A Guy Called Bloke compiles his Top 30 Sci-Fi/Horror Series

Dec. 30th, 2018 09:24 am
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[personal profile] froodle
New year’s Eve is literally just around the corner -we can’t just have Sitcoms so let’s see what everyone’s favourite of all time Sci-Fi and Horror series are as well?

So given the choice – what would you pick?

Place your vote in the comments section below – they don’t necessarily have to be from 2018, they can be from whenever!

Come along, more votes please.

I will reblog this till the 30th, so let me know … below!

Haunted Wordsmith: Horror: Nightmare Cafe, Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist: The Legacy, X-Files, Death Note, Swamp Thing, Forever Knight, Are you afraid of the dark, goosebumps, Tales from the crypt, Monsters, Tales from the darkside, American Horror Story, Hannibal, Penny Dreadful, iZombie, Channel Zero, Friday the 13th, Dark Shadows, Millennium, American Gothic, Eerie Indiana, Brimstone, Kingdom Hospital, Being Human, Freddy’s Nightmares, Charmed, Masters of Horror, Alfred Hitchcock Presents
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How the Pacific Northwest Became TV's Favorite Setting for Speculative Fiction

May. 19th, 2018 10:59 am
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If television is to be believed, the temperate rainforests and rocky seashores of America’s Pacific Northwest are filled with time travelers, mad scientists, vampires, witches, werewolves, more time travelers, shape-shifting lady seamonsters, fairytale monsters passing as human, fairytale hunters passing as law enforcement, actual fae passing as both, still more time travelers, zombies, huckster cryptids, real cryptids, belly-buttonless alien-clone-mystery boys, even more time travelers, multiple Bigfeet, and at least two Kyles MacLachlan.

And it’s not just traditional television that’s pushing this regionally specific (sur)reality: Boasting the tagline Only Slightly Exaggerated, the Miyazaki-inflected Travel Oregon ad published to YouTube virality in March of this year goes so far as to suggest that the Beaver State is teeming with cloud-sized rabbits, whale-filled clouds, and smiling caterpillars riding their fixies all over the verdant mountainous wilds surrounding the city hipsters go to retire.

Of course, barring the many Kyles MacLachlan flitting around the country’s every burg, (probably) none of these spooky, supernatural things are real. The Pacific Northwest, however, is. And something about it, some intrinsic part of its green, rainy soul, has attracted such a great magnitude of American television’s sci-fi, fantasy, and supernatural storytellers over the last few decades that the identity of speculative fiction has become as firmly tied to the moody, lichen-swathed forests of the Pacific Northwest as noir got tied to the hot, neon-soaked streets of Los Angeles in the 1940s.

The trend started out slow, with Twin Peaks (Washington) and Harry and the Hendersons (Washington) premiering in 1990 and 1991, respectively, but started picking up steam after Dead Like Me (Seattle) and The 4400 (Washington) got in the game in 2003 and 2004, with Kyle XY (Seattle) and Eureka (Oregon) premiering in 2006, The Secret Circle (Washington) and Grimm (Portland) in 2011, Continuum (Vancouver, BC) and Gravity Falls (Oregon) in 2012, iZombie (Seattle on television/Eugene, OR in the original graphic novels) in 2015, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (Seattle) and Travelers (unclear, but somewhere near Olympia/Seattle/Portland) in 2016, and both Siren (Washington) and The Crossing (Coastal Oregon and Seattle) this spring. Rick and Morty, recently renewed for [checks notes] one billion more seasons, (apocryphally) takes the Seattle exurbs as its rare Earth-based setting.

So, sure, a terrestrial sci-fi/fantasy/horror/monster show could be set anywhere across the continent—The Originals and True Blood have made stellar use of Louisiana’s inherent spookiness, while Wynonna Earp and Warehouse 13 find barren mysticism in the high desert plains, and The Vampire Diaries and Falling Skies mine the bleak colonial magic of Virginia and New England—but based on sheer volume alone, it’s increasingly those sweet, sweet coastal range breezes that keep sounding their siren song. Even the short-lived MTV/Spike adaptation of The Shannara Chronicles (2016-2017), full as it was with elves and orcs and magic trees and in zero evident need of ties to a recognizable contemporary setting, was set in a post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest several millennia in the future.

So what is it, exactly, about the Pacific Northwest that has put it in such a genre-defining position?

The most prosaic answer is that Vancouver (British Columbia) is such a booming industry town—at the time of publication, there are 19 movies and television series filming in Vancouver; 62 have wrapped since 2018 began—that it makes as much sense to force a series’ setting to match Vancouver-like locations as not. But the PNW setting isn’t limited to live-action series, and the majority of the projects filming in Vancouver, spec-fic or otherwise, aren’t set in the PNW, so there must be other factors at work. Which means [adjusts Dipper Pines conspiracy hat] it’s time for some theories.

