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.
