Dark at the End of the Tunnel
In October of 2018, Hulu launched its original horror series Into the Dark. I was two episodes into the first season before I realized what I had stumbled on to. I was just looking for some holiday-themed horror when I discovered New Year, New You, but by February I had figured it out. I am not in love with Hulu’s platform which is set up to tell you what to watch rather than making it easy to find what you are looking for. If there is one thing true horror fans love, it’s holiday-themed horror. A series that scratches that itch every single month? That’s an automatic win for everyone. Don’t make it so hard to find this sort of content.
Once I cracked the code, I was able to work the episodes into my annual preview while developing a hobby of guessing which holiday would be riffed. Naturally, I couldn’t resist ranking the episodes from best to worst and lucky for me, some geek with way more spare time than I have actually plotted the data on Wikipedia. Now my only job was to agree or disagree. It is so much easier to criticize than create, isn’t it? More fun, too.
I thought about uploading the wiki plot here, but then you would have to spend time matching the episodes with the data when you should be watching them. So I did it for you. Apparently, I have more time on my hands than I thought.
My pick for the best episode from both seasons is one that almost didn’t happen. Blood Moon is the final installment of Season 2, delayed six months by the pandemic and possibly the end of the series. There are some rumors of a Season 3 but nothing credible. Into the Dark is a collection of independent episodes so you can go straight to Blood Moon and skip everything else without losing context. I would love to say more about the best and last episode but that would risk a spoiler so I invite you to go ahead and watch it now. This past year has been pure crap – you deserve this.
You also deserve to know that the critics did not pick the same favorite as I did, but … we were close. What we did agree on is the worst of the worst, and that is Tentacles - the other episode that almost didn’t happen because of the pandemic. It was due for an August 2020 release and let’s be honest, August is kind of a holiday wasteland. Blumhouse used back-to-school as the August theme the first time around and that episode, School Spirit, is second from the bottom. The updated February release pushed Tentacles into Valentine’s Day territory where a terrifying tale of a twisted relationship fit nicely even if it is overdone.
If you are still with me, then you might get a kick out of the Rotten Tomato threshold. Only one-third of the episodes dipped below the splatter line and since critics can be critical, two-thirds positive is better than I would have expected. I will take exception to their ranking of The Body – that one is in my Top 5 of both seasons. And to keep things real while reminding you that you are the captain of your horror ship, I plotted the line showing how few reviews it takes to chart a movie’s destiny. Actually, I wanted to see if there was a correlation between the number of reviews and the Tomatometer score. What I learned is that a half dozen critics can make or break it for the rest of us if we let them. So, when deciding whether to invest the 90 minutes or so into a movie based on the “rating,” maybe take a chance on horror.
In a cinematic world where sequels and follow on seasons degrade as the material runs out, it was refreshing to really enjoy the finale, if that be the fate, or to be left anticipating the next episode if there is more dark at the end of this tunnel.