Monsterland, Episode 1 - Port Fourchon, Louisiana: Who Do You Want To Be?

It’s becoming more and more common for streaming services to commission exclusive series of different types - I mean, shit, that’s like 80% of Netflix’s model at this point, and that’s not really anything new. HBO got their start re-running movies before they moved to prestige series programming, so it’s no surprise to see streaming services follow in their footsteps. 

For example, Hulu has a horror series called Into The Dark, 90-minute horror takes on different holidays. I’ve written about a couple of those films here. Neither of them were very good. So seeing that they’d commissioned a series called Monsterland, based more or less on the book North American Lake-Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud, I was a bit skeptical. Especially since Hulu already adapted his short story “The Visible Filth” as a film called Wounds, which also…wasn’t very good. Straight-up, Hulu does not have a good track record for original horror. 

So I was skeptical, but Monsterland had gotten some good press and some good word-of-mouth, so I thought I’d check out the first episode, Port Fourchon, Louisiana. And it’s…pretty damn good. It’s a relentlessly bleak story about monsters and monstrous behavior that avoids some easy clichés and aims its punches directly at the gut. It’s weird - the user reviews on IMDB (not exactly the acme of criticism, to be fair) seem to consistently pan this for not “really” being horror. It is. It’s just not as simple and literal as what some folks expect.

We open on a man, about as nondescript as they come, up to his waist in water. He’s strangling a teenage girl to death. Once she is dead, he drags her body from the water and pulls out a knife. He goes to work on her face, but we don’t really see what he’s doing. Once he is finished, he puts her clothes (among other things) into a box. He puts the box into the back of his car. There are a lot of boxes in the back of his car. Each of them bears a name.

And then we meet Toni. She’s trying to bathe her daughter, Jack. Jack is screaming, punching, kicking, biting, anything not to be bathed. Jack seems almost feral, and Toni is reduced to hosing her down in the kiddie pool in their backyard. There is weary resignation there. The absence of hope.

Toni looks young - too young to be on her own with a kid, but so she is. They live in a ramshackle little house in Port Fourchon, Louisiana. She’s a waitress at diner as squalid and forlorn as her house, as the look on her face, as her life, as the whole damn town. She’s arguing with the utility company about an overdue payment while Jack screams at the top of her lungs. Child care is tough to find when your kid has a nasty habit of going after other kids with scissors. But she manages to wrangle another week of it. The lady watching Jack says she can’t keep watching her, but for today it’s taken care of.

And so she goes into work, and she’s got a customer. His name is Alex. He’s the man from the beginning, the one who drowned the girl.

What follows is a story that manages to combine the crushing burden of The Babadook with the sort of life-in-the-margins story that Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer did so well. The pressure on Toni is tremendous - Jack’s prone to fits of violence that make her impossible to leave alone and about as impossible to trust to anyone else for long, and she’s barely holding it together waiting tables in a rundown diner in a go-nowhere small town, Jack’s dad isn’t really in the picture because he has a really hard time controlling his temper and his fists. She’s young, but grown up in a hurry by the responsibilities she has. Like Amelia in The Babadook, her child swallows up all of Toni’s life and there’s no room left for her to relax or enjoy any sort of connection. The cost of this is sketched in elegantly in a heartbreaking display of vulnerability and desperation for connection that has you dreading what comes next. And like in Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer (which I really should write up at some point), Toni lives a life filled with desperation - not enough money, not enough time, no margin for error, where any one thing going wrong could send her falling through the cracks, another casualty of a society that doesn’t care for its own. Her every moment is about survival - hers and Jack’s. 

And so here comes Alex, who pays for his cheeseburger with a $100 bill. He wants some conversation. No, really - that’s all. Just some conversation. He asks Toni if she could be anyone else in the world, who would she be? And this leads Toni to consider some of the pivotal moments in her life, the ones that led her here today. There are flashbacks, reveries to moments when things could have been different - a childhood bike ride, her future stretching out before her, moments of almost-normalcy ending in horrible violence, an attempt at a home abortion. The story moves along at a decent clip - we don’t really get to know Toni all that well, but we get everything we need to know. A sense of who she was, what choices led her here, and how she struggles with all of that now.  

And this is part of the elegance of this episode. It’s as much about people and the very real horrors they face as it is the more traditional kinds of monsters. This is that kind of horror that I really, really like - the kind that intertwines the real horrors of life with supernatural horror. You think it’s going to be one kind of story, but a late turn in the proceedings reveals it’s another. There’s a tension for most of it - we know what Alex is (well, we think we do) and so for most of its hour runtime, it feels like we’re watching the inevitable drawn out. Like, we saw the opening, we know how this ends, but we don’t. It could just as easily be a snuff film of Toni’s last days, and Alex is definitely a monster, but he isn’t exactly the monster he appears to be - and Toni discovers what he meant when he asked “if you could be anyone other than you, who would you be?” Toni really, really wants to be somewhere else, someone else, wants to shed her life and start over. The need for it makes her scream with its insistence. Who does she want to be?

Like any good short story, this is a story told economically, in terse exchanges, interludes, vignettes, and the environment. The cinematography is washed-out and overcast, painting a picture devoid of any real hope. There is very little joy in Toni’s world. The best she can hope for is fleeting moments of something just slightly better than relief, and when she dares hope, it’s dashed by Jack’s screaming. It’s a story told in drowned rats, rose-colored memories, nights without light, beatings, moments when everything could change, but doesn’t, and terrible choices, when confronted by a creature that sheds lives as easily as we do our work clothes.

Toni wonders what could have been, how things could have been different, if only. And her encounter with something not quite human changes her. I wish I could say it changed her for the better, but then this wouldn’t really be horror, would it?

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu