Widow's Bay

I already liked it. Two old guys having a conversation over a CB radio, talking back and forth, and then everything cut out and the boat got surrounded by fog.

It is normalcy, then removal. An ordinary competent exchange taken away mid sentence. That is a harder thing to build than a scare and it is the best thirty seconds in the season.

Episode 1 is a cast list. It is a "these are who is in it" episode and the shit does not start until episode 2. The only thing in it that is not introduction is the electric chair at the end.

The scares do not work, at least for me. They try to jump scare you and it is super predictable. I do not know if it is because I have watched so many of these or because I understand the formula driving shows like this, but it is not scary.

And I could see it coming without any of the sound. The DP framing in the shot where Shep is in the hospital gave it away immediately. The frame leaves a hole, and the hole is a reservation.

That is what a jump scare costs you. It has to be pre composed, because the camera has to already be aimed at the place the thing will appear and the frame has to leave room for it. So the composition breaks its own balance to hold that space open, and a hole in an otherwise balanced frame reads as a hole. The picture tells on itself before the audio ever gets a chance to. It is not a mix problem, it is a structural leak.

The score is supposed to cause dread or a pit in your stomach and it does not really work either.

By episode 2 I could see the pattern. Every haunt is built on a known thing, alternating real crime and film.

Gacy, with the clown and the crawl space and the contractor cover. Thin Pogo, which was the right call, because an exact copy reads as cosplay. The Ring and the vanishing hitchhiker and the drowned woman, all three fused into the sea hag. Fusing three does not make a new one. The Shining, which I called off the second book in the donation bin. Jonestown, for the punch. Salem and the ergot theory for the girls who died years ago. Halloween, in a watered down Myers mask with coveralls and a knife, walking slow, looking like a mixture of Leatherface and Myers. King, for the reels saying do not comfort the sacrifices because it likes the taste of fear.

I looked it up mid season and the creator has done this on purpose, homages to her favorite horror writers and to history. So it is working as designed. I am just not the audience for it.

Here is why I think it fails anyway. The horror is quoted and the comedy is caused. Every haunt is built on something I already know, so I recognize it on arrival, and recognition is not fear. The comedy comes out of physics, out of rooms behaving like rooms, and that lands every time. The show is trying SO HARD to scare you that it fails on every level, at least for me. The writing and the direction are not bad. The intent is what leaks.

The self-help book in episode 4. In my own opinion and my own experience, self-help books do not help shit. Mostly because yourself is fucked, and a fucked state cannot get itself unfucked without actual intervention from the outside. With books you have to internalize it all, and I think that just makes it worse.

The recliner. The mayor escaping the hag by flipping a recliner back and her going over it. Genuinely funny, and nobody wrote a joke. The room did it.

The mirror turn in episode 4. She is giving her toast, the camera pans the room, runs across a mirror, and half the faces in the reflection are stretched out like the Scream mask before it lands back on her. That was good.

And it works for the exact reason the rest of them do not. Nothing is reserved for it. The shot is an ordinary social pan, the wrongness is already there when the mirror arrives, so no hole in the frame announces anything. It passes through instead of holding, which means you never get to confirm what you saw, and doubt does the work a sting cannot. It is also the most expensive shot in the episode. Panning past a practical mirror in a crowded room means a reverse built set, a separate plate, or a full crew paint out, and they spent it on the one scare that does not tell you it is coming.

The lights in episode 5. The mayor going in and out of consciousness on the mushrooms, and the practicals going out one at a time around him as he goes under, then coming back on one at a time as he surfaces. That is done with the lights in the room, not with an effect laid over the picture. It is also the island's own symptom, the power going down, borrowed for his head.

How they did the mushrooms generally. Not much visual. Mostly sound cues, hearing voices, snapping out of the haze being yelled at by different people. I have done mushrooms enough in my life to find the office scene hilarious, and the funny part is the people around him reacting to behavior they cannot see the inside of. Episode 5 is the best directed and put together episode of the season.

The staged concurrency between 3 and 4. In the hag episode the mayor checks his machine and there is a message from the woman saying she is at the party he is supposed to be at, so where is he. The next episode shows her making that call. Same night, two strands, and they placed the sync object on both sides on purpose. So this is not an anthology no matter how many times it gets called one. They plant and pay off across episodes.

