Editorials
5 Tales of Beach Horror from TV Anthologies [Series of Frights]
Series of Frights is a recurring column that mainly focuses on horror in television. Specifically, it takes a closer look at five episodes or stories — each one adhering to an overall theme — from different anthology series or the occasional movie made for TV. With anthologies becoming popular again, especially on television, now is the perfect time to see what this timeless mode of storytelling has to offer.
The beach is that terminal stage before entering the water and possibly never returning. Lakes, oceans, seas — these unfathomable places can create nostalgia as well as dread. Not everyone is capable of readily stepping foot in these wet expanses, so the shore seems like the safest place to be.
The characters in the following anthology episodes realize even dry land cannot stop water’s influences or dangers, though. Something unimaginable or terrifying can appear from the waves and onto the beach just as easily as people can wet their toes.
Night Gallery (1970-1973)
Brenda
The namesake of this Night Gallery episode does not make it easy to like her. As soon as audiences meet young Brenda (Laurie Prange) in this Margaret St. Clair adaptation, she is wantonly destroying another child’s sandcastle. The other girl is distraught not only because her creation is ruined but because Brenda is nasty to her and every other kid on the island. Like the other families there, Brenda’s is vacationing on this undisclosed getaway from the mainland. What should have been a fun summer has turned out to be a lonely one for Brenda, and she only has herself to blame.
Everything changes when Brenda comes across a bizarre creature in the nearby woods; a muck monster covered in seaweed has washed ashore. She traps the thing in a pit before ultimately deciding to sic the creature on her parents. After leaving the door open at night, the monster slips into Brenda’s house. Eventually, Brenda’s parents and the neighbors drive the intruder back to the pit and bury it under a mound of rocks.
As easy as it is to dismiss Brenda as a brat with no redeeming value, she warms up at the end. She starts to act more human. And shortly before leaving the island, Brenda promises to come back to see the monster. She keeps her word; there in the pit, the trapped creature waits, showing signs it is still alive underneath the rocks. Flowers poke through the mound’s cracks, reflecting Brenda’s own personal growth since they last met.
The monster is less a freak of nature and more a physical manifestation of Brenda’s wellbeing. Her trapping it early on suggests the stagnancy in her emotional development; she repeatedly apologizes for her immature behavior yet still acts out. It is only when she sees the monster confront her parents does she recognize what is happening to herself. The creature approaches Brenda’s father not out of intent to harm him but to get him to see past its troubling veneer.
Tales of the Unexpected (1979-1988)
A Harmless Vanity
Although Tales of the Unexpected was inspired by Roald Dahl’s sizable output, most of the series is made up of other authors’ works. Theda O’Henle’s “A Harmless Vanity” is one notable example; Jeremy Paul turns her sordid story into a memorable, late-season offering befitting of the show’s title.
Mary (Sheila Gish) now suspects her husband George (Keith Barron) is cheating on her after her best friend Liz (Carol MacReady) planted the idea in her head. So, she sets up a meeting on the beach with the other woman. The encounter is awkward, but the real trouble starts when Mary’s rival Carol (Phoebe Nicholls) goes for a swim.
After an extensive makeover — a dramatic paint job from head to toe on top of a strenuous diet — Mary is ready to meet George’s apparent paramour. It seems probable Mary is going to do away with George’s lover herself at the beach until something in the tide turns, narratively speaking. The three women’s insecurities instead come out as they talk, and it seems more and more unlikely murder is in the wind.
A number of Unexpected episodes centered around affairs of the heart and body, yet none of them are as shocking as this one. In fact, it is not entirely clear if there really was a dalliance or not. That ambiguity is partly why director Giles Foster’s yarn is so suspenseful and compelling. Most of all, the audience also has no idea where this story is going until that devastating ending.
The Ray Bradbury Theater (1985-1992)
The Lake
The late Ray Bradbury expressed how much he loved this story; he even cried after writing it. The inspiration came from a lake he visited at a young age and wondering what was below the surface.
The Ray Bradbury Theater’s visual translation of “The Lake” captures the dreaminess and tangible pathos of the source material while also briefly expanding on the element of terror. Melancholy is still center stage as a man returns to a place of both great comfort and trauma.
