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The Abandons to With Love, Meghan: Holiday Celebration – the seven best shows to stream this week

The Abandons to With Love, Meghan: Holiday Celebration – the seven best shows to stream this week

Gillian Anderson’s wealthy landowner threatens rural smallholders in a zippily entertaining period drama set in 1850’s Oregon, while the Sussexes’ rental mansion is awash with enough festive kitsch to bother even Santa As his biker epic Sons of Anarchy proved, Kurt Sutter is helpless to resist the iconography of the American outlaw. This western is set in the 1850s, a gritty era of cattle rustlers, blood vendettas and murders with pitchforks. In rural Oregon, the brutal Van Ness family are threatening smallholders as they expand their territory. Will the locals join forces to protect their homesteads? Lena Headey stars as sad-eyed Irish emigre Fiona Nolan, a woman who cannot bear children but has gathered a band of orphans around her. Looming menacingly over her is Constance Van Ness (Gillian Anderson), an amusingly one-note villain. Pure hokum but it rattles along entertainingly. Netflix, from Thursday 4 December Continue reading...

Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror review – dark tales with a sting

Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror review – dark tales with a sting

This collection of macabre stories set across England explores class, hierarchy and the enduring nature of inequality Folk horror may have had a dramatic resurgence in recent years, but it has always been the backbone of much of our national storytelling. A new anthology of 10 stories set across England, Bog People, brings together some of the most accomplished names in the genre. In her introduction, editor Hollie Starling describes an ancient ritual in a Devon village: the rich throw heated pennies from their windows, watching those in need burn their fingers. Folk horror by its nature is inherently connected to class and hierarchy. Reverence for tradition is a double-edged sword – or a burning-hot coin. The rain stops, the sun shows, another night comes dark and flowing with energy. I don’t sleep; I feel my way through the landscape, the trees that reach and catch my shirt sleeves, holding on to me, saving me from slipping on mossy roots, the unfriendly gorse keeping me at a distance, saying don’t step here, stopping me from tearing my feet on its throne of thorns. Stars alive, alight, I wish you could see them… First light fattened like a dying star and formed the signature of an industrial town already at toil predawn, its factory stacks belching the new day black, the mills dyeing the forked-tongue river sterile inside that Hellmouth north of Halifax where paternal cotton kings had housed their workers in spoked rows of blind back-to-backs quick to tilt and rot. Continue reading...