Theory 1: Go West, Young Man

California has the earned reputation as the romanticized ideal at the far end of the myth of the American West (in which, according to scholar Richard Slotkin, America is seen as “a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top”) but the formative computer game of 1990s kids’ youths wasn’t called The California Trail: it was called The Oregon Trail. Oregon—and by geographic extension, Washington and Vancouver—was as wide-open and promising a frontier for pioneers and 19th-century mythmakers as was California, just with a topography shrouded in dense mossed forests and rain rather than blessed by sun and friendly, endless surf.

That is, the Pacific Northwest contains all the possibility of self-reinvention and the discovery of untold riches that California does, just framed by a mist and mystery that takes what in California becomes bustling creative, industrial, and technological output and instead twists it into a proliferation of supernatural poppycock.

Enter, the disorientingly surreal possibility barely contained in Twin Peaks’ borders. Enter, the surreally familiar possibility bursting from Gravity Falls’ seams.

“Everything in the Mystery Shack is some form of smoke and mirrors and general hokum,” Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch told The Oregonian in 2012. “It’s a boring day job and serves as a point of ironic contrast to the fact that the real magic and mystery is all outside in the woods.”

Theory 2: KeepItWeird

Stuck between the Cascades and the Pacific, Oregon and Washington’s cultural capitals—Eugene, Salem, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle—have developed aggressively quirky personalities. Eugene is where hippies go to die. Portland is where young people go to retire (Portlandia is basically a documentary). Seattle is notoriously proud of its counterculture history, despite being a contemporary corporate mecca. If there was ever going to be a region of the country that demanded co-identification with the supernatural weirdos of the world, that would so readily accept a secret DOD-funded town housing the world’s maddest mad scientists, or a holistic detective agency run by a British weirdo in a bright yellow leather jacket, or a major city being overrun by non-feral zombies and taken over by a zombie-led black ops organization and policed by a zombie-staffed police force whose resident zombies eat murder victims’ brains and overdramatically take on the biggest parts of their personalities, costumes and accents and all, it would be the PNW.

New Seattle: the most believable thing currently happening on iZombie.

Theory 3: A Land of Opposites

While the PNW shows that have taken over genre television in the past decade mostly keep to the bigger foothills cities, there are enough that are set on the coast or in the wilderness that it’s clear that the inherent oppositeness of the region is a major factor in its genre-defining role. Mountains and ocean, high plains and dense forests, the rural and the metropolitan, the super progressive and the super conservative—all of these things exist in the Pacific Northwest (with both hopeful and infuriatingly shameful consequences), and the natural tensions those opposites create in reality are reflected in the supernatural tensions that speculative fic stories aim to illuminate.

While it had plenty of storytelling flaws, it was this tension that made NBC’s Grimm such a compelling series, taking those opposites native to the PNW region and framing them with all the violence, moral grayness, and conflicting identity issues inherent to fairy tales. Portland doesn’t actually have wesin “others” living among its human citizens in all those great (real!) Portland craftsman homes, but in a state so historically, shamefully, violently exclusive with such passionately progressive modern politics, it definitely could. The same goes for all the many time travel series that land (literally) in the PNW: For all the region feels like it’s on the socio-cultural vanguard, it has some real out-of-time conservatism.

Theory 4: Spook-Adjacent Dreariness

At the end of it all, though, is just the utter spookiness of seemingly eternal clouds and rain. That’s nothing to sneeze at! Seattle has upwards of 160 days of rain per year. Portland and Eugene (full disclosure: home of an alma mater) are nearly as dreary. This makes for an explosion of verdant vibrancy in the summers, but the rest of the year…

Well, let’s just say a pod of rat-chomping fish-girls coming ashore to steal Huskies’ sweatshirts off clotheslines and terrorize the local population doesn’t sound impossible.

While most of these series repping the PNW have been relegated to television history by now (including, most recently, The Crossing), Siren, iZombie, and Travelers are all still with us, and if the snowballing of the trend continues, they’ll just be joined by more down the road. And while I certainly wouldn’t want all speculative fiction to go the way of the Bigfoot, I definitely look forward to watching it continue to grow and KeepItWeird with the evolving PNW identity.

Siren airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on Freeform. iZombie airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on The CW. Travelers is now streaming on Netflix.
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Why Zombie Shows Are Better Than Zombie Movies

May. 10th, 2018 08:47 pm
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I have been watching zombie movies nearly all of my life, but only recently have I picked up on some of the popular zombie TV shows around. From my personal experience, I prefer TV shows centred around zombies as opposed to movies. Here’s a few reasons why.

1. More detail can be included

When we consider a TV show based on zombies, Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comes to mind. The Walking Dead is a TV series that follows a group of individuals trying to make life work after a zombie apocalypse.

It differs from classic zombie movies by adding more depth to the characters and plotlines. The show is presented in 60-minute segments which are aired every week. This format allows the show to explore far more depth and substance behind a real-life zombie scenario.

