Editorials
‘The Testaments’ Doesn’t Need Torture Porn To Make You Squirm
When “Offred,” the first episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, begins, the audience is immediately thrown into adrenaline-pumping action as June (Elisabeth Moss) runs for her life and her family faces irrevocable fracture. It’s a terrifying starting point that conditions the viewer for an uncomfortable ride ahead.
Alternatively, “Precious Flowers,” The Testaments’ first episode, begins with orderly visuals of an elaborate dollhouse amidst greater opulence. There’s a sense of order, control, acceptance – and even pride – that’s present here that’s completely absent in the introduction to The Handmaid’s Tale’s world. The Testaments begins a little more than four years after The Handmaid’s Tale’s final episode, yet it’s initially difficult to recognize that they’re even a part of the same universe due to the extreme tonal shift at hand.
It was a little less than a decade ago when The Handmaid’s Tale first premiered in 2017, yet there is a shocking degree of parallels between 2017 and 2026. Horror, however, was in a different place, and there was a greater appetite for vicious films like Jigsaw, Gerald’s Game, Downrange, and Victor Crowley. The world has become much more desensitized to carnage and bloodshed, as if it’s just an everyday nuisance that needs to be compartmentalized. Accordingly, The Testaments’ world isn’t any less horrendous than what was on display in The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s just become commodified to such an extent that it no longer even reads as trauma. It’s Stockholm Syndrome to the nth degree.
The Handmaid’s Tale was such a splash of cold water to the face that got the audience’s attention because of its rampant sexual assault, twisted and torturous body horror, genital mutilation, and an oppressive government that makes Escape from New York’s political cabinet look rational. It presents a hellish world where its horrors don’t even have to hide in plain sight because there’s nothing to hide from.
The Handsmaid’s Tale‘s YA-sequel unlocks an insidious dollhouse of horror
Curiously, The Testaments reads as a YA-coded subversion of The Handmaid’s Tale’s norm, and in many ways it is. It also tells a story that’s even more insidious than its predecessor by normalizing and sugar-coating these horrors through a younger point of view. The Testaments presents its “opportunities” as aspirational inevitabilities that its younger cast of characters has been born into. Many of them have never even known an alternative way of life, whereas The Handmaid’s Tale is all about the anguish of that schism and how to return to the status quo. Gilead is the status quo in The Testaments.
The Testaments is a coming-of-age drama that follows a new generation of women in Gilead, led by Agnes (Chase Infiniti) and Daisy (Lucy Halliday), two residents with very different backgrounds who share an unexpected connection. Agnes and Daisy make their way through an elite prep school that’s designed to prime them for their obedient futures as wives. It’s fascinating to see Handmaid’s Tale’s aggressive nihilism receive a tie-dyed YA makeover that even plays into the burgeoning “micro-drama” space.
It’s a smart angle that rejuvenates The Handmaid’s Tale’s brand, which was admittedly flailing after six seasons. The Testaments draws in a completely new audience, while it still does enough to appeal to the original Handmaid’s Tale crowd. The same breed of relationship drama still exists, yet it’s impossibly more corrupted in The Testaments. These arranged marriages and prescribed fealty are something that Gilead’s youth are fighting rather than rebelling against. It’s their idea of a love story. The Testaments often feels more like a Freeform teen drama than a Hulu prestige piece. Even the series’ omnipresent voiceover echoes June’s use of this device in The Handmaid’s Tale, yet it’s turned into egregious, unnecessary narration that evokes the egregious internal monologues found in young-adult fare.
It’s no coincidence that The Testaments repeatedly turns to its introductory dollhouse imagery. It’s a convenient metaphor that displays the conditional happiness and oppressive roles that pull the strings in Gilead. Agnes and Daisy are drowning in a sea of poison, yet The Testaments deceives its victims through overpowering imagery of beautiful pastries, pastel desserts, and ornate tea parties. There’s even a “prom episode” that adds a Bridgerton quality to this horrifying story and pretends that it’s a fairy tale. At one point, a character remarks, “Gilead was so beautiful I could sometimes forget where I was.” The characters focus on dance steps, pomp and circumstance, and fancy pageantry that masks the abuse. It’s an Instagram filter of normalcy over subjugation and ignorance.
The Testaments‘ hidden mask of cruelty cuts deeper
Even the episode titles in The Testaments reflect a sanitized and repressed nature that focuses on beautiful lies and artifice, rather than the truth. Episodes have titles like “Precious Flowers,” “Perfect Teeth,” and “Green Tea,” which all hide the true horrors that lurk beneath these ideas and what they really represent. Alternatively, The Handmaid’s Tale would have episodes with titles like “Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum,” “Unwomen,” and “Jezebels.” The girls in The Testaments are so oblivious to life’s true dangers that Agnes has her own Little Mermaid moment in which she misinterprets a crude crack pipe for something beautiful.
