Dear Watchers,While streaming shows lately, I've been coming across a new Chili's ad featuring Tiffani Thiessen of the TV series "Saved by the Bell" that goes hard on the '90s nostalgia. By the end of the ad, the neon-colored animated squigglies that were everywhere in that decade seem to take over, attacking patrons in the restaurant. "Everybody panic!" a Chili's employee shouts. "The '90s are back!" It got me thinking about a recent movie, "I Saw the TV Glow," an off-kilter thriller that is bathed in that same ubiquitous '90s neon. Our horror expert Erik Piepenburg recommends that film on this Genre Movie Wednesday and drills into its ideas about how perilous nostalgia can be. (The perils are a lot more serious here — and far stranger — than in the Chili's ad.) He pairs that pick with a slow-burn, cabin-in-the-woods movie that quietly reveals its chilling ghost story. Read what Erik has to say about each film below, then head here for three more of his picks. Happy viewing. 'I Saw the TV Glow'
Where to watch: Stream "I Saw the TV Glow" on Max. In 2022, the writer-director Jane Schoenbrun knocked my socks off with the disturbing but poetic found-footage oddity "We're All Going to the World's Fair." Schoenbrun returns with this more polished but equally unnerving supernatural drama that uses nostalgia for the '90s to drive a story about the perils of looking back. The film is set in 1996 and centers on two young misfits — Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) — who bond over their affection for "The Pink Opaque," an "X-Files"-like show about two girls with monster-battling superpowers. For those of us who found our tribe through weird television — for me it was "Tales From the Darkside" — theirs is a comfortingly familiar friendship. But as fiction and reality blur, otherworldly dangers threaten Owen and Maddy's kinship, and it's there — in an uneasy fusion of recollection, tenderness and sexual and gender awakening — that this heartbreaking and visually arresting film bears terrifying fruit. 'Come Home'
Where to watch: Stream "Come Home" on Fawesome. Like "The Strings" and "Falcon Lake," this indie ghost story is slow-burn horror that is so talky, some people might not even consider it a horror movie. But it is, and it's an unassuming doozy. The film is set at a cabin in the Adirondacks, where Mel (Caitlin Zoz), whose family owns the property, and her new husband, Ikenna (Chinaza Uche), escape the city with another interracial couple, Arjun (Sathya Sridharan) and Taylor (Paton Ashbrook). The area is said to be haunted by a woman who summons her dead lover by calling out, "Come home" — a warning, not a folk tale, says Sam (Audrey Hailes), a local who, like Ikenna, is Black. When Ikenna and Arjun go missing, let's just say it isn't to go on a hike. "Come Home" was directed by Zoz and Nicole Pursell and written by seven people, including the actors — usually a sign of a messy, catchall script. But while the film's racial messaging is muddled — too many cooks, too many directions — the movie still kept me hooked and guessing, using time and silence to ponder ghosts and the evil unseen.
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