Over the past decade or so, Hollywood has become obsessed with the imminent downfall of civilization. From The Walking Dead to the Planet of the Apes franchise to a countless number of young adult dystopian nightmares, the theme has grown into such prominence that major newspapers and magazines have begun writing long think pieces on what it all means. Why is it that in a time when the Earth is more geopolitically stable, more peaceful, and more economically prosperous than it has been for centuries, we are as a culture worried that the end has finally about to hit? Is it because we need enemies to provide purpose? It almost seems as though the collapse of the imperial order and the end of the Cold War took away the very raison d’ être for the political and social order, and en masse countries and their peoples turned on themselves
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Netflix’s algorithm doesn’t quite have a handle on what I might like, and I am constantly surprised by its steadfast insistence that I will enjoy the lesser works of James Franco, particularly the ones about porn and sex. I can’t quite figure why. But for the past two weeks, Netflix has been recommending that I watch The Hollow, an animated mystery series that debuted on June 8. The family-friendly series, from Canadian producers Slap Happy Cartoons, the creative force behind Cartoon Network’s Unikitty, tells the story of three teenagers who awaken in a strange fantasy land with no memory of their past lives and must work together to survive. I successfully avoided the show for two weeks, but I finally gave in and tried it for one reason: Episodes ran under half an hour and fit in my schedule this week where Netflix’s bloated dramas and their hour-plus episodes did not. I’m glad I watched it, but man, oh man, was the ending disastrously bad.
Most of you reading this probably think that I watch TV shows simply to hate them. That’s not the case, and I go into every show with the assumption that I’m going to like it. This leads to a lot of disappointment, of course. But in this case, I was so pleasantly surprised by The Hollow for the first three quarters of its season that I fully expected to give it an enthusiastic review. Fair warning: If you click through to the full blog post, I will be discussing the show’s ending. If you haven’t seen the show and plan to watch it, you may want to wait and read this post after you’ve finished the ten-episode series. Most of my review will be spoiler-free and can be read safely as a complete review on its own. I will mark where I dive into spoiler territory near the end. Every week I receive messages asking why I bother to cover topics the writer considers too discredited or ridiculous to have anything to do with the reality of daily life. And then we hear stories like yesterday’s revelation that British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and at least half a dozen other high-ranking party members were participants in a private Facebook group where they shared Holocaust denial claims, Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds (the timely subject of my forthcoming British history magazine article), and conspiracy theories from David Icke, the British personality who folded the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into a ridiculous tale of space aliens and lizard-people. The Labour Party confirmed the story to Britain’s Telegraph, but Corbyn said he made only a few posts and condemns the group’s Anti-Semitism.
This week Syfy debuted the third season of its Channel Zero anthology, entitled “Butcher’s Block.” This is not really a review since I have not seen enough episodes to form a final opinion, but I am apparently in the minority in that I watched the season premiere and felt it to be little more than a random mishmash of horror clichés held together by confusion masquerading as intrigue. But virtually every critic that saw the series gave it a glowing review. Rotten Tomatoes, as of this writing, gave it both a 100% fresh rating from professional critics and the popular audience alike. Granted, the reasons for that have little to do with the show’s quality. The critics surveyed numbered six, all of whom are horror aficionados, a group notorious for praising anything with shadows and blood; and the popular audience also numbered six, a self-selecting group of horror fans.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been catching up on obscure genre movies and series. I was amused to see that the Decades channel showed a few episodes of Circle of Fear (a.k.a. Ghost Story), a 1970s supernatural series that NBC commissioned as a companion piece to Night Gallery. I had never seen Circle of Fear, which only ran for 22 episodes over two years, and it turns out that it is a rather poor knockoff of Night Gallery. Episodes are overlong at an hour, and the production values are low, even for 1970s TV. The stories are a little flat, and the enjoyment of the episodes comes mostly from the retro stylings of the outrageously 1970s costumes and sets, and the appearance of celebrities like John Astin, Carolyn Jones, Martin Sheen, and others. I’m glad I saw it, but I don’t think I’d want to watch it again.
A decade ago, a news story from Japan made flesh crawl around the world. A homeless woman in the town of Kasuya entered a man’s house and hid in the closet, where she lived undetected for a year while the man went about his life oblivious to the intruder. The homeowner installed cameras after becoming suspicious when food started disappearing from his kitchen, which led to the woman’s discovery. Not long after the story broke, horror authors incorporated variations on this bizarre event into their work, producing some creepy tales that I half-remember from old editions of Best New Horror.
The first in my new occasional series reviewing movies I watched over the weekend.
It is hard not to feel like there is a moral rot at the center of our civilization, one that has been festering for decades and threatens to become gangrenous. In the past few months, we have learned that nearly every man with any power is a sex predator. We have seen freedom redefined as a celebration of anger, hatred, and disgust. Self-interest has been remade as the new national interest. The crass vulgarity of Donald Trump has unleashed a toxic miasma of American ugliness that was always there but had hitherto been kept hidden by the fantasy that civility was a virtue. Johnson and Nixon were nearly as foul as Trump, but never before have large crowds cheered open displays of crudity. When historians tell the story of our times, I wonder how it will go? Perhaps future historians will punctuate chapters on America’s decline in the face of power and prosperity with vignettes of individuals who went mad and in self-destructive rage lashed out against the perceived enemy within. This week the Screen Junkies team returned from a month of crisis following sexual harassment allegations against Andy Signore, and they released a parody trailer for Stranger Things. In the trailer, the overriding argument is that the show is basically nostalgia porn, a program hand-crafted for 40-somethings to relive their childhood. It’s funny, as they say, because it’s true. It’s funny to think that it’s been a full decade since I published my book Knowing Fear, my study of the development of the horror genre. (The book was released a few months ahead of its official 2008 publication date.) Time goes by fast, but it’s more amazing to think that I used to be so deeply enmeshed in the horror genre that I once wrote a whole book about it. Maybe it was the weight of the explosion of media over the past decade, or my waning enthusiasm about devoting my decreasing free time to intentionally seeking out horror, but I’ve found it harder and harder to keep up, or to care.
Since the birth of my son, I’ve been a bit hard-pressed to make time for reading, and it is with regret that it took me several weeks longer than expected to finish Edgar Cantero’s new novel Meddling Kids, a mashup of Scooby-Doo and H. P. Lovecraft that earned rave reviews from critics earlier this summer. I found the book to be enjoyable, but a little less impressive than the critics made it out to be. Meddling Kids is a book I wanted to love, but it was one I liked instead. And to be frank, I think TV is ruining novels for me. It’s hard to pretend that 300 pages of a one-off novel can rival the hundreds of hours I spend with characters on TV series over the years of their runs. It takes, what, 20 hours to read this book, while, for example, a throwaway TV show on a similar theme like Teen Wolf has 100 hours of content spread over six calendar years. Perhaps that’s why I just don’t feel the same connection when I read reviews about how realistic and detailed the book’s characters are. I barely got to know them before they were gone. Each had, I believe, one personality trait. It seems like the CW’s Riverdale was more of a fresh and darker take on Archie than Meddling Kids is for Scooby-Doo
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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