Patricia escorting the body to the cremation. After she shoots him saving the cop, she follows the body around until it is ash. She does not trust a corpse on that island, and she is right not to.

The soot. They have the candle burn marks going up the walls above the holders. Somebody was at least half paying attention, and it is the right kind of aging rather than just aging, because a poor coastal parish burns tallow and tallow smokes. Beeswax is clean and expensive and belongs to a congregation with money.

The period work in episode 6. The whites are too white and the teeth are all perfect. The church has two hanging chandeliers with about six candles each plus a few scattered on the walls, and it is far too bright for that. I understand you have to light it to get the shot. But they lit the inside of the church during the day as well, and daylight is free.

And nothing about the camera is stopping them. Kubrick needed the f/0.7 NASA glass for Barry Lyndon in 1975 and nothing needs it now. What actually stops you is the schedule. Candles burn down, so your key changes height and brightness across the shooting day and the coverage will not cut together. Which is exactly why the one sequence in that episode that looks right is a woman walking a house alone. Single moving source, one actor, no coverage to match. The set department did the research and the lighting shot straight past it.

"Fuck you." The back and forth between the mayor and Warren in the coffin. Somebody from 1709 does not talk like that, and buried underground that long there is no way he picks it up. A man from that time reaches for damnation, not obscenity. God damn you, a pox on you, the devil take you. In a religious community the strongest insult available is a religious one, because the curse is a real claim about where you are going.

That said, while it is not accurate I understand why they modernized the insults. Modern people need to understand the frustration, and telling somebody "a pox on you" would go over their head quicker than a fart in the wind.

Amber, over the episode 5 credits. 311 on top of an hour about girls dying of fungal poisoning. Does not fit.

Two houses built to look alike. The boogeyman house is not the Warren house. They look really similar and the show gives you nothing to tell them apart, and I spent an episode believing it was one house.

Expensive. Bowie's Let's Dance alone is pricey as fuck.

Brandy is the first actual musical match in the season. Warren has the braided chain he claims is keeping them all alive, the song is about sailors and a braided keepsake, and Sara was trying to give him poisoned brandy. That one fits. The object on screen and the object in the lyric are the same object, which is what a needle drop is supposed to do and almost never does.

Mythology underneath, a legend per episode on top. Each of the legends has to die for the island to be safe and each one needs its own method. The genealogy walkthrough in episode 9 ties them all together; they were all relatives of Warren.

The founding: Warren came to the island, everyone was starving, he found mushrooms, the devil showed up and it was starving too, and that is when the pact was made. He said he cannot be killed. The old people buried him alive and he survived in the coffin the whole time. Soon as they got him past the buoy he disintegrated into bones and dust, like they had hoped.

At some point the leaders figured out what was going on and started sacrificing people to abate the pact. There are reels in the office thanking people for their sacrifice and instructing that the sacrifices not be comforted, because it likes the taste of fear.

The chair is two objects, not one. The one at the end of episode 1 is one hundred percent an electric chair. The one in 1709 is a standard kitchen chair with arms and straps. Same practice three hundred years apart with upgraded hardware. The island did not go from folk remedy to execution, it went from holding you down to running current through you, which is what everybody else did too, just kept in a cellar.

And the route is the worst part. The Warren house basement connects to the chair room and to the well outside of town. A well is the water supply. Three hundred years of putting the afflicted down a hole the town is also drinking from, in a story whose whole mechanism is a fungus living in the ground.

The maintenance man followed the kids down to the cellar, got locked in with the chair, and got eaten. The storm and everything stopped right then and the lights came back on. The thing just needed to eat, exactly like the reels said, and the guy who got accidentally trapped was it.

What never got answered: Patricia's turn, where after the boogeyman thing she shifts hard, refuses to listen to any of the lore or history, and no longer believes in anything that has gone on. It is a really sharp shift with less than forty minutes left in the season and it never gets reconciled. The clown is open. The captain's room, where thirty seconds seemed to feel like three months, is open. And only the son knows the maintenance man died and that everything stopped when he did.

Here is the whole season in one line. Everything this show causes works, and everything it applies fails.

Caused: the recliner, the mirror pan, the practicals going out one at a time, the answering machine, the cremation escort. Applied: the stings, the dread score, the reserved framing, and every borrowed monster.