Why Hbo S Chernobyl Is 2019 S Most Vital Terrifying And Relevant Horror Story

Why HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ Is 2019’s Most Vital, Terrifying And Relevant Horror Story

By Rafael Motamayor/June 6, 2019 10:30 am EST

A week before TV viewers witnessed a dragon burning thousands of people to death in Game of Thrones, and a couple of weeks before Godzilla fought Ghidora and Mothra stole our hearts in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, HBO released not only the best depiction of the dangers of radiation, but also the most terrifying TV series in years. The Haunting of Hill House made us cry and scream, but Chernobyl will haunt our collective nightmares for weeks to come.If you are not old enough to remember the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as it happened on April 26, 1986, you probably learned about it via the lens of popular culture. In 2019 most people know what Chernobyl is, yet not everyone knows what exactly happened of how it affected the people living close to Reactor Number 4 at the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station. It is in this space of uncertainty that creator, writer and showrunner Craig Mazin thrives.

Horror through sacrifice

Because of the enormity of the nuclear calamity, the Soviet government had to rely on thousands upon thousands of people to clear up the area and ensure that the radiation wouldn’t spread to the rest of Europe. This is where Chernobyl shows both the heroism of the volunteers that fought this crisis, and the horrors they faced. If you haven’t yet, do go through Slava Malamud’s Twitter threads giving a Russian perspective on each episode of the miniseries. When writing on episode four, “The Happiness of All Mankind”, Malamud comments on Russian collectivism, and how it values the whole of the nation way more than individual lives. This is an ideology that permeates through the miniseries, as Legasov and Central Committee member Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) are forced to ask volunteer after volunteer to give up their life in gruesome ways in order to stop the catastrophe.Consider the closing moments of the second episode of Chernobyl, “Please Remain Calm,” in which three brave men, mechanical engineer Alexei Ananenko, senior engineer Valeri Bespalov and shift supervisor Boris Baranov volunteer to dive into radio-contaminated water beneath the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Under the exploded and exposed reactor was a huge pool of water that, when in touch with the open core, would allegedly create a second steam explosion that would destroy the other three reactors and leave Europe uninhabitable. These men, outfitted in protective suits and gas masks, venture into the darkness of the building’s basements in search of the valves that would drain the contaminated waters.Dubbed by history as “The Suicide Squad”, Chernobyl shows the dread and claustrophobia these men felt, who walked half-submerged in contaminated water to find what is pretty much a needle in a haystack. Johan Renck’s exquisite direction turns these short scenes into a fully fledged horror movie, as the only light we see is the dim light of a flashlight that guides the brave men through a maze of valves and pipes, and the only sound we hear is the men’s laboring breathing and the radiation detector’s constant ticking. It is like a scene taken straight from Alien, only with an invisible monster that kills you more slowly and painfully. Not only is that a horrifying scene in and of itself, but the moments leading up to it where Legasov has to explain to a group of engineers that they’ll die horrible and painful deaths if they accept the assignment is equally as haunting.When we finally check back with the Vasily, the other firefighters, and the engineers who worked in the control room the night of the explosion, we see their hair gone, including their eyebrows. The skin on most of them covered in discolored patches of red, green and even blue tones. When Lyudmilla finally gets to see her husband, she barely recognizes him. It’s a marvel of make-up and prosthetics effects, as we see the flesh on Vasily looking almost translucid before turning black and finally liquefying due to the massive radiation. Their sacrifice complete, their deaths looking like straight out of a body horror movie. But it’s real.Chernobyl excels at injecting terror into the most benign of things, turning the sight of children playing outside into an ominous warning of what lies beneath, or the swaying of tree branches looking like a better, scarier, more real version of The Happening. The more men we see walking into what will later be known as the Exclusion Zone, the area surrounding the power plant, the more dread we feel. “If not us, then who?” seems to be a question asked a lot in the miniseries, as we see several of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who worked in the Exclusion Zone to prevent the disaster from expanding. Among them were a group of miners tasked with digging a relief tunnel to prevent a bigger catastrophe, who work in temperatures above 120 degrees Fahrenheit without any type of radiation shielding.Those miners, among other workers and volunteers, became known as “liquidators”, which included a squadron responsible for finding and killing all abandoned household pets in the Exclusion Zone because they also were contaminated, a sequence I found so upsetting I can’t even dwell on it here.Chernobyl excels at portraying not only the physical and body horror that these men and women experienced, but also the psychological horror inflicted on them. In one standout scene that’s guaranteed to make your blood race, we follow a team of liquidators tasking with removing as much heavily radioactive graphite as possible from the roof of the plant. They must do this within a 90-second window before the radiation makes them collapse. We see wave after wave being sent out, scrambling to do their jobs knowing that the air itself is quickly killing them. There is no need for a literal, visible monster or a horde of zombies, because we have seen what happens when the mission fails, and they get overrun by the radiation.Before the miniseries, the Exclusion Zone had become a fertile ground for horror movies and videogames like Chernobyl Diaries and S.T.A.L.K.E.R, but in the end, none of them came close to replicating the excruciating horror that HBO and Sky UK’s Chernobyl depicts. Cellular-killing radiation and the lies that allowed it to spread are terrifying enough, and deadly enough, to haunt our dreams and make sure nothing like this ever happens again. As far as horror TV series go, Chernobyl is as real as it gets.

