It can be a cheap trick for a popcorn flick or its TV equivalent to mine real-world tragedy for pathos. It’s so easy for the relative tastelessness of that kind of entertainment, much as I love so much of it, to read as defilement of something that should be held sacred. When it goes wrong, it does so in spectacular fashion: Marvel attributing the authorship of Hiroshima to one of its Eternals, say, or Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” playing over the memorial for Emmett Till in Lovecraft Country. 

These are not accusations you can level at any project in the Godzilla franchise. Godzilla is inextricably linked to the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically, and to the threats of nuclear war and environmental devastation generally. So when the third episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters depicts a Japanese woman trying to physically stop the detonation of a nuclear bomb while screaming in terror and grief, all I can do is respect it. With a paraphrase of “My God, what have I done,” writer Andrew Colville and director Julian Holmes underline what’s really going on here, though they respect you enough to catch it without anyone bringing up Dr. Keiko Miura’s nationality. In this franchise, they shouldn’t have to.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider.

What a difference a dragon makes, huh? There’s a lot I find misjudged and misguided in Apple TV+‘s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters at this early stage, but they got at least this much right: They ended their two-episode series premiere with a huge berserk reptilian creature emerging from the wreck of a sunken World War II battleship that’s now on land for some reason. After all, this is not Monarch: Legacy of America’s Next Top Best Friend. There’s a promise the show makes with its very title, and it knows it has to deliver.

I’m not sure it’s delivering on much else at the moment, unfortunately. Once again written by co-developer and showrunner Chris Black and directed by Matt Shakman, this episode (“Departure”) is not, as I’d hoped, all delivery after the first episode’s setup. It’s basically more of the same.

I reviewed the second episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

The MonsterVerse is a mixed bag. As an official welding together of the big screen’s two biggest giant-monster icons, Godzilla and King Kong, it mostly does what it needs to do, i.e. toss giant monsters at each other and get out of the way. But there’s a pretty wide range of quality in terms of the movies surrounding those monster fights. Kong: Skull Island is a charmingly berserk adventure-movie throwback, with a fun cast of memorable little characters. This puts it head and shoulders above the three Godzilla-led entries in the series, in which the characters range from inert to inane. But there are some truly awe-inspiring, almost cosmic monster visuals in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong has the lizard/ape action you crave. 

The biggest disappointment in the series is its opening entry, 2014’s Godzilla, for two reasons. First, it hides its monster effects by staging its fights at night, an annoying maneuver also employed by Pacific Rim. Second, it fails completely to deliver on the horror promised by the Bryan Cranston–heavy trailer (not least by killing off Bryan Cranston after the second reel). One of the reasons the subsequent entry, Kong, feels so strong is because it does just the opposite: It focuses squarely on its best actors, roots itself in horror with genuinely gruesome kills, and shows us its titans clashing in glorious broad daylight.

So there’s a template to be followed for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the new TV show set in the MonsterVerse — a set of Giant Radioactive Do’s and Don’t’s already established by the franchise. What approach will showrunner Chris Black, who developed the show with Matt Fraction, wind up taking?

I’m covering the new Godzilla TV show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider, starting with my review of the first episode. It has its moments.

It’s unlike me, but with Monarch I banked all the reviews I could in advance, so I’ve seen and reviewed the first eight episodes. My initial reviews won’t reflect it, but the show does get much better as it goes. The material centered on romance and on Godzilla himself is very strong by the end. The Russells are as good as you’d expect and Mari Yamamoto is really something.

Spectacle is the language through which art communicates when the vocabulary of the everyday fails us. Fantastic fiction, an inherent trafficker in the unreal, says as much through spectacle as any art form this side of musical theater, in which excesses of emotion transcend dialogue and emerge through the eruption of song and dance. That Act Two showstopper speaks to us (or rather sings to us) because we recognize what it is to be so in love; so enraged, so bereft, so drunk on the possibilities or vicissitudes of life that mere spoken words could never capture it. Only an explosion of sound and movement will do.

