"Legacy" and "Hide" – Two Sentence Horror Stories S01E03-E04

Well, those were better than last week's pair. Which as I noted last week, is damning with faint praise. But it is what it is.

The stories are nothing to write home about. And among my comparisons from last week, the one I left out is to the late lamented Channel Zero. Two Sentence Horror Stories shares a lot in common with that program. Both are based on Internet horror stories: in the case of Channel Zero, "creepypastas". Both are very dark and gloomy and have a lot directorial flourishes. And both try to draw out relatively short horror pieces and turn them into full-fledged stories. Channel Zero uses a creepypasta as the basis for a six-episode-per-season, one-hour-per-episode series, a different story each season. Two Sentence takes a two-sentence horror "story" and spins out a 30-minute episode.

So you have two sentences, like:

Knock, knock, I heard.
But the monsters had already found their way inside.

And the creative team turns that into a 30-minute story. And let's face it, with a bare-bones "story" like the above, a writer (or writers: "Hide" has Sehaj Sethi, Leon Hendrix III, and Stephanie Adams-Santos all credited) could make pretty much anything out of that. What did they make?

Well, first, let's look at "Legacy", which is written by Pornsak Pichetshote. A man named Jin dies, his wife, Angela, and mother, Ma, are in the house and mourn. A boy runs around and giggles a lot while making faces. Then the man comes back, in true The Ring style, as a ghost and attacks his wife.

Ma eventually brings in an exorcist. He sees the boy when Ma and Angela can't, and then Jin breaks Harold's neck and attacks the women. They run a lot, and Ma finally admits her husband abused Jin and she looked the other way, and did the same thing when Jin abused Angela. It turns out the boy, Bao Bao, is Jin as a child. Ma begs with Jin to take her instead of Angela, Bao Bao touches Jin and disappears, and Jin reverts back to human-looking and freezes, looking at Ma's locket with a picture of him as a boy inside.

Ma and Angela move out, and Jin stands there, invisible to them and staring at the locket. He "wakes up" at the end and looks at them out of the window as they leave. And that's it.

"Legacy" doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a narrative. For one thing, you wonder what happened to the body of poor Harold. Another, bigger one, is we get no characterization of anyone beyond the bare bones. Ma is loyal to her son, and to her husband before her. We're left to assume Jin was a monster in life, and is still a monster as a ghost. Angela is the woman in danger. Bao Bao (BB), we have no idea what's going on with him. He runs around a bit and does some stuff, which in retrospect, either isn't as "real" as it looks but was shot to fool us, or is misleadingly real when BB can't be real.

More importantly, we don't know anything about BB to anticipate any kind of twist about his ghostly existence. It's also not clear why he's there. So, he's the ghost of Jin as an abused child? BB doesn't serve any narrative purpose, beyond keeping Jin away from Angela and Ma long enough to take the episode to 30 minutes. He says he hates Jin, keeps him away from Ma, and ends up disappearing when Jin and Ma touch.

There are several things that step the episode up. The music is good, the direction is good, and it's hard to go wrong with The Ring type pale-faced dark-eyed weird-haired specters. Wai Ching Ho (Madame Gao on Marvel's Daredevil and Iron Fist, among many other appearances) brings an effective gravitas to the proceedings. The episode is more about Ma than Angela: Angela gets terrorized, choked, and beaten by the invisible ghost. Ma gets to confront the ghost, and, I guess, is the one who ends up driving it away by admitting her guilt and showing it the locket with the picture of BB. Although why this would cause Ghost BB to disappear and Ghost Jin to freeze up, I don't know. Asian ghost mythology?

"Hide" leaves off the supernatural of the ghostly and returns to the more mundane reality of last week's outings. We see a Hispanic woman, Araceli Gomez (Greta Quispie) deal with her two children and her sister, before going off to the Smythe home to watch over their autistic child Gracie (Zaria Degenhardt) while the couple take a night out. Two masked women home-intrude on the house and stalk Araceli and Gracie.

