Main cast: Madison Iseman (Sam), Cameron Cowperthwaite (Charlie), Spencer Neville (Jesse), Jeff Doucette (Henderson), Sara Silva (Dani), Jessika Van (Poppy), and Chelsea M Davis (Jules)
Director: Logan Kibens
Necro opens with a young girl breastfeeding off the corpse of her dead, decomposing mother. Ooh, lovely, maybe this show will finally serves up some transgressive horror elements instead of just putting familiar tropes through the idiocy filter.
This girl, Sam, soon grows up to be a mortician, thus reinforcing the unfortunate stereotype that people in that job all secretly want to violate their dead charges. She is trying to have a normal life with Jesse, but things start to unravel when she bonds with the new staff member Charlie.
Charlie seems to understand her, but that guy is predictably enough a nutcase that wants to gain her affections by destroying all her chances at finding happiness elsewhere. Along the way, he also awakens her dormant erotic fascination with death, which he hopes will be something the two of them can bond over.
Necrophilia resides in one of the darkest corners of horror as well as erotica marked as taboo, never to go past the yellow sticker tape that says you are a deviant and a pervert if you even look at what is behind the tape.
Naturally, this is one element of those genres that will never go away. When it’s marked as forbidden, disgusting, deviant—of course people want to look, even if it’s just once to sate their curiosity!
As this show is good at borrowing tropes from better sources, this episode portrays Sam’s journey as a sexual awakening, attributing her desire to have arisen due to a childhood trauma. Again, it’s a common trope, and the other tropes are all here too: the bland and forgettable guy she tries to have a “normal” relationship with, a catalyst (in this case Charlie) that triggers her to be aware of her taboo feelings, and all the obvious signs already there that she becomes far more alive in the presence of her dead charges than she is around living folks.
While all these are nothing new, Madison Iseman makes Sam a sympathetic character, vulnerable yet self aware and can stand up to herself when she has to. Ms Iseman valiantly shoulders the episode as she brings it to the finish line.
I also have to admit: Cameron Cowperthwaite’s portrayal of Charlie makes that character a compelling, if loathsome, villain.
The problem with this episode is that it doesn’t know whether it wants to be a cartoon or a character study. The tone of the episode drunkenly veers from one extreme to another, often abruptly—from sensitive introspection about life and death to over the top moments, and back again.
Whenever one scene has me thinking that the show has finally elevated itself, the next scene merrily comes on and makes me cringe.
The ending scene, especially, is so ludicrous and overwrought that it nearly kills all my appreciation for the episode!
Necro may not be appreciated by the usual single-digit-IQ’ed fans of the show that have little understanding of horror and can only muster the brainpower to compare every episode to their favorite moments on American Horror Story: Coven, but in the context of this show and the parent show, this one breaks more ground than any other previous episodes.
For that alone, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for this episode.
