Summary
I already liked Blumhouse’s Nightmares of Nature, but Season 2, “Lost in the Woods”, ups the levels with a more interesting, quirky setting and a new cast of predators and prey.
I already liked Nightmares of Nature. It was a great idea – balancing the education of nature documentaries with the entertainment of a classically styled horror narrative – that felt seasonally appropriate and genuinely new. You got the sense that the format could be reworked for a virtually infinite amount of stories, focusing on new predators and prey each time, but Season 2, which debuts less than a month after the first, proves that setting is the most important consideration of all.
Let’s be frank – things haven’t changed a great deal. The premise is the same. This time, instead of a mouse, a bullfrog, and a raccoon, we follow an opossum, a baby iguana, and a spider (the latter being noteworthy in that arachnids almost always tend to be the villains in this kind of thing). Our “heroes” are heading to a single location, like the cabin in the woods in the first season. Their stories intersect in odd and interesting ways again. It’s the exact same idea repackaged for another three episodes in a different biome. But that makes all the difference.
“Lost in the Jungle” lives up to its title, with the tropical backdrop providing a more diverse array of predators and natural environmental danger. It’s more exaggerated than “Cabin in the Woods”, but without losing any of its accuracy and insight. Scenes in that season were effectively framed so that a mouse being cornered by an owl was genuinely panic-inducing, but there’s just more organic energy in, say, an opossum coming face to face with a snake. The Central American jungle is a vast playground for apex predators roaming their natural habitats, and Nightmares of Nature uses that to find much more fact-based terror that doesn’t need as much genre artifice to work.
But there’s still plenty of artifice. The repurposing of horror staples still works, arguably better than before, given the deadliness of the jungle’s threats, but its narrative trappings feel similarly expanded. That cabin in Season 1 worked fine, but its upgrade to a secret lab in the heart of the jungle here in Season 2 has a much better, B-movie quality about it. As the follow-up to what was essentially a proof of concept, this second batch of episodes – there are just three again, all nicely zippy – should feel like it’s building on the core ideas and taking them a bit further. It also feels like the surface has only barely been scratched, leaving multiple unexplored ecosystems on the table to keep the pacing tight. You could easily imagine another couple of jungle-set seasons focusing on different critters, which wasn’t a feeling you got after the first season, which began to feel hemmed in after a while.
Maya Hawke, who returns on narration duties, feels similarly bedded in. The technique is once again used sparingly enough not to feel overwhelming but often enough to provide important context for what’s happening on-screen. Hawke’s tone is the most obvious example of the tricky balance that Nightmares of Nature looks to find between education and entertainment; she’s almost exclusively just sharing Wikipedia-style nature facts, but she’s doing it in a way that ripples with foreboding, making even the dispensation of information feel like an integral piece of a larger scary story. You wouldn’t ordinarily consider documentary narration as a “performance” in the strictest sense, but that’s inarguably what it is here.
Ultimately, for those who didn’t like Nightmares of Nature in the first place, it’s unlikely that Season 2 will sway them. It’s better, sure, but it’s a better version of the same thing with no real interest in evolving beyond its core idea, which is good enough to sustain multiple seasons in its current form. I love it, honestly. It’s a fun horror pastiche underpinned by a serious nature documentary, and, for the most part, it works as both equally well. If it’s this easy for Netflix to knock out two seasons back-to-back, there’s no real reason why we shouldn’t get another couple next October. I’ll look forward to it.