So it is with genre. The dragon, the android, and the vampire embody fears and dreams either too delicate or too overpowering for realism to express. Ratcheting up the scale and stakes of ideas and imagery like these to the level of spectacle renders them capable of handling even more intense feelings and fantasies. A trip beyond the infinite, a monumental horror-image like a wicker man aflame, a last terrible battle between good and evil: Such spectacles describe our desire and capacity as people to do things so great or terrible—or so great and terrible—that they stagger the mind.

Before they assayed updating a country’s biggest pop-cultural icon and helming the first large-scale battle on what was rapidly becoming television’s biggest show (respectively), Hideaki Anno and Neil Marshall were past masters of this technique. Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion pitted giant robots against increasingly bizarre godlike beings in battles that directly reflected the titanic scale of its protagonists’ adolescent angst. Marshall’s The Descent plumbed the depths of its heroine’s grief in a literal bloodbath.

Importantly, they each recognized the role of beauty in such spectacularly grim visions. From Anno’s awe-inspiring animated angels to the firelit scarlet of Marshall’s subterranean charnel pit, the gorgeousness of it complimented and enhanced the terror rather than canceling it out. Beauty is the sea salt in the caramel of horrific spectacle.

Both filmmakers applied these lessons to the biggest assignments in their careers. In 2012, “Blackwater,” his directorial debut on David Benioff & D.B. Weiss’s blockbuster fantasy series Game of Thrones, Marshall depicted the horror of war with an explosion that beggars anything seen on television before, and most of what has come since. In 2014, Anno and co-director Shinji Haguchi’s satirical but harrowing update Shin Godzilla destroyed Tokyo with an alien dispassion that reignited all the majesty and menace felt by filmgoers when the king of the kaiju first emerged decades earlier. And despite their differences, the techniques used by each to convey the magnitude of these unnatural disasters and the people they befell are strikingly similar.

I wrote about Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, Neil Marshall’s “Blackwater” from Game of Thrones, and the horrible beauty of spectacular violence for Blood Knife.

And the thing looks so expensive. The casual ease with which it depicts the most expensive place to film in America getting completely destroyed by a gigantic entity and the United States military is mindblowing, especially after 15 years of bland destructive spectacles in superhero movies shot either on streets in Vancouver or in warehouses in Atlanta. I watched it with my 14-year-old kid, who at times literally couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “How the hell did they film this?” he asked, completely baffled — and awed.

I wrote about Cloverfield, an excellent and extremely effective giant-monster horror movie that deserves reappraisal, for Decider.

Copenhagen Cowboy, Dead Ringers, The Idol, Foundation Season 2: It’s been a great year for the lurid and the florid on television, maybe the best I can remember. The Fall of the House of Usher fits right alongside them, glowing and buzzing like a gorgeously lit, expensively dressed corpse. 

I reviewed the finale of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

As was the case with T’Nia Miller last episode, Samantha Sloyan is outstanding as an extraordinarily wealthy and well put-together woman coming apart at the seams. The way she almost physically wills her presentation back on track after stumbling out on stage shouting the f-bomb at a nonexistent person, with the camera never flinching from her high-cheekboned, anxiety-ridden face, is a wonder to behold. She handles the explicit sex stuff in the sex tape with the practiced frankness of a woman confident in asking for what she wants. (As much as her fetishes represent a deeper dysfunction, I don’t think Usher is presenting the fetishes as a dysfunction in and of themselves, any more than Chuck Rhoades being a sub on Billions is supposed to indicate he’s an unethical prosecutor.)

I reviewed episode six of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

True, the episode may lack keep-you-up-at-night scares — the occasional flash of a corpse in a place where corpses shouldn’t be isn’t enough — but it makes up for that in intensity. It’s like an Evil Dead movie in that regard: I don’t think anyone has a hard time sleeping because of anything Ash slices up with that chainsaw hand, but none would deny that Evil Dead 2 is horror, because it was clearly made by filmmakers dedicated to shotgunning outrageous fucked-up violent gross over-the-top shit at your face every thirty seconds. From its rich assholes’ long Glengarry monologues about their own awfulness to the deliberately cruel demises of all the Usher kids, that’s obviously The Fall of the House of Usher’s intention too. You could say that’s its beating heart.

