Day Three: Fringe (FOX, Tuesdays, 9PM)

Ok, so it’s not a movie; but Fox’s new science fiction show from JJ Abrams of (most recently) Lost and Cloverfield fame can get your heartbeat raised as much as anything else worth viewing during the Halloween season, and frankly, most of it is just as—if not more—jarring.

The basic premise of Fringe is the following: Specific sector of FBI is dedicated to investigating peculiar happenings—often referred to as “The Pattern”—with the help of a crazy old genius, and his son who seems to only be involved because his father is so crazy that he’s in his son’s custody. There’s also a lot of evidence that most of “The Pattern” is a result of experiments the old genius did decades ago in his Harvard-based lab, where he shared space with another genius who, instead of going crazy, patented most of his ideas and is now a rich genius. I never got into the X-Files, though evidence is strong that if I started watching it now, I would enjoy it. Having said that Fringe seems to be a lot like the X-Files, but instead of aliens, science is the cause of the weirdness.

And make no mistake: things are very, very weird. Spooky even. Like most shows, each episode of Fringe begins with some sort of catalyst, followed by the opening theme. Fringe’s opening theme is bright and happy, accompanied with bizarre images. It’s a great sensory piece that offers conflict: I hear happy, I see crazy. Isn’t that what Halloween is? What makes us happier than being able to escape reality—even if we’re escaping somewhere that we eventually realize we don’t want to be (when it's finally too late)?

Every episode thus far (four have aired since mid-September) has featured some escape from reality that we’d all hate to be experiencing, yet the world in which it takes place is very much our own. If the psychosis of that isn’t “Halloween enough” for you, consider that peoples’ faces melt, others get trapped like “mosquitoes in amber,” bizarre men read other peoples’ thoughts, serial killers eat flesh, and those you thought you could trust turn out to be the exact people you can’t.

It might not be a movie, but for an hour each week, Fringe succeeds in bringing out the most frightening of October thoughts.

Score: 4 out of 5 murderous experiments.