🎬 #216 Horror Comedy, Comedy Horror.
Apologies, it’s not a film this week but I’ve been hooked since episode one and I urge you guys to check it out. It’s excellent. Also an oddly apt companion piece to last week’s recommendation
Please enjoy
Bry
SHOW: Widow’s Bay
2026
Dir Hiro Murai et al
Creator Katie Dippold
I’m currently on episode 3 of the Apple TV show Widow’s Bay, and I’m hooked. Episode 3, for me, is when it really gets going in terms of all the elements working together. In a funny set of episodes already; Ep 3, for me, is stand out, absolutely hilarious, but it’s the uneasy categorisation of the show that is so impressive. It could be lazily described as a horror comedy or comedy horror, but the way that the writers and the creator, Katie Dippold, have tonally navigated those waters so well, so effortlessly, is really to be admired. Hiro Murai’s direction is superb. The atmosphere that they conjure up, the New England fog-shrouded horror, is really palpable and textural, even beautiful in the show. They’ve managed to make the town or the island itself a place that you would equally love to live in and do anything to escape from.
You can see from the very first episode that it has nods to John Carpenter’s The Fog, and it’s quite John Carpenter-like in its direction, in the sense that it really takes its time. It’s not overly covered the way you might expect a TV show to be. It’s very masterfully done. Similarly to Hiro’s episodes of Barry, he lets things play out in their entirety, using that to land both the laughs and the screams. Everything is just very choiceful in terms of angles and lenses. You can feel the rigour that he approaches things with, the craft, and how brilliantly that works with the sharp writing. There is no getting out of situations easily, as no characters are playing things knowingly. It’s not a show that’s self-aware or a winky “this is a horror, but also we know it’s a bit silly.” It’s not like that at all. It’s just like life, really. Life isn’t just one note, and this is a story that certainly isn’t.
It moves nimbly between genuinely frightening, tinged with a saltwater smell of dread, to really funny and quite poignant moments. The range is huge. It’s brilliantly done, and when you realise how difficult it is to make something that’s even one note, it becomes utterly crystal clear that what they’ve managed to achieve with this is impressive on a whole other level.