Summary
Nightmares of Nature is such a good idea that it’s a bit of a shame it feels trapped in the middle of its concept, unsure of quite how much to commit to either its horror presentation or its animal facts underpinnings.
I’ve often criticised Blumhouse for treating the horror genre as a conveyor belt of lowest-common-denominator cliches, and as we enter October, I’m sure I’ll have more to moan about in that regard. But I won’t be starting with Nightmares of Nature, a three-episode miniseries streaming on Netflix – with a second season already commissioned and on the way – that is built atop a legitimately good idea.
It’s obvious when you think about it. There’s a lot of overlap between nature documentaries and the horror genre. Even most Attenborough productions know to hone in on a vulnerable underdog creature who has to navigate a deadly world full of hidden predators. Many recognise the value of showing us a familiar landscape – an idyllic woodland, say, or a picturesque stretch of coast – and then revealing it to be teeming with what are, essentially, monsters; unknowable hunters with bizarre eating habits and an all-encompassing need to survive.
These two things, which are combined to immediately striking effect in Nightmares of Nature, aren’t as dissonant as you think. And yet the combination still feels wonderfully novel. What underscores the horror genre – the manipulation and exploitation of fear, in the characters and in the audience – also underscores nature, in its way. Fear is an evolutionary impulse. Everything that has survived until now has survived thanks to it. This isn’t a gimmicky fusion of the two most diametrically opposed genres imaginable; it’s the presentation of the endlessly beautiful but ferociously hostile natural world through the lens most accommodating to it. It’s the answer to the exciting elevator pitch of “what if Planet Earth were a horror movie?”
Nightmares of Nature begins with a disclaimer: “For the safety of our heroes and monsters, some scenes have been dramatized. All animal behaviors are natural.” It’s hard to make exact sense of that, which plays into the show’s most striking element. The footage is edited and structured in the manner of a slasher movie or similar, with the same kind of scene composition and pacing, but the footage is also real, with woodland critters cast as heroes – there’s a pregnant mouse, a hungry raccoon, and a young bullfrog – going about their everyday business in their natural habitat. Where is the line drawn? How much of what we’re seeing is orchestrated, and how much of it is the framework of a story being sketched around animals’ innate behaviour? It’s impossible to tell.
Nightmares of Nature Still | Image via Netflix
This off-kilter vibe is great. Deliberately stylised visuals and a very good score occasionally have to do a lot of heavy lifting, especially in sequences of very intense hiding and staring that sometimes don’t amount to anything, but the random brutality of the natural world crops up all the time without warning to tremendous effect. It might be a crocodile bursting from the water to stop a raccoon from stealing its eggs, or a giant bird gobbling up a frog, but the natural instincts of the subjects sometimes blur the framing of the horror genre, too. These three episodes centre on an old horror faithful, a cabin in the woods, and the first episode, for instance, revolves around the three “heroes” all making it to that cabin for what they presume to be safety. In a horror movie, this would be the heroes teaming up. But here, it suddenly dawns on you that if the “heroic” mouse gives birth, the “heroic” raccoon might eat the babies.
To keep all this in some kind of order, the show employs the services of a narrator, Maya Hawke, who provides surprisingly sultry explanations for what’s happening, but also fills in the dramatic blanks to draw explicit similarities between natural impulses and familiar horror setups. A predator chasing prey; prey hiding in what seems like a safe haven but reveals itself to be another nest of dangers; creatures bursting from eggs; sudden bouts of violence and death. The parallels are endless and effectively highlighted, but the narration also pulls double-duty to provide the fact-based justifications for why these animals are acting in the way that they are. And it’s in this middle ground that I think Nightmares of Nature feels a bit confused.
The problem is that the show is trying to be both a horror series and a legitimate nature documentary. It can’t commit to being really scary and horrible because it’s often stopping to dispense helpful facts, but it can’t dispense too many facts, or go too far off the beaten path in what it’s capturing, since it’s trying to maintain the close parallels between nature and horror. It ends up not being scary or informative enough to really stand out in either respect. Instead, the novelty of the fusion has to do all the legwork. In large part, I’d argue it pulls this off, but after three episodes, the format was straining under its own weight, and each of those episodes has saggy periods in the middle where it feels too artificial or too detached and observant.
But I’d be lying if I said the core of Nightmares of Nature isn’t terrifically effective and unique-feeling edutainment with really palpable high points. The sense of responsibility the audience feels for, say, a cute mouse, is significantly higher than what they feel for a dumb jock in a slasher flick, and that gives the sometimes indifferently brutal spurts of nastiness a bit more power. It needs more episodes under different conditions to refine the formula, and it seems like it’s going to get them, but in many ways, this kind of thing is what streaming platforms were made for. Welcome to the Halloween season once again.
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