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Sorting through the seasonal bounty of horror and supernatural television series timed to Halloween, I have focused on shows that approach the grim task with a sense of humor. Here, in alphabetical order, are five series released this month that put more emphasis on wit than on sheer terror.<\/p>\n
The Spanish filmmaker \u00c1lex de la Iglesia careens through the conventions of the religious conspiracy thriller in this preposterous and highly enjoyable series that combines a \u201cDa Vinci Code\u201d-style premise with extremes of gore and a circling, tenuously comprehensible plot.<\/p>\n
In the first season, a Spanish village became the site of a battle among Roman Catholic cabals and emissaries of Satan over Judas\u2019s 30 pieces of silver, which if collected would give their owner unimagined power. Or something like that. Fighting back against these forces of evil was a motley crew that included a renegade priest, the village\u2019s unhappily married mayor and a plucky veterinarian.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In Season 2, which premiered this week on HBO and Max, the apocalypse has been averted but its likelihood is still palpable, and the number of creepy beasts in the manner of Bosch and Guillermo del Toro has exponentially increased. Also joining the show is Paul Giamatti as a science-fiction-writing cult leader who is human in form but as frightening as any beast.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Now in its fourth season on the horror-centric streaming service Shudder (as well as AMC+), this anthology series wears its comic-book sensibility and B-movie aesthetic proudly. And the best of its 22-minute stories (two per episode) also exhibit the cleverness and industriousness that contribute to real pop-culture satisfaction. You\u2019ll see the first twist coming, but the second and the third may take you by surprise.<\/p>\n
\u201cCreepshow\u201d doesn\u2019t reach too far for its inspirations \u2014 Season 4\u2019s familiar scenarios include a persecuted vampire family, a werewolf in a \u201cLittle Red Riding Hood\u201d situation, a haunted video game and a cursed pair of 3-D glasses.<\/p>\n
But along with its unpretentious nature comes a willingness to be self-referential and provide fan service, and some of its most entertaining segments are unabashed in-jokes. The Season 4 opener, \u201cThe Hat,\u201d suggests that the novels of a writer strongly resembling Stephen King were actually composed by a snappy homburg that refuses to stop writing. In \u201cGeorge Romero in 3-D,\u201d Romero comes back to life in animated form to battle ghouls of his own creation. King and Romero were, of course, the writer and director of the 1982 film \u201cCreepshow\u201d from which the series was spun off.<\/p>\n
Mike Flanagan\u2019s fifth horror mini-series for Netflix (a collection that began with \u201cThe Haunting of Hill House\u201d) is, if you care about consistency with the source, a serious mismatch. The genuinely morbid intensity of Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s writing, on prominent display in \u201cThe Fall of the House of Usher,\u201d is out of tune with Flanagan\u2019s well-upholstered, tongue-in-cheek, slightly synthetic approach to horror, where everything is right there on the surface.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But that surface is often diverting, if not particularly frightening or memorable, and Flanagan can be counted on for large, capable casts. The eight-episode \u201cUsher\u201d offers Bruce Greenwood and Zach Gilford as current and past versions of Roderick Usher, reimagined as a Sackler-like big-pharma executive; Carl Lumbly as a prosecutor named Auguste Dupin; a raspy Mark Hamill as a corporate fixer named Arthur Gordon Pym; and T\u2019Nia Miller as an Usher offspring named Victorine Lafourcade. The Flanagan regular Carla Gugino cycles through costumes and makeup, \u201cKind Hearts and Coronets\u201d-style, as a seductive angel of death.<\/p>\n