I reviewed episode 5 of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

It’s my kind of catty, my kind of blunt, my kind of gross, my kind of show.

I reviewed the fourth episode of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

And so we continue with the recipe that’s worked so far: Graphic violence, sexual fetishism, actors having fun playing heel, and the unwavering belief that the ultrawealthy should be brutally punished for their crimes. What, honestly, is not to like here?

I reviewed episode 3 of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

I can think of worse ways to spend a few nighttime hours this month than in the company of these rich assholes as they slowly destroy each other in a creepy mansion, while Mike Flanagan’s script introduces a patent attorney named Ligeia, or reveals that the artificial heart Victorine implanted in that monkey has the brand name Tell-Tale, or turns the monkey into a murderer on the rooftops of Paris, or whatever. At the very least, the element of satire should cancel out his more maudlin tendencies. (“Whatever walked there, walked together,” anyone?) Flanagan feels about as convincingly Poe-ish as B-movie legend Roger Corman did back in the day when he loosely adapted the bard of Baltimore’s work. But if we’re having some spooky fun, so what?

I reviewed the series premiere of Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

Is that good enough? Y’know…yeah, probably. Denying your audience any kind of opening season wrap-up whatsoever isn’t a habit I want to see showrunners adopt as a rule, and it’s frustrating to see it in effect here. My concerns about the emotional tone of the show remain in effect, too. (Over the past week I kept thinking about how little I want little soliloquies about how great it is to remember the smell of food cooked in the kitchen with love in a horror TV show.) But it’s still LaKeith Stanfield, one of the best in the biz. It’s still Clark Backo, who I feel has many more notes to play in this role. When the show does make its mind up to be creepy, it’s real creepy — just the baseline assertion “It’s not a baby” alone is a scary thing to hear, to contemplate, to consider the ramifications of and the rationale behind. The Changeling was frustrating, but it showed a great deal of promise. I’ll head deeper into the forest if the journey continues.

I reviewed the season finale of The Changeling for Decider.

Channel Zero (2016-2018)

There are more scares packed into the first scene of the first episode of the first season of showrunner Nick Antosca’s exceptional horror anthology series than most horror TV shows can muster in their entire run. Amazingly, it only gets better from there. Each surreal standalone season of Channel Zero loosely adapts a famous “creepypasta” from the internet — the subjects include a cursed children’s television broadcast, a Halloween haunted house with a dark secret, a family of wealthy cannibals, and a woman haunted by her imaginary friend — and uses a different talented director. This gives story a different feeling, look, and tone, with one thing in common: All four are legitimately terrifying. The episodes and seasons are short, too, making each one a perfect weekend afternoon binge. And if you feel like the series ends too soon, don’t worry: Antosca has since co-created a quartet of killer streaming miniseries about murder and madness — The Act, Brand New Cherry Flavor, Candy, and A Friend of the Family — that are just as distinctive and chilling.

For Decider, I wrote about ten of my favorite horror television shows since 2016.

Making gutsy departures from the norm, “Stormy Weather” is a noble failure, yes, but it’s still a failure.

I reviewed today’s episode of The Changeling for Decider.

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. In this story from Stephen King, a psychic child with a bullying father is drawn to a sprawling old building, built by the rich and thrumming with undying evil. The building needs the child’s psychic energy to fully unleash its horrors, but a kindly adult psychic stands in the way. No, it’s not The Shining — it’s Rose Red, the 2002 ABC miniseries currently burning up the Hulu charts. But hey, if it ain’t broke, am I right?

Fans of Uncle Stevie (I’m certainly raising my hand) will recognize many of the beloved horror maestro’s signature touches in this story of a professor determined to prove the existence of psychic phenomena by leading a gaggle of seers and mediums to an infamous haunted house. The recurring power of evil, the idea that some places are just bad, the psychic child, the psychic guardian, the sins of America’s robber-baron past, Cliff Clavin-esque factoids about the paranormal, and of course the promise of seeing something scary when you see the words “Stephen King’s” before the title of a movie or show — it’s all there. But is the whole greater than the sum of its nostalgically familiar parts? Let’s head inside that haunted house and find out!