Young Douglas (Eli Sharplin) meets Tally at the story’s eponymous locale; they connect over building sandcastles. On the last day of their vacations, Tally goes for a swim — her last one, as a matter of fact. Douglas watches helplessly as his first love disappears beneath the waters and never comes up again. Twenty-something years later, an older and married Douglas (Gordon Thomson) visits the lake with his wife Margaret (Tina Regtien). Tally’s body was never found, but it is on this day she and Douglas are finally reunited.
Pat Robins plays up the presence of the lake; he makes it an omnipotent entity that can both take things away and give them back. In this case, the water does something appalling; it removes a child from the world before she has a chance to live her life. It is hard to summon up the mental labor to explain away such a tragic death, but at the same time, there is some solace to be found in the story’s eerie ending.
Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction (1997-2002)
Morning Sickness
Over the course of four seasons, Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction adapted multiple urban legends of varying popularity. One of the more obscure but crawly myths involves a certain oceanic critter. “Morning Sickness” aired as part of the third season’s premiere, but this segment’s basis goes as far back as the 1930s.
For one family, there is only one reason when the teenage daughter, Marissa (Heather J. Miller), exhibits pregnancy-like symptoms; she has stomach pains, intense cravings, and morning sickness. Her parents (Mary Cadorette, Don Gettinger) are convinced she and her boyfriend Jason “made a mistake,” but Marissa rebuffs their accusation and even takes a pregnancy test to prove them wrong. A negative result and a mysterious movement in Marissa’s abdomen lead to emergency surgery. What doctors assume to be a cyst turns out to be something else altogether. Something “denied by the medical community” after all these years.
Jan Harold Brunvard succinctly sums up this absurd myth in Encyclopedia of Urban Legends: “Years ago a young woman complained about gripping pains in her stomach. When operated upon, a young octopus was discovered. The explanation? She swallowed an octopus egg while swimming.” This exact outcome is used in the Beyond Belief episode. Other variations of the legend have the young woman ingesting frog, lizard, or snake eggs. Logic automatically debunks the story — stomach acids would intervene long before anything has a chance to hatch — but the fun is in the details. While this particular legend is not in circulation as much as it used to be, there are occasional resurgences in the news.
Historically, this story has much to do with a fear of pregnancy; specifically unwanted ones. As a form of entertainment, it falls squarely into the enduring category of body horror along with baby spiders erupting from someone’s “pimple” and earwig infestations.
Monsterland (2020)
Palacios, TX
Contrasting the likes of Ariel are the more fearsome interpretations of mermaids that would make Hans Christian Anderson shiver. Movies like Sebastian Gutierrez’s She Creature and Milan Todorović’s Nymph, along with the TV series Siren, serve up these sea-maidens as monsters in disguise. The mermaid and siren’s mythologies are conflated these days with more emphasis on the former’s, but Monsterland strictly uses the word “mermaid” in the episode ‘Palacios, TX.”
Nicolas Pesce, the director of The Eyes of My Mother and Piercing, helms this story written by Mary Laws. A few Monsterland episodes are original and not based on anything from Nathan Ballingrud’s book North American Lake Monsters, and this is one of them. In “Palacios,” a former fisherman nicknamed Sharko (Trieu Tran) makes the greatest discovery; he brings home a sick mermaid (Adria Arjona) stranded on the beach. His attempts to rehabilitate her are then disrupted by locals who want to sell her.
Darker mermaid stories have a common theme; these creatures cannot be tamed, and if so, not easily. Here, Sharko is enamored with his catch to the point of fantasy. He endures the long-term health effects of an oil spill and can no longer do what he loves. With the mermaid, however, he can be himself again.
Sharko, the son of an immigrant who experienced racism during his acclimation, pours his heart out to the mermaid and reveals how he too is a fish out of water. In addition, Sharko is very much a prisoner of his own small tank; he feels trapped because of his poor health and depression. So how this dreary episode ends only makes sense given the foreboding line of “I wish I’d drowned [that day].”
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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