THE STATE OF THE GENRE: Who Wants to Sit Through a 13-Hour Slasher Movie? I Do.


I have a tricky relationship with horror on television. In my youth, I ate up everything the small screen had to offer that featured weird creatures or a frisson of terror: TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE, MONSTERS, THE HITCHER, SWAMP THING, WEREWOLF, whatever cheesy, bizarre horror flicks they would show on COMMANDER USA'S GROOVIE MOVIES -- you name it, I probably watched it. Now, with my tastes more discerning and my time more valuable, there are only a handful of horror series that keep my attention. I loved TWIN PEAKS, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, THE X-FILES, MILLENNIUM, and CARNIVALE, for instance, and more recently TRUE BLOOD and REAPER, which I was only just starting to really enjoy this season (just in time for it to be canceled!), but for whatever reason, other popular shows like ANGEL and SUPERNATURAL left me cold. Chalk it up to personal taste; they just weren't my bag.

So last year, when CBS announced a mid-season replacement horror series starting in April called HARPER'S ISLAND, billed as a self-contained, thirteen-episode slasher movie, I was both excited and wary. The thing that interested me most about it was the same thing that could easily be its biggest detriment: it was a thirteen-hour slasher movie. Since most slasher movies wear out their welcome well before the end of their average ninety-minute running time, could a thirteen-hour one be any good?

The answer, surprisingly, is yes. HARPER'S ISLAND, created by Ari Schlossberg, who also wrote 2005's Robert De Niro and Dakota Fanning dud HIDE AND SEEK, follows a group of friends and family who return to a remote island off the coast of Seattle where many of them grew up for the week-long destination wedding of twenty-something couple Henry Dunn (Christopher Gorham) and Trish Wellington (Katie Cassidy). But, as is often the case in these stories, not everything is what it seems. Seven years before, a serial killer named John Wakefield went on a rampage on Harper's Island, killing the mother of Henry's best friend, the spunky protagonist of the series, Abby Mills (Elaine Cassidy). When wedding guests start getting picked off in mysterious and grotesque ways, Abby starts to wonder if the presumed-dead John Wakefield might not be at it again.

In some ways, HARPER'S ISLAND could just as easily be called CLICHE ISLAND: every character has a big secret they're keeping from everyone else, there's a creepy little girl who may be psychic, almost every character is cheating on his or her significant other, and of course everyone in attendance for the wedding is attractive to the point of hotness, instead of being the usual unattractive, annoying relatives that make up most real weddings. But to the show's credit, they do turn some of the character cliches on their heads, specifically the douchebag with the hot girlfriend trope, where said douchebag and hot girlfriend actually turn out to be pretty charming and reveal they have more personality than just about everyone else.

But what I really like about HARPER'S ISLAND is that there's an over the top, almost giallo-like level to the violence that reminds me of the films of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava. One character is tied to the bottom of a ferry boat and killed by its rotor blades, another is chopped in half while dangling through a broken footbridge -- and those were just in the first episode! At least one character is killed off every week, which makes the show fun in a sick sort of way and keeps the plot moving along. What's more, several of the characters who have died in the six episodes that have aired so far truly surprised me as cannon-fodder choices. And of course there's the central mystery itself. As the clues and bodies pile up, it's reeling me in deeper.

At heart, HARPER'S ISLAND may be no more than a soap opera with a gruesome murder-of-the-week, but I'm completely hooked. CBS recently announced the show was canceled due to lack of viewer interest, but they've promised to air all thirteen episodes through the summer on Saturday nights. And thank goodness for that. I have to know who will live and who will die! And I really have to know who the killer is! I can't remember the last time I saw a slasher movie, let alone one that was thirteen hours long, that I could say that about.

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When he's not thinking about starting a "Who will die next on HARPER'S ISLAND?" betting pool, Nicholas Kaufmann is a Bram Stoker Award-nominated author, reviewer and interviewer. For more regular doses of Kaufmannia, visit his blog at http://nick-kaufmann.livejournal.com or his website at http://www.nicholaskaufmann.com.