folk horror part 2

26 Jun, 2026

This was going to be an updated/added footnote or postscript to the last post, but now it’s its own post. It’s basically just a full transcript of a conversation. (I got explicit permission to call her by her name, since good ideas should be properly attributed, and I didn’t want to reword her)

My friend Rowan, who is an actual TV reviewer and critic, finally caught up to me and, effectively, unplugged me, thank God.

“The way you talk about the show is very interesting because it’s all about what it means, where it’s going, where it’s ending,” she messaged, “but this is television! Television is built to keep going. The premise must endlessly recycle. Granted,” she continued, “prestige TV these days is in a weird sort of hybrid place, but either way Widow’s Bay is a show built to last several seasons. Tom never can fix things unless it’s decided that it’s ending or until Matthew Rhys decides to leave.”

“Right, in woo-woo parlance it’s a karmic cycle,” I said. That is, trying to break out of a schema, a behavioral programming loop, by learning the necessary lessons.

“He is doomed,” Rowan continued, of Tom, “not just because it’s folk horror (although yes I do think you’re right that that is it at its core), but doomed because he is a TV character¹.”

Now I sighed heavily. “Right, and that’s actually what a karmic cycle is,” I agreed. “It’s staying locked into scripts and roles. Scripts that don’t fit and aren’t you!!! Or sometimes they’re ok. You ‘try it on.’ Like high school fashion phases.”

“Did you know this apparently began life as a Parks and Rec spec script?” Rowan asked.

I had heard that, yes.

“So that’s a perfect example of a show that got stuck trying on roles that didn’t fit,” she messaged.

“Oh interesting,” I replied. I admitted I’d never seen Parks and Rec. Too many seasons! I need a show to know when to stop. I need to see a little growth. (Like everyone else who enjoys Widow’s Bay, I want three seasons. No more than four. Six seasons is too many; no spinning the wheels. Promise us a resolution of some sort, I get so bored.)

“The premise of the show,” Rowan continued, “is that there’s a problem in town and Leslie tries to fix it, at an episodic level. Leslie, as an employee in the Parks department.” That sounded nightmarish. Sisyphean, even. How can one woman correct a systemic ill? Of course it’s a sitcom, but the format is X-Files, a monster-of-the-week to battle.

“But over time Leslie’s political ambitions bear fruit,” Rowan continued, “and she becomes a city councillor. Growth. It fits her character. It’s what she wanted. But it doesn’t fit the show.”

“INTERESTING,” I replied. “Time to change genres!!!!!” (It’s why I’ve always loved the director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. “That man is like ‘fuck a genre,’” I wrote.)

Rowan described the deterioration of Parks and Rec to me:

but as part of the overall city government all these freaks and weirdos become part of a mob that hates her and stand against every goal she has.

The show is still convinced that Leslie's love of Pawnee is good and real and true, but its behavior is that these people are the worst and most ungrateful pieces of shit in the world.

So there's this huge split in her character where she goes from being a delightful optimist to clearly insane and myopic, and in my view, this is where the show collapses

Widow's Bay is actually a lot smarter about this because it understands that Tom is wrong about wanting to make the place normal, and even better, that he at his core KNOWS that he's wrong about it

But it's also walking a much more dangerous knife edge because it's so heavily serialized and leading towards some kind of ending someday

What I ended up telling Rowan about was the British series Nathan Barley, but also Disney’s Beauty and the Beast—about having all this contempt for the exact people you are meant to care about, much as Tom Loftis does. I gestured toward Belle being sweet and caring in public, but privately she’s like “Dad… honestly, I hate all these motherfuckers.” Of course she gloms onto the most vindictive, antisocial werewolf she can: Belle is a roiling cauldron of unexpressed rage!

But I love Rowan’s points about the plight of being a character on TV—the fact that outgrowing the character means outgrowing the show.

Plus, Rowan points out, “with Widow’s Bay we don’t actually know its genre in full, in part because it has a sitcom core with a horror setting. Another key thing, beyond the text being genre-agnostic, is that Dippold is playing her cards close to her chest about the future. She’s making jokes, and good for her, but also this is the sort of thing that drives Reddit superfans that you mention crazy.”

