AMC’s boutique horror channel Shudder takes a different tack this week with Neil Gaiman, one of the genre’s modern masters.
Neil Gaiman’s Likely Stories, a four-part series whose episodes run about 20 minutes each, debuts Friday on the streaming service (www.shudder.com).
Most of Shudder’s fare comes from a deep well of traditional and offbeat horror films. The series Jordskott has also gotten some attention.
Likely Stories, however, approaches horror from a slightly different angle. Rather than a pure cinematic production of the story, we spend much of the show watching the storyteller.
Each episode has a primary storyteller, who is sometimes in a one-on-one conversation and sometimes emerges from the show’s ensemble cast.
He or she will be sitting in a place where people tell stories, like over coffee in a cafe or around the table at a bar.
In keeping with Gaiman’s writing style, the stories start in some modest, seemingly ordinary situation and gradually grow into something more ominous.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they explode into a supernatural force that threatens whole continents. There’s an intimacy to the horror here, an eerily calm focus on how it impacts a single unsuspecting person.
As the story goes along, parts of the narrated story become scenes in the show. Shadowy figures slip into a darkened house. A well-spoken woman with a madwoman’s hair asks for some raw meat.
But these scenes serve as illustrations rather than becoming the whole show, because we always return to the storyteller to be reminded how he or she is being affected by the tale.
It’s generally agreed that the most effective horror is what we conjure in our minds, and the most disturbing horror movies are the ones that plant the seeds for that conjuring. They let our imagination do the work.
Likely Stories subscribes to that approach, and takes it one step further back by making the narration itself a part of the story, not just a vehicle.
Gaiman isn’t sending us to bed worried that Freddie might be lurking in the closet. He’s after a more subtle takeaway: the sense that we simply don’t know whether something is out there, and that if it is, it might surface almost anywhere, in the most routine of circumstances.
Likely Stories underscores that point with some familiar horror movie trappings. The sky always seems to be gloomy, and even indoors there’s a greyness, as if every place is a little under-lit. The world generally seems a little rundown, a little weary, and there’s a chill in the air.
It’s campfire-story horror, unfolding at its own pace, created by a writer who knows what he’s doing. If you’re a horror fan and only have time for a short binge, Likely Stories is a likely candidate.