Another Tasty Horror Treat From Apple

Matthew Rhys stars as Mayor Tom Loftis in Apple's Widow's Bay

Widow’s Bay is a quaint island town 40 miles off the coast of New England. But something lurks beneath the surface. Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) is desperate to revive his struggling community. There’s no Wi-Fi, spotty cellular reception and he must contend with superstitious locals who believe their island is cursed.

He wants these people to respect him. They don’t. They think he is soft and cowardly. And he is. But Loftis is determined to build a better future for his teenage son and turn the island into a tourist destination.

Miraculously, he succeeds: tourists are finally coming. Unfortunately, the locals were right. After decades of calm, the old stories that seemed too ludicrous to be true, start happening again. Widow’s Bay blends genuine horror with character-driven comedy.

From these teases, it would appear that Widow's Bay is a delicious blend of dark humour, Stephen King, HP Lovecraft, and Twin Peaks. Possibly. Or it could be something completely different... but I look forward to finding out.

Hailing from Apple Studios, Widow’s Bay is created, showrun, executive produced and written by Katie Dippold.

Director Hiro Murai executive produces alongside Carver Karaszewski, Claudia Shin and Rhys. Murai directs five episodes this season, in addition to directors Ti West, Sam Donovan and Andrew DeYoung.

Apparently the story of Widow's Bay began as a spec script Dippold wrote for - of all things - that greatest of sitcoms Parks and Recreation. Which makes me want to watch this even more!!!

The first two episodes of the show drop in three weeks, on April 29, then the remaining eight episodes of the series will appear on subsequent Wednesdays through to June 17 (with a second double-dip on May 27).

"Diane, 11:30a.m., February 24th."

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Mandy (2018)

Revenge thrillers are not renowned for their complex plots and they don't come more linear than Nicolas Cage's wonderously visceral Mandy (out on DVD this week).

It's 1983 and grizzled lumberjack - and man of few words - Red Miller (Cage) and his artistic, hippy, girlfriend Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough) live an idyllic life in the wilderness.

Unfortunately, by chance, one day Mandy catches the eye of failed musician and deranged cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache).

Sand employs demented biker gang The Black Skulls to kidnap Mandy for his pleasure, but things don't go exactly according to plan, sending Red on an epic, furious, quest for vengeance.

At times feeling like a journey into Hell curated by David Lynch, Mandy is part Apocalypse Now, part Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and part Unforgiven, taking queues from multiple genres as writer/director Panos Cosmatos aims his laser-focus on Red's mythic mission of revenge.

I loves me some weird cult shit and Mandy delivers on that front with The Black Skulls and Sand's Children of the New Dawn, and enough peculiar characters and mannered dialogue to populate a suburb of Twin Peaks.

Startling visuals merge with subtle camera tricks to disorientate the viewer, enhancing our insights into the minds of both protagonist and antagonist, creating an artistic cocktail of psychedelic grindhouse.

Reminiscent of Baskin in its brutal relentlessness, Mandy, however, is more concerned with the human - and occasionally superhuman - monster than the cosmic.

The role of Red is one that only Cage could truly have embodied, segueing from effortless charm to ruthless killer as his descent into madness progresses.

With a running time just shy of two hours, Mandy feels a fraction of that duration thanks to its spectacular pacing and addictive imagery.

The plot may be a short railroad, but the scenery is breathtakingly hypnotic as you are catapulted along this stunning and unforgettable ride.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Digging Up The Marrow (2014)

Known for horror movie series like Hatchet and Frozen, director Adam Green (playing himself) receives a wad of information in the mail from a fan who claims to have discovered real monsters.

Green decides this would be a brilliant subject for a documentary and heads out to meet the mysterious William Dekker (Twin Peaks' Ray Wise) and hopefully get a chance to see these so-called monsters.

Dekker spins him yarns about a subterranean world - accessed through holes in the ground usually found near cemeteries - called 'the Marrow', populated by an assemblage of deformed creatures.

Shot in a mock-documentary style (with swatches of 'shaky hand-held camera footage'), the film follows the childishly-excited Green and his sceptical cinematographer, and long-time collaborator, Will Barratt (also playing himself) as they interview Dekker and are then taken on a series of night-time reconnaissance missions, staking out an alleged Marrow entrance.  

Along the way, there are several cameos from known-genre figures (such as Kane Hodder, Mick Garris and Green's ex-wife Rileah Vanderbilt) who don't get what he is trying to achieve with this documentary and generally dismiss Dekker as a potentially-dangerous nutter or a con man.

