If you’re dying for your Halloween-season horror to begin, check out Hulu’s Light As a Feather. It’s got lots of dying.
Light As a Feather, a 10-episode series, becomes available Friday on the streaming service – and if you think it’s a spoiler to say that a horror series has a lethal component, then you must be very new to the genre.
Titled after a popular “scare ‘em to death” game played at slumber parties, Light As a Feather stands apart from routine horror series because it’s not just slasher stuff. It’s also a double-edged mystery involving stories both in the present and in the past – in a sense, not unlike the anthology crime series The Sinner. We see the crimes, then the show leads us to the sometimes surprising stories behind them.
Light As a Feather starts with an interesting twist on the classic “mean girl” storyline.
Four best friends – Olivia (Peyton List), Alex (Brianne Tju), Candace (Ajiona Alexus) and McKenna (Liana Liberto) – see a new girl in school, Violet (Haley Ramm), become the innocent and embarrassed victim of a prank gone wrong.
McKenna convinces the other three they should invite Violet to their annual Halloween graveyard party, just because it seems like a decent, friendly thing to do.
It’s a ridiculously innocent party. No one seems to have brought so much as a lite beer. When they start discussing what to do, Violet suggests a more grownup version of "Light As a Feather, Stiff As a Board," wherein one person lies down and the others make up a story about how she died.
The idea is that once the story has finished, the person who is now stiff as a board will also be light as a feather and can be levitated by the others.
You can see where, once scriptwriters get their hands on this game, it could become creepy.
Light As a Feather weaves the game part into a number of subplots as we get to know the main characters. McKenna, for instance, lost her twin sister several years ago in some sort of tragedy that initially goes unexplained.
In the aftermath, apparently, her mother and father got divorced and her mother, while sweet and caring, drinks a little too much wine.
Meanwhile, super-rich Olivia’s brother, Henry (Dylan Sprayberry), has a thing for McKenna, which is perfectly normal and understandable, but also a complication, because there’s something between McKenna and the boy next door, Trey (Jordan Rodrigues), that also is clearly going to require an explanation at some point.
Light As a Feather mixes a couple of genres, and does it adeptly. The half-hour episodes move along at a lively clip, doling out clues one at a time, and if it’s not the ultimate in timeless television, it’s an engaging tale full of characters we like enough so we hope they stay alive.
In some cases, they do.