Through five episodes, “The Strain” (8 p.m. Central Sundays on FX) is already shaping up to be one of the best horror TV shows ever. Its combination of wonderful Guillermo del Toro-style mood along with believable modern special effects would make for a fine horror flick, but the fact that it’s a 13-episode miniseries allows for more depth.
Advancement of the plague
Taking advantage of the medium, each hour has gradually shown the advancement of this vampire plague — it seems like it’ll go global soon — while also allowing for moral nuance. “The Strain” is based on a book and comic book series, which – like TV — have similar advantages over movies. When it comes to the topic of horror done right on TV, “The Walking Dead” springs to mind, but I have heard that a fair number of viewers find that show boring.
While I’m not in that group, I suspect that part of their boredom comes from the deliberate pacing and the way the rules of the zombie plague are conveniently parceled out. (Classics like “The X-Files” and “Buffy” are great horror TV, but I categorize those as dramas that have horror elements. “The X-Files” was a mood piece and “Buffy” was a character piece. Similarly, I’d say “Bates Motel” is a character drama and “Hannibal” is a style piece. Only rarely did/do those four shows aim to scare viewers as consistently as “The Walking Dead” or “The Strain” do.)
“The Strain” Season 1 (2014)
Sundays, FX
Creators: Guillermo del Toro, Chuck Hogan
Stars: Corey Stoll, David Bradley, Kevin Durand
“The Strain” embraces the chaos of how a real plague would unfold. As we learned in the pilot episode, four survivors are infected on the plane at the same time. However, the goth singer turns into a vampire a couple episodes into the series, and Jack Bauer’s wife is finally succumbing to the disease only now.
These “Strain” vampires can live above ground in the early stages of their transformation, but – as we see when the pest-control worker (scene-stealing character actor Kevin Durand) ventures into the sewers – the completely transformed vampires can’t handle the sunlight. The traits of the condition have been unveiled like the notes of a symphony, from the goth singer’s no-longer-needed genitalia falling into the toilet, where he calmly flushes them, to the suburban mom feeling like there’s something in her eye before they blink sideways for the first time.
Best of all is the scene where our CDC heroes (Corey Stoll’s Ephram, Mia Maestro’s Nora and Sean Astin’s Jim) dissect a vampire and Stoll pulls a 15-foot long stinger from its mouth. This stinger mechanism makes the “Strain” vampires a cross between traditional human-esque vamps and the xenomorphs from “Alien,” and it has led to some great scenes, such as the nursing home attack that finds Nora deadpanning to her mom: “We’re going home.”
It has some dark humor
Furthermore, “The Strain” can play the dark humor card almost as well as “Fargo,” another 2014 FX show. Most notable is the scene where the flustered housewife is confronted by her neighbor about her barking dog. She tricks him into entering the shed to teach the “dog” some manners, knowing that her infected/transforming husband has chained himself in there for her protection.
The special effects are so good at making the vampires look far gone from their humanity that it seems absurd that Nora would morally oppose Eph’s and vampire hunter Abraham’s (David Bradley) plan to kill everyone who is infected (and destroy the corpses of those who may have been infected before they died). On the other hand, the most recent episode finds Abraham – always armed with that awesome cane-sword – beheading the barking-dog complainant. He was PROBABLY infected, but the moral ambiguity is palpable.
A TV series also allows for more mythological depth, and “The Strain” rather abruptly dug into that rich minefield on Sunday by showing that floaty, wispy bloodsucker picking off Nazi concentration camp prisoners one by one at night. Those scenes took me out of the flow of the series a bit, as I suddenly had to reconcile the scary fun of a ridiculous vampire drama against the real-life horror of the Nazi atrocities.
However, I’ll give this flashback plotline a chance because I like the visual parallel to “Harry Potter’s” Dementors. I wonder if this floaty vampire is not merely sucking blood but purposely picking off the downtrodden. And of course I hope those Nazis eventually become its victims, although it’s possible the Nazis will get transformed into the ringleaders of the 2014 plague.
Even in the midst of a golden age for horror TV, “The Strain” is making its mark. It has scares to match the best horror flicks plus a rarely equaled richness to the way the outbreak and mythology unfolds. I’m enjoying a little piece of this grand story every Sunday, always with the lights out.