Candidate #11
CHANNEL ZERO:
BUTCHER'S BLOCK
BUTCHER'S BLOCK
“... 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.”
No, you haven’t experienced a time slip.
There are indeed two seasons of a TV show that have staked out Candidate slots in the
same year, a ¡Qué horror! first!
With Butcher’s
Block, 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: 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…
No comments:
Post a Comment