A scare at bedtime

Can TV ever be truly scary? Or is hiding behind the couch a thing of the past?

Last night, I watched some scary TV, but enough about For Fact’s Sake.

If you’re looking for a proper scare, dip your toes into e Haunting of Hill House (Netflix). Of course, this is physically impossible unless you’re watching too much Videodrome (we’re talking 1983 David Cronenberg, millennials) but you get the drift. Shirley Jackson’s 1959 book was adapted for TV by Mike Flanagan and Stephen King, who surely damned it by describing it as “a work of genius.” It’s not really, but it does make you jump now and again, which is a lot more jumps than many other so-called fright fests.

Ever since TV began, it’s been hell-bent on scaring us to death. Sixties sci- show, e Outer Limits, wanted us to believe that it could control the vertical and the horizontal until someone pulled the plug. Tales of the Unexpected lived up to that billing until they didn’t. Even children’s TV dialled up the weird with that ’70s show, Wanderly Wagon, featuring Crow (a puppet that looked like a crow), Judge (a puppet that looked like a dog) and a creepy man who wore 40 coats. en along came reality TV and everybody got scared for real. Look out your window right now and there’s a good chance that Daniel and Majella are pulling into the driveway.

But the scariest thing ever on TV, apart from Twink on Play the Game, was the vampire guy on Salem’s Lot. A er its screening on RTÉ, children were unable to sleep for a month and parents, brandishing sharpened TV licences, marched on the Dáil. en they saw the light: Vampire Guy became the new bogeyman. And a very useful tool he proved too. In homes across the land, parents wielded the threat of a repeat screening of Salem’s Lot as they exhorted their wee ones to ‘eat your beetroot soup’ or ‘renounce Satan.’ en came Twin Peaks. What was that about? Nobody knows. But it was the scariest thing ever, until Twin Peaks 2. And what was that about? TV is still trying to scare. American Horror Show, e Walking Dead and Dancing with the Stars: take your pick. However, Hill House is the pick of the current even if it’s no Black Mirror. But then, Black Mirror is no Black Mirror, if you want to get all meta about it. Here is a show that doesn’t aspire to control the vertical or horizontal, just the future. A h season arrives in late December, making it a Black Christmas for those tinsel times. Until then, e Haunting of Hill House will keep you up at night for all the right reasons.