John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams review: The master makes an ill-advised return

What could possibly be compelling enough to pull John Carpenter, the semi-retired maverick filmmaker of Halloween and The Thing, back into the director’s chair? Upon viewing the first half of John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams, the six-episode docu-horror series Peacock has cheekily timed for a Friday the 13th premiere, the safe guess would be the amount of zeroes on his check.

That’s frustrating to say because the concept of Suburban Screams does sound frightfully good at first blush: “A genre-busting unscripted horror anthology” (per NBCUniversal’s press release) that delves into the forbidding underworld of hum-drum domestic living, featuring original music by Carpenter and his first director’s credit since 2017. (That was for music-video work; his last film credit was 2010’s The Ward.) So it’s a scream come true for any horror fan and Carpenter completist. Yet, as the storyteller who once cursed fictional Haddonfield with Michael Myers has already shown us, peeling away a cheery suburban facade rarely dredges up anything good.

Suburban Screams is not good. For starters, the execution of its setup is flawed. From a distance, the “dark underbelly of suburbia” concept might suggest harrowing family secrets, abductions, or even murder (the kind of fodder for the true-crime dreck that often defines 20/20 these days). As Netflix proves again and again, there is a place for this kind of sensationalism, and when it’s produced well enough, one can—for a time, anyway—dismiss the moral implications of such sordid entertainment. Screams takes a different, clumsier tack with its docudrama format.

While there are relatable real-life horrors couched inside Screams—including in “Phone Stalker,” the only Carpenter-directed episode screened for critics—most of the tales told in this anthology are presented like dopey campfire ghost stories embellished with the trashy flair of tabloid journalism. If it helps, think of what it might look like if Blumhouse got into the Rescue 911 business. Now picture the Suburban Screams format, which assembles nervous testimonials from people who claim proximity to urban legends (as in “Bunny Man”) or local tragedies (its premiere, “Kelly”) and then splices in scripted reenactments that take outlandishly creative license with the material, featuring performances that are often more frightening than the stories being told.

Those reenactments are produced with the thin veneer of Carpenter’s filmic design, which is disappointingly shoddy, oddly generic, and frequently conflicts with the earnestness conveyed by the people there to share their tales. It does feature an atmospheric score (though “pervasive” might be a better word) and sudden bursts of violence (regardless of whether it’s appropriate to the story or not), but its hollow stabs at replicating the unnerving dread reminiscent of Carpenter’s earlier—and handily superior—work ultimately make a lampoon of it. Ignore the horror prestige of Carpenter’s name; this is strictly Redbox material.

On a somewhat more dreadful note, the show adheres to a formula that vaguely establishes the provinciality and relative safety of its communities before diving into the unsavory subjects at hand. (Get used to hearing subtle variations of “It was a nice, safe place” at the beginning of every episode.) As there is no host for Screams, an egregious misstep for a series that confuses Carpenter’s brand for a personality, the responsibility of setting a tone for the hour falls squarely on the shoulders of its interview subjects. An array of nondescript stock video clips follows to convey a bygone sense of Americana before indulging its horror-soaked reenactments. It gives the impression that the folks working on this show couldn’t be bothered to fly out to shoot any local B-roll. (For the record, they couldn’t; this series was shot in Prague.)

Suburban Screams becomes so engrossed in crafting low-budget horror movie scares that it fumbles its attempts to say anything of material value—not about the nightmare lives of modern domestic living, nor about horror’s ability to give this mundanity fearsome context. Take “Kelly,” directed by Jan Pavlacky (Netflix’s Haunted), which suffers most from a lack of credibility.

The primary subject in “Kelly,” Dan, claims to have made spiritual contact with Kelly Lynn Fitzgerald, a 19-year-old woman whose body was found wrapped in a sleeping bag in 2000, through an Ouija board cobbled together by pizza box and Sharpie. This connection, he says, could have been brought about by two traumatic events: the death of his father and a rough break from his girlfriend, who was struggling with addiction. Dan also claims to have seen visions of Kelly’s final moments, the details of which are left to our interpretation but are suggested to be more sinister than the police’s ruling of a probable overdose. It’s later revealed that Dan never went to the authorities about his suspicions, not because his claims would be hard to believe, but because he “didn’t want to be implicated” in her death. Why he’s on a Peacock original series talking about it now is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Suburban Screams is the lazy way its horror sequences are shot. It does have images that, in isolation, prove to be scary (you likely saw them in the trailer): mud-caked hands creeping across a face; a bunny-man wielding an axe,: and, its most striking piece of imagery, a woman tied up inside that red sleeping bag floating down a raging river. It evokes Twin Peaks in its abrupt cruelty and is an effectively startling way to kick off the series. Yet, in keeping with the harsh contrast of the show’s true-crime documentation and horror movie schlock, Suburban Screams doesn’t have the sophistication to present any of this on a compelling level. Real life is scary enough; this is just a collection of insipid frights.

John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams premieres October 13 on Peacock