The Homey, Hacky Pleasures of the 2002 Twilight Zone Reboot and Freddy's Nightmares
I’m not entirely sure why, but horror anthologies have always been the pop culture equivalent of comfort food for me. Childhood nostalgia probably plays a sizable role. As a kid I adored The Twilight Zone and would watch it religiously.
Then I turned thirteen and HBO unveiled a magical show that combined horror, comedy, moralism and lots and lots of gratuitous T&A. It was everything my hormone-crazed brain wanted from a television show. I was instantly hooked.
I’ve returned to Tales from the Crypt over and over again as an adult. Heck, I even had a column here where I wrote about all of the episodes in chronological order. It was a project I enjoyed for myriad reasons but then life happened, as it invariably does, and for reasons I cannot remember I abandoned the column at a certain point to focus on more pressing concerns.
I may have stopped writing about Tales from the Crypt for this website but I never stopped watching it. For well over a year it was my go-to choice after my wife fell asleep or I was home alone.
I reached a point, however, where I had watched every episode of Tales from the Crypt, many several times. I even watched the British season AND the animated kiddie spin off Tales from the Cryptkeeper.
I drew the line at the game show Secrets of the Cryptkeeper’s Haunted House, which was like Double Dare except with the Crypt-Keeper.
After finishing Tales from the Crypt and Tales from the Crypt-Keeper I was on the lookout for another horror anthology to feed my addiction and found one in the aughts version of The Twilight Zone.
Unlike the original Twilight Zone and the solid 1980s reboot, the aughts version of The Twilight Zone is NOT good. It is extremely not-good.
Every element of it feels deeply misguided, from Korn frontman Jonathan Davis’ desecration of the classic theme song to the puzzling choice of Forest Whitaker as host.
I love Whitaker. I am a huge fan. He has amazing presence but he nevertheless feels like a weird, random choice to host The Twilight Zone. It’s a little like how Unsolved Mysteries tapped Virginia Madsen as a cohost late in its run.
Obviously I love Virginia Madsen but I can’t imagine why she was chosen for a gig like that. The 2002 incarnation of The Twilight Zone, which ran for a single season on UPN, had a star-studded cast but they were the B and C list stars you’d expect in a half-ass project like this.
We’re taking Gil Bellows, Jeremy Sisto, Shawn Hatosy, Sean Patrick Flannery, Brian Austin Green and the like.
Thankfully a horror anthology does not need to be good to hold my attention. On the contrary, there’s something reassuring and comfortable about mediocre and tacky horror anthologies that I find tremendously soothing.
In my hunger for horror anthologies I recently binge-watched Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which I thoroughly enjoyed despite it being very good and artfully conceived and executed.
Cabinet of Curiosities is a work of genuine quality and craft but I try not to hold that against it.
Del Toro’s classy anthology is an anomaly in favoring ideas and gore over gratuitous nudity. Most horror anthologies are like Freddy’s Nightmares, which I watched as a child because I loved horror anthologies, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and Freddy Krueger but mostly because it was very smutty.
You have to respect a series like Freddy’s Nightmares that understands that its audience is made up primarily of 13 year olds like my younger self looking for something to jerk off to at one o clock in the morning.
Freddy’s Nightmares is weirdly unavailable. It’s never been released in the United States on DVD or Blu-Ray. It’s not on Amazon or Netflix but apparently is on Youtube Premium and Screambox. In fact I had given up on watching it as an adult before I did a search for it on my Roku box and discovered that every episode is available for free on Tubi, with commercials.
I’ve been making my way through Freddy’s Nightmares after my wife is asleep and it is everything I hoped it would be and more. That does not include “good”, of course.
The series is hosted by Freddy Krueger, everyone’s favorite horrifically burned child murderer turned funnyman. In the first Nightmare on Elm Street Krueger is a figure of genuine terror.
By the time Freddy’s Nightmares was green lit, however, he had morphed into something very different, a ghoulish Catskills comedian beloved by children everywhere.
That’s the version of the character featured here, a Crypt-Keeper-like cut-up (pun intended) with a one-liner for every occasion. Freddy acts as a host and a commentator in every episode but he also sometimes enters the action as a participant as well.
Freddy’s Nightmares takes place in Freddy’s hometown, a city haunted by his presence on an individual and collective level.
The anthology’s other innovation is that every hour long episode consists of two stories that overlap and intersect with one another.
Unlike Tales from the Crypt, Freddy’s Nightmares is cheap, brightly lit and decidedly non-cinematic but that ends up working in its favor. Freddy’s Nightmares exploits the horror trope of a character being unable to delineate between their real life and their dreams but if any franchise earned the right to beat that convention to death, it’s this one.
So if you are looking for a gloriously cheesy, mediocre horror anthology I very heartily recommend the 2002 Twilight Zone and Freddy’s Nightmares. They’re not great, or even particularly good, but that ultimately just makes me like them more.
Black Friday is coming early this year! I'm offering the following offers on my books:
The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Cynical Movie Cash-In Edition coloring book: $10.75 for one book, 23 dollars for three signed books SHIPPING & TAXES INCLUDED + A FREE PACK OF COLORED PENCILS
Signed (by Felipe Sobreiro and myself) and numbered (to 270) The Weird A-Coloring to Al/Colored-In Special Edition-Only 27 dollars! Shipping and taxes included + a nifty 5 by 7 card signed by Felipe + myself + a chance at one of 8 remaining cards signed by “Weird Al” Yankovic,
The Weird A-Coloring to Al, original edition: 10.50 for one book
22 dollars for three signed copies + a pack of pencils
Paperback The Weird Accordion to Al: 18 dollars, hardcover: 25
The Weird A-Coloring to Al signed trilogy: just 40 dollars (signed and numbered to 100)
The Joy of Trash: 12 dollars for one, 22.50 dollars for two
DOMESTIC ONLY!
Christmas AND Hannukah are right around the corner, but thankfully you can finish your holiday shopping over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop