¡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.)

FEAR ITSELF
Season 1 Episode 4
“In Sickness and In Health”
Written by Victor Salva
Directed by John Landis

The person you are marrying is a serial killer.


That’s what a typewritten note received by Samantha (Psych’s Maggie Lawson) reads, on her wedding day.
And though the premise does sound like some cheesy thriller by way of Lifetime, this was an episode brought to us by the tag team of Victor Salva (Jeepers Creepers) and John Landis (An American Werewolf In London).
With that sort of pedigree alone, this was high on my radar, and ultimately, I can appreciate the attempt, but am nonetheless disappointed with this particular union.


To begin with, though not as pronounced as it was in American Werewolf, that brand of Landis humour can still be detected in “In Sickness…”, and it’s an element that doesn’t quite benefit the episode’s set-up and action, much of which occurs in a dark, creaky church.
The thrills aren’t really there as well, and the overkill with the religious iconography—statuary and stained glass windows seem ubiquitous in this one—frankly gets annoying, as if Landis had nothing else to train his camera on. (Though they may perhaps be meant to foreshadow some gruesome climactic imagery, their repetitiveness just seems lazy and uninspired.)
The casting of Lawson’s co-star on Psych (and the USA Network show’s lead) James Roday as Samantha’s husband-to-be, Carlos, also serves to distract, as his portrayal of over-the-top fake psychic detective Shawn Spencer is a difficult shadow to shake; I don’t think I’d ever mentally equate the actor who plays Shawn Spencer with a groom and possible serial killer named “Carlos.”


And as far as Salva’s script goes, though I did note the narrative eventuality as soon as it was mentioned early on in the proceedings, I will nonetheless commend the script for the passably effective climactic twist.
The red herrings though, seem, in retrospect, to be desperate stabs at keeping the audience guessing.


There are some pluses, mind.
The stunt casting of Cancer Man himself, William B. Davis, as the hard-of-hearing Fr. Chris, is amusing, and the Hitchcock echo is also neatly slotted in.
And this is better than Landis’ earlier Masters of Horror entry, “Deer Woman,” so that’s something.
If however, you’re hard-pressed to see some truly worthwhile stuff from either Salva or Landis, you’d be better served by watching either Jeepers Creepers (just the first; you can skip the sequel) or An American Werewolf In London (not to be confused with the terrible sorta-sequel, Anthony Waller’s An American Werewolf In Paris).

(Images courtesy of nbc.com.)