’s hoping he comes back for The Dream Door…