The movie also generates curiosity about how Jenna’s story will tie into the seemingly unrelated tale of a grief-ridden skeptic (Anna Friel) seduced, in more ways than one, by a psychic medium (Rafi Gavron).īut on its own, this second plot is more manipulative than chilling, sticking the talented Friel in a broad nerd-professor getup and rushing through both her personal pain and her relationship with Gavron in an unconvincing blur. (Why she spends so much of the story in a web café is a terrifying mystery for the ages.) Jenna’s insistent paranoia keeps this segment on edge, without an obvious connection to various go-to horror subgenres like “masked killer” or “damp ghost.” There’s a pervasive omnidirectional creepiness that wrings suspense from the simple, deliberately paced mystery of where this story is ultimately going. On the run from her family and blocking out the world’s symphony of crunching and splattering with noise-canceling headphones, Jenna winds up at a small-town bed-and-breakfast run by a genteel older couple.
It’s an unsettling story that follows Jenna (Britt Robertson), a young woman suffering from misophonia - a psychological sensitivity that renders the sounds of chewing, in particular, into a nightmarish, overwhelming ordeal. Maybe that’s why the most vivid and substantial chunk of the new film adaptation doesn’t appear to come from the books at all.
And still others have been mined for different horror-show anthology projects. Remember Midnight Meat Train, starring Bradley Cooper? No? How about the 1986 Irish film Rawhead Rex, or the comically bad Scott Bakula film Lord of Illusions? At least one Books of Blood adaptation found success - “The Forbidden” became the 1992 cult classic Candyman. The film was inspired by Clive Barker’s Books of Blood short-story anthologies, some of which have already been picked over and adapted into other films. Its unusual structure makes it both novel and ungainly. At times, it feels like two and a half episodes of a horror show remixed into a super-sized pilot - appropriate for a feature-length film produced by multiple TV companies. Hulu’s new movie Books of Blood continues that mix-and-match approach. Shows like Lovecraft Country employ monster-of-the-week elements to tell an ongoing story, while anthology projects like Welcome to the Blumhouse offer stand-alone stories at a feature-length running time. There are a handful of recent ones, from HBO’s Room 104 to Amazon’s Lore to Jordan Peele’s revitalized Twilight Zone on CBS All Access, but mostly, recent series take inspiration from the format without fully committing to it. With so much horror content available on streaming channels right now, it’s surprising that there aren’t more contemporary horror anthology series in the style of Tales from the Crypt.
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