Masters of Horror: Dance of the Dead (2006)

Now, here’s a real master of horror, at last! I’m talking more about Robert Englund than Tobe Hooper, but this is one of the better episodes from the first season, so he’s not all bad either.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world defined mostly by fast cuts, flickering lights, and teenage rebels who all look like heroin addicts in their late 20s, Dance of the Dead follows one particular family whose youngest daughter is about to find out something very, very, very disturbing indeed. Her life is unpleasant enough as it is: Peggy lives alone with her mother, working in a rundown diner, with a deceased sister and father. Maybe it’s that hard life that’s aged her so that she looks about ten years older than she’s supposed to be? Not that I’m worryingly preoccupied with that fact, mind you. Anyway, things are bad enough already, but then a group of cracked out good-for-nothings turn up in the diner and make alternately threatening and seductive faces at her. Clearly, this is enough to convince her to run away with them, take all manner of drugs, and go to a club hosted by Robert Englund. Not a nice place to be, but even that’s nothing compared with what’s about to happen…

The grotesquery in this episode is much better handled than in most of the others: disgusting and creepy without being ridiculous, just gross enough to be disturbing without being so over the top that it becomes laughable. Which is a lightness of hand I wouldn’t really have expected of either this series or this director, so that was a pleasant surprise. The frenetic editing could have been toned down, but it’s a look, a style that feels deliberately chosen rather than just a result of someone wondering what this button does … and THIS one…

It comes in at a respectable second place, then. It’s still no Sick Girl, but it’s head and shoulders above the rest of the series.