In the time that it has been on air, The Walking Dead has detailed and explored cult phenomena, sexism, racism and sexual infidelity. It is able to do this as each plot point can be introduced, explored and resolved over the course of a number of episodes, which gives The Walking Dead the ability to stay relevant long after the credits have rolled, and spark debates revolving around the main talking points until the next episode either confirms, or denies audience beliefs and conclusions, this happened most notably with both the Negan introduction and the Did Glenn Die episode.

2. Characters can be more than a name

We all know the feeling. We sit through the runtime of a movie, develop a pseudo-bond with a character and the movie ends before we can explore the depth of that particular person. This restriction in character exploration occurs due to limited run-time. TV shows do not suffer the same fate.

Using their extended screen-time, TV shows are able to display, explore and resolve situations and ideas more thoroughly. This is something the CW series iZombie, does very well.

iZombie follows a medical examiner by the name of Olivia ‘Liv’ Moore as she contracts a zombie virus and is forced to live her life as a zombie. iZombie presents the main character as a member of the undead, rather than the seen/unseen hostile presence. It also explores the idea of the personality surviving after the body has stopped functioning, as when Liv eats the brain of a deceased person she displays the most prominent part of their personality, which allows her to aid in the solving of murders.

The show runs for 45 minutes a time and allows Liv, who is played by Australian actress Rose McIver, to showcase different personalities and flesh out multiple characters in a given series. The show may follow Liv and her crime-fighting Breakfast Club team for the most part, however each series also has a central theme which tells a larger story.

The narrative throughout changes and evolves from a terrible dime-store comic book tale to one of a blockbuster series or best-selling graphic novel. I believe that if iZombie was limited to a 120-minute runtime, it would not be as appealing to its audience.

3. You can flip stereotypes and challenge preconceptions

The image of zombies is that of a decomposing shambling corpse, dragging itself around on broken limbs and crying out for that tasty, squishy grey matter. This idea is largely based on the work of godfathers of the genre, Lucio Fulci and George A. Romero.

While also being a purveyor of such stereotypes, George A. Romero also showed his ability to develop and change the zombie image with ‘Bub’ from Day of The Dead (the original one) and with Big Daddy from Land of The Dead.

He did this by showing that both had the capacity for empathy and ability to relearn how to function in society. This was parodied in Shaun Of the Dead with the now classic scene of zombies being trolley-takers in supermarkets.

Imagine a movie which centred around Bub exclusively and detailed his long journey from military personnel, to mindless zombie, to rehabilitated corpse. There is a great deal not known about Bub and a TV show would be the perfect place to explore his personal life before, during and after the events of Day of The Dead (not the Mena Suvari one, sorry Mena). I wager it would be quite fantastic.

4. Zombies don’t have to mean end of the world

When we envisage a zombie scenario, it is usually litter with burning cars, screaming people and dead bodies but what about if a zombie story wasn’t the end-of-the-world scenario that we know it to be. How could we explore that idea? Perhaps with a show like Santa Clarita Diet.

Santa Clarita Diet is a Netflix original series starring Timothy Olyphant and Drew Barrymore as a married couple whose lives are turned upside down when one of them becomes a walking, talking and functioning zombie whose only hope of not going ‘full Romero’ is to eat the brains of the living, it explores the personality quandary and posits the idea that once we die and come back, our personality is changed drastically.

This idea is an interesting one, not only because of the potential for comedy and entertainment – and it is funny – but also that many studies and real-world observations have shown drastic personality changes in those who have survived a near-death experience or have actually ‘died’ and returned to life.

Whether this is due to the innate idea of an epiphany or actual brain chemistry changes is open entirely to your interpretation. But one thing is for sure it makes for a fantastic show which is allowed to be kooky and odd in a way that movies just aren’t. Allowing it the freedom of a TV series enables it to be a self-referential presentation and comedic social commentary and gives it the ability to be enjoyed without any real commitment to viewing.

5. Zombies also don’t have to mean serious

Stories don’t need to be serious or mature in their themes in order to convey a message or moral: we need only take a look at Dr Seuss to be assured of that. This is something which is often lost on movies as any zombie movie which attempts to be humorous and juvenile while also projecting a mature cautionary tale is usually relegated to the bargain bin of your local supermarket. We generally only see this happen to movies as there is far more commitment to plot and experience when watching a movie as opposed to casually watching a show like Z Nation.

Z Nation is a SyFy original series following a group of survivors of a zombie outbreak. They travel around, kill, steal and help wherever they can, so far so Walking Dead right? However, Z Nation pulls away from The Walking Dead formula by relying heavily on the more camp weirder elements of zombie movies – think Return of The Living Dead.

The characters in Z Nation are a role-reversal of standard zombie movie tropes with females actually being the centre of the majority of the action. The show offers a number of different zombie types, survivors and various wacky situations – Citizen Z may be one of my favourite all-time characters.

If a movie had the same outlook on zombies as Z Nation it would undoubtedly be a flop at the box office, but in a world that brought us Starz horror series Ash VS Evil Dead and British TV presenter Keith Lemon recreating classic movies on a shoestring budget, really anything can happen.
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