This summer sees the arrival of a new series on ABC, Dead of Summer, co-created by Ian Goldberg, Edward Kritsis and Adam Horowitz (both of Lost and Once Upon a Time);
After the television reboot of Scream and the original series and Scream Queens, it seems that the slasher has the wind in its sails. The genre, popularized by John Carpenter's Halloween (1979) had been dusted off with Wes Craven's Scream (1994), giving birth to a wave of neo-slashers in the 90s and early 2000s, a horrific reform that saw his works play with the codes of the genre in a kind of burlesque second-degree. In this, Dead of Summer should also follow this path, but what is it really?
The series is immediately reminiscent of Sean S's Friday the 13th (1980). Cunningham, and all the prequels/remakes/reboots that followed it, whose well-known plot takes place in a summer camp in which a masked killer prowls slaughtering the monitors one by one, shortly before the opening. Here, the principle is the same: in the 80s, a group of teenagers meet at Stillwater Camp a few days before the opening to prepare the ground, but strange phenomena take place as soon as they arrive. At the same time, we discover the past of the heroine, Amy, and the reason for her coming to the camp.
The problem, what would seem to be a nostalgic pastiche at first, appears more like an unpleasant and indigestible accumulation of clichés: the characters are ultra-archetypal (the pretentious bombass, the effeminate gay, the handsome protective kid, the marginal and mute rocker) and artificial, as if they had been specifically written to respond to clichés seen and reviewed. And this is where the challenge of the series lies: to bring a new breath to an over-exploited genre, worn to the core, and whose outcomes we know in advance.
Also, despite a few attempts, the pilot sets its frame without anything surprising shaking it: the gardener recalls the hillbillies of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hill with Eyes, the drinking around the fire is not terrifying, and even the passive of Amy – who, she, intrigues, that said –, Disclosed between four relatively hasty scenes, smells warmed. This is without counting on a staging that kills the tension in the bud, clearly calibrated for a pre-adolescent audience, and an atmosphere that never manages to distill the slightest anxiety.
Especially since it is hard to believe, as the characters show a frightening credulity. In forty minutes of episodes, already a dead person, a house on fire, an eviscerated deer, and tree branches that come out of nowhere, but the characters still manage to sleep soundly and are not afraid to go and turn on the electric meter on the other side of the wood when the current has mysteriously jumped. This abusive anti-realism would not have been disturbing if we had relied on parody humor to counterbalance it, but the dialogues themselves are seriously and improbable frivolous (understand that we are made to believe that the interests of the characters are important even when these last ones have nothing to say).
To see, now, if the rest of the season will manage to raise the level and offer something new, if it is not invaded by subplots silly, juvenile and above all recycled and predictable: for now, that's kind of all we've seen.
