Reviews
[Review] Netflix’s “Elves” is Perfect Christmas Horror for Fans of Creature Features and Folk Horror
When young Josefine asks why part of the forest is fenced off in Elves, a local woman (Ann Eleonora Jørgensen) replies: “So no one goes in.” She then tells the tourists to “stay away” from that area in general. As made very obvious earlier on in the series, the fence in question does more than keep people out; it’s keeping something in.
This short and not-so-sweet Danish series follows a family’s vacation to the fictional island of Årmandsø. Charlotte and Mads (Lila Nobel, Peder Thomas Pedersen) steal their two kids, Josefine and Kasper (Sonja Steen, Milo Campanale), away from the city for some much needed togetherness after drifting apart. Their Christmas holiday, however, is already off to a bad start when Mads runs over something on the way to the cabin. They only find what looks to be a tar-like substance on the car and no sign of whatever they might have hit.
It is only when Josefine goes back to the scene of the accident does she discover they in fact did injure something. She hides the victim, a small and unusual creature later named Kee-ko, in the barn without realizing the misfortune she’s now brought upon herself as well as her family. News of the fledgling’s displacement sparks concern in the community, and the forest’s caretakers take action to prevent any further trouble.
Elves, or Nisser, could be mistaken for a Goosebumps story based on the setup alone. A somewhat impaired family is attacked by unearthly creatures while visiting a strange, new place. Sounds familiar. Yet as soon as cows are sent to their sacrificial deaths in order to appease whatever lurks in the forest, you know you’re in for something bolder. The feast does not stop there either; the titular monsters eventually take their first human life after a number of years without incident. The severed head hurled over the fence is a sign this standing truce is hereby over.
The aggressively adorable Kee-ko is this series’ own version of Gizmo; it comes across as a mix between a classic Troll doll and a Fingerlings toy. That cute veneer is why the show’s main character, the unhappy Josefine, becomes attached to her new friend. She’s not only tired of her mother treating her like a baby, she wants something to love. Like the aforementioned Mogwai, humans aren’t cut out to take care of something like Kee-ko. They don’t stay precious and little for long.
Elves taps into an unsung part of Nordic culture, and it does it in a way that’s better than its basic premise would suggest. The cinematography alone is an asset; Lars Reinholdt (The Bridge, The Rain) captures the bucolic beauty of the woodsy setting while also providing incentives for cottagecore enthusiasts. The eye-pleasing aesthetic soothes when the series flouts its own themes of ecological dread and family dysfunction. The folkloric namesakes signify human’s disrespect for rules; be it societal or natural. It’s frayed symbolism at best, but the adult elves at least look convincing and terrifying as they devour members of the cast.
Elves relies on a considerable amount of tropes to get the story up and going, and for those who look for this sort of thing in their horror, the characters don’t tug at hearts or garner all that much sympathy. Nevertheless, this distinct creature-feature in the form of a swift, straightforward and exquisitely shot TV series is a welcome addition to the world of hinterland horror.
Elves can be streamed on Netflix right now.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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