Summary
Easily one of the weakest episodes in the entire anthology, “Spectral Class” relies on cheap violence to obscure the lack of an underlying theme or point.
Don’t let the shocking and effective opening fool you – Episode 5 of Terror Tuesday: Extreme, “Spectral Class”, is pretty rubbish. It’s easily one of the Netflix anthology’s weakest offerings, with no unifying theme or underlying point to speak of, performances that veer into distractingly over-the-top territory, and try-hard controversy-bait gore that feels sophomoric at best.
This is also where this collection’s repetitive approach starts to show through, with recurring ideas and motifs – especially ambiguous straight-to-camera endings – that are beginning to crop up far too often to keep Terror Tuesday feeling fresh.
Nik Isn’t Attending School
Anyway, that intro. It is, to be fair, quite effective – a young man jumps an old woman and beats her half to death, wordlessly and seemingly for no reason. It works in large part because it occurs mostly off-camera, with the sound effects doing the work.
The victim of this attack shows up again shortly. She’s visited by our protagonist, Oil, a teacher a Nong Sam Wang High School who has taken it upon herself to investigate the absence of a student named Nik, who hasn’t been to school for some time. The older woman is his grandmother, but she claims he ran off with his junkie friends and doesn’t seem especially concerned about his whereabouts.
Say No To Drugs
It’s very obvious that Nik’s family isn’t being entirely truthful, and so when Nik presents himself to Oil at the school where he’s hiding out, we believe his story immediately. He claims to have been held hostage by his family, and forced to participate in rituals.
Why would his own family treat him this way? Well, that’s part of the problem. They have simply been conned into hallucinogenic drug addiction by a hermit who has led them to believe they’re being guided by the Buddha himself. And that’s it. There’s nothing more to this episode, really – Nik is the victim of violent and delusional drug addicts who have had their faith exploited by a bad actor.
Oil to the Rescue
With Nik suddenly under Oil’s protection, what follows is, essentially, a thriller in which a meek schoolteacher tries to fight off violent drug addicts and ends up essentially being corrupted by the severity of her actions. Oil’s arc is fairly interesting in the way she becomes unhinged gradually and then all at once, but the dramatic pacing is way off, giving the episode a frantic feeling of one thing happening after another.
As with Episode 1, “Our Little Sister”, brevity is the enemy here. We know nothing about Oil, don’t see much of Nik’s family, and don’t get to spend much time with Nik himself before he’s unceremoniously killed off. It’s a shame, really, since I thought the performance was quite compelling. But no sooner has Oil met Nik than she’s fighting to protect his life from high-as-a-kind psycho grandmas.
Oil in “Spectral Class”
Root and Stem
Some of the visuals in “Spectral Class” are decent, with a style informed by the psychoactive toxin that Nik’s family take and try to force on Oil. There’s a trippy psychedelia to the cinematography that does kind of work.
But any visual sophistication is undermined, I think, by lazy attempts to shock the audience, as in a scene where Oil lops off the male member of Nik’s brother, Num. There’s really no need for this beyond cheap shock tactics, and it’s a scene so unlike all of the ones prior that it sticks out like a sore thumb. Or some other kind of sore appendage, anyway.
Needless to say, slicing off someone’s tackle is a bit much for a schoolteacher, but by this point, Oil has lost it, and rightly so. She hacks up Nik’s grandmother and by the end of the episode has thoroughly gone mad.
It’s an uninteresting ending, though, because it isn’t like there’s an underlying cause for Oil’s very sudden descent into murderous madness, just like how there wasn’t a better explanation for the rest of the plot than, simply, “They’re on drugs.” It’s actually difficult to explain how this might be considered “horror”, and not in a good way as we saw in Episode 4, “The Vow”.
It’ll earn its intended reaction either way, though, as the d*ck stuff is notable enough that people will discuss it on social media and Google it and become mightily curious. It almost seems a shame that they won’t find a better story than this to accompany it.
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