This is more than a simple "what if monsters really existed?" movie, as a key element in the tale is that that question is being tackled by a horror movie director whose career is based on creating terrifying creatures.

The mockumentary is joyously incomplete, dangling plot threads that are never truly explained (such as the chronology of whatever is in Dekker's locked storeroom), but that's life. And the movie's brilliant ending justifies wholeheartedly why Green left his magnum opus unfinished.

I get why some people don't grok this. They're wrong. But I get it. Digging Up The Marrow is a slow burner, building up to its kick-in-the-teeth third act. Sure, there's a pretty terrifying jump scare about half-an-hour in, but the bulk of the film is about building atmosphere and creating a world.

I can only imagine that a lot of people - coming off the back of the Hatchet franchise - were caught off-guard by how subtle and intelligent Digging Up The Marrow is.

Thematically it owes a lot to the more-grounded tales of HP Lovecraft's oeuvre (particularly his "ghouls") and, of course, Clive Barker's Nightbreed, but the documentary style gives it a verisimilitude that is only undermined by the presence of such a recognisable actor as Ray Wise in a lead role.

Wise is superb, wholly convincing as the shady and driven Dekker, and I understand why Green cast him - to stress that this is 'make-believe' and not an attempt at a Blair Witch-style hoax. Yet I can't help but wonder how the film would have been received if Green had gone down that route with an unknown actor as Dekker.

In reality, Digging Up The Marrow came about because of a fortuitous confluence of events in Green's life. First, he received a highly detailed package of notes from a fan claiming to be the real story of Green's creation, Victor Crowley (from the Hatchet series).

Later the film director met artist Alex Pardee who gave him a booklet of illustrations for his exhibition Digging Up The Marrow that told the story of detective William Dekker commissioning him to draw creatures he'd encountered in his investigations of the Marrow.

HALLOWEEN HORRROR: I Saw The TV Glow (2024)

In late '90s suburbia, a pair of isolated teens - Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine aka Jack Haven) - bond over their shared appreciation for a late night, young adult TV show called The Pink Opaque.

The show, which is woven throughout the main feature, is clearly inspired by Buffy The Vampire Slayer (it uses the Buffy font for its credits and one of the main characters is called Tara, which then echoes on a meta level when Amber Benson - who played Tara on Buffy - pops in for a brief cameo). But this is Buffy filtered through The Mighty Boosh and directed by David Lynch.

Although Buffy was strongest influence in my eyes, there were definite shades of Twin Peaks (particularly The Return) in both the show-within-the-film and the 'real world' of Owen and Maddy: the pivotal, central scene taking place in a liminal bar while a band plays in the background (their song featuring the lyric "I Saw The TV Glow").

Just as the The Pink Opaque is about to be cancelled - on a shocking, fifth season cliffhanger - Maddy disappears, leaving behind a burning television in her garden.

Almost a decade later, she returns to find Owen, and tries to convince him that she has been "inside the show" and that their memories of watching it in her basement were false, that they were really the characters they remembered from the show.

I'd been sold on I Saw The TV Glow as a "horror picture" and had been expecting something akin to the wonderful Channel Zero: Candle Cove serving of creepypasta television from 2016.

I was wrong. While there are fleeting elements of unnerving psychological horror, especially in Maddy's powerful speech about her efforts to recreate the season five cliffhanger of The Pink Opaque, so that she could get to "season six", the art house film's theme is an allegory for the trans experience and a meditation on the nature of reality and how that impacts identity.

The final act follows Owen as he grows into adulthood, but there is an increasing feeling that - while he represses it - he is living a lie, the whole experience with The Pink Opaque serving as a metaphor for his confused sexuality.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw The TV Glow is mesmerically shot, drifting in and out of the TV show as it skims through Owen's life like the chapters on a DVD. 

While the gamer in me was quite fixated on the mythology of The Pink Opaque (with its 'big bad' Mr Melancholy and his demonic henchbeings), the emotional performances of the two leads held my attention throughout.

I Saw The TV Glow wasn't quite what I was expecting, but I didn't mind: it's still a weird and powerful piece of 'coming of age' cinema. John Hughes this ain't!

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Night House (2020)

Grieving widow Beth (Godzilla vs Kong's Rebecca Hall) returns to the lake house her husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), built for them, but can't shake the feeling she is not alone.

Desperate to understand why Owen killed himself, Beth starts to dig through his belongings as she spirals into a maelstrom of paranormal activity, lucid dreaming, and paranoia.