“Right,” I replied, “it’s actual pareidolia.”

“Totally,” Rowan joked—then, in asterisks, “immediately googling.”

“lmaoooooo,” I replied. “Fan psychosis. We’re all Tom and Clemmons. I’m paranoid now.”

“Not me I’m normal,” said Rowan.

I explained pareidolia: “Deliberate dearth of info and people’s brains go wild filling in the missing parts,” I said.

“To be fair,” Rowan said, “this show has shown that it loves stupid little foreshadowing clues.”

“Sure, an adventure game or ARG,” I replied.

With Game of Thrones fans, Rowan continued, “pretty much everything that happened was the obvious thing, but they’d invent these grand conspiracies.”

“Right, that’s the pareidolia,” I said. “Look, I just wrote a way better show than you did. We’ve come full circle now, since that was the operating premise of the [last] blog.”

“It’s also like, this is the necessary side effect of serialization,” Rowan mused. “Your brain has weeks and years to think about the shows in healthy and unhealthy ways. What better thing to do than speculate?”

That isn’t all, though. The long gaps between seasons of BBC’s Sherlock had effectively killed the show for me. Like, at that point there was nothing its writers could do, no story they could come up with that would be satisfying for me. “The disappointment came down to my own control issues I guess,” I said. I’d like to be a passive recipient, to get what I get and just be happy with it, but I’m always writing mental fanfic and not even monetizing this impulse.

“Sure,” Rowan said, of my self-generated failure of Sherlock (which, truly, is also fanfic, all ‘properties’ are effectively fanfic, as a famous fan-fiction author once pointed out to me), “but also I would argue that shows designed to trigger speculation are manipulative. They create mysteries and cliffhangers to pull in fans, and then fans, collectively, cannot control themselves.” Yes, it’s literal metaphorical breadcrumbing.

It’s why she couldn’t fault George RR Martin for refusing to write—since there’s nothing he could possibly write that would satisfy fans now—but, because he “writes these things entirely in cliffhanger,” Martin had made his own bed, was at fault for his own fandom. “Lost is, as far as I understand, another example of this,” she concluded.

Well, it’s Reichenbach Falls over and over again: kicking Sherlock Holmes off a bridge, with every intention of having the detective die, then having to write your way out of a hole again, because the detective makes money.

I didn’t reply, but I was thinking of the time Lee K. Abbott was a visiting lecturer. What he’d said to us writing majors, which I’ve never forgotten, was that ‘genre’ writing cannot be literary or ‘highbrow’, because it’s predicated on a con: on the author deliberately withholding vital information from the reader until the very end, information that was always available, just not accessible to any of the characters we were following.

Abbott was describing a power game, willful obfuscation, information asymmetry. At the time I remember feeling angry. Of course I didn’t plan to write genre anything, but Abbott was criticizing mysteries, as if real life doesn’t contain mysteries. I was also confused: the average person isn’t omniscient. Why should a reader always know exactly what the author knows? Who says? (Then there’s the movie Glass Onion, a rare departure from form, where the switcheroo occurs onscreen, transparently, in plain sight where it can easily be detected and scrutinized.)

Anyway, he didn’t like me, I don’t think. There was some short story he’d had us quickly read, and I was captivated by a remarkable detail: one character had warned another to not touch an armadillo’s feet.

I put my hand in the air. “Armadillos carry leprosy between their toes,” I said, veering incredibly close to “did you know the human head weighs eight pounds” territory.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Abbott said to me.

I sank down in my seat, thoroughly humiliated. I may have muttered something else—well, verisimilitude, obviously, that I was able to trust the author because of this detail, which I imagine would not be well known outside of the South—but Abbott had stared at me wordlessly like I was a lunatic. Fair enough. I winced and disappeared.

“Anyway,” Rowan said, a little over an hour later—I’d disappeared to play Don’t Break the Ice with a small child—“I just found it fascinating that you were watching the finale almost entirely through the lens of Tom’s moral battle (in the world, as it were) and my main lens was ‘How are they gonna give this a satisfying ending and set up season 2?’”