Why would a serial killer use Betamax? This question is very specific, but “What We Found Out There” answers it! I’m leery to give away the twist on this one because it’s … okay- it’s not amazing, but it’s not bad either. I would describe this short that way too: it’s…okay, not great, but aggressively mediocre. “What We Found Out There” is the six hours of sleep, the two dollar win on a five dollar scratch ticket, the soft cooked bacon, the flat soda, or the tie game of films.
Two friends go hiking and find an injured hiker who has a bag of Betamax tapes. They go straight to the police? Nope. Call in emergency services? Nope, that’s for wimps! The two guys go to their creepy friend’s house who has Betamax capabilities and they watch the tapes and discover that they are films of a man’s murders! Yes, the tapes are the recordings of a prolific serial killer! But whodunit?
The film does answer whodunit, but how? If you were expecting an answer on how, tough cookies! You heard me! Should you watch this? Why not? I mean, it’s not the worst thing I’ve seen. You won’t love it, but it is a solid mid.
“Butchering people is hard work. Physically and mentally.” — Ed Kemper
The scariest thing in Mindhunter isn’t a crime scene. It’s how quickly a conversation with a murderer can start to feel normal. Someone makes a joke, offers an observation, or answers a question with surprising thoughtfulness, and for a moment you settle into the exchange. Then comes a detail that makes your stomach turn, delivered in exactly the same conversational tone. Across its two seasons, the Netflix series repeatedly catches you making that adjustment. You become comfortable listening to people whose actions should make comfort impossible. That’s where the show finds its particular kind of horror: not in making monsters seem alien, but in showing how easily they can sound like anyone else.
Created by Joe Penhall, with David Fincher serving as an executive producer and a defining directorial presence, Mindhunter draws from John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit. It follows the early development of criminal-profiling research within the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit through agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench and psychologist Wendy Carr. We’ve watched countless investigators study killers and connect behavioral patterns, but what feels different here is the uncertainty. These characters aren’t applying an established formula. They’re trying to determine whether their questions can produce anything useful at all.
That gives the procedural material an unusual texture. Holden and Bill travel, negotiate access, conduct interviews, and deal with colleagues who don’t necessarily see the value in their work. Wendy wants to turn their encounters into research rather than a collection of gruesome anecdotes. The process can be repetitive, awkward, and bureaucratic, which makes it convincing. Instead of treating profiling as a supernatural gift possessed by the smartest person in the room, Mindhunter presents it as a developing discipline shaped by observation, disagreement, and mistakes. Getting someone to talk is only the beginning. Knowing what to do with the answers is another problem entirely.
Unlike Se7en, Mindhunter doesn’t surround its characters with a grimy, nihilistic atmosphere that makes the entire world feel rotten. Nor is its main driving force the obsessive, cat-and-mouse pursuit that consumes the investigators in Zodiac. Its horror comes from somewhere quieter: the suggestion that beneath everyday normalcy lurks a darker, much darker world. Ed Kemper, Dennis Rader—the BTK killer—Wayne Williams, and Charles Manson weren’t inventions designed to populate a nightmare. They existed and walked among the masses. Their histories aren’t interchangeable, but their presence throughout the series punctures the comforting idea that dangerous people must somehow announce themselves as dangerous.
Calling Mindhunter a crime thriller or police procedural, then, only gets you so far. It has horror in its DNA and both feet firmly planted in the genre. That isn’t simply because it deals with murder and sexual violence. It makes normalcy itself feel unreliable. A calm voice, a familiar routine, or an apparently reasonable explanation tells you remarkably little about the person behind it. These people occupied ordinary spaces, held conversations, and participated in a world that didn’t always recognize what they were. There’s no supernatural threat to identify and no reassuring boundary separating their world from ours.
The use of the killers’ own recorded words makes that realization harder to shake. Although Mindhunter dramatizes its encounters rather than reconstructing them as a documentary, portions of its interview dialogue draw from actual statements. You aren’t simply hearing a screenwriter invent something horrible for a villain to say. There’s a real person behind the language, someone who found ways to describe, explain, or rationalize appalling acts. The matter-of-fact presentation makes it worse. The show rarely needs to insist that you be disturbed. It simply gives you enough time to understand what you’ve just heard.
