The Haunting of Bly Manor, Monsterland and Next

   My Top Three This Week 

Greetings to all my semi-constant readers. Welcome to my favorite time of year. The best time to rewatch The Exorcist and Hocus Pocus. The best time for scary stories, things that go bump in the night and raise the hair on the back of your neck. There are a lot of Halloween options to binge, cringe and pull the covers over your head and here are some new ones that I am enjoying.

1) The Haunting of Bly Manor from the team that brought us The Haunting of Hill House is a new mini series now streaming on Netflix. Based on the classic  book -The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, this is a different kind of haunting. Featuring several of the actors from Hill House this is the story of a young Dani (Victoria Pendretti) an American who is hired as a nanny for two unusual children in an English manor. After the mysterious death of the children's au pair and untimely demise of their parents,  Flora and Miles seem haunted, mournful and determined to frighten Dani. There is a great  sense of dread building with each episode while evil spirits roam the drafty old manor. There are some great actors in this series -Amelie Bea Smith as Flora and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth fantastic as Miles. Oliver Jackson-Cohen who played Pendretti's brother in Hill House is menacing as Peter and Rahul Kohil is great as Owen. Pendretti is always a favorite but  T'Nia Miller (Years and Years) as Hannah Grose almost steals every scene she is in. The perfect binge.

2) Monsterland a Hulu Original series is a anthology of  stories about monsters, some human and some definitely not. Each story shows us the place and a person on the verge of self discovery, destruction or an identity crisis. Serial killers, shape shifters and other creatures mix with human evil . Some of the episodes are better than others but there is some great casts including Taylor Schilling and the immensely talented  Kaitlyn Dever who appears in several episodes, each one with some great moody cinematography.

3) NEXT a new sci-fi series on Fox has a lot of potential and I hope that we get to see where this takes us. What if your Alexa suddenly starts having alarming conversations with your young child ,how would you feel? This series focuses on Paul LeBlanc ( John Slattery) who along with his brother invent a new A.I. called NEXT that self corrects and learns  to free itself from its confines in the lab and seems intent on taking over ... everything. It has the capacity to infiltrate car computers , cc tv cameras and an Alexa type device called Iliza created by LeBlanc's tech company Zava. Leblanc is kicked out of his company by his own brother and teams up with Special Agent Salazar (Fernanda Andrade) to battle this malevolent artificial intelligence.

Bonus: Vampires vs. the Bronx- a Netflix Original movie is the perfect 70s throwback about a community that is quickly finding its residents disappearing quickly as a large real estate company suddenly moves to the Bronx and starts buying and closing local establishments. A group of teenagers witness some brutal killings by a nest of vampires. This is my favorite kind of vampire movie- part comedy and part horror and all kinds of fun.