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Hulu’s ‘Monsterland’ takes twisted to new levels — and then leaves you there
When you’re a kid, you fear monsters. You stare or scream or run away when you see something unfamiliar. As you grow up, that instinct shifts. You learn to look beneath the surface of something frightening, or perhaps you find something frightening where once there was safety. Monsters, we learn, are less the stuff of scary stories and legends than what surrounds us, or lays dormant within. Hulu’s Monsterland deals with all of these, creating an aberrant, enthralling tapestry of stories with just the right amount of Halloween scares.
The eight-episode anthology series, based on Nathan Ballingrud’s short story collection North American Lake Monsters and adapted by showrunner Mary Laws, introduces us to a handful of seemingly ordinary characters living across the United States, all morally compromised and often confronted with literal demons: the young girl wary of becoming a mother, the boy resentful of his ailing mother, the woman unable to keep up with her wife’s bipolar disorder.
And the monsters, as you may have guessed, are never what you expect. Each episode contains something straight out of a horror movie creature feature, but the more compelling monsters lurk in plain sight, their inner ugliness encased by the innocuous human form and exposed when they come face-to-face with the uncanny.
