Editorials
Why “Monsters” is Still One of the All-Time Best Horror Anthology Shows [TV Terrors]
Horror and science fiction have always been a part of the television canvas, and constant attempts have been made over the years to produce classic entertainment. Some have fallen by the wayside, while others became mainstream phenomena. With “TV Terrors,” we take a look back at the many genre efforts from the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s, exploring some shows that became cult classics, and others that sank into obscurity.
This month we revisit the nostalgic charms of late 80s/early 90s series “Monsters.”
- Aired from 1988 – 1991
- Aired in Syndication
The 1980s were filled with an abundance of great anthology horror both in theaters and especially on television. Even when the series were considered failures like “Amazing Stories,” they still managed to age pretty well. One of the most unique anthology horror series of the eighties (and one of my top five anthology horror series ever) is “Monsters.”
Developed by Richard P. Rubinstein (Creepshow, Tales from the Darkside, Pet Sematary, Dawn of the Dead), “Monsters” was a syndicated anthology horror show that often told short form stories that delved in either straight faced horror or dark comedy horror. “Monsters” has one of the most interesting opening intros of all time, as the camera pans down to a normal suburban household one evening. What we assume is going to be a normal nuclear family is actually a suburban family of monsters.
They’re preparing for family night (monsters have those too!), and much to their surprise their favorite show “Monsters” happens to appear on television. Despite never really changing a thing about this prologue, it’s surprising how re-watchable this opening is as there are so many subtle nuances, including the strong monster make up and the tongue in cheek humor.
“Monsters” had one mission and that was that every episode had to feature a monster (or monsters). There was never a single episode that didn’t have some kind of beast or creepy crawly in it. Despite the concept demanding the writers concoct ways to introduce new monsters, the series was pretty fantastic and almost always delivered. As mentioned, “Monsters” was a show that leaned heavily in to dark horror comedy, or just straight faced horror. When it was tongue in cheek, it managed to be very clever, but when it offered up straight faced tales of terror, the series excelled at being pretty scary.
Even today a lot of my favorite episodes from the show give me the willies. Some of my all time favorite episodes include “Cellmates,” centered on a spoiled rich American man who is jailed in South America for hitting a kid with his car. Expecting to be bailed out and rescued by his father’s lawyer, he realizes that he may not make it out as his mate in the next cell may be something otherworldly. This is a great, often creepy look at an affluent racist man getting what’s coming to him. The darkly comic “Small Blessings” works like It’s Alive as a sitcom focusing on the domestic life of a young couple (Kevin Nealon and Julie Brown) caring for their mutated flesh eating baby, Eric.
As people around the neighborhood begin turning up dead, the exhausted mother wonders if there’s a psychopath on the loose, or if Eric is going out at night to eat. This one is pretty fun in all of its demented humor, and includes a very early appearance from David Spade.
“The Hole” is one of the many Post-Vietnam horror tales from the decade involving a platoon of American soldiers that are forced to raid an underground tunnel, hoping to garner some information on the enemy. While in there, they come across a wounded Vietnamese Soldier who warns them that the dead are lurking within the walls, and are ready to take anyone that enters the hallowed ground.
Tense and claustrophobic, this is a classic horror tale that feels ripped right out of EC Comics. My favorite episode though is the bleakest of the series, “The Waiting Game.” Centered on two soldiers watching over a nuclear bunker overnight, the two stir crazy men are horrified when unexplained circumstances force them to launch nuclear warheads from the silo. Setting off a chain of nuclear explosions around the country, they learn that they’re draped in nuclear winter with the bunker their only safe haven.
As they fight off boredom and anxiety, they begin to realize that someone or something is lurking outside in the darkness. Before long, they realize something horrible just might have survived the apocalypse. Even worse, it’s trying to lure them out. This is a pitch black horror tale filled with biting tension and some top notch performances. It’s all topped off by an absolutely perfect and bleak final scene. I vividly recall watching “The Waiting Game” as a kid back in 1990, and it kept me up all night.
“Monsters” was considerably lower in budget than anthologies like “Creepshow” and “Tales from the Darkside,” so many of the episodes were confined to one setting, often feeling a lot like stage productions. Nevertheless, the series excelled in unique horror stories that made great use of its resources. The production crew also offered up a plethora of creative monsters like sentient lab rats, subterranean mutants, a vengeful Indigenous deity, a man eating bed, and a monster that feeds on cancer patients.
