As it’s Halloween, All Saint’s Eve, season of the (sexy) witch, whatever you want to call it, there’s no better time to take a peek from behind the sofa at the state of horror on our TV screens.
Horror is always around, in film and TV, even if it’s often hidden away on the far reaches of the schedules like the unwanted murderous crazed stepchild locked in the attic of so many gothic melodramas. It falls in and out of favour, but we’re currently enjoying one of the cyclical upswings: perhaps because horror generally increases in popularity in times of hardship and stress, it provides a useful release, and as fans know, a good scare can be thoroughly invigorating.
With Jekyll and Hyde, Scream Queens and The Fear joining The Walking Dead and the latest instalment of American Horror Story, there’s plenty to choose from – but is any of it actually scary?
Hopefully, for younger viewers at least, the answer is yes with regards to ITV’s Jekyll and Hyde, a bold attempt at aiming horror at the Sunday teatime audience.
“They do say that gloomy Victorian gothic is coming back into style,” says one character in the second episode, a line that surely comes from the pitch meeting for Charlie Higson’s update of the split-personality classic. Other than character names and places, there’s little of Robert Louis Stephenson’s original here. It’s more akin to something like a Sax Rohmer potboiler: all foggy streets, ancient cults, arcane symbols, gangs of one-eyed crooks, paranormal investigators and racism.
It’s unusual enough to see shootings, stabbings and the occasional drops of blood in this 7pm TV timeslot, but we get all that, plus some flesh-eating rotted ghouls, mutations and an effectively bizarre dog with a man’s head, surely something to haunt the dreams of the younger viewers long into adulthood. Meanwhile, the cast struggle to keep up with Richard E Grant’s levels of camp, and try not be be upstaged by the art-deco stylings.
ITV stays on similar ground with the forthcoming The Frankenstein Chronicles (ITV Encore, November) where Inspector John Marlott (Sean Bean) investigates grisly crimes on London’s foggy streets (did ITV purchase a job lot of smoke machines?). On at a much later hour than Jekyll, it has a suitably increased level of horror: Marlott’s quest begins when he discovers a child’s corpse in the Thames made from a patchwork of several bodies.
Again, it riffs on a literary classic, and here we get an extra fourth-wall breaking layer with Anna Maxwell Martin appearing as Mary Shelley, her novel Frankenstein being popular with many of the characters.
Over on BBC3, there’s The Fear, a semi-admirable attempt to nurture new horror talent. An audience is shown a slew of four-minute horror shorts made by amateurs, they vote on the best and the grand winner gets some cash to invest in their next project.
Where this show, which really should be called Scream Test, slips up is in its formatting, all of which conspires to undo the film-makers’ hard work. We get a too-chirpy host with eccentric facial hair cracking wise, and the films are interrupted by night-vision shots of the audience jumping out of their seats at the scary bits – which gets old remarkably quick. The films are generally pretty good, plenty of obvious influences from movies such as The Babadook and The Grudge, but with some surprisingly well-crafted mini-shock sequences made for peanuts.
On E4, we get the new teen slasher Scream Queens, a show that seems more interested in being annoying than in generating scares. Having unlikeable characters is fine (Mad Men managed for years), but having uninteresting ones is not so excusable. It’s off to a shaky start, and seems more concerned with telling the standard teens-striving-to-be-popular-at-school story that resembles nobody’s real-life experience. The occasional flash of intentional humour – one victim has a text conversation with her killer as she is murdered – and the welcome presence of actual scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis are almost enough to hold the interest. Still, early days.
Scream Queen’s creator/producer Ryan Murphy’s other show, American Horror Story: Hotel, is off to a decent start. Long-term fans know Murphy has scant regard for things such as logic or continuity, so the show is never really that scary, but it does quite often manage to be wonderfully gross.
There’s not an original bone in its rotting corpse, though: it takes mere minutes before the expected rips from The Shining start to appear, and the intro of Lady Gaga’s vamp character is stolen intact from the underrated David Bowie/Tony Scott bloodsucker The Hunger. All that’s missing at that point is Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead on the soundtrack, which, inevitably, does appear a few minutes later in the episode. Actually, the soundtrack (New Order, Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc) the wonderful sets, game actors (the quite good Gaga, the great Kathy Bates and Angela Bassett) and generous doses of splatter and messed-up imagery are enough to keep this chugging along.
Still, the best horror shows on at the moment are the two that deal with the undead: The Returned and The Walking Dead. Neither show is at all arch or knowing, there’s nothing meta or spoofing about them. They tackle their subjects with seriousness, and it pays off.
The Returned is currently expanding its mythos and deepening its mystery, throwing in some great, unsettling and as yet unexplained imagery, such as all the bodies tied to the trees and the submerged section of town.
The Walking Dead has hit the ground running, cutting back on the dialogue and piling on the action and tension – although they have clearly just tried to pull a fast one concerning the “death” of a major character, so it is likely a lot of viewers will be hacked off, at least for a short while.
Are we getting the horror we deserve? Are these shows tricks or treats? Recent shows like the groundbreaking Hannibal and the beautifully executed Penny Dreadful haven’t performed as well as hoped. What is the future of horror on TV? What will you be watching this Halloween?
