Summary
“The Mimic” sees Haunted get back to its hilariously flagrant lies with a story which I’m fairly sure is about a woman cheating on her husband with his friend. Or maybe it’s about a monster. Who knows?
This recap of Haunted Season 2, Episode 1, “The Mimic”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous season by clicking these words.
Haunted Season 2, Episode 1 certainly doesn’t disappoint when it comes to absolutely laughable hogwash, so allow me to begin the privilege of recounting this definitely very true story for the benefit of our loyal readership. Hold onto your hats, folks. It’s about to get spooky!
Meet Becca. She was a sickly kid; high heart rate, low blood pressure, that kind of thing. She was fitted with a monitor that would bleep whenever she was about to faint, just to let her know to take it easy. For about half of “The Mimic”, this becomes a classic horror device, like the radar in Alien, then it’s totally forgotten about and I don’t think ever referenced again. Maybe she got better.
Anyway, Becca meets her future husband, Jared, and their college clique in a bar, and before long they’ve all rented a historic house in Cleveland from the early 1900s. You know it’s a scary house because when they all enter there are lingering shots on the creepy furnishings and someone plays the piano really loudly when nobody else is expecting it. This is all especially hilarious whenever Haunted Season 2, Episode 1 cuts back to the present-day debate, as Becca and her friends have to make a serious attempt at rationalizing generic horror jump scares. “I really thought you were there the whole time!” “I was probably at work!” Oh, the tension.
Becca hears her friends constantly, their voices emanating from — wait for it — the basement. At one point, Jared is lured into that basement and temporarily trapped there, but he’s able to break free before anything happens. (This is kind of inevitable since they’re all sat there discussing this years later — tense!) Where “The Mimic” takes a brilliant turn is with a new arrival, Branden, who turns up wanting to stay in the basement because there’s apparently no room anywhere else, even though we barely see any of Becca’s buddies throughout the reenactment. Regardless, because Becca is relatively new to the group — this is her excuse for everything by the way — she doesn’t bother to tell him that she thinks the basement is haunted.
This is where things get hilarious. Becca presents herself to Branden, gets naked, and seduces him into a smooch, at which point she reveals herself to be some kind of monstrous doppelganger who promptly disappears. In the discussion, Branden explains how tangible this felt, and Jared is clearly fuming. This is brilliant because it raises the possibility that these two invented the whole story of “The Mimic” just to disguise the fact they had an affair, which would be hilarious if true, and is much more likely to be true than the alternative, which is that there was a monster in the basement that nobody but Becca noticed and that never did anything to any of them.
Well, it ruined Becca’s bedroom roof, anyway. After noticing a face pop out of a water stain, she and Jared head up into the attic with a blacklight which for some reason Jared has, and they discover that the water spot is coming from an “amorphous puddle” where a previous tenant had shot himself and been left for days. Had the mimic been messing with him too? You have to wonder. But you don’t have to wonder for very long since Becca meets the thing the following night, a mass of muscle and sinew and a badly-rendered human face that crawls very slowly out of the basement and is thwarted by Becca simply… leaving through the door. There’s no wonder this thing is stuck chilling in the basement.
Everyone moved out. Since then, renters have been in and out of the house since. Spooky! It’s almost as if a remote house located at a reasonable distance of a college campus would be occupied by students who would subsequently leave the area after graduation and be replaced by other students. Becca, though, hasn’t thought of that. Is the mimic tormenting them? Yeah, that’s probably it.