After ending in 1990, “Monsters” lived on for a long time in syndication on cable television, garnering a long run in the 1990s with repeats airing constantly on The Sci Fi Channel (Now Syfy), and in the aughts on (the now defunct) Chiller TV. “Monsters” was very much in the tradition of “Creepshow” and “Tales from the Darkside” in that it owed a lot of its twists and mood to EC Comics and their offbeat horror stories. The production wasn’t always spectacular, but the series still holds up shockingly well in the annals of horror anthologies.
Is It On DVD/Blu-ray/Streaming? In 2014, Sony released a great DVD set of the entire series. It’s sadly out of print at the moment. However, the entirety of “Monsters” can be found streaming on Amazon Prime Video, and The Roku Channel.
Five decades ago, Stephen King published the story of a bullied girl with telekinetic powers and forever changed the world of horror.
Carrie follows a high school misfit who seeks revenge for a hideous prank by psychically destroying her senior prom. The name Carrie White has become synonymous with the concept of a formal dance thanks to a flawless adaptation from Brian De Palma. Now fifty years after the film’s release, Mike Flanagan is putting his own stamp on the troubling story.
Rather than a feature film, the writer/director will expand King’s relatively slim debut novel into an eight-episode miniseries for Amazon Prime set to premiere on October 7.
Flanagan is no stranger to the world of Stephen King. A long-time Constant Reader, he first made waves with his daring adaptation of Gerald’s Game (2017), a novel many fans considered un-filmable. His underrated Doctor Sleep merges the disparate plot of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with King’s original source material, and his 2024 genre-bending tearjerker The Life of Chuck faithfully executes one of the author’s most metaphysical novellas.
He’s currently mired in pre-production for an expansive adaptation of The Dark Tower series, keystone to King’s connected universe, and Warner Bros. recently announced that Flanagan will helm a new version of The Mist, King’s 1980 novella which sees a small Maine town overrun by otherworldly monsters.
Considering the vast array of the author’s previously unadapted material, an obvious question arises. Why reimagine Carrie in 2026? Noting the timeless nature of the content, Flanagan expressed his desire to bring the story of a bullied girl into modern times, mirroring his approach to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. He explained, “The only way to approach it was to build something new out of the ingredients of Carrie. Otherwise, there’s really no purpose in trying to retread ground that’s been so beautifully walked before.”
His miniseries will maintain the novel’s bloody bookends while delivering “big surprises” along the way.
A New Prom Night Nightmare
The roughly 60-second teaser introduces Summer H. Howell as Carrie White just before the moment of catastrophe. Standing in a prom dress, she smiles at her applauding classmates with an ominous crown perched upon her head. Moments later, Carrie unleashes a rage-filled scream into the night air while promgoers rush for the exit doors. But careful examination of this scene shows Carrie wearing a different, albeit dirty dress as she seems to telekinetically punish her peers.
In an exclusive first look with Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan explains that in his version of the story, “the events of that prom are going to be completely different.” An open trunk emitting a crimson glow does hint at the pig’s blood dumped on Carrie’s head, but it’s likely Flanagan’s formal dance will be a different kind of horror altogether. Despite these changes, the series may end with the widespread destruction outlined in the source material. Unlike any previous adaptations, King’s novel ends with the near-total destruction of Chamberlain, Maine. A flaming street in Flanagan’s trailer promises similar carnage no matter what prank sparks Carrie’s deadly revenge.
The Monstrous Addition of Social Media
On the opposite end of this fiery conclusion is an extreme act of bullying that brings together the story’s main cast. King’s novel begins as Carrie gets her first period while showering in the girls’ locker room. Completely unaware of the concept of menstruation, the sheltered girl thinks she’s bleeding to death. Her classmates respond with vitriolic rage. Led by ultra-mean girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), they mock the terrified teen while pelting her with tampons. Glimpses of this disturbing event reveal that Flanagan has excised the scene’s nudity while adding a seismic update. As Carrie sobs in the shower stall, Chris and her friends film the breakdown with their phones.
Other scenes note the presence of social media, bringing King’s fifty-year-old story into the digital age.
Flanagan’s adaptation promises to explore the destructive power of social media, an often invisible entity with a potential for harm rivaling Carrie’s own powers. While King’s tormented heroine suffers in front of a small group of girls, Flanagan’s version of the incident will likely become a viral video, potentially circling the globe on social media. Similar to Katt Shea’s criminally underrated The Rage: Carrie 2, which includes elements of revenge porn exploitation, Flanagan’s modern retelling will distinguish itself by exploring the nebulous cruelty of online bullying, a force ten times more powerful than the irl pranks King first envisioned.