The more secrets about Owen she unearths, the more threatened Beth becomes by whatever is haunting her home.

Despite the best efforts of her friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg) and lovely neighbour, Mel (Vondie Curtis Hall), an elderly widower, to get her to cease her pursuit of "answers" and move on with her life, Beth is a woman on a mission.

Perhaps I watch too many movies, but there are some pretty hefty sign posts/red flags in the first act of The Night House that - knowing I was in for a ghost story from the get-go - pretty much spelled out what was going on.

Despite the nice, measured, slow burn I couldn't help but feel the movie may have shown its hand a bit early with the first of Owen's note books that Beth comes across, with its strange diagrams and cryptic notations.

There are plenty of clues to the underlying mystery throughout the film with many left ambiguous even as the central conceit is spelled out in a necessary info-dump.

Director David Bruckner delivers some really impressive camera tricks, particularly in his use of shadow entities, but also in a wonderfully disturbing sequence with an invisible ghost, as well as a striking, sudden, switch of POV as Beth's dreams overlap with her reality.

He also has an uncanny knack of building to what you expect to be a jump scare, but then taking the scene in a different direction, which only accentuates the creepiness of the situation.

Even the story's ultimate resolution is atypical for this style of predominantly threatening and violent ghost story.

Unfortunately, there is an inescapable sense that the film doesn't do enough with some of its more intriguing elements, such as the lake itself, the "other house" (that exists in different forms in dreams and reality), Beth's real connection with the entity, the "mirror world" etc

While occasionally evoking comparisons with other modern ghost stories, from Twin Peaks to Final Destination, The Night House certainly has a style all of its own.

Sometimes this obfuscates the narrative a bit too much, but generally it creates something that is truly memorable - if only for some of its clever imagery, at the expense of its plot.

However, as intriguing and enthralling as Brucker's direction of Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski's script is, The Night House truly belongs to Rebecca Hall, whose central performance as Beth dominates this 107-minute movie.

She is in almost every scene, often alone, and wholly convinces us of Beth's heartache, despair, deterioration, confusion, anger, and fear. 

Ultimately, The Night House feels a bit patchy, but it's certainly unnerving viewing and never resorts to cheap tricks when trying to elicit a reaction from its audience.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Baskin (2015)

If you're looking for a memorable horror movie that feels like it was based on an HP Lovecraft story, but wasn't, then look no further than surreal Turkish splatterfest Baskin.

A generally unlikable, thuggish, group of police officers respond to a call for back-up in a rural area with a bad reputation.

Among the five-man team is Arda (Görkem Kasal), the newest recruit and the ward of the chief Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu).

As the freshest face in the unit, Arda has yet to be ground down, or corrupted, by the obviously hard work the men do.

Unfortunately on the way to the emergency, their van crashes.

The squad has to ask for directions from a strange group of "frog-hunters" they find camped at the edge of the lake their van ended up in.

A quick jaunt through the woods brings them to an abandoned Ottoman Empire-era police station.

The building appears to have been taken over by squatters, who have vandalised it with it peculiar graffiti and left evidence of all kinds of obscenities.

But it's only really as they descend into the lower levels of the building that the true horror of the building's current inhabitants becomes clear.

And the police officers soon find themselves in the clutches of a  terrifying, possibly sub-human, cult.

While Görkem Kasal's Arda is the nominal star of the story, the stand-out performance has to be the amazing Mehmet Cerrahoglu as the cult leader Baba (The Father).

Baba: The Father

A Turkish Clint Howard, Cerrahoglu's incredibly rare skin condition gives him a unique physical appearance that he draws amazing power from here in his first feature film role.

Forget all the splatterpunk Grand Guignol for a moment, Baba is the iconic image of Baskin that will endure.

Baskin (Turkish for 'Raid') was the first full-length movie from Can Evrenol, an extrapolation of his 11-minute short of the same name (which featured several of the same actors, including the magnificent Mehmet Cerrahoglu).

Buoyed along by a thumping, Carpenteresque, score, Baskin is Lovecraftian cosmic horror meets Hellraiser by way of The Void, Blair Witch, The Last Shift, In The Mouth Of Madness, and - for for better or for worse - Twin Peaks: The Return.

Even though it predates David Lynch's most recent visit to Twin Peaks, there's a key scene in Baskin - as well as its ending - that share important thematic, and stylistic, similarities and, I think, will ultimately decide whether you rate Evrenol's surreal shocker or not.

One thing I felt after viewing Baskin is that it is more of an experience than a coherent narrative. It's main purpose is to draw the audience into the mind-boggling ordeals that the policemen go through, rather than explaining too much or attaching it all to a traditional story structure.

Be warned, things do go a bit torture porn once the coppers are captured, but, for me, it's all about intent.

This isn't a bunch of wealthy businessmen torturing 'innocents' for shits and giggles, but an evil cult trying to transform its "chosen one" through arcane rituals handed down from their unknowable ancient deities.

Although the truly weird stuff doesn't start until the half-way mark of this 96-minute film, the pacing and rhythm are perfect so you're drawn in from the get-go, as the tension escalates and you try to figure out what the hell's going on.

Throughout Baskin there's talk about dreams (and dreams within dreams) and one - almost heavy-handed - shot of Arda nodding off in the van before everything goes sideways that I thought was the M. Night Shyamalan moment when the "it's-all-a-dream" twist was given away.

But, and I know some of you may consider this a spoiler, that's not what's going on. If it had all been a dream I would have been very annoyed and not nearly as smitten as I am by this flawed gem.

Much of Baskin has a dream-like nature, and dream-logic to its flow, but - as far as I'm concerned - what was happening to the protagonists was very real.

Having sat through much of the movie inner-monologuing "don't be a dream, don't be a dream", I'm now looking forward to going back and watching it again, comfortable in the knowledge that Baskin avoids that cop out (pun intended).

It is, however, genuinely the stuff of nightmares.

Skinamarink (2022)

Experimental, arthouse horror Skinamarink is the kind of film to be experienced rather than necessarily followed as you would a more traditional movie.

Named after a nonsense playground chant from North America, the plot of this Canadian film - written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball - revolves around the travails of two seemingly abandoned young children, four-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) and his sister, six-year-old Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault).

The kids wake up in the middle of the night to discover all the windows and doors leading out of their home have disappeared, along with their father (Ross Paul) and mother (Jaime Hill).

Kevin and Kaylee decamp to the lounge and turn on the television to watch cartoons while they play with their toys.

Soon, though, they realise they are not alone in the house, and a strange, disembodied, voice starts speaking to them and making demands of them.

When Kaylee tries to challenge the omnipotent entity, she is punished, and it is left to her younger brother to wander through the 'haunted house' alone.

Shot almost entirely at a low angle, so that we are either taking the point-of-view of one of the young protagonists or simply seeing events unravel from their level, the disorientating film demands our attention from the moment it begins.

We barely glimpse the children - the adults we see even less - and it's usually just legs and feet, while the dialogue is a mixture of often mumbled, naturalistic, delivery and - when it's too quiet to properly make out - subtitles.

The only sounds we hear are diegetic, so there are long periods of near-silence where - if you've surrendered yourself to the movie experience - you start to subsume sounds from your own environment, until you can't tell what's happening in the movie and what's in the room with you.

Objects appear and disappear, one of the televised cartoons gets stuck in a loop, and eventually we see flashes of shapes and figures in the shadows, toys and video cassettes stuck to walls and the ceiling, blood splatters across the TV screen etc 

Lighting is also minimal, often coming just from the flickering of the TV screen or a child's torch,.

Combined with the faux retro patina of the film, and its 1995 setting, all these tricks give the film the aura of a proto-found footage/video nasty mixed with dream logic and early David Lynch stylings. 

Ball's obsession with the TV screen and the way objects flicker in and out of existence scream David Lynch and it wouldn't take much, if you were so inclined, to headcanon this slice of disturbing weirdness into the world of Twin Peaks.

If demons and the supernatural were real, I can't help believing that an actual encounter with a paranormal entity might be something akin to the experience of watching this movie: intense, unsettling, confusing, baffling, bewildering, and ultimately beyond our comprehension. 

There is no "stunt man in rubber suit" or slick CGI monster serving up jump scares. In a very Lovecraftian way, at its core, Skinamarink is clearly "something man was not meant to know". 

Nothing that happens is overtly explained, meaning Skinamarink is the ultimate montage movie; it is up to us to assemble our version of what's going on from the succession of images and sounds that Ball provides us with.

Depending on the personal baggage and preconceptions you bring to Skinamarink, it's either a terrifyingly immersive and psychological descent into a child's nightmare encounter with a demon or 105 minutes of laughably pretentious bullshit. Your mileage will vary.

Personally, I'm glad I watched this peculiar work of mad genius as I've never seen anything quite like it before, but I have no great desire to see it again in a hurry.

I was hooked by it as it played but the concentration required to fully absorb Skinamarink was rather draining.