More People Need to Be Talking About Channel Zero, the Scariest Show on TV

The first season of Channel Zero takes its name from and is based on what I consider to be the best Creepypasta: "Candle Cove" by Kris Straub. This, in combination with the casting of real, serious actors Fiona Shaw and Paul Schneider, is what piqued my interest.

Laid out as a series of forum posts, the fictional poster asks if anyone born in the '60s or '70s remembers a creepy nautical puppet show: Candle Cove. The forum users discuss unsettling imagery they remember, until one poster announces he asked his mother if she remembers Candle Cove. The mother reveals she thought the show was imaginary and that she'd often find her child staring at the snow on a blank TV screen. No backstory, no BS, that's where it ends. It's a clever little piece of storytelling.

Channel Zero's Candle Cove takes the basic concept and weaves it into a disturbing story of twisted childhood nostalgia. It takes clear inspiration from Stephen King's It, in a town with a history of gruesome child murders where fear seems to hang like an oppressive force. Protagonist Mike Painter returns to his hometown as an adult and to face his estranged mother, who sent him away as a boy after the disappearance of his twin, Eddie.

Unlike It, Candle Cove doesn't try to explain the supernatural force that haunts the town and relaxes into its surreal and frightening imagery. The show confidently leaves its viewers with an emotional resolution but no clear explanation. And it's perfect. Schneider and Shaw carry the series with very competent, nuanced performances, but the standout performance comes from child actor Luca Villacis, who plays both Mike and Eddie Painter in flashbacks.

Based on a Creepypasta of the same name, the original story (by Brian Russell) is a bland, meandering tale with good ideas and some great imagery but no restraint. Your faceless narrator is told by a sketchy friend that there's a weird house with nine rooms, and if you go through all of them, you win $500. The narrator gets out after experiencing some increasingly nasty stuff in each of the nine rooms of the house and is shocked to discover his own house HAS A NUMBER 10 ON THE DOOR AND THERE'S NO END TO THE HOUSE!

But he does get the five hundo, so . . . you know, it could have been worse?

Channel Zero's second season dumps the monetary incentive, the heroin-addicted friend, and, to my relief, about four rooms from the house.

No End House is now the story of Margot, grieving the recent loss of her father, and Jules, Margot's best friend, who feels guilty for leaving for college and not giving Margot the support she desperately needed. The season is a surreal, melancholic reflection on grief and loneliness, anchored by a genuine and tender female friendship.

The titular No End House appears as a creepy piece of installation art that travels from town to town, appearing for a few nights once a year. "Beware of the Cannibals" is scrawled on the first door.

Margot, Jules, and company make it through the house in the first episode, with the majority of the season taking place in an uncanny, empty version of their neighborhood, which serves as the house's final room. This environment recalls the eerily empty, closed worlds of early RPGs and serves up plenty of striking imagery. Reading the original story, one might expect an adaptation to end up as a Saw-style series of torturous set pieces, but the end result is more like Pet Sematary meets The Truman Show, and it's creepy as hell.

No End House is, so far, Channel Zero's standout season. It's been one of the best seasons of television I've watched this year. I cried, I cringed, I'll never turn up my nose at Syfy again.

Channel Zero's third season, Butcher's Block, is a strong follow-up even with my newly high expectations for the show. It's also the first season I went into without having read the Creepypasta it's based on: "Search and Rescue" by Kerry Hammond.

Butcher's Block deals with sisters Alice and Zoe. Social worker Alice is dragging self-medicating, schizophrenic Zoe to a poverty- and crime-stricken city, in search of a fresh start. We quickly find out Alice is fleeing both her student loan payments and her schizophrenic mother's attempts to reconnect from a psychiatric hospital.

Now, I know what you're thinking: horror, mental health, ruh-oh. Historically, the two haven't made the best bedmates, and this onscreen combo usually ends in a tropey, offensive mess.

As always, Channel Zero surpasses expectation. While Butcher's Block is campier and even stranger than the previous two series, I was extremely impressed by its portrayal of schizophrenia. My grandfather was schizophrenic, and flashbacks to Zoe's early strange, hostile behavior as her illness surfaces rang true with family stories I've heard over the years. Alice's own schizophrenia is represented by a strange, squishy version of her own face, lurking in the deep, soft parts of her brain. It grins, and gurgles, and Alice is terrified of it.

While I managed to dodge schizophrenia, chronic mental health problems have dogged me since I was a teenager, and Butcher's Block's ultimate message is extremely refreshing for me. Mental health problems aren't a ghost, or a monster (even if it feels like that sometimes), or something that'll vanish if you press the right narrative buttons; they're just part of you. They're not the end of the world, they're just something you have to deal with, and the sooner you accept that, the better.

This, paired with some truly wild imagery and a fantastically surreal final act, has me absolutely jazzed for season four: Dream Door, based on "Hidden Door" by Charlotte Bywater. It's scheduled for an Oct. 26 premiere on Syfy.