Dupin, Pym, Lafourcade and many others are named after Poe characters who had nothing to do with \u201cUsher,\u201d an indication of how Flanagan\u2019s series is less an adaptation of the original \u2014 it isn\u2019t really that at all \u2014 than a Frankenstein\u2019s-monster collage of references to numerous Poe stories and poems. Episode titles \u2014 \u201cMurder in the Rue Morgue,\u201d \u201cThe Pit and the Pendulum\u201d \u2014 clue you in to the style of gruesome death that\u2019s about to take place. Passages of Poe\u2019s prose and poetry are frequently incorporated into the dialogue, making for very flowery conversations. Gugino\u2019s character is named Verna, an anagrammatic nod to Poe\u2019s favorite bird.<\/p>\n
Flanagan\u2019s biggest change is to expand and update the story into a carnivalesque critique of capitalist greed and inhumanity. Roderick Usher, childless in the original story, now has six heirs whose lives are a catalog of wealth-and-entitlement motifs: nightclub bacchanals, sex with subordinates, wellness profiteering, antiquities looting, crisis management, A.I. infatuation, baking silly trompe l\u2019oeil cakes. Poe\u2019s Ushers were doomed by malaise and sheer malevolent ambience; Flanagan\u2019s have to die because they\u2019re a virus on the earth. As apocalyptic metaphors go, his \u201cUsher\u201d is reasonably entertaining.<\/p>\n
Jeff Astrof and Sharon Horgan\u2019s series cunningly blends horror, satire and situation comedy in its picture of a modern American woman\u2019s dilemma: Has Pat Phelps, the struggling writer played by Courteney Cox, been driven crazy by the stresses of marriage, motherhood and career? Or does she act like a crazy person because her house is haunted and she\u2019s fighting off demonic possession?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The first season of \u201cShining Vale\u201d on Starz was a riff on \u201cThe Shining,\u201d with Pat eventually taking an ax to her suburban Connecticut manse and to her feckless husband, played with simpering perfection by Greg Kinnear. Season 2, whose third episode premieres Friday, tackles another celebrated film, \u201cRosemary\u2019s Baby\u201d; the herbal tea a neighbor provides to calm Pat\u2019s nerves after her release from a psychiatric ward has the unexpected side effect of reversing her menopause.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The avenging (but often friendly) spirit played by Mira Sorvino in Season 1 has supposedly been electro-convulsed out of Pat\u2019s head, but luckily Sorvino returns, now playing the concerned neighbor. She and Kinnear, along with a stellar supporting cast that includes Judith Light, Merrin Dungey, Parvesh Cheena, Allison Tolman and the great Harriet Sansom Harris (Bebe in the original \u201cFrasier\u201d), bring a comic harmony to the show\u2019s indelicate balance of tones.<\/p>\n
A melancholy Australian romantic dramedy with werewolves, Peacock\u2019s \u201cWolf Like Me\u201d mixes tones and tropes in the manner of \u201cShining Vale\u201d but with a quieter, less satirical effect. When \u201cShining Vale\u201d sags, it goes flatly jokey; when \u201cWolf Like Me\u201d runs out of energy, it gets blandly sentimental.<\/p>\n
But when the creator, writer and director of \u201cWolf Like Me,\u201d Abe Forsythe, is on his game, it\u2019s a funny, lovely and moving show that can tap straight into your emotions. Also crucial are the performances of Isla Fisher as Mary, an American werewolf hiding from the world in Adelaide, Australia, and the young actress Ariel Donoghue as Emma, a girl devastated by the loss of her mother who becomes Mary\u2019s de facto stepdaughter and develops a fierce loyalty to her. Josh Gad plays Gary, Emma\u2019s father and Mary\u2019s unlikely new boyfriend, and does a nice job of staying out of Fisher and Donoghue\u2019s way.<\/p>\n
Season 1 brought this accidental trio together, introduced a teasing note of magical realism (along with the outright full-moon supernaturalism) and established the theme of love\u2019s triumph over grief and alienation. In Season 2, the focus shifts to Mary\u2019s pregnancy, which is both a blessed event and a five-alarm crisis. Forsythe\u2019s inventiveness occasionally runs low, and the characters can get strident and unengaging, but he builds to an exciting and wrenching finale that\u2019s also a dire cliffhanger.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n