The Best Horror Show That You Might Not Like
Or: Do We Really Need an Ending?
Warning Traveler, major spoilers ahead about The Curse!
I just finished a show that I loved from the beginning. I’m unsure if it will have another season or how it could even have another one. But I couldn’t help googling The Curse after I finished the season finale to see how people rationalized the final episode.
Big surprise: media outlets hated it or tried to find some meaning in it, and many got it wrong from the get-go.
The Curse is about two YIMBYs, Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder, who co-created the show with Benny Safdie) and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone, who is an executive producer). The husband and wife take over the town of Espanola, New Mexico, with three goals in mind. First, they want to make the town a self-sustaining community that can also contribute to reducing carbon emissions for the entire Earth. They do this by buying up property and turning the homes on that property into modern, eco-friendly, carbon-neutral domiciles. Second, they want to create a greater sense of community in Espanola by finding local work for town residents and encouraging businesses to locate there. In addition, Whitney reaches out to the local Pueblo nation to try and feature the plight of the Pueblo within their television pilot.
That would be the third goal of the couple: Fliplanthropy.
Fliplanthropy is the portmanteau name of the show-within-a-show reality series the couple produce. It follows Whitey and Asher as they interact with the town in their quest to find buyers for these passive houses and find altruistic companies to provide jobs and services to move to the town and promote culture.
All of those elements sound ideal in an overview. However, the Siegels can’t get out of their own way.
Asher is insecure, self-absorbed, and manipulative. Whitney is essentially the same but worse. They’re both toxic people who think they know best but worsen the town through poor, short-term solutions. Most of what they do is to feed their own egoism that they mistake for altruism. No matter what they tell themselves and each other, everything they do is for their own personal gain. This goes so far as waiting for a thank you when they end up giving away one of the houses that they owned to the family that was squatting there in the first place.
But, all of the American political climate and behavioral questions will have to wait until another day, Traveler. I said in the title that this show is in the horror genre, and I meant it.
So, let’s talk about horror.
The claim can be made that horror is satirical. One of Poe’s greatest stories, The Masque of Red Death, is a metaphor for being unable to outrun fate. Memento mori, as it were. Get Out is an excellent example of modern satirical horror.
And just because The Curse is a dry take on American society, television programming, and YIMBY culture, that doesn’t mean it can’t also be a satirical horror piece.
In the pilot, while the Fliplanthropy pilot is filming in a shopping center, Asher runs into two girls selling candy. With the cameras rolling, he gives them a hundred-dollar bill. When Dougie (Safdie) lets Asher know they got the shot, Asher demands the note back, promising to give them twenty dollars as soon as he gets change.
And one of the girls puts a curse on him.
I curse you, she says matter-of-factly.
By the way, the squatting family that I mentioned above? The two girls are the ones squatting in the house with their father (Barkhad Abdi, from Captain Phillips)
What happens as a result of this curse, Traveler? When Asher’s pre-made meal kit is delivered (because, of course, Asher and Whitney use meal kits. And by the way, no offense if you use a meal kit, Traveler), his chicken-pasta dinner is missing the chicken.
I know that isn’t scary at all. But that’s why I love The Curse. This moment is never shoved into the background, and it gets played up for vast portions of episodes. Asher becomes obsessed over the chicken and proving that someone is messing with him (he suspects that it’s Dougie for the majority of the series) that it engulfs his life to where he can’t see what’s happening around him.
Dougie manipulates both Asher and Whitney to get more drama out of them for the show. Whitney moves around Asher’s back, both in the show and in their marriage, for her own self-interests and developing delusions of grandeur, to the point where she asks Dougie to change the show title to Green Queen, thus going from working towards a shared community to ruling over a town.
But the supernatural element, the eponymous Curse, is always there.
When Asher discovers the family squatting in the house that he and Whitney were renovating to flip, he also meets the two little girls again. The one that cursed him lets him know she was inspired to curse him from a TikTok video series she had been watching. He then brushes this off as we, the audience, do.
But then, chicken starts showing up often as a running theme. On a story format level, this is to keep the curse in the story. Whenever chicken shows up, it has sinister music and undertones with it. As ridiculous as this sounds, Traveler, it’s a brilliant writing move by Fielder and Safdie. So much so that this may actually have to do with Jewish mysticism, as is pointed out in an excellent column on the Jewish website, Forward.
Even though one of the girls tells Asher that she copied the curse idea from TikTok, and he subsequently writes it off, Asher can never quite shake the feeling that something still isn’t settled. This is where the genius of the show truly is. The Curse, right from the title, tells us that the supernatural exists and plays a part in this show, whether we believe it or not and whether it scares us.
There’s a critical moment in the show, a mini-climax, where Asher uses the restroom at a firehouse (Fliplanthropy, at this point, has been greenlit by HGTV and Dougie, Asher, and Whitney are now filming episodes, and one takes place at a fire station, which will matter shortly.) and while he does we learn a bit about Asher’s insecurity.
Then, he looks up and sees shredded chicken on top of the toilet he’s been using.
Now think about that for a moment, Traveler.
Maybe you thought the phantom chicken was absurd. Perhaps you thought it was goofy. You likely didn’t take it seriously. And that’s okay because that was the point of using chicken as a MacGuffin.
Because the show can’t continue from this moment unless you find it silly and let your guard down, you can’t suspect anything at this point, or The Curse doesn’t work.