I took a look at the first episode of Rose Red, the currently improbably popular 2002 Stephen King/ABC miniseries, for Decider.

If you’re a horror person, it’s as fun (“fun”) to watch as anything; it wouldn’t have made major bank at the domestic box office if it weren’t. But at heart, it’s a film about suffering, about our compulsion to inflict it in ways both large and small, political and personal, extravagant and intimate. If it is indeed torture porn, it’s not here to jerk you off, metaphorically or otherwise. Hostel has a lot to say, as long as you have the stomach to listen.

I wrote about Eli Roth’s Hostel for Take 2, Decider’s series on films that deserve a second look.

And that, sigh, is where Wheels come in. He’s the leader of a secluded but benevolent underground community in the tunnels beneath Grand Central Station, a multi-racial gender utopia that is functionally identical to a hippie commune from a circa-1970 off-Broadway musical. In New Orleans-accented dialogue laden with absurd beatnik wordplay like “electrickery” and “ain’t no people higher, in both senses of the word,” he introduces Emma to this improbable community of “mole people” straight out of an urban legend.

Frankly, I wish they’d stayed there. Once, not very long ago, this was a show about a mother driven to psychosis by the belief her baby is not human, and the horrified husband left behind to deal with the fact that the woman he loved more than anyone murdered their child and nearly murdered him as well. The horror stems from that, and from the uncertainty of the role of the supernatural in it all — the fear that the mother was right all along, and what that means about the world. It does not stem from a visit to the Age of Aquarius, featuring Tom Bombadil narrating a Zatarain’s commercial.  

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Changeling for Decider.

All of this is engrossing and effective, powered by the raw and lively performances of LaKeith Stanfield, Clark Backo, and Samuel T. Herring. (Jane Kaczmarek I’m a little cooler on, though I think that’s more the character than the acting.) Yet I find it difficult even now to give myself over to The Changeling completely. 

Despite what wrestler Bret “Hitman” Hart might refer to as its excellence of execution, it still can’t shake my distaste for modern/urban fairytales, for one thing. It’s an inherently twee genre, its dark magic too cute at its roots, as decade after decade of Neil Gaiman knockoffs have demonstrated. (To say nothing of Gaiman himself. No, I still haven’t forgiven anyone involved for American Gods.) 

I feel similarly about benevolent witches, same as I feel about benevolent vampires, benevolent werewolves, benevolent giant spiders, whatever. You know me, Marge: I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my Draculas eeevil. 

Most of all, there’s my lingering suspicion that The Changeling will eventually have some big obvious gloopy moral: the power of family, the magic of storytelling, the need to Believe Women, whatever. (Please note that we do in fact need to believe women, but believing people exhibiting every symptom of a psychotic break is a different matter entirely, and the two should be conflated.) Maybe it’s all that amber lighting, but there remains a syrupy warmth to this show I distrust. With few exceptions, I like my horror cold as the grave.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Changeling for Decider.

When I say LaKeith Stanfield is the star of The Changeling, I mean it: LaKeith Stanfield is the star of The Changeling. So much of what makes the show work stems directly from his performance, which takes a single note — grief — and turns it into a symphony. 

I reviewed today’s episode of The Changeling for Decider.

Oddly, this is the second week in a row that a dark fantasy show from a major tech-platform streaming service debuted with three episodes because they were clearly saving the best for last; the same thing happened with Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time just a few days ago. Lord only knows why streamers do what they do (beyond screwing writers and actors to save a buck, I mean), but it’s hard to question the wisdom of packaging The Changeling this way. From “promising but a bit treacly” to “okay, now we’re going somewhere” to “Jesus Christ make it stop” in three episodes is the kind of trajectory that shows a horror series is being made with thought, skill, and a willingness to go there. I’m both dreading and excited for where it goes next.

I reviewed the third and final episode of The Changeling‘s three-part premiere last week for Decider.