Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 2: Dead & Breakfast / Pesticide
I love how the beginning of this episode began with an animated bit, with the Creep taking a fly from his eye, and placing it into a spider’s web to eventually … die. There was an old lady, am I right?
And there was. Let’s look at “Dead & Breakfast,” directed by Axelle Carolyn and written by Michael Rousselet and Erik Sandoval. It begins in an old boarding house in 1939 where a guest is killed with an axe by an old woman named, fairly inaccurately, Spinster. For, as it turns out eighty years later, her adult grandchildren now run the house with which she committed her serial killings.
Unfortunately, for all her granddaughter Pamela’s — the name and obsession of which reminds me of Jason Voorhee’s mother — pretensions to her grandmother having been the greatest American serial killer alive, she and her brother Samuel barely keep the boarding house running as a tourist attraction. And it’s too bad, for even as they encourage an influencer — a young social media personality by the equally pretentious name of Morgue — to stay at their property for free to get more exposure and potentially more bookings, even the Winchester Mansion-labyrinthine characteristics aren’t enough to keep her entertained or engaged, and Pamela decides to take rather drastic measures more out of a sense of twisted pride than common sense.
I like how this one plays out. Morgue plays with the word “Spinster” as she makes fun of Pamela, as the older woman dresses up as her grandmother to scare her with an axe, only to seriously lose her already tenuous sanity, and kill the young woman after a lengthy chase and fall down the old stairs. And then Samuel, seemingly incompetent, always browbeaten, wanting to give up on the whole scheme altogether, constantly dressing up in a headless costume, kills his sister — revealing that he is just as much a grandchild of Old Lady Spinster as she is — to profit from the amount of social media Views and Likes that their “performance” of killing Morgue would bring. I have to hand it to him: making it look like it was staged, combined with the idea that an influencer can in fact disappear off the grid, or retire out of publicity reasons and making it look like his sister committed suicide really did add to his scheme: as convoluted as it is.
Of course, we find out that Old Lady Spinster had indeed been a successful serial killer. The problem, of course, with being a truly effective killer is that — even with her deathbed confessions — she was just too good at her job: at hiding the bodies. At the end of the day, there had been nothing to even prove that Spinister had even been a killer: that is how good she was, until Samuel goes back to the sealed room with the sewing machine and spindle. It turns out, Old Lady Spinster had a certain liking for either Sleeping Beauty, or Rumplestiltskin in that when he accidentally touched the mechanism of the machine, it opened a trap door for him to fall through: surrounding him with the old bones of his grandmother’s victims. He was pleased by this development too until, in EC Comics karma fashion, the trap door closed in on him: killed by a device his own grandmother installed ages ago. Even as Morgue gets to truly be involved in a serial killing she’s always investigated, as Pamela notes before killing her, Grandma Spinster’s whole line is destroyed by her own murderous legacy beyond the grave. I will say, however, that my only complaint — the only thing that took me, briefly, out of my immersion — was the fact that Morgue reconnected the modem Pamela unplugged that was she was so quick to get her Wifi connection back. That is just unbelievable, but in my mind still forgivable as I was entertained by this twisted circle of life in a story commenting on an America profiting off a history — and a reality — of murder.
And then, speaking of murder and profitting off countless exterminations of life, we have “Pesticide,” as written by Frank Dietz, and directed by Greg Nicotero. This particular story reminds me of a story in the first Creepshow movie, “They’re Creeping Up On You!” Like that protagonist, we have the exterminator Harlan that calls himself the King — who despises insects, though he also enjoys killing other beings that are considered vermin — and, unlike the callous rich man in that 1982 story, he doesn’t have money until it is offered to him for … undertaking a whole other kind of pest control.
His guilt, however, does plague him like Upson Pratt — or some kind of supernatural delusional event anyway — and the creature effects are fairly impressive,and gross. I do think that people living on the streets would be able to figure out that there is something off about their stew being poisoned, especially as the King — for all of his expertise in chemicals — isn’t particularly subtle, especially in how he kills that one homeless man with the knife. Street-smarts are a real thing, and the whole story makes me wonder if it truly happened at all, or if the exterminator just lost his mind. It has a whole dream-like quality to it, including another EC Comics karma ending that draws on a Kafkaesque “he found himself transformed into his bed into a monstrous vermin” moment. But The Metamorphosis reference aside, I truly appreciated Keith David as one Mr. Murdoch — the devil in the King’s ear — and that deep, baritone voice filled with casual satisfaction over the exterminations he received. I had some major Goliath from Gargoyles flashbacks hearing him speak again, and him appearing as an exterminator the end brought the whole Creepshow reference to “They’re Creeping Up On You!” full circle, which was the concluding story for the 1982 film as well.
I also enjoyed seeing Ashley Lawrence appear in her role as a psychologist and — just like her work as Kirsty Cotton in Hellraiser — she plays both victim and killer, with fear and disdain — extremely well. If anyone would see a blubbering would-be killer as beneath her, as someone on the other end of the counselling sessions this time, it would be Lawrence, and while the story itself is a bit disjointed at the end it is fitting that she ends King’s pathetic little life, with Murdoch offering to help her with “further pest problems.”
Two stories, one with the descendants of a killer hoping to profit off of her deaths, and the latter of a killer of insects making the choice, foreshadowed by his uncle in jail for some unspecified crime — who taught him how make poisons, to kill “larger vermin” — the legacies and actions come back to take them full circle, back to the spider and the fly at the beginning of the episode. And, after all, aren’t these stories just a microcosm of the horror cycle of life. Doesn’t death always come back to death? And isn’t that, ultimately, how these stories will continue, when everything is all said and done?
Either way you look at it, I look forward to seeing more callbacks and familiar horror faces in the episodes that are still to come.
The Horror Doctor 