Halloween night or otherwise, to get away from the horrors of everyday life, as the year 2016 comes rolling to an end, there’s nothing like hiding under the sheets and escaping into a good horror movie whether it be filled with gore, thrills or good old-fashioned spine-chilling psychological terror. If I want to pick a movie that rattles my bones every time, it’s The Exorcist. Being a Xaverian, the religious aspect terrifies me. Its confident filmmaking with the silence and tastefully scant special effects keeps me feeling like I’m actually there in that room. With other horror flicks, when the end credit scroll rolls, I know I’ve just watched a movie and I can move on with my life. But with The Exorcist, God help me if the wind makes my bedroom door creak. I’ll invariably make a quick check under my couch, just to be safe.
I’ve been waiting for horror to make its splash into this new era of TV, which has been kicking-ass and turned my movie-nights into TV-nights over practically all the other genres including crime, drama, thriller, detective and even comedy.
With no choice but to wait, like other horror junkies, I’d as usual search for the newest flick, like a devoted fool always hoping that somehow this one would be better than the last one. If IMDb scored it anything above a 4, I’d give it a shot. But each time, I was left bored and irritated as the new horror movies got worse and worse. With the calibre of writing talent in TV now, I expected that if anyone could do it, these new TV writers would be the ones to save this genre that’s been dying a slow horrific death on the big screen, and give it CPR to bring it back to life on the smaller one.
I wish I could say that horror on TV instantly blew me away this time round too, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. I first saw American Horror Story and it didn’t work for me with its underlying dark comic element. So I thought maybe the structure of horror doesn’t work on TV. Then I was a little happier when I saw The Strain where the first season was a nice, decent zombie tale. But honestly I wasn’t that big a fan of zombies to begin with, and Season 2 didn’t work at all. It just wasn’t scary. Then 2016 came up with some big promises. The first letdown was Damien, based on The Omen. How could it go wrong? But it just didn’t work.
Very quickly before I knew it, came Stranger Things — a delicious marriage of Firestarter, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a bunch of other classics with a whole lot of ’80s nostalgia thrown in for good measure. I was back in horror-love again.
But my wariness and reservations returned when I heard about the coming of The Exorcist TV series. Considering the Damien debacle, which was an insult to the classic The Omen, I settled in to watch the first episode with my finger poised above the stop button of my remote, ready to ditch it the second I smelt failure. But from the first shot of the episode, I was hooked. It was fantastic, and along with millions of world-wide fans across generations, I couldn’t believe my luck! So now that horror on TV is working for me, maybe I’ll give The Walking Dead a shot, which I had skipped earlier as I was scared of not getting scared.
The feel of The Exorcist’s original movie and novel is perfectly captured in the atmosphere of the TV series. The cast is fantastic, with Geena Davis playing the stressed-out mom of two beautiful girls who believes a demon has taken over her house. My personal favourite is the older priest Father Marcus Keane, who’s been locked in a battle against evil since his orphan childhood. He’s played by this new guy Ben Daniels with a sexy British accent who’s got style flowing out of his every pore when he delivers hot dialogue after dialogue. I looked him up on IMDb, and apparently he’s been around for a while, but somehow maybe it is this character of the rebellious passionate priest, who isn’t at all priest-like in his abrasive demeanour, that made him stand out. His complete opposite, the other younger gentler priest who does the exorcisms with Marcus, Father Tomas Ortega is played by Alfonso Herrera, again a new actor for me, who is an Antonio Banderas look-alike and talk-alike, but in a good way. Ortega is an ambitious and compassionate guy who runs a small parish in the suburbs whose quiet life is changed forever.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you the story, because I really want all you horror fans to see it as the grand finale of the horror offerings of 2016. But before you press play, gather all your pillows and blankets around you, say a quick prayer to God and as the trailer of The Exorcist TV series advises quite helpfully, “don’t watch it alone”.
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Which horror TV series makes you want to hide? Tell t2@abp.in
