Dear Watchers,
“We’re all thinking it,” Maya Hawke says ominously. “Don’t … go … in … there.”
Hawke is not sharing these cautionary words in an episode of “Stranger Things.” In Season 2 of another Netflix series, “Nightmares of Nature,” she’s warning a 4-month-old opossum not to wander into a dangerous space in an abandoned animal lab.
The actress serves as narrator of this nature docuseries that’s draped in the aesthetics of a Blumhouse horror flick. (Jason Blumhouse, the founder and chief executive of Hollywood’s premier fear factory, is an executive producer.) The concept is simple but clever: Each season follows a few animals as they attempt to survive conflicts with their jungle or woodland neighbors, who often see them as prey.
“Nature is full of wonder and beauty,” Hawke explains. “But for the creatures who live out in the wild, it’s also full of monsters. And the sooner you figure that out, the better your chances are of staying alive.” Basically, “Nightmares of Nature” is what it would look like if Ryan Murphy made “American Horror Story: David Attenborough.”
The scary-story conventions are laid on pretty thick in these three episodes, which follow the equally concise first season released last month. A disclaimer at the beginning of the season states: “For the safety of our heroes and monsters some scenes have been dramatized. All animal behaviors are natural.” Certainly the overarching story is a contrivance, tracking the three leads — the opossum, a baby iguana and a jumping spider — as they travel from their respective habitats, through the Central American jungle and eventually into the abandoned lab, where they have to figure out how to escape. (For the record, the credits of each episode also state that “No animals were harmed in the making of this series.”)
Extreme close-ups and whiplash editing often magnify the tension. A scene in which the iguana attempts to swim away from a caiman, for example, is shot from underwater like a sequence in “Jaws.” (The director Charlotte Lathane has several nature documentaries in her filmography.) There are some mild gross-out moments, too, including our opossum slurping down a bunch of maggots and a parasitic wasp taking out a victim. But the series isn’t too extreme in that regard, and some scientific facts are sprinkled between the jump scares. Did you know that boa constrictors can birth up to 60 live babies in one go? I didn’t either.
The element that ties this wholesome-yet-creepy enterprise together is Hawke’s narration, which alternates between curious, macabre and fascin