A Completely Reimagined White Family
In addition to modernizing these canon events, Flanagan hints at updates to Carrie’s oppressive upbringing at the hands of her mother, Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan). Dead before the novel begins, we never meet Carrie’s domineering father Ralph, known to carry a bible alongside his gun. Flanagan’s White household will be an altogether different beast. In his version of the story, Carrie and her mother have been hidden away in the unassuming home, forced out of hiding by Ralph’s unexpected death. Perhaps we will finally meet this elusive man whose shadow hangs over his wife and child. Considering the White family’s fundamentalist lifestyle, this reimagining hints at tradwife culture and a home ruled by staunch patriarchal control.
Whereas King’s Carrie has been tormented by her classmates since Kindergarten, Flanagan’s Carrie will be a wide-eyed newcomer to public school, eager to make friends and engage with her peers. We glimpse Carrie cozying up to Chris and the equally popular Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) as she navigates a new social scene. Of course, we know this kindness is part of an elaborate plot designed to lull Carrie into a false sense of camaraderie, setting up an atrocious act of public humiliation. These brief moments of feigned compassion put Sue’s own complicity into question. Will Flanagan’s version of the character find the courage to defend Carrie from vicious bullies or will she succumb to peer pressure and join in the mob mentality?
Perhaps the biggest deviation from King’s original text is the relationship between Carrie and her mother. King’s Margaret White is a horrifically abusive religious zealot whose worldview has been hardened by internalized misogyny. She shames Carrie for menstruating, locks her in a closet to “pray,” and regrets not killing her child in infancy. She’s also responsible for Carrie’s social ostracization. Known to berate her neighbors for their “sins,” Margaret forces her daughter to live by an extreme code of conduct and disallows any potential friends lest they corrupt the girl with their worldly ways.
Flanagan’s version of the character is perhaps just as much a victim as Carrie herself. Also trapped inside her home, his Margaret is overly vigilant, her own trauma manifesting as strict control. Describing a more sympathetic depiction of the iconic villain, Flanagan explains, “Our Margaret White is a woman who fiercely loves her daughter and wants to protect her from this world … [She] doesn’t know how to do that and thinks the way to protect her is to close her off; not punitively, but to create this private utopia.”
Despite this potential softening, Sloyan’s Margaret may still have a sharp edge. Though she has appeared in many Flanagan projects, from Hush (2016) to The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), she is best known for her role as the abhorrent Bev Keane in the poignant saga Midnight Mass (2021). Perhaps inspired by King’s Margaret White, Bev is pious and sadistic, willing to punish anyone who does not adhere to her warped approximation of Catholicism.
Flanagan specifically wrote Margaret with Sloyan in mind, likely remembering the actress’s eerie ability to create deceptive empathy and shift our allegiances on a dime.
Expanding Stephen King’s Telekinetic Universe
While most of King’s story deals with an unthinkable prom night in Chamberlain, Maine, large sections of the semi-epistolary novel see experts debating the nature of telekinesis. Do Carrie’s frightening abilities represent a new phase in human evolution or is the prom night carnage merely a fluke? King settles the debate with a shocking denouement in which a young mother recounts her infant daughter’s ability to dangle her crib toys in midair. We’re left to wonder if she will become another tormented girl who surprises the world with metaphysical strength.
Flanagan plans to build out this brief scene while amplifying themes of female empowerment. After introducing our main cast of characters, episode two will open with an unrelated story in which we meet another girl with the TK gene. Each subsequent chapter will expand this world, building out a roster of telekinetic young women. Considering King’s fondness for stories about powerful kids, often described as possessing “the shining,” Constant Readers will no doubt have their eyes peeled for various Easter Eggs nodding to the author’s vast catalogue.
Giving Carrie Her Own Voice
Perhaps the most striking distinction in Flanagan’s new trailer is the extent to which we hear Carrie’s voice. The sneak peek is fully narrated by the titular prom queen as she demands accountability. “I want to know why,” she explains while detailing Chris’ elaborate plan. Aside from the aforementioned coda, King’s book essentially ends with the aftermath of the prom night tragedy, leaving little time for Carrie to reflect. His shifting narrative does bring the reader into her fragile mind, though not before she’s been cowed by relentless cruelty. We watch Carrie sink into bloodthirsty revenge, but never hear a considered desire for justice or repair.
Flanagan’s original monologue allows Carrie to voice her pain and mourn the life she could have had. We’re also treated to a mug shot-style photo of Chris with a bruised and bandaged face, implying that the mean girl will have to answer for her senseless sadism.
Flanagan is known for filling his series adaptations with heartwrenching speeches that cut to the heart of his thematic intentions, and this teaser seems to follow suit. After years of fans, critics, and scholars analyzing Carrie’s pain, perhaps his modern retelling will offer the titular anti-hero a chance to finally speak for herself.
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