Using an origami "selector", the women pick "Skewer" and "Crush" to dispose of their intended victims. They have different-colored hoodies, so the one wearing "Red" goes after Araceli while "Yellow" goes after Grace. Yellow finds Gracie presumably hiding under a blanket, and leaves to go to the kitchen and make an improvised flamethrower out of a candle lighter and a can of peanut oil.

Red chases Araceli down, but Araceli gets the drop on her, and stabs her to death. I think. She then goes after Yellow, who has returned to discover Gracie either switched with a stuffed animal or was never under the blanket in the first place. Araceli stabs Yellow in the foot and then kicks her in the head until she goes down.

At the end, it's the next day and Araceli is at home tending to her children and her home. She's watching a convenient newscast which tells us all the details: the two women were girls at a local ritzy boarding school who had set out to be infamous. One lives, one dies. Araceli is hailed as a hero. There's a knock at the door, and Araceli looks through the peephole to see three ICE agents. Araceli tells her children to hide.

I assume "Hide" is trying to say something about immigration. We never find out if Araceli is a legal or illegal immigrant, assuming there's a difference these days. And if that makes a difference. Most of the episode is her protecting a rich white couple's girl. We're rooting for Araceli and Gracie because Araceli is a valiant woman who fights back, and Gracie is an autistic child who needs protecting. The relationship between the two, as brief as it is, is interesting. There's a lot conveyed in the few relatively quiet moments we get of the two of them, like when Araceli soothes Gracie out of a temper tantrum. It indicates a long-term relationship between the two, and that Araceli knows more about Gracie than Gracie's parents. As opposed to the preceding three episodes, when there's not much conveyed to indicate anything about the characters.

The directors, Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, do a lot with relatively little. Other than a scene with the Smythes talking to Araceli and a later newscast, there's almost no English dialogue. Araceli and her family all speak Spanish with subtitles. Red and Yellow have no dialogue. They wear creepy translucent masks, titter a lot, and quirk their heads at an angle to indicate scrutiny and/or confusion.

There are other scenes that capitalize on the relative lack of silence. For instance, Araceli bangs on a window to get the attention of a neighbor. The house is presumably soundproofed so she can't be heard. Even when the neighbor does see her, he just shrugs and goes into his own house. The directors play up Araceli in the big house, lit from behind, pounding on the window in silence, and it makes an effect image.

"Hide" is the first episode of Two Sentence Horror Stories I wish did run an hour. The creepy home invaders, and Araceli's efforts to save Gracie, could use a little more time. The 30-minute nature of the episode also means the "twist" ending is rushed. For a twist to work, there needs to be some irony. The creative team is so focused on making Araceli's plight both dangerous and touching, and establishing the home invaders as creepy presences, that the ending is rushed. There's a convenient exposition newscast playing up how Araceli is a hero. And by the time we take in her heroism has revealed her to ICE and she's being taken away (to her country of birth, presumably) because of said heroism for a rich white couple, the episode is over. In the original Twilight Zone, for instance, Rod Serling, the other writers, and the directors managed to leave some time for the "sting" of the twist to sink in. Even last week's "Gentleman" gave us a little bit of time with Hana after she killed the killer, to let the ironic twist of the situation sink in.

And maybe that's the problem with "Hide". There really isn't much of a twist. Araceli's efforts to save Gracie gets her picked up by ICE. It's not odd or unusual. The creepiness of the home invasion, as effective as it is, doesn't match up with the ending.

Overall I'd rate both "Legacy" and "Hide" as fairly effective episodes. The creative team takes different approaches at horror--ghosts and home invaders--and pulls off making them both effective. Both are more... atmospheric and have unique feels to them. As opposed to last week's "Gentleman" and "Squirm", where the creative team was content to use darkness, a few creepy camera angles, and spooky music to make up for shallow characterizations and mediocre writing.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?