Channel Zero (2016 series)

Promotional image for Channel Zero (2016series) - "Candle Cove"...

Summary

• Candle Cove (2016) - A child psychologist returns to his small town home to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his twin brother and a slew of other children in the 1980s, and how it is connected to a bizarre local children's television show that aired at the same time.
• The No-End House (2017) - A young woman visits the No-End House, a bizarre house of horrors that consists of a series of increasingly disturbing rooms. When she returns home, Margot realizes everything has changed.
• Butcher's Block (2018) - A pair of troubled young sisters move into a new town where people have been disappearing in a mystery involving a mysterious staircase to nowhere in the city park, and an older mystery involving the mysterious disappearance of the eccentric family whose mansion stood on that spot decades before.
• The Dream Door (2018) - A newlywed couple moving back to their home are forced to deal with their rocky marriage when they discover a mysterious and impossible door that appeared overnight in their basement wall.

Details

• Release Date: 2016-present
• Country/Language: US, English
• Genres/Technical: Drama, Horror, Mystery, urban legend and creepypasta
• Setting: 1980s and Modern USA
• Runtime: (generally formatted for a 1-hour US commercial television slot)
• Starring: Abigail Pniowsky, Keenan Lehmann, Amy Forsyth
• Creator: Nick Antosca
  • "Candle Cove" by Kris Straub
  • "No End House" by Brian Russell
  • "Search and Rescue Woods" by Kerry Hammond
  • "I Found a Hidden Door in my Cellar" by Charlotte Bywater
• Producer/Production Co: Universal Cable Productions
• View Trailer: (2016), (2017)
• Film Website: (link)
• TVTropes: (link)
• IMDB Page: (link)

Ratings

MPAA Ratings

• Rated: (not rated) (perhaps equivalent to a TV-PG for Violence, and occasional mild Profanity and Adult Content)

Tentacle Ratings

A rough measure of how "Lovecraftian" the work is:

• SS___ (Two Tentacles: Barely Lovecraftian; similar in tone)

The first season had at least a few elements of paranoid cosmic horror. The "creepypasta" genre the series anthologizes is, arguably, a modern descendant of the sort of weird pulp horror that Lovecraft helped to create, and in general "creepypasta" borrows and updates a lot of the conventions of pulp horror into a modern, mobile-technology-driven, typically suburban middle-class setting.

Note: This rating is not intended as a measure of quality, merely of how closely related to Lovecraftian "Weird" fiction the work is.

Reviews

Review Links:

• (review needed)

Synopsis (SPOILERS)

 Spoiler Section (Highlight to Read)

• Candle Cove (2016) - A child psychologist returns to his small town home to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his twin brother and a slew of other children in the 1980s, and how it is connected to a bizarre local children's television show that aired at the same time.
• The No-End House (2017) - A young woman visits the No-End House, a bizarre house of horrors that consists of a series of increasingly disturbing rooms. When she returns home, Margot realizes everything has changed.
• Butcher's Block (2018) - A pair of troubled young women move into a new town where people have been disappearing in a mystery involving a mysterious staircase to nowhere in the city park, and an older mystery involving the mysterious disappearance of the eccentric family whose mansion stood on that spot decades before.
• The Dream Door (2018) - A newlywed couple moving back to their home are forced to deal with their rocky marriage when they discover a mysterious and impossible door that appeared overnight in their basement wall.

Notes

Comments, Trivia, Dedication

• film: the premise of the Channel Zero: No-End House 2017 season appears to be a variation on that from the (not very Lovecraftian) 2012 film Toad Road (perhaps they were based on the same urban legend/creepypasta?)

Associated Mythos Elements

• TO DO
• location: portals to the Dreamlands, Other Side
• race: "Tooth Monster", bizarre puppets, grotesque dwarfs, cancer-monsters, and other assorted and off-beat monsters
• tome: the post-modern version of found video tapes and video games

Keeper Notes

• The investigators are called in to investigate a series of bizarre crimes involving children claiming to be acting under the influence of sinister "invisible friends" and a disturbing "children's" television program that doesn't seem to exist which plays over the static of a television station that isn't even on the air.