Cameron Britton’s Ed Kemper is the clearest expression of that approach. He’s articulate, conversational, and seemingly pleased that someone wants to listen. Britton doesn’t play every exchange as a warning that violence is about to erupt. He lets Kemper be engaging, which creates a more uncomfortable response than constant menace would. You understand Holden’s fascination even while recognizing the danger in it. Kemper’s willingness to talk doesn’t mean he has surrendered control. Sometimes it means he has found another way to exercise it. Britton makes the difference between access and understanding frighteningly easy to miss.
Fincher’s influence is apparent in how patiently these encounters unfold. The controlled framing, subdued interiors, and measured pacing encourage you to notice small changes: a pause, a look, a shift in posture. A room can remain physically unchanged while the balance of power inside it moves somewhere unpleasant. These are horror sequences built around conversation. Nobody needs to jump out of the shadows. The tension comes from proximity and the possibility that the investigators have become more exposed than they realize. They can leave the room, but that doesn’t mean everything they heard stays behind.
Jonathan Groff makes Holden’s confidence both understandable and irritating. His curiosity opens doors, but he starts confusing his ability to provoke a response with an ability to control the encounter. Groff preserves the earnestness beneath that arrogance. Holden wants the work to matter, but he also wants to be right. His frightening encounter with Kemper exposes how little professional enthusiasm can do when intellectual curiosity becomes physical vulnerability. Understanding danger isn’t the same thing as feeling another person take control of your safety.
Holt McCallany’s Bill Tench supplies the weary perspective Holden lacks. He’s practical, skeptical, and more aware that a useful interview can still leave damage behind. His dry humor keeps the series from becoming suffocatingly solemn, but exhaustion always feels close to the surface. The second-season situation involving his adopted son and a toddler’s death brings his professional anxieties home. The parallel sometimes feels overly arranged, yet McCallany grounds it in a father’s helplessness. Anna Torv’s Wendy provides another necessary counterweight, insisting on methods and conclusions that can withstand scrutiny. Her personal story integrates less smoothly, but her presence keeps the project from becoming a celebration of Holden’s instincts.
The Atlanta child-murder investigation pushes those instincts against a reality that refuses to accommodate them. Behavioral patterns collide with racial distrust, political pressure, institutional priorities, and families whose grief cannot be answered by an interesting theory. Holden’s certainty becomes harder to admire when the stakes extend beyond proving his approach works. Meanwhile, the glimpses of BTK quietly undermine any comforting sense of progress. Whatever knowledge the team acquires, other lives continue beyond its awareness. Understanding some offenders doesn’t mean the investigators can recognize or stop them all.
The lack of a third season makes that expanding scope especially frustrating. Fincher has declared Mindhunter finished, citing the difficulty of justifying its production costs against its audience. Instead of reaching a deliberate conclusion, the series stops with important threads still hanging. The recurring glimpses of BTK suggest a longer game that never gets played out, while the futures of Holden, Bill, Wendy, and their developing work remain unresolved. For fans and critics who championed the series, that’s more than the disappointment of losing a favorite show. It’s the frustration of watching something grow more ambitious only to have its possibilities cut short. There’s a difference between deliberately withholding easy answers and losing the opportunity to continue asking the questions.
Still, its unfinished state doesn’t erase what those two seasons accomplished. You can admire the performances, the filmmaking, and the intelligence of its procedural detail, but its lasting effect is less comfortable than admiration. It leaves you thinking about pleasant exchanges and ordinary faces that gave nothing away. Other crime shows let the solution create distance between us and the horror. Mindhunter keeps taking that distance back. By the end, the troubling question isn’t how anyone could sit across from these men and listen. It’s how many people sat across from them before anyone knew what they had done.
“I can’t just roll over, I need to see this thing through.” — Calvin Penney
The scariest thing in Netflix’s Below might be the possibility that the place you call home no longer has a future. Sure, there’s a monster lurking offshore, and the series isn’t shy about putting its characters through some nasty situations. But beneath the creature-feature setup is a more personal story about people struggling to recognize when holding on becomes its own kind of danger. Created by Jesse McKeown, this six-episode series mixes coastal horror, family baggage, and small-town stubbornness into something engaging, even when its storytelling gets a little tangled. It works best when those elements feel like different parts of the same problem.
