OTT Halloween horror offerings like the Barbarian and Cabinet of Curiosities raise the bar

Its time for jump scares and goosebump-inducing frights. Horror, a genre that consistently receives indifference and contempt from elite reviewers and high-brow commentators, is back with a bang post-Halloween. What is essentially a childrens’ fun festival worldwide coincides with the most awaited horror films and series on OTT. As the genre remains a favorite with audiences everywhere storytelling in the frights space has also evolved. Horror is now also drama and black comedy in parts.

Barbarian, on Hotstar, has taken the sub-genre of a horror house to a fantastic level. Simply put it’s a basic premises. An AirBnB home houses a secret chamber of twisted truths, and a young woman reaches this home only to find out that the website has double-booked her. It’s a rainy night at a secluded place, so she has to live here till morning. And her stay here, despite the ill logic of living with a weird stranger and never checking up on him, triggers a series of reveals that involve dark chambers underground, hidden doors inside hidden doors, a torture chamber and multiple unspeakable acts committed by one human being that leads others to do the same. Zach Cregg, a relatively new film director, has built a snide and smart socio-economic commentary underlaid to this relentless fright fest. It’s about leaving a part of a once important city, Detroit, to rot when the economy changed. It highlights racial paranoia and poor government choices made during the Reagan era that altered the landscape of a respectable neighbourhood, leaving it to become systematically derelict by the city’s authorities. Barbarian is not a solidly thought out or scripted story, rather it’s a reactive screenplay that scares the viewer while taking a sarcastic point of view of why such unspeakable acts occurred in this house of horrors.

Not quite as well structured as Barbarian, but sufficiently compulsive, is the new web series The Devil’s Hour on Prime Video. Pete Capaldi makes a big change from his Doctor Who act as the ominous, mysterious and somewhat underwhelming villain in it. Jessica Raine is the protagonist, a young mother grappling with an non responsive young boy who mystifies doctors and has worrisome visions of the future, among other things. Tom Moran, another relatively new talent, has written this dark show packed with twists and turns. Raine’s character has to confront her fears and in the process, talk to the unexplained old man Gideon (Pete Capaldi). When she meets him a rabbit hole of sorts opens up, crossing her path with unfortunate events of the past, and current police investigations. Without giving out spoilers, this series concludes on a note that makes you realize that simply too much is going on. There’s explanations, rapidly wrapped up solutions and some philosophy. A series that wraps itself in so many unresolved questions that it keeps you on the edge of the seat throughout could have had a more gripping end, albeit one less reasonable. But overall this series sets the tone for a fresh kind of horror- one that looks inwards and rests on conversations.

But the most engaging offering amongst all these, the one with epic proportions and grand scale, is Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. In the lines of a show like Alfred Hitchcock presents, this anthology series on Netflix unpacks a lot of Del Toro’s convoluted yet compelling thought process over the years. Eight episodes are directed by upcoming horror film directors, including some well-known ones like Jennifer Kent of The Babadook and Catherine Hardwicke of Twilight. Del Toro’s Cabinet features themes around which horror emerges through specific responses of people. There’s vanity, greed, ambition and obsession. Each story is visually spectacular, with beautiful ghosts and disgusting alterations to the human form. There’s a touch of the gothic and the deep, dark, tunnelled nature of Del Toro’s films, yet most of these eight episodes have room for the director to also create some impact. The director of Pan’s Labyrinth and Shape of Water, makes his monsters likeable; an element that stands out in these stories spread over the ages. Cabinet of Curiosities is actually fairy tale-like storytelling, only with a frightening touch to all it’s characters. Rather than count of jump scares and common horror techniques this anthology utilises fear as an effective story telling theme.

Horror is no longer a self-limiting genre. Be it A Quiet Place or Hereditary, or Mike Flanagan’s series that have worked wonders for Netflix (The Haunting on Hill House, Midnight Mass), scary stories have a special spot on most people’s viewing lists. With filmmakers, writers and also upcoming movie stars dabbling in engaging horror over the past few years, the genre has grown qualitatively. Needless to say, it entertains every time it pops up on our screens.

Archita Kashyap is an experienced journalist and writer on film, music, and pop culture. She has handled entertainment content for broadcast news and digital platforms over 15 years. 

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