“Widow’s Bay” Sets a High Bar for Horror Comedy

A decade ago, back when Twitter was still Twitter, and writerly types gathered there to amuse one another, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter named Katie Dippold posted one of the all-time great tweets. It was “tbt,” or throwback Thursday, a weekly excuse to post a picture from one’s past. Dippold chose an image of herself sitting with a group of friends at a Halloween party, dressed as the titular character from the horror film “The Babadook.” The costume—doofy top hat, smeared white paint—suggested full commitment to the bit. The only problem was that no one else in the photo was dressed up. Dippold captioned the post “Tbt to Halloween when I dressed as the babadook but my friend’s house had more of a grown ups drinking wine vibe.” The heady mix of emotions the image stirred up—amusement, horror, secondhand humiliation—made it go hugely viral. In an interview with New York, Dippold said, “I feel like that tweet just shows my soul.”

Dippold is a prolific comedy writer, who got her start on “MADtv,” wrote for “Parks and Recreation,” and has worked on films such as “The Heat” and the “Ghostbusters” reboot. But her dream was to make a series that combined her lifelong passion for horror movies with her absurdist comedic instincts (essentially, the spirit of her “Babadook” tweet, adapted for television). She grew up in New Jersey in the eighties, and she had formative memories of visiting a haunted house on the boardwalk: “It was so scary,” she has said. “And I was also laughing so much, and I felt giddy, and that’s a kind of feeling I’ve been chasing my whole life.” She first tried to capture this feeling back in 2009, in a spec script she wrote to land a job on “Parks and Recreation,” which asked: What if the residents of a small town like Pawnee had to face nightmares beyond administrative red tape?

That episode was never made, but after what Dippold described as “years and years of trial and error,” she recently realized her vision in the form of “Widow’s Bay,” a new comedic horror series that just concluded its first season on Apple TV. There have been many scary television shows that are also funny (“Dexter,” “Santa Clarita Diet,” even “Hannibal”) and many television comedies that traffic in horror tropes (“What We Do in the Shadows,” “Los Espookys,” “Search Party”), but few, if any, provide a seamless blend of humor and frights. The comedies often fail to elicit real goosebumps, and the thrillers often deploy comedy so erratically that they veer into camp. “Widow’s Bay,” excelling in both modes, has the rare distinction of striking a tone that feels genuinely new. It is easily one of the best shows of the year.

The setting is a tiny, fictional island three hours off the coast of New England, reachable only by ferry. The time is the present day, though, perhaps owing to its isolation from the mainland, the island seems to have stalled permanently in the nineteen-eighties. Cell service is spotty, so inhabitants often communicate using landlines and walkie-talkies. Many islanders look as if they’ve been pulled off the set of “Jaws” (salty beards, chum-stained dungarees) or “Sleepaway Camp” (colorful bike shorts, knee-high moccasins). They decorate their homes in the dated style of those who have access to new furniture only via barge: chintz and wicker abound. And the anachronism is only one of the island’s unique properties. Widow’s Bay, alas, is saddled with an ancient curse, or so many of its denizens believe, and it may or may not be trying to kill its inhabitants as a result. A foundational part of the island’s dark mythology is a belief that anyone born there cannot safely leave it; awful fates befall any natives who dare to venture out. It’s a great setup for a thriller. It also happens to be a great setup for a comedy about quirky local bureaucrats whose jobs are literally hellish.

Their leader is Tom Loftis, the island’s ambitious mayor, played by the great Welsh actor Matthew Rhys. He has a job that nobody wants (he ran for office uncontested), but he takes it extremely seriously. Tom was born off the island, so he is naturally skeptical of the local lore, but deep down he has suspicions about the place. His wife, we learn, was a native who tried to leave the island while pregnant, then suffered a massive stroke during childbirth, supposedly leading to her untimely death. The tragedy left Tom as a single father, and he fears that his teen-age son, Evan, who was born in Widow’s Bay, is among those who can never leave. Still, as the town representative, Tom must swat such rumors away to keep up citizen morale, and also because he dreams that under his tenure the run-down Widow’s Bay will become a bustling tourist destination.