The most chilling example of The Testaments’ indoctrinated delusion involves the young girls’ highly stylized and color-coded outfits that delineate their various stages and roles. It’s treated like a fun outfit to coordinate and accessorize with as yet another aspect of this carefully coordinated lifestyle. It’s a disturbing exercise that ostensibly turns all these girls into targets, and yet it’s treated like haute couture. The whole “Plum” concept that labels girls who have yet to have their periods is so simple, yet one of the most vile things that the franchise has ever done. This disgusting idea is normalized in such a chilling manner. It turns a twisted tool that’s used to mark young, vulnerable women into a fashion statement.
Girls are literally crying because they haven’t had their periods, and they want to be paired off with Commanders who are twice their age. It’s presented as a privilege that’s reinforced through a reprehensible cult mentality to characters who are too young to know any better. The whole Plum ritual is aspirational, and those who buck this trend are destined to become outcasts. The horror that’s so expertly weaponized in The Testaments is more akin to The Stepford Wives, Subservience, or even Village of the Damned and Dogtooth, rather than a more blunt and brutal examination of gender and status, like in Hostel, Society, or Revenge.
The Testaments has even created an ecosystem where women from outside of Gilead are targeted by “Pearl Girls” and drawn into a world where “women still have value.” They co-opt and twist this subjugated sex slave narrative into a world where women are valued, cared for, and given a clear purpose. It’s The Testaments’ version of embracing a “trad wife” lifestyle, albeit with a lot more carnage and cruelty. Funnily enough, the one Testaments episode that ditches its stylized sanitation is a flashback entry that’s set pre-Handmaid’s Tale. It’s also the season’s most gratuitous and brutal episode. It’s outwardly terrifying, and the episode that feels the most like a traditional horror movie.
Gilead’s dystopian system still inspires violence
The Testaments masquerades many of its horrors, but the series isn’t completely devoid of violence. There’s a toxic version of girl power that’s exploited throughout the series and channeled into a fiery fury towards men. To be clear, Gilead’s system is still deeply broken. The Testaments is just very particular about how its most overt punishments are done to men, rather than building terror from their freedom to abuse women. This is not a world where violence is erased. It’s just powerfully focused to elicit a very specific response. This illusion of control and agency creates even greater horrors that are interwoven into these young girls’ identities.
The sheer jubilation that Gilead’s youth experience during a man’s dismemberment speaks to the bloodthirsty and rabid tendencies that are bubbling under the surface of these seemingly “proper women.” They’re living embodiments of Gilead’s toxic veneer of compliance. There’s a level of reverence and awe in these girls’ reactions that’s comparable to the Sawyer family watching a butchering session in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Both are governed by self-imposed norms that argue for a simpler, more honest existence.
It’s fascinating to see both The Testaments and Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights wrestle with the same themes of conditioned normalcy and women’s relationship and curiosity with pain, violence, and death. Surprisingly, The Testaments seems to have more to say on this front as Agnes and Daisy head further down Gilead’s rabbit hole. Daisy has some frame of reference for why all this isn’t normal. Agnes faces a much more challenging struggle ahead that involves liberation from Gilead, but also a complete reeducation on how to exist.
Agnes’ psychological scars run much deeper than any mutilation wound from The Handmaid’s Tale. She’s so busy getting excited over marriage and celebrating puberty that she doesn’t even know that she’s trapped in a horror movie. Playing with dolls may be more pleasant than kicking and screaming through the woods, but the results can be so much worse.
The Testaments’ first three episodes are available on Disney+ and Hulu, with new episodes releasing weekly.
Editorials
Before ‘The Blair Witch Project’, ‘Alien Autopsy’ Showed How Real Found Footage Could Feel
The line separating artist from con man is a lot thinner than you might initially believe. While I think we can all agree that lying for the sake of profit is actively malicious behavior, isn’t it also true that the faux documentary aspect of The Blair Witch Project is half the reason why that film became such a cultural phenomenon? After all, if there’s one thing filmmakers have in common with stage magicians, it’s that misleading and misdirecting audiences is simply part of the job.
That’s why I’ve developed a habit of mostly ignoring the moral quandaries behind many of film and television’s biggest “hoaxes” in favor of appreciating the narrative elements that drive productions like Mermaids: The Body Found and even Animal Planet’s highly underrated The Cannibal in the Jungle. However, if there’s a definitive case of a highly publicized broadcast fooling the world into taking it seriously, it has to be Fox’s infamous 1995 TV special Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction.
It’s been over three decades since that eerie footage first haunted television screens right at the peak of the ’90s ufology craze, and in that time, the video has taken on a life of its own. From countless parodies and references in everything from The X-Files to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (as well as John Dower’s recently released tell-all documentary The Alien Autopsy Scandal, which I’d highly recommend to genre fans everywhere), there’s no denying the legacy of the Alien Autopsy video. However, I rarely see the tape discussed as what it truly is: a highly convincing found footage film directed by a passionate stage magician and brought to life by masterful practical effects work.