Set in the Newfoundland community of Snook’s Arm, Below follows Calvin Penney, a widower played by Josh Hartnett whose attachment to the town runs deep. A childhood tragedy involving relocation and the death of his father has left him with understandable reasons to distrust the idea of starting over. Now he makes ends meet alongside his son Wade, harvesting iceberg ice and renting out a room. With his other children coming home for a visit, there’s an opportunity for the family to reconnect. Naturally, this being a monster series, the reunion comes with some unpleasant complications waiting in the water.
That setup gives the show something more substantial than the usual group of strangers stumbling into danger. Calvin already has things to lose before the creature becomes a threat, and not all of them can be protected by simply surviving. His family’s relationship with Snook’s Arm isn’t necessarily the same as his own, which creates tension without requiring anyone to behave like an obvious villain. For Calvin, leaving means surrendering something essential. For others, staying might mean sacrificing a chance at a different life. The monster doesn’t create those disagreements so much as make them impossible to keep putting off.
Hartnett gives the series a reliable emotional anchor. Calvin is warm enough to make his devotion appealing, but he’s also capable of turning that devotion into a burden for everyone around him. Hartnett understands that balance, playing him as someone whose good intentions don’t automatically make his decisions reasonable. You can sympathize with his fear of losing another home while still wanting him to listen when someone challenges him. His Newfoundland accent occasionally becomes a distraction, but the performance underneath it feels grounded. Calvin’s grief matters because it influences how he behaves, not just because the script tells us he has a painful past.
Charlie Heaton adds a useful edge as Wade, whose relationship with his father carries both affection and frustration. Their shared routine suggests closeness, but it also raises questions about how much room either has to move forward. The family material is strongest when it lets those mixed feelings sit without immediately explaining them away. Mackenzie Davis brings a different energy as marine researcher Fonda Howander, giving the mystery an investigative thread beyond Calvin’s personal concerns. She helps connect the disturbing events to something the characters can begin to understand, while the family drama keeps the consequences from becoming purely theoretical.
Snook’s Arm itself is one of the show’s biggest assets. The coastal scenery has an appealing harshness, making it easy to understand both why someone would love living there and why someone else would want out. The town feels isolated before the horror really gets going, and that isolation becomes more oppressive as familiar surroundings turn threatening. There’s a difference between being somewhere quiet and realizing help might be a long way off. Below makes good use of that distinction. Its setting isn’t just attractive background scenery; it shapes the characters’ options and gives their reluctance to leave a believable emotional foundation.
The horror is especially effective when it grows out of ordinary details becoming wrong. Foul-smelling ice, disappearances, and unsettling changes create the sense that something has worked its way into the community before anyone understands its scale. The ocean has always been unpredictable, but now that uncertainty feels actively hostile. Mark Korven’s score helps sustain the unease, while the more grisly material supplies the creature-feature payoff. When the water becomes dangerous, it doesn’t just interrupt the characters’ plans. It undermines the relationship that makes the town possible. Later, the creature side of the story takes some interesting turns that complicate the initial setup without abandoning its sense of danger.
That’s why resettlement is such an effective idea to build the drama around. Residents are considering whether to accept money to leave, and the series gives that decision emotional weight rather than treating it as a simple question of common sense. Calvin’s resistance comes from experience, but experience can also trap someone in an old way of understanding a new crisis. The ecological themes fit naturally alongside that conflict. This is a story about a community facing the possibility that its surroundings can no longer support the life it knows, with a monster giving that anxiety a much more immediate form.
The danger also grows as it becomes clear that certain characters have agendas they aren’t sharing. Without giving away who wants what, those competing interests make an already desperate situation worse for the people still stuck on Snook’s Arm. Surviving isn’t simply a matter of figuring out what’s in the water; it also means navigating people whose priorities may not line up with everyone else’s safety. That adds welcome tension, although the accumulation of secrets and revelations sometimes crowds the storytelling. The later episodes reach for bigger emotional and thematic payoffs, and a little more breathing room would have helped some of those developments land more naturally.
