The Cutprice Guignol

Hi! I’m Louise, I’m twenty-four, and the only thing that gives my life meaning is the horror genre! It’s October, which means I actually have a tenuous reason to talk about the genre for a change, as if I need one.

I’m a huge fan of horror television, and man, is there some good stuff out there – The Haunting of Hill House, Marianne, the first two seasons of American Horror Story but Certainly Not the newest ones – but I want to share some of my newest discoveries to creep you out this Halloween season. From slashers to zombies to, uh, miscellaneous, let’s dive into the sPoOkiEst series out there.

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As I write this, I am jetting off to La Belle France avec ma famille for a cheesy beach holiday where I plan to consume my body weight in croissants and roadside crepes. And, well, in keeping with that mood, let’s talk a little about a show that fits the theme, shall we?

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You girl is on her period and utterly busy-ed out at the moment, so this post comes courtesy of my excellent co-writer over at No But Listen, who has stepped in to vent about a show he hates for your reading pleasure. And also mainly so I don’t have to hear him ranting about it any longer.

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When it comes to depictions of mental illness on television, there’s an all-or-nothing attitude. It’s either 13 Reasons Why all-consuming-DEPRESSION or nothing ever going wrong at all thank you so much and if it does it’s certainly resolved by the end of the episode, no in between; either mental illness is consuming the life of a main character, or it doesn’t exist at all.

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Suburgatory, much like Happy Endings, seemed to be a victim of just being marketed the wrong way at the wrong time. All the adverts for it that I saw were just dullish teen-comedy nonsense about a young girl (Jane Levy) who was Way Cooler than All of You moved from the city to the suburbs after her uptight dad (Jeremy Sisto) caught her – gasp – with condoms. I didn’t bother with till a few years after it came out, when I went down an Alan Tudyk rabbit hole, spotted this Emily Kapnek-helmed sitcom on the list, and thought, hey, why not? I tried to put that cheesy title to the back of my mind, and, somewhat nobly, I feel, pushed on.

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I feel like I have made my love for creepypastas abundantly clear on this blog already, but in case I haven’t: I fucking love creepypastas. For those who have lives enough not to know what they are, they’re basically the internet versions of campfire scary stories – tales passed around forums and websites, from user to user, growing and evolving with every retelling and every new detail added by all those people bold enough to stick their fingers in and get involved. They’re multimedia projects, that span text and video and chat and sound, that allow for anyone who engages with them to add to the mythos in some way or another.

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So, Orange is the New Black is over, and I’m sure by now you’ve read precisely ten thousand commentary articles on the show as a whole: the best characters, performances, arcs, seasons, episodes, moments. And quite rightly so – OITNB has consistently, despite some wobbly seasons, proved itself as a dynamic, diverse, woman-centric piece of storytelling with a solid mix of the serious and the silly, as well as providing platforms for a collection of awesome actors to launch their careers off of.

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You know, when I first saw the news of the Gossip Girl reboot a few days ago, I didn’t think much of it. Yeah, sure, whatever. Just because I spent my teenage years consuming the books and TV series and the spin-offs with an avaricious hunger that is only triggered when I’m a hormonal teenager crushing hard on Blake Lively doesn’t mean I actually still care about it. I mean, the series is trash – pulp of the highest order. I’m grown now. I watch films and describe the camera work as “dynamic”. I don’t have room in my Meaty galaxy brain for stuff like Gossip Girl anymore.

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