His blustering confidence that he can turn the place around puts him in exquisitely comical tension with some of the more intense locals, particularly a grizzled mariner named Wyck (Stephen Root, at his burly best), who, when the series opens, is convinced that the arrival of a thick fog on the water signals that the island has “awakened” to unleash havoc on the populace. Wyck bellows to anyone who will listen about the coming scourge: “Stage 1, the eyes turn white,” he warns. “Stage 2, loss of the five senses and delirium. Stage 3, loss of erection.” (In a line typical of the show’s wry humor, another character interrupts Wyck’s rant to ask, “Who the hell is trying after Stage 2?”) His premonitions are a nuisance to Tom, who spends most of the pilot convincing a Times travel reporter that Widow’s Bay is “the next Bar Harbor.” As he tours the writer through the town’s historical museum, which features such frightening objects as a leather gimp mask and barbed wire, Loftis rhapsodizes about the raw beauty of the land. “Imagine arriving in an untamed wilderness,” he gushes. “Blank canvas, totally empty island!” To which the island’s historian offers the disturbing addendum, “Except for the teeth.”

The Times publishes a rave, and travellers come pouring in. But Tom’s publicity coup comes at a cost. Wyck, of course, is right about the island being awakened, and Tom has unwittingly invited in dozens of potential victims. He spends the first half of the series in stages of denial (Rhys is excellent at transmitting smug stubbornness), but, as anyone who watches horror movies knows, those who deny the danger are usually the first to confront it. In the second episode, Tom spends a night in the local inn, and ends up in a crawl space with the ghost of a psychotic killer clown. In the next, he is pursued by a demon crone known in local legend as the Sea Hag. He finally realizes that, if only for his son’s sake, he must pivot his attention to stemming the tide of terror. If that involves digging up the body of the island’s founder, who was rumored to have made a pact with Satan, and then dragging the body out to sea, then so be it.

The devilish appeal, here, is absolutely in the details. Dippold has populated the show with lovable eccentrics played by great character actors—Dale Dickey, Jeff Hiller, Tim Baltz. The most inspired casting is that of the wonderful British actress Kate O’Flynn, a recent favorite of Mike Leigh, as Patricia Mower, a mousy assistant in the mayor’s office (and a dead ringer for Shelley Duvall in “The Shining”). Patricia harbors memories of a childhood encounter with the “bogeyman,” but few people in town seem to believe her; a group of women she went to high school with shun her as a liar who’s just out for attention. But Patricia is determined to transcend her loserish fate. In an episode titled “Beach Reads,” she comes across a tattered book on entertaining written by the fictional author Lucy Fours (get it?) and applies its techniques to host a “sunset cocktails” party, which proves an epic success. Patricia wears a tiara and circulates dreamily, like a grownup Carrie at prom. It is not until the local sheriff (Kevin Carroll, a solid straight man) snaps her back into reality that she realizes the book—and, thus, her fête—was a work of gruesome witchcraft (a true jump scare: looking in the mirror, she sees that her festive headpiece is, in fact, a pair of bloody antlers). In the show’s best episode, Patricia finally confronts the “bogeyman,” who chases her at a hilariously languid clip. She plays out the episode as a classic horror “final girl,” sprinting away with arms flailing. But Patricia is smarter than most slasher heroines: when she and the sheriff finally subdue the bogeyman, she follows the body into the ambulance and all the way to the crematorium, while holding a rifle to its head.

There are many meta nods to horror classics peppered throughout “Widow’s Bay.” A drawing of a shark on a board is reminiscent of a doodle in “Jaws.” A metronome in city hall is a callback to “Misery.” In the season finale, a grainy movie reel explaining the island’s history of human sacrifice seems to nod to the Dharma Initiative films on “Lost.” But the show is at its best when it leans into its own idiosyncratic world. Dippold is the rare current showrunner who has the patience to simply sit inside a scene and let it play out—holding long shots, watching conversations meander. The finale is a cliffhanger, but much of it is taken up by a quiet scene in which Tom visits the home of his elderly secretary, Ruth. He believes her to be the town founder’s last living descendant, and he therefore plans to kill her. But his mission is thwarted, first by Ruth’s suggestion of an herbal tea that takes a preposterous twenty-seven minutes to brew, then by the wistful stories she tells as she pores over an old photo album. He learns, eventually, that Ruth’s life, like those of so many born on the island, has been touched by countless sorrows. She shows Tom a cross-stitch sampler, embroidered with a comically long quote about accepting catastrophe. You can either fight the fear, she advises, or walk in tandem with it. Perhaps this offers a hint as to what Dippold is really up to with “Widow’s Bay,” which has been renewed for a second season. You can run away from trouble—be it a haunted island or a humiliating Halloween costume—or you can learn how to live with it. At the very least, you can mine it for a laugh. ♦