When you're a kid, you fear monsters. You stare or scream or run away when you see something unfamiliar. As you grow up, that instinct shifts. You learn to look beneath the surface of something frightening, or perhaps you find something frightening where once there was safety. Monsters, we learn, are less the stuff of scary stories and legends than what surrounds us, or lays dormant within. Hulu's Monsterland deals with all of these, creating an aberrant, enthralling tapestry of stories with just the right amount of Halloween scares.
The eight-episode anthology series, based on Nathan Ballingrud's short story collection North American Lake Monsters and adapted by showrunner Mary Laws, introduces us to a handful of seemingly ordinary characters living across the United States, all morally compromised and often confronted with literal demons: the young girl wary of becoming a mother, the boy resentful of his ailing mother, the woman unable to keep up with her wife's bipolar disorder.
And the monsters, as you may have guessed, are never what you expect. Each episode contains something straight out of a horror movie creature feature, but the more compelling monsters lurk in plain sight, their inner ugliness encased by the innocuous human form and exposed when they come face-to-face with the uncanny.
As with any anthology, some outings are more successful than others. It takes until episode 3 to really get on board, and that's saying something considering its deeply disturbing subject matter — but that's when the monster motif really clicks into place with a real-life villain, a fanged predator, and a bystander caught in the maelstrom of both. The best episodes — "Plainfield, IL," "Palacios, TX," and "Iron River, MI" — all come after that (and all star women or people of color, just saying).
Those episodes also include standout performances by Taylor Schilling ("Plainfield, IL") and Kelly Marie Tran ("Iron River, MI"), as well as a deranged but mesmerizing breakthrough from Trieu Tran. Sleepy Hollow's Nicole Beharie gives her all to "New Orleans, LA" but that's the aforementioned episode 3 in which watching her nail the performance also means visceral discomfort for the viewer.
If you like your sci-fi and horror with rules and resolutions, this show is not for you. You will never find out where they ended up or if they recovered or how this specific breed of werewolf's powers function — and more often than not the ambiguity is for the best, especially with the werewolf. At first it feels like a cop out, but then it becomes Monsterland's menacing signature.
As much as we instinctively long for neatness, we get stuck with suspense, danger, and the threat of corruption looming over our characters. Towards the final episodes, the show embraces full-on fantasy, and it's the better for every moment it does so. It's tough to tell a story of monsters without heroes and angels, but Monsterland nails it and leaves us wanting more.
Monsterland is now streaming on Hulu.
Topics Hulu
