Stream It Or Skip It?
Each season of Nightmares Of Nature, narrated by Maya Hawke and produced by Jason Blum, takes on the feel of a horror movie. In the first season, “A Cabin In The Woods,” we follow three creatures as they navigate all the dangers and horrors they face in their natural environments.
Opening Shot: “Nature is full of wonder and beauty,” says narrator Maya Hawke in a slow, haunting tone as butterflies flit around. “But for the creatures who live out in the wild, it’s also full of monsters.”
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The Gist: A pregnant mouse scrambles into the aforementioned cabin, looking for shelter from hawks, snakes, owls and other predators. We also see a young racoon, on his own after being pushed out of the brood by his mother, hunting for food. He’s not quite savvy enough to catch a hognose snake, which defends itself by playing dead and secreting a rotting stink. He barely escapes a huge alligator after finding and eating some alligator eggs. The racoon eventually makes it into the cabin, too, ignoring the decaying dead critter that’s in the attic, a victim of something that invaded the cabin in the past.
We also get to follow a tiny bullfrog, who is still getting used to his new body after his childhood as a tadpole. He doesn’t tend to venture out of his hiding spot, in a rusty pot, all that much, because he has “seen things,” as Hawke says. The odds that any tadpole even gets as far as he has are long, due to all the predators out there. But, as the froglet sees, venturing out as a hopper also has its risks, from other frogs fighting you for mating territory to snakes eating you whole to birds snapping you up with their beaks.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Nightmares Of Nature has a similar feel to another Netflix nature series, Tiny Creatures.
Our Take: Jason Blum is the main executive producer of Nightmares Of Nature, and Nathan Small directs the first season (a second season, Lost In The Jungle, premieres on October 28 and is directed by Charlotte Lathane). So the idea is that the nature show is shot, scored and narrated as if it’s a horror flick. It’s an idea that doesn’t work as well as it could have, despite the efforts of Hawke and cinematography that amps up the drama.
As a disclaimer at the beginning of the episode states, some of what is shot “has been dramatized.” In other words, it’s likely some of these animals were not shot in their natural environments but in the cozy confines of a studio. That’s how Tiny Creatures was shot and it made no bones about it, so we’re glad that the folks at Blumhouse and Pimsoll Productions made sure that we knew they did that, as well, even if “all animal behaviors are natural.” In other words, if something gets eaten, something really gets eaten. No VFX were used, at least as far as we know.
Hawke’s narration is unexpectedly sexy, all things considered. We’re not sure if she was going for “sexy” with her slow, low narration style, but it definitely turns out that way. It is supposed to add tension to scenes, and it does. But she’s so smooth that at times her narration is less scary and tension-filled and more soothing. We definitely don’t think “soothing” was something that any of the filmmakers were going for.
It all gets put together into a package that is supposed to be scary, with many of the usual horror movie conventions that are supposed to make viewers jump, but it never really reaches that level. There have been plenty of nature movie and series scenes where a predator is after the animal that we’ve been following, and they just about always escape. If the protagonist of the story that’s written gets eaten, we’d have no more story, and that’s what we expect to see here, even if the end of the first episode hints that the presence of humans at the cabin will be way more dangerous for our heroes than anything they encounter outside.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: As our heroes rest in the cabin, a car drives its way. “Here, in the real world, they’re about to face their worst nightmare,” says Hawke.
Sleeper Star: The closeups of the animals are fantastic, even if they were done in a studio, so we give this to the cinematographers and the wranglers that helped get the animals in the position to be filmed.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Nightmares Of Nature tells a good story, and can be fun at times to watch it play out. Just don’t expect to be scared while watching it.
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.
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