Beyond ‘Black Mirror’: 7 Shows That Serve Bite-Size Scares

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/arts/television/best-horror-creepshow.html

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Sure, my feeds are full of friends’ requests for shows that will take their minds off troubled times. This list is not for them.

Spurred by AMC’s television premiere on Monday of the streaming series “Creepshow,” it’s a list for those of us who take comfort in being creeped out: seven current or recent horror anthology shows, in order of creativity, for those nights when you can’t sleep without a good scare.

While they don’t get the attention devoted to more socially acceptable dramas and comedies, horror anthologies and their close cousins, science-fiction anthologies (some shows inextricably combine the two), are experiencing a renaissance. It’s probably driven by nostalgia — several of the new shows are based on notable forerunners like “The Twilight Zone” and “Amazing Stories” — and by the success, beginning in 2011, of the unsettling British anthology “Black Mirror.”

Add a tradition of incorporating social-justice themes that dates back to the original “Twilight Zone,” the attraction of bite-size bingeing — the best shows keep episodes to a half-hour or less — and our primal love of a twist ending, and you’ve got an indestructible genre.

(Seasonal anthologies, like “American Horror Story” and “The Terror,” are not listed here.)

FRAMING DEVICE: Each half-hour story takes place at a location (house, flat, berth, squad car) marked with the number 9; the show’s creators, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, write every episode and one or both always appear. As a bonus, there’s an Easter egg: The same small brass rabbit is always briefly seen in the background.

Leaving the overly familiar “Black Mirror” off this list saves the trouble of deciding whether the top spot should go to it or to this more than worthy rival that premiered on BBC2 in 2014. Celebrated for their dark, surrealist comedy series “The League of Gentlemen” and “Psychoville,” Pemberton and Shearsmith went the anthology route with “Inside No. 9,” which has logged five seasons (with two more ordered) of brainy, sardonic tales.

Comedy, in a wide variety of styles, is their bedrock, but episodes take surprisingly macabre and unusually inventive turns. And their range is impressive, from the silent slapstick of “A Quiet Night In,” in which the world’s most incompetent burglars invade the world’s most oblivious household, to the melancholy, moving “12 Days of Christine,” with Sheridan Smith as a woman seen in successive but seemingly scrambled moments of her life. (Streaming on BritBox; Seasons 1-2 also on Hulu.)

FRAMING DEVICE: The main characters are all passengers on a disgusting-looking nighttime bus. Whoever disembarks at the start of an episode is in for trouble.

This Norwegian series is a little bit like a less self-serious “Black Mirror,” without the focus on technology but with a similar fondness for tweaking 21st-century behaviors. An ancient stone in the woods confers financial success ranging from lottery winnings to corporate hegemony, depending on how personal a sacrifice you offer; a company holiday party turns bloody in an amusing satire on office politics and bullying. The resolutions can be less than imaginative, but the half-hour stories are snappy and diverting; Geir Henning Hopland, who directed four of the six episodes, was the primary director of another engaging Netflix series from Norway, “Lilyhammer.” (Streaming on Netflix.)

FRAMING DEVICE: The skeletal Creep serves as master of ceremonies, and episodes begin and end with panels from the fictional “Creepshow” comic book.

The series is based on the Stephen King-inspired “Creepshow” films, which were themselves homages to an even earlier generation of horror comic books. And it is marinated in nostalgia, from its plots (werewolf soldiers battling Nazis, a murderous monkey’s paw) to its casting (horror luminaries like Adrienne Barbeau, Tobin Bell and, as a Nazi officer, the iconic Jeffrey Combs of “Re-Animator”). But under the supervision of the horror makeup wizard Greg Nicotero (“The Walking Dead”), it also has energy and an engaging B-movie texture. Highlights among the eight 22-minute stories (which premiered last fall on Shudder) include the always engaging DJ Qualls as a loner with a strange pet in “The Finger” and Cailey Fleming (the intrepid Judith on “The Walking Dead”) as a girl trying to prevent bloodshed in her dollhouse in the genuinely creepy “The House of the Head.” (Streaming on Shudder; Mondays at 10 p.m. on AMC.)

FRAMING DEVICE: None, but the spirit of Steven Spielberg hangs over the series like a benevolent crypt keeper.

Spielberg created the original “Amazing Stories” for NBC in 1985, and he’s an executive producer of this reboot run by the “Once Upon a Time” team of Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. There’s a Spielbergian focus on absent parents — a teenage girl’s mother wakes from a coma but she’s not the same; a boy whose father died in Afghanistan encounters a time-traveling fighter pilot — and his involvement is attested to by the expensive production values. (Also, perhaps, by the decision to do longish 50-minute episodes.) Excellent performers turn up, like Robert Forster (in his last appearance, as a grandfather turned superhero) and the New York theater actress Michelle Wilson.

Then there’s the other side of the Spielberg equation: Every story has a happy, if sometimes bittersweet, ending, and the whole enterprise is, as one character labels another, “Super, ultra, extra square.” (Streaming on Apple TV Plus.)

FRAMING DEVICE: Episodes start with one onscreen sentence (the premise) and end with another (the twist you’ve just seen).

In between, the nine episodes of this CW series are clever little baubles, though they tend to run out of steam before their 20 minutes are up. Maybe that reflects the show’s origin as a 12-minute, fan-fiction-inspired Web series. (The ninth episode, a compilation of the webisodes, is not on Netflix.)

Plots skew toward contemporary social issues in a less self-conscious way than in “Amazing Stories,” as seen in episodes about a beauty vlogger who doesn’t appear to notice the home invasion going on behind her, or about children in a housing project whose pursuit of a shape-shifting demon makes them look suspicious. Under the executive producer Vera Miao, its roster of writers, directors and characters is more diverse than you’ll find in just about any other broadcast-network show not set in a specific milieu. (Streaming on CWTV.com and Netflix.)

FRAMING DEVICE: Season 1, which premiered on April 30, is set in New Orleans, where a cabdriver played by Omar J. Dorsey shows up in every episode.

“Soul City” is a miniature — just three 15-minute episodes, and two of them are pretty standard, graced with appealing stars (Dorian Crossmond Missick of “For Life,” Chad L. Coleman of “The Wire”) but exploiting the New Orleans setting in predictable ways. (One involves a voodoo bargain.) The third, “Grace,” about a young girl (Mikaela Kimani Armstrong) whose drawings come to life, is more distinctive, shot by the show’s creators, Coodie & Chike, in black and white with unnerving close-ups and an eerie quietude. (Streaming on Topic.)

FRAMING DEVICE: The sketch-comedy maestro and horror aficionado Jordan Peele takes on the Rod Serling role, delivering solemn commentary on the characters’ predicaments. It’s not the only thing that will make you giggle.

A lot of people put a lot of work into this fourth TV iteration of the original big-twist anthology, and a second season has been commissioned. The results are handsomely produced, and you won’t feel as if it’s time poorly spent, especially in the less self-conscious episodes like the remake of “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” with Adam Scott as a very nervous flyer. But overall the show is flat, draggy — the 10 episodes run from 37 minutes to a ruinous 55 — and self-satisfied. Apparently the thing the makers of the new “Twilight Zone” liked best about the original was its preachiness. (Streaming on CBS All Access.)

More current anthologies to check out: “The Shivering Truth” (Adult Swim) and “Love Death + Robots” (Netflix), animated shorts; “Into the Dark” (Hulu), 19 feature-length episodes and counting; “Creeped Out” (Netflix), aimed at teenagers; “Room 104” (HBO); and the progenitor, “Black Mirror” (Netflix).