Why HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ Is 2019’s Most Vital, Terrifying And Relevant Horror Story

By Rafael Motamayor/June 6, 2019 10:30 am EST

A week before TV viewers witnessed a dragon burning thousands of people to death in Game of Thrones, and a couple of weeks before Godzilla fought Ghidora and Mothra stole our hearts in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, HBO released not only the best depiction of the dangers of radiation, but also the most terrifying TV series in years. The Haunting of Hill House made us cry and scream, but Chernobyl will haunt our collective nightmares for weeks to come.If you are not old enough to remember the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as it happened on April 26, 1986, you probably learned about it via the lens of popular culture. In 2019 most people know what Chernobyl is, yet not everyone knows what exactly happened of how it affected the people living close to Reactor Number 4 at the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station. It is in this space of uncertainty that creator, writer and showrunner Craig Mazin thrives.

Horror through foreknowledge

Horror through exposition

Horror through sacrifice

Because of the enormity of the nuclear calamity, the Soviet government had to rely on thousands upon thousands of people to clear up the area and ensure that the radiation wouldn’t spread to the rest of Europe. This is where Chernobyl shows both the heroism of the volunteers that fought this crisis, and the horrors they faced. If you haven’t yet, do go through Slava Malamud’s Twitter threads giving a Russian perspective on each episode of the miniseries. When writing on episode four, “The Happiness of All Mankind”, Malamud comments on Russian collectivism, and how it values the whole of the nation way more than individual lives. This is an ideology that permeates through the miniseries, as Legasov and Central Committee member Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) are forced to ask volunteer after volunteer to give up their life in gruesome ways in order to stop the catastrophe.Consider the closing moments of the second episode of Chernobyl, “Please Remain Calm,” in which three brave men, mechanical engineer Alexei Ananenko, senior engineer Valeri Bespalov and shift supervisor Boris Baranov volunteer to dive into radio-contaminated water beneath the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Under the exploded and exposed reactor was a huge pool of water that, when in touch with the open core, would allegedly create a second steam explosion that would destroy the other three reactors and leave Europe uninhabitable. These men, outfitted in protective suits and gas masks, venture into the darkness of the building’s basements in search of the valves that would drain the contaminated waters.Dubbed by history as “The Suicide Squad”, Chernobyl shows the dread and claustrophobia these men felt, who walked half-submerged in contaminated water to find what is pretty much a needle in a haystack. Johan Renck’s exquisite direction turns these short scenes into a fully fledged horror movie, as the only light we see is the dim light of a flashlight that guides the brave men through a maze of valves and pipes, and the only sound we hear is the men’s laboring breathing and the radiation detector’s constant ticking. It is like a scene taken straight from Alien, only with an invisible monster that kills you more slowly and painfully. Not only is that a horrifying scene in and of itself, but the moments leading up to it where Legasov has to explain to a group of engineers that they’ll die horrible and painful deaths if they accept the assignment is equally as haunting.When we finally check back with the Vasily, the other firefighters, and the engineers who worked in the control room the night of the explosion, we see their hair gone, including their eyebrows. The skin on most of them covered in discolored patches of red, green and even blue tones. When Lyudmilla finally gets to see her husband, she barely recognizes him. It’s a marvel of make-up and prosthetics effects, as we see the flesh on Vasily looking almost translucid before turning black and finally liquefying due to the massive radiation. Their sacrifice complete, their deaths looking like straight out of a body horror movie. But it’s real.Chernobyl excels at injecting terror into the most benign of things, turning the sight of children playing outside into an ominous warning of what lies beneath, or the swaying of tree branches looking like a better, scarier, more real version of The Happening. The more men we see walking into what will later be known as the Exclusion Zone, the area surrounding the power plant, the more dread we feel. “If not us, then who?” seems to be a question asked a lot in the miniseries, as we see several of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who worked in the Exclusion Zone to prevent the disaster from expanding. Among them were a group of miners tasked with digging a relief tunnel to prevent a bigger catastrophe, who work in temperatures above 120 degrees Fahrenheit without any type of radiation shielding.Those miners, among other workers and volunteers, became known as “liquidators”, which included a squadron responsible for finding and killing all abandoned household pets in the Exclusion Zone because they also were contaminated, a sequence I found so upsetting I can’t even dwell on it here.Chernobyl excels at portraying not only the physical and body horror that these men and women experienced, but also the psychological horror inflicted on them. In one standout scene that’s guaranteed to make your blood race, we follow a team of liquidators tasking with removing as much heavily radioactive graphite as possible from the roof of the plant. They must do this within a 90-second window before the radiation makes them collapse. We see wave after wave being sent out, scrambling to do their jobs knowing that the air itself is quickly killing them. There is no need for a literal, visible monster or a horde of zombies, because we have seen what happens when the mission fails, and they get overrun by the radiation.Before the miniseries, the Exclusion Zone had become a fertile ground for horror movies and videogames like Chernobyl Diaries and S.T.A.L.K.E.R, but in the end, none of them came close to replicating the excruciating horror that HBO and Sky UK’s Chernobyl depicts. Cellular-killing radiation and the lies that allowed it to spread are terrifying enough, and deadly enough, to haunt our dreams and make sure nothing like this ever happens again. As far as horror TV series go, Chernobyl is as real as it gets.