Last year Hulu teamed with author Nathan Ballingrud adapting his novella The Visible Filth. Despite being dense, unpleasant and surreal, the adaptation Wounds ended up accurate to the source, maintaining themes and subtext intact and one of the better horror entries of the year. Here they re-team for an anthology series based upon his short story collection, North American Lake Monsters, and the result is exceptional and impactful. The best description I might give is of ‘slice of life’ contemporary horror, examining individual stories across the country, where life, choice and circumstances have rendered myriad lives a wasteland. The series focuses on damaged and desperate people, all to a different degree wallowing in their own damnation, on metaphorical and literal levels dependent on the tale. The horrors in this series occur less from supernatural threats or terrors, which linger in the periphery and shadows, rarely at the forefront, but are never truly the focus of the episode. Each and every monster is used only a vehicle to examine the darkest elements in contemporary society: mental illness, suicide, environmental disasters, class warfare, radicalization, etc.. Each topic is given a powerful and uniquely effective vehicle by which to examine the wreckage and damage of the daily grind upon lost souls in the aftermath of shattered dreams. The stories themselves are beautifully told tales of sorrows and choice, of dependence and obsession, of abuse, scars and damage upon the mind, body and spirit. Powerful, heart-wrenching, horrifying and tragic, each segment comes with its own narrative twists and often a powerful coda that feels resonate, earned and utterly thought provoking. This series is often hard to watch. It covers difficult subject matter that goes into very dark places about the human psyche and human condition. I cringed while watching it, both from the visceral skin-crawl of grotesque visuals, but mostly the cringe of watching something truly horrible unfold, unable to predict entirely where it may go, but knowing it will inevitably end up worse. Nathan Ballingrud understands the mundane aspect of horror: the existential hells of being trapped in a self-made purgatory, by the choices, by the external machinations of fate, by betrayals of values, ideas… Manipulated and puppeteered into hells of your own creation through simply the soul-whithering Sisyphean grind of daily life. The tarnish and stain left upon our souls by pressures and compromises bringing us to choices we make, live with and the monsters we inexorably end up seeing in the mirror.
Monsterland (2020)