Ben Watches Television : The Outsider - "The One About the Yiddish Vampire"
* This review contains spoilers for the first six episodes *
Come on down to terror town! The Outsider has finally kicked into gear and became legitimately creepy, this week. The episode begins with Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo) revealing to Ralph (Ben Mendelsohn), Yunis Sablo (Yul Vazquez) and the other members of the Peterson killing task force that she believes the murderer is not human. Of course, she is met with violent disbelief and a borderline nervous breakdown by Glory Maitland (Julianne Nicholson). But it doesn’t mean she’s wrong. Because Holly is absolutely right. Evil is lurking in their godforsaken little town.
*
I was right.
The Outsider is a show you need to binge in order to fully enjoy. Not only The One About the Yiddish Vampire is a great episode, but it redeems the slow burning first half of the season AND manages to improve on a crucial elements of Stephen King’s novel. In other words, it lives up to the very promise of making an Outsider miniseries. I haven’t felt this much vindicated for watching television in a long time. Let me explain:
In the novel, the scene where Holly reveals the existence of El Cuco is an absolute joke. She puts a VHS on an old Mexican movie in the VCR, presses PLAY and tells the task force: “Look, we’re fighting this creature from a fictional movie featuring luchador detectives” and she never really has to press the issue. Everyone in the room starts shooting the shit about literary monsters, dopplegangers and goes like: “Oh, I guess we’re fighting the boogeyman now” within twelve pages or so. It’s very short and kind of stupid. By the end of the book, you’ve almost forgotten it.
What makes the big reveal so efficient in the show is that you come into meeting equipped with half a season of following Holly around, knowing what she’s seen and how she’ll be received. It’s an inevitable tragedy for everybody involved and you’ll already emotionally bound to it, because you’ve seen these characters go through hell already and being controlled by forces they don’t understand. It’s brilliant writing. Most of The One About the Yiddish Vampire consists in them talking themselves into Holly’s hypothesis while evil lurks incredibly close to their lives.
How close is it exactly? Well, Holly and Jack Hoskins (the great, great Marc Menchaca) start having some serious-ass hallucinations in broad daylight.
Speaking of which, psychological horror is another thing The One About the Yiddish Vampire does well. It doesn’t do it EXTREMELY well, but director Karyn Kusama and screenwriter Jessie Nickson-Lopez drummed up a handful of genuinely creepy moments, like the one with Jack Hoskins illustrated in the header of this article. Horror is at its most effective when the explanation to what you’re seeing isn’t obvious. Whatever you can come up with in your mind will terrorize you more than the actual explanation. Because it feeds on your own fears.
In The One About the Yiddish Vampire, Jack is constantly confronted to his deepest fears. It culminates with a bizarre showdown with his dead mom, where Kusama is valiantly trying to make an elderly, invisible foe terrifying. The scene works better than, let’s say the It Follows invisible foe scenes… but it doesn’t quite work. What makes El Cuco’s relationship to Jack so scary is that he forces him to do things. Maybe if ghost mom forced Jack to self-mutilate instead of beating the shit out of him like a coked-up mafia goon, it might’ve worked better.
Anyway, I really liked this episode. The One About the Yiddish Vampire is a tremendous payoff for those who’ve stuck by the show’s throughout a slow moving first half and welcomed change of pace from existential dread to psychological horror. It has a good thing going now. If you weren’t already watching The Outsider, it’s now worth binging the first six episodes in order to prepare for what’s coming up.
