Let’s log on to Apple TV+ and see which actor they have lured into starring in and executive producing their own miniseries this week, shall we? Ah, good news: they’ve got reformed Oscar host Billy Crystal, and he’s starring in and executive producing Before, a psychological thriller (out Friday). Crystal plays Eli – which already puts me on edge as no character is ever called “Eli” unless the whole thing is a biblical allegory or there’s some ancient, unknowable horror going on, and in this case it’s the latter – who is grieving the recent death of his wife, Lynn. While doing that, he meets an unnerving child, Noah (Jacobi Jupe), who sees visions, speaks in tongues and keeps turning up at Eli’s house in the middle of the night in a way that no one seems to find weird but me. There’s some spookiness, and a hundred thousand unresolved secrets, and Eli learns his and Noah’s anguishes are deeply linked, somehow. It is October so we are allowed to tell stories like this. “What if Billy Crystal was spooky?” got fired out of Apple’s commissioning supercomputer, and now we have 10 whole episodes of Before.
My problem with the supernatural is this: it has to make sense in the end, or it has to never make sense in the exact way it didn’t in The Blair Witch Project. Nothing in between. The best horrors have some sort of resolution – the ghost was, I don’t know, a maid or something, and she was in love with a guy who, I don’t know, got murdered and thrown in a well, and you have to retrieve his bones and put them with hers so they can be in peace together. Something like that, you know? You have to go and bury a piece of cloth, or have a haunting vision of 100 years ago where you somehow repair a broken relationship, or you need to cry while saying sorry on the exact varnish-black blood mark in the attic where they died. I always need to understand why the ghost was angry, or the witch cursed them, or where the monster came from, or why exactly this person got possessed. Otherwise it’s just Things Happening, and it’s hard to get caught up in that. Oh, a wardrobe blew open, did it? Someone had a dream? Give me a break. I need to eventually know what happened in the basement to be truly afraid of it! It can’t just make haunting sounds!
