It Came From Netflix Instant: DARKNET (2013-14)

The premise for the Canadian TV show "Darknet" isn't the freshest, and sounds an awful lot like the plot of feardotcom, William Malone's disappointing rip-off of The Ring.  It's a series of loosely connected fables centering around a website that features grotesque mutilations, maimings, snuff films, all things which we hold near and dear to our hearts.  Everyone who visits the website becomes roped into a macabre underworld.

It's silly, but the show is actually a lot of fun, in a way that not many horror TV shows have been since "Tales from the Crypt." Each episode consists of several threads involving not only murder, but the sensationalizing of violence through the internet, and viral video in particular.  A medical student suspects there to be an intruder in her house.  A businesswoman thinks she spies a peeping tom outside her hotel room.  A woman receives a series of e-mails with surveillance footage of people being murdered.  The threads are slowly revealed to tie together in interesting and subtle ways, occasionally across episodes.

As with all anthologies, the effectiveness of each story varies, but none overstays its welcome.  "Darknet" also doesn't have same problem as, for instance, The ABCs of Death, which limited its entries to 5 minutes and thus didn't give any of them the time to build suspense or mood.  Since the stories in each "Darknet" are tonally similar and interwoven with one another, the atmosphere and tension are allowed to build gradually.

The first episode, written and directed by Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Splice), is an appropriate hook for the remaining five episodes.  Episode 3 has the most memorable sequence, in which a smug salesman is tailed in the street by an odd stranger.  Episode 4 is the weakest, hinging on a hospital plot line that's more predictable than the rest (though it features a secondary story about breast implants gone wrong that's a must see).  The final episode of the season (directed by The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh's Rodrigo Gudiño) is a knockout of a closer, taking the concept of internet trolling to a whole new level.

"Darknet" is available on Netflix Instant.