Yes, You Should Watch Widow's Bay

I have a complicated and lifelong relationship with horror as a genre (a friend, after a recent long conversation about horror, smiled at me and said, kindly, “you know you are actually a horror fan, right?” I spent years identifying as not because I was a kid in the 80s, when horror was Freddy and Jason and gouts of blood spouting everywhere and girls in their panties getting killed in profoundly disturbing ways, all of which I hated, so of course I wasn’t a horror fan.

Except for all the Stephen King and Dean Koontz and, of course, Lovecraft that I read, and the Hammer Horror films my dad - an old-school horror fan himself - introduced me to. As a kid, I cheerfully claimed the 1932 Mummy as one of my favourite films. Perhaps I didn’t consider it real horror becuase it wasn’t scary and it wasn’t bloody. I moved into horror slowly, gently: an article about feminist action films got me to watch Aliens when I was 12 or 13, which led to Alien. The Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror episode “The Shinning” convinced me to try The Shining. X-Files episodes from “Ice” to my beloved “Darkness Falls” to “The Host” (aka the flukeman episode) to, of course, “Home,” eased me into other elements of the genre. Over time, I learned the language of horror, and while I still didn’t identify as a horror fan, I wouldn’t say I hated it. Not all the time, anyway.

And then the 1999 Mummy awoke something inside me. Is it even horror? It’s not especially horrifying or gory (a plus in my book) but it does riff on horror tropes I already knew well - especially given how much I’d loved the ‘32 version as a kid. And it’s funny, but the kind of funny that isn’t annoying: the characters arent’t winking at the audience, all ‘lol, a mummy’. They’re horrified and baffled and upset and just, like, doing their best, and also making jokes, because how else is one meant to cope with a five-thousand-year-old dude with cosmic plague powers??

There’s still plenty of horror-comedy out there I don’t like much: I’ve bounced off Young Frankenstein several times over the decades (look, there’s just a lot of yelling, everyone is always yelling), and I genuinely loathe Scream and its insufferable, smug ilk. But there’s lots of great horror-comedy out there that’s true to its roots without being all ‘look at us, we’re so in on the joke, har har’.

I had a cold last week and spent a miserable few days lying on the couch, feeling very sorry for myself. It was nine billion degrees outside and I couldn’t stop sneezing and producing frankly gross-out horror-effect levels of snot, and the fatigue on top of the rest of it all meant that I was just, honestly, a floppy, icky mess. So I rewatched Shaun Of The Dead, and then Hot Fuzz, and then later that week, when I was feeling better, my husband and I did a double-feature and watched Ready Or Not, and then Ready Or Not: Here I Come. (Mom, I am not sure you would love any of these films, but I don’t know!)

And although I’d aready seen all ten episodes of Widow’s Bay by then, my sickbed rewatches reminded me why I like Widow’s Bay so much: it riffs on horror tropes (and lots of ‘em!), the characters are not in on the joke, and take everything very seriously, and it’s funny. I mean, we all know that Stephen Root is a comic genius, but I did not know that Matthew Rhys could serve face that way, and I only knew Kate O’Flynn from My Lady Jane, which depends on a very different kind of humour for its larfs. (Arch, self-aware. No shade, I liked MLJ very much!)

But what Widow’s Bay does that lots of horror-comedy doesn’t do, becuase it’s hard to pull off and still be funny, is this: its three main characters are deeply traumatised people. We don’t know at first whether Patricia’s trauma is real (she survived a serial killer… or did she?), and we don’t think Tom is anything other than a totally normal guy, and Wyck a run-of-the-mill town weirdo. But the show deftly layers their backstories into the show’s mythology; each character, we discover, has been irrevocably changed by the island’s curse, mostly in ways that wouldn’t seem to be anything other than ordinary trauma (Patricia’s early brush with death aside), but each of which is revealed to be ultimately supernatural in origin.

It’s hard to play trauma for laughs, which is why horror-comedy generally doesn’t make its characters start out as deeply traumatised before traumatising them further. But with ten episodes to develop the story, Widow’s Bay does what I wouldn’t have guessed possible: create a generally excellent supernatural setting, lovingly riff on horror tropes, and treat its characters with dignity and respect. We might laugh when Tom spends an episode high on shrooms, but his visions fulfil an important narrative function, deepen our understanding of his character and motivations… and the whole things’s funny AF.

Also we rewatched Nimona recently and I wept through the entire third act, again, and yeah, you should watch that too.

Just One More Thing

Netflix has brought all 75 episodes of David Suchet’s Poirot out, which has been a delight to revisit (I last wached Poirot as a kid, when it was showing on PBS’ Mystery! Mystery! is also what introduced me to the work of Edward Gorey, whose work I’ve collected in a completely desultory fashion for the last 30 years. As a student at Harvard, Gorey and his roommate once stole a broken gravestone from a local cemetery and used it as a table in their dorm room.

Thanks for reading! x