That’s why I’d like to invite readers to join me on a deep dive into one of the most infamous broadcasts of all time in an attempt to reevaluate the footage as a fascinating narrative experience rather than a complete hoax.
The TV Special That Convinced Millions It Was Real
Ray Santilli next to Extraterrestrial replica in ‘The Alien Autopsy Scandal’
For starters, regardless of whether or not you believe that there was in fact an extraterrestrial crash in Roswell during the summer of 1947 and that some form of autopsy was performed on the victims, the producers behind the black & white recordings, Ray Santilli and Gary Shoefield, insist that their video was a “restoration.” Though I’d argue that the proper word is “remake”of genuine footage that was too damaged to air on television. That’s why the duo went on to recruit filmmaker and eccentric magician Spyros Melaris and sculptor/monster designer John Humphreys to bring their version of the autopsy to life and sell it to the highest bidder.
This is where the story of the Alien Autopsy as a narrative experience really begins. Melaris claims that his approach to the faux recording consisted of striving for extreme period accuracy in both shooting equipment and setting while also planting subtle details that would initially seem like mistakes but could later be revealed to actually fit the time period. That being said, the filmmaker was under the impression that the short would be released for free as a PR stunt, with the team later producing and selling an informative documentary chronicling exactly how the footage was faked and commenting on how easy it is to manipulate public perception with a good old-fashioned magic trick.
This obviously isn’t how things went down, and that’s likely the reason why Melaris has since distanced himself from everyone else involved with the project. Yet, no amount of behind-the-scenes drama can undermine the genuine effort that went into making the short as impressive as it is. From the sourcing of real animal organs from a local butcher to make the organic part of the creature more lifelike to the highly detailed sculpt that made use of a hollowed-out underlayer that could be filled with fake blood and assorted viscera, there’s a reason why so many Hollywood specialists are still impressed with the artistry on display here.
Of course, the believability is only half the story, as I think that the best part of the autopsy is how Melaris builds on the existing tension by obscuring certain details and often embracing the chaos of what a real examination of extraterrestrial life could feel like. The camera often goes out of focus at just the right time to make certain effects hit even harder, and we can only speculate as to what the hazmat-suited doctors are gesticulating about during the operation. There’s a real air of mystery to the whole thing that almost makes it feel like a cosmically terrifying, cursed film containing forbidden knowledge that civilians were never meant to see.
So when Fox’s Fact or Fiction brings in the specialists to comment on the film and its otherworldly subject, it’s no surprise that we end up with one of the most memorable mockumentaries of all time – albeit one where the participants are unaware that the footage they’re commenting on is basically a large-scale practical joke. A joke that the network was obviously in on, as many participants claim that the TV special cut out significant portions where guests point out that they believe the footage to be an elaborate hoax.
The Lasting Impact of the Hoax Turned Cultural Event
Regardless, I remember going to bed terrified after watching reruns of the special and thinking about the respected pathologist who claimed that the body was almost certainly inhuman, with even effects maestro Stan Winston commenting on how difficult it would be to recreate some of these visuals through practical puppetry. That’s not even mentioning Jonathan Frakes’ dramatic hyping up of the disturbing imagery as if he was talking about the tape from The Ring, with his spooky demeanor here likely being responsible for his later role as the host of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction a few years later.
Personally, I’d argue that the Alien Autopsy phenomenon had just as much of an impact on me as a horror fan as The Blair Witch Project, a film that was almost certainly influenced by the success of this immensely popular hoax (to the point where they even produced their own TV special commenting on Heather’s found footage). Even if Fox didn’t intend to produce a narrative feature about the aftermath of the Roswell crash, the end product still holds up remarkably well as a highly entertaining mockumentary exploring the idea that we may not be alone in the universe.
While neither Santilli nor the rest of the production team has ever commented on this, I also think it’s very likely that the idea of a faux Alien Autopsy could have been influenced by Dean Alioto’s The McPherson Tape/UFO Abduction. I’ve already written about how this granddaddy of found footage was co-opted by rogue ufologists who began selling bootlegs of the tape at conventions as if it were real evidence of a close encounter, so it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine that Santilli and company could have heard about this phenomenon and been inspired to come up with their own highly profitable hoax.
At the end of the day, it’s unlikely that the Alien Autopsy film is recreating any real footage from Roswell, but I can still appreciate the short and the accompanying television event as a standalone horror story that still influences the way we see found footage to this very day.
After all, the possibility that something could be real is often much scarier than finding out for sure – and that’s why I think Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction is still worth revisiting three decades down the line.
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