Five-Legged Iguana

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2019

Candidate #1

INTO THE DARK

Season 1 Episode 1
THE BODY
(October 2018)

“Yeah, the one that was dressed as, ummm… uhhh… uhhh… Elsa from Frozen?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow! Marie Antoinette, you dipshit! Do you know anything about anything that’s not been made into an action figure?”
“I’m so sorry, Professor. I’m not an expert in Civil War history, okay?”

(Clears throat.)

“It has begun!” he exclaims in his best Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa*-as-Shang Tsung tones.

¡Qué horror! 2019.

And it begins here.

With Into the Dark.

In case you haven’t heard, Into the Dark is the latest horror anthology to hit the scene.

Brought to us by the unholy (but very, very welcome) alliance of Hulu and Blumhouse, what makes Into the Dark different from all the other horror anthologies out there is its structure: it isn’t one story told in serialized form over x number of episodes, but rather, a dozen distinct horror features brought to us over the course of a season.

And they’ve decided to kick off with Paul Davis’ The Body.

“I still can’t believe it’s him.”

“I know. Doesn’t he have like, 20 million Twitter followers?”

“Well… Not anymore.”

Based on his short of the same name, The Body follows a cultured and exacting hitman (Jekyll & Hyde’s Tom Bateman), who’s unfortunately inconvenienced on Halloween night, disrupting his plans of transporting the titular body of his latest victim (an apparently “famous person”) as part of his deal with his client.

Cue horror-comedy shenanigans.

“This is what death looks like, boy.”

But don’t let the word “comedy” fool you.

The Body is still very much a horror film. It just so happens to have some funny lines and some blackly comic situations baked into it.

With brief appearances by Sasha Grey and John Landis** (the Landis connection presumably stemming from Davis’ direction of the Beware the Moon: Remembering ‘An American Werewolf in London’ documentary), The Body’s a great way to kick off the Candidates list for ¡Qué horror! 2019, and if you’ve already checked out the 2018 rundown, then move smoothly onto this title for some awesome Halloween viewing.

“And why couldn’t he just kill like, Elijah Wood or someone small?”

* Who, incidentally enough, plays my hands-down favorite character on The Man in the High Castle, Trade Minister Tagomi.

** Interestingly, Landis’ An American Werewolf in London is a great example of the horror-comedy hybrid.

Parting Shot: Into the Dark presents me with an interesting conundrum. It’s a television series (or, well, “web television”) whose episodes are feature films.

So, in light of the ¡Qué horror! set-up, here’s how I’m planning to solve the conundrum:

I’m going to consider each episode as a feature film, so Into the Dark doesn’t potentially hog the TV Horror slot (since it’s going to have a dozen separate titles vying for that slot, as opposed to any other TV series, which faces the tricky and difficult task of having all the episodes in any particular season tie up into a single solid horror experience).

Considering Into the Dark as “television” here wouldn’t be fair to the other TV horror shows…

(Into the Dark: The Body OS courtesy of impawards.com.)