One of my longstanding gripes about fiction is when characters within it act as if they’ve never seen a movie before. Genre fiction tends to be better at this, often lampshading the trope they’re participating in with some clever remark (no genre does this so skillfully as romance, which frequently has characters both acknowledge the fake dating/only one bed etc. trope while also gleefully participating in it). But a lot of horror remains stubbornly blind to its constitutive tropes, with characters wandering into perilous situations no horror-watcher should ever dream of getting lured into. It is a breath of proverbial fresh air, then, to encounter a piece of horror fiction that is committed to full realism.
The Outsider is an HBO adaptation of Stephen King’s 2018 novel of the same name. It begins as a traditional crime story. A young boy is found brutally murdered in the woods and it looks like his little league coach is the culprit. The lead detective on the case, Ralph Anderson, puts the pieces together and arrests Terry Maitland, despite having known him for years. The evidence is overwhelming; there are witnesses and DNA. The only thing we don’t know is why this mild-mannered family man would suddenly kill a child. The entire first episode plays completely straight, ending with Terry’s death at the hands of his supposed victim’s brother. But there’s something in the dim background, like an electrical hum. There’s something wrong here.
Slowly, as the episodes unfold, we start to feel that wrongness in sharper ways. Video footage surfaces of Terry 100 miles away at the exact time of the murder. Terry’s youngest daughter starts talking to someone no one else can see. Every family member connected to Terry’s supposed victim starts to die, from heart attacks, suicide, sorrow. There’s so much grief surrounding this murder that it’s like a malevolent presence lurking in the shadows. Slowly, it starts to feel like that’s more than just a metaphor. The series is dropping hints, some subtler than others, and leaving us clues that we won’t be able to put together until later in the series. And then, in episode three, we meet private investigator Holly Gibney and the axis on which the show turns shifts.
Gibney has appeared in multiple Stephen King novels (and has just been given her own novel, 2023’s Holly). She’s a woman with some sort of extrasensory powers. What exactly the nature of those powers are isn’t that important; in only one instance in the series do we ever see her even sort of use them. But with the introduction of Gibney into this narrative, the writers bring the world of Stephen King rushing into a story that’s been fairly sealed into the crime genre. King’s novels are intertwined in subtle ways, with some characters like Gibney appearing in multiple novels, reinforcing the idea that his novels seem to all take place in the same universe. This symmetry was played on to great effect in the FX series Castle Rock, which brought to life a fictional Maine town that King has often mentioned in his novels and peopled it with characters from throughout his universe. In this series, Gibney is an open door through which we can allow in the possibility of monsters.
Back on the home front, Ralph is not a man who believes in monsters. When doubt arises regarding Terry Maitland’s guilt, it is Ralph’s own guilt that pushes him to make sense of the tragedy. He hires Gibney expecting her to solve a puzzle. What she does instead is present him with the possibility of a world where children can be ripped apart by faceless monsters. It is too much for a realist like Ralph to believe. The tension between Holly Gibney the believer and Ralph Anderson the skeptic is a familiar one; it is a sort of father/daughter version of Mulder and Scully. It is also where this show takes flight, becoming far more than either a straightforward crime drama or a monster flick.
What would you do if someone told you a monster was responsible for the murder of your child? What would you do if you found out you’d arrested the wrong man because the right one wasn’t a man at all? In one episode, Ralph’s wife tells him that the monster (which they call El Cuco throughout, but which I prefer to call blurryface), has been in their house and spoken to her in the middle of the night. She points to the chair it sat in, but he cannot believe her. He tells her she was dreaming. In most fiction, there is initial resistance when a character encounters persuasive (or even irrefutable) evidence that the supernatural exists. But once you’re face to face with a big squiggly creature and it’s trying to rip your throat out, you tend to adjust quickly. The Outsider smartly allows Ralph to keep his doubts by keeping him from a face-to-face encounter with blurryface. We know that blurryface killed those children, that he morphed himself into Terry Maitland in order to frame him for the murder, and Ralph knows that something went wrong with this case, but the series lets him believe in his own time.
There’s a freshness to this approach. It retains the crime drama feel of the series, only occasionally venturing into monster hunting territory. The series understands that the way Ralph handles this case and the way Holly Gibney handles this case are both natural, realistic reactions to the circumstances. When Ralph finally does believe, he cannot stop jumping ahead of the present moment, muttering to himself again and again that this changes everything he ever knew. The believers caution him: take baby steps. Bite off small chunks. Otherwise, you’ll go insane.
What the series doesn’t do is play with our own perception, but that’s because it doesn’t need to. We aren’t here to be scared, but to bear witness to the emotional journey our characters take from skepticism to belief. For that to happen, we have to know what’s real and what isn’t. We have to wait patiently in the monster’s lair for everyone else to catch up. That’s what makes this series so unique from the other fright fests out there. It is frightening because the events within it are disturbing (though the scariest scene by far involves humans, guns, and a persistent copperhead), but blurryface is present far more in the minds of his hunters and victims than on screen. Instead, we see the effect his existence has on the characters we have come to know. That’s something better than your classic monster hunter story, and well worth your time.