Stream It Or Skip It?

True Haunting, produced by James Wan, is a hybrid of a docuseries and a scripted horror series, with dramatized accounts of paranormal encounters peppered with interviews with the real-life people who had those encounters. The five-episode first season tells two stories: The first three episodes, Neil Rawles, are entitled “Eerie Hall,” and the other two episodes, directed by Luke Watson, are entitled “This House Murdered Me.”

Opening Shot: A man is running in the woods, and some visions are intercut as we go through those woods.

The Gist: “Eerie Hall” is about Chris Di Cesare (Wyatt Dorion), who goes to SUNY Geneseo in upstate New York in the fall of 1984. He’s well-liked around campus, and makes quick friends with his roommate Paul (Ariel Barros) and Jeff Ungar (Rhys Alexander Phillips), whose dorm room is down the hall, and he’s always seen with a camera around his neck.

It doesn’t take long before Chris hears someone whispering his name, whether it’s in his dorm room or even outside while he’s running. As the presence becomes stronger, Chris becomes more despondent and isolated, and when he finally sees glimpses of a paranormal being in his dorm, he turns to Jeff for help.

Besides the dramatic reenactments, Rawles interviews Chris Di Cesare, his father Vito (played by Ralph McLeod in the reenactments) and friends Jeff Ungar, Craig Norris (played by Cooper Levy in the reenactments) and Linda Kalasinski (played by Mackenna Pickersall in the reenactments).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? True Haunting reminds us of the docuseries Files Of The Unexplained.

Our Take: It’s always hard to balance the real and the scripted in horror docuseries that use extensive reenactments to build tension. True Haunting is one of the best we’ve seen, because not only is James Wan an expert at horror, but he and his team treat the stories like horror movies first and docuseries second.

The scripted reenactments in the first episode of the “Eerie Hall” story have a story in mind, and aren’t just treated as vignettes, with the interviews taking care of all of the storytelling. You can see how the paranormal encounters wear Chris down over time, and how the people around him start to worry about his mental health as the school year progresses. Yes, the interviews are also a part of this storytelling. But the interviews and the scripted portions work in tandem and flow together well.

It helps that we get Chris’ perspective, and the story isn’t just his friends and family talking about his emotional decline in the face of these encounters. Even Chris himself questions whether what he’s seeing and hearing his real instead of something that might indicate a mental health issue, but 41 years later, he is definitely the only one who is still convinced that he saw something that is paranormal.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As real-life Chris counts to ten “to put space between you and the moment,” we see reenactment Chris and his roomie Paul confronting a paranormal being. We’re not sure if Paul actually sees them, though.

Sleeper Star: Jeff Ungar and the actor who plays him (Rhys Alexander Phillips) are both thoroughly nerdy (in a good way) and obsessed with cameras (also in a good way).

Most Pilot-y Line: That being said, we find it hard to believe that real-life Jeff had huge posters of cameras in his dorm room and not posters of attractive models, singers or actors (male or female), like most college kids had on their dorm walls (for instance, we had not one but two Married With Children-era posters of Christina Applegate on our dorm wall our freshman year).

Our Call: STREAM IT. True Haunting does a good job of mixing the scripted reenactments and real-life interviews about these paranormal encounters, which is something that’s rare in the horror docuseries genre.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.