Even with those weaknesses, Below offers more than a disposable run through familiar monster-movie territory. Hartnett holds the emotional center, the coastal atmosphere gives the horror texture, and the town’s uncertain future makes survival mean something beyond escaping the next attack. Its late turns give the creature story another dimension, while the human conflicts keep the threat from feeling comfortably predictable. The strongest material remains the people trying to protect a home while disagreeing about what protecting it actually requires. The creature gives that struggle teeth, but the harder question remains human: how do you know when staying is an act of love, and when it’s just fear of letting go?
I spent a lot of time helping my brother at his general store, the Hollis Country Store, last fall. We talked a lot in between fixing bologna sandwiches for our customers and other general store kinds of things. One day we got to talking about some of our favorite comedians, and we stumbled upon the fact that we both really enjoy comedian Dusty Slay. I had been seeing a lot of his clips on TikTok, so I was just becoming a fan. We swapped some of our favorite bits we’d heard and had a good time. When Christmas was coming around I noticed that Dusty had a show scheduled at a casino in Pocola, OK, on December 26th. Pocola is just across the state line from Fort Smith, Arkansas, so my wife and I bought him and his wife tickets to the show as a Christmas gift. We went with them and had the best time!
This being Labor Day, I thought it would be fun sharing a clip of Dusty analyzing the country song “Hard Workin’ Man” by Brooks and Dunn. It’s one of my favorites. And as a CPA, I truly appreciate its financial humor. Happy Labor Day, my friends!
It’s not quite shark week, but we’re still all in on sharks eating people here at TTSL. I watched this shark v people movie with Lisa and it was pretty fun. It did have a touch of environmentalist gobbledygook, but it was brief enough to ignore. My advice to anyone doing a shark film is to stick to reality: sharks. You don’t need to bring in vampires, werewolves, or climate change to raise the stakes.
see above
There is a category five hurricane that hits a South Carolina town, it breaks the seawall, the town is taken by the sea, and sharks come in to eat everyone. There were some decent tropes to keep the popcorn popping: abusive foster parents, redneck foster kids, a pregnant woman who gives birth, an annoying anxiety-ridden lady who stares at things through the movie and rises mostly to the occasion, and a wise sailor/marine biologist who actually saves the day.
The mean foster parents and some good Samaritans become shark food, but that was about it. I was happy to see the foster parents die, but one of the foster parents was straight up murdered by the foster kids, which made the foster kids less sympathetic to me. Yes, foster dad was a horrible jerk, but there was no reflection on the fact that they killed him. You would’ve thought the abusive foster parent would’ve been well thought of by the director and writer because he was a state subsidized parent. I thought government intervention was supposed to make everything better?
My three big critiques is that there were not enough deaths, some scenes were too bright, and the protagonist did not get to save the day. “Thrash” was low on the body count; it made me wonder if they ran out of money or had to donate half of their money to an NGO. Did it have to be “Sharknado” levels of shark chomping? No, but I think that there were only five deaths in this film and that’s a little light.
The other critique is the lighting; typically, Netflix films are really dark and I don’t mean mood; it’s actually difficult to see. “Thrash” went the other direction and there was clear sunlight in a number of scenes that were supposed to be at night. The director had an environmentalist streak; so, maybe it was purposeful to lower a carbon footprint and use daylight to film? I do not have a good answer because it took me out of the story.
Finally, the anxiety-ridden star, whom I will call Anxious Girl, was more annoying than inspiring. Also the film ended where the Anxious Girl and the pregnant woman needed to be rescued by Anxious Girl’s uncle. I don’t think the writer understood that this was a failure. The Anxious Girl faced her fears and should’ve saved the day, but it was her Uncle, a minor character, who had to save the protagonist and pregnant woman. Was the Anxious Girl annoying? Sure, but she grew as a character and by taking away her chance at true heroism, it made the victory hollow and deflated.
Is the film worth watching? Sure. Like a tinder date missing a left-arm, “Thrash” was all right.
