By all accounts, Shining Vale shouldn’t work as well as it does. It’s a horror-comedy show about a woman who moves to a new town with her family and starts sensing something supernatural about their new house, a house that just so happens to be hundreds of years old, only for her husband to wave it away with some probable explanation. Oh, and she also has a mom who suffered from schizophrenia. It’s horror elements you’ve seen over and over again before, elements that should’ve made the show fun but ultimately forgettable, another entry in the horror genre that blends in too well with the rest.
Somehow, though, Shining Vale manages to be one of my favorite horror offerings of the decade so far, not because it does anything new but because what it does do, it does so impressively well, despite having been done numerous times before. This is even more impressive when you consider that it’s a horror-comedy, a genre that often has trouble balancing out its two opposing natures. Thankfully for Shining Vale, this isn’t a problem: while not all the jokes or the scares work, the comedy never overshadows the horror, the horror never overshadows the comedy, and when the comedy and/or horror fail, they fail on their own merits.
A huge reason why this works is because of the show’s stellar cast. Nearly everyone here from Greg Kinnear to Gus Birney to Mira Sorvino is giving it their all, able to shift their performances to best fit the dramatic scenes to the comedic ones to the suspenseful ones. Even recurring cast members like Sherilyn Fenn, Merrin Dungey, and Judith Light are topping their scenes, despite how little screen time they may have. The show is almost worth watching for the performances alone.
However, the true scene-stealer here is Courtney Cox, who crushes her role as the show’s lead. Luckily for Cox, her character Pat Phelps is a really well-written one. She’s a writer who hasn’t written a book in years hoping to finally be able to write one after moving to a new house, but it isn’t so easy when she’s got problems to deal with like her kids growing sick of her, her marriage slowly falling apart, and her new house is seemingly haunted but she’s the only one who notices.
Yes, it’s another writer trapped in a haunted house, but Pat is written with a surprising amount of depth and Cox’s embodiment of her is top-notch, so much so that you genuinely can’t imagine the character being played by anyone else. The show would be nothing without her — Cox’s performance is mesmerizing to watch, easily being a career-best for the actress. Yes, it’s even better than her performance as Gale Weathers from the Scream franchise. The final episode should cement that opinion for you.
Stylistically, Shining Vale doesn’t always succeed. While it does balance horror and comedy well, the show still has a fair amount of try-hard scenes, scenes so eager to please they come across as quite obnoxious at times. While the episodes are never boring, they are occasionally overwritten, overedited, over stylistic with the camera work, or all three.
The dialogue is ridiculous at times: characters say things or do things that you know in real life would warrant eye rolls from everyone around them. They also curse a lot, and while I usually don’t have a problem with that, it does sometimes feel like the writers think adding curse words to a line of dialogue makes that line funnier or more interesting. The show is usually fast-paced but the pacing is way too fast at certain points — shots and scenes go by so quickly you don’t have time to process what just happened. And there’s some really fun camera work here, but there’s an overabundance of it. One can only take so many dutch angles and rotating shots before it becomes too much.
However, when Shining Vale does succeed, it can be really fun. The creative visuals, the fast editing, and the funny dialogue can often make for very entertaining scenes and every episode offers a generous amount of thrills and suspense. Even if no new ground is being broken, these scenes are still so high energy that it’s hard not to want to watch more and more of the show.
The show is the definition of binge-worthy — if you weren’t following it when the episodes were released week by week, you’d most likely finish every episode in a single night or a weekend, even if you weren’t planning to. While the haunted house setting has been done to death, Shining Vale reminds us why we’re so addicted to these types of horror stories: there’s something so frightening about the thought of otherworldly beings living in your home, where you’re supposed to feel safe.
Finally, there’s the ending, another thing the horror genre is infamous for. Many horror films suffer from cheap cliffhangers, clearly only there to allow for sequels in case the first film becomes successful enough to warrant a franchise. Shining Vale ends on a cliffhanger too but it’s a cliffhanger done right. It doesn’t feel cheap or forced — instead, it opens up so many possibilities for the things the second season could focus on. Shining Vale’s first season may not have been the most consistent throughout its run but it really stuck the landing.
All in all, Shining Vale is a show that doesn’t always succeed, but when it does, it does so remarkably well. Horror fans looking for something new may not find a lot to hold onto with the show, but for horror fans simply looking for a good time and familiar horror tropes being done well, Shining Vale has enough to offer to keep you entertained. Whether it be the cast, the style, or the balance of horror and comedy, you’ll find something to like about the show, even if you have to get through the occasional try-hard moment.
READ MORE: 15 Best Horror Movies of the 2000s
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