But at the same time, The Curse has to give us periodic reminders that the titular curse is always there. Abdi’s character tells Asher to stop talking about curses around his daughters during routine landlord maintenance because curses creep him out. The girl ends up cursing someone else at her school with actual consequences. Dougie cries out about curses being real because his wife died in a car accident (while he was driving intoxicated, mind you).
But we ignore it. And we miss it because the show is grounded in reality, and interpersonal storylines are happening all over the series that we focus on instead. The Curse tells us that it is real, and that it is a character, and that it will make its presence felt, and we ignore it like everyone else does.
And then we end up in the finale.
In the tenth episode, the show has flash-forwarded several months. Whitney is now pregnant. As it is now known by Whitney’s title, Green Queen has been picked up for a second season by HGTV. The episode starts with the Siegels filming a segment on The Rachael Ray Show, with their vanity and insecurities taking over as they always do.
Later, they go to the home they were trying to flip. Asher turns over his spare key to the family, unconditionally leaving them the house (and even the remaining property taxes). While waiting for a thank you, all they get is so, can you bring the papers by this afternoon?
Then they go home and sleep. When Whitney wakes up the next day, we’re treated to a horror show.
Asher is lying on the ceiling.
The remainder of the episode is two-fold. Asher is stuck to the ceiling in the house. He and Whitney try to get him down. She moves through the house carefully because Asher thinks an air pocket in their passive home has caused an anti-gravity effect. As Whitney fumbles around the home, both trying to get outside as well as get to one of their cell phones, she goes into labor.
Whitney contacts someone to get her medical attention and get Asher down from the ceiling. While waiting and with Whitney in labor, they argue about the trivial matter of how they can’t raise a baby in the house where Asher is now stuck to the ceiling. He crawls outside to the spot underneath the front entrance roof when help arrives. He tries to get Asher down by pulling him out from under the entrance, which in turn causes Asher to fly by his backside into a nearby tree, where he catches a branch.
Whitney is taken to a nearby medical center and requires a c-section. On the way, she calls Dougie to come by the house and contact emergency services to get Asher down from the tree.
What remains is a standoff through two different perspectives. Only Asher, Whitney, and the person Whitney first called know first-hand that Asher will float away. When Dougie arrives, he calls someone with a drone camera (because, of course, he does), thinking that Asher is simply freaking out because of the baby coming and that he climbed the tree. The fire department (see the callback?) doesn’t take Asher seriously in his plea to anchor a net behind his back and pull him down to the ground level. It’s a tense standoff for Asher and the audience, but to the other characters, it’s just funny.
A firefighter throws a net onto Asher patronizingly, and he begs to get anchored to the fire truck. Another firefighter climbs the ladder and pulls a chainsaw to cut the branch. Asher pleads with the firefighter to stop cutting the branch. Fielder performs an excellent acting job here.
And then the branch snaps and falls to the ground, and Asher flies away.
Dougie looks up and has the drone sent up to capture Asher, but as Asher flies into the atmosphere, Dougie finally feels the weight of what he’s done, passively or not, and sits down on the ground and starts to cry. Onlookers mistakenly think the stunt was for the television show.
And Asher floats into space, presumably asphyxiated.
So why is everyone mad? Why might you be angry? Because you’re left asking how?
And that was the point, and why it’s horror. We don’t need to know how.
The last 40 minutes of that episode are hyper-focused on a doomed man. We watch his last minutes on Earth and how he’s being treated. People laugh at him, joke about him, and don’t take him seriously. In a way, Asher gets what Whitney wanted all along. He’s about to do something legendary, something completely impossible. He is going the first man to propel into space spontaneously.
And what does it get him? It doesn’t get him anything. No one cares.
Maybe the curse ended Asher because he tried to rectify the problems they created through egoism. There may be a deeper theme here that I’m not getting.
But from a story perspective, the curse got him. That’s it. That’s the how.
Now think about it like this: Traveler. Watch this show again from the beginning, and how this man is followed by something that can’t be quantified and how it will be the end of him. He doesn’t know it yet and doesn’t really believe it, but it also looms in the back of his mind. And when he goes, he’s going to be alone. Watch it again like that, and tell me how it hits.
If there’s a chance that you ever get pulled into outer space by an unseen force, how would you feel at the end?
The brilliant location choice of New Mexico (The Land of Enchantment and also Roswell) adds to the mythos. I give this show five out of five.
My favorite short story that I wrote is a little piece called Tuesday’s Gone. In it, the main character loses his Tuesdays. He goes to bed on Monday and wakes up on Wednesday for weeks on end. While I wrote it out, I kept trying different climax points for the ending, and none worked.
Instead, I focused on the character as he traversed an unwinnable situation, and the story became a metaphor for mental illness. The story actually started from a point of coping with mental illness. I was inspired by a time I was so stressed out that I actually forgot a Tuesday. One Wednesday, I couldn’t remember what had happened the day before. I even went to grab tacos because I thought it was Tuesday.
The most criticism the story received when it went broad was that it didn’t have an ending.
“It ended,” I told my critics. “The protagonist told you everything he knew. If you wanted more of a conclusive ending, there are other short stories out there.”
And I stand by that, and when I watched The Curse, I smiled.
Thank you, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie.
And until again, Safe Travels, Traveler.
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