The Small Town Hell of WIDOW'S BAY (2026)

Widow's Bay, the 2026 horror-comedy series on Apple TV, gives viewers plenty of reasons to shudder with its darkly funny evocation of 70s and 80s horror tropes, and fans of classic horror movies from those decades can revel in the tributes to Stephen King, John Carpenter, and Jaws (1975), among many others. Over the course of the first season's ten episodes, the monsters range from immortal serial killers, hungry demonic entities, and sea hags to the locals themselves, who might be willing to do anything to break the curse that grips their island. The unfolding of the larger plot pulls the series further into absolute horror as we learn more about the nature and history of that curse, but one of the scariest things about Widow's Bay - both the show and the setting - is the lifelong isolation of anyone unlucky enough to be born on the island. Like the Hotel California, Widow's Bay is a place where you can check out, but if you're a native, you can never, ever leave. While many horror movies focus on the insular, corrupted nature of small town life, Widow's Bay imagines a small town whose inescapable borders make it an especially chilling image of hell on earth.

All of the show's characters are forced to grapple with the implications of this particular element of the island's cursed nature. The series stars Matthew Rhys as Tom Loftis, who was not born in Widow's Bay but spent his summers there as a child and now lives on the island as the town's mayor. His dead wife, however, was a native, as is their restless teenage son, Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick). Tom wants to bring tourists to the island even though he should know better, and his efforts are forcefully criticized by local Wyck Crawford (Stephen Root), who was also born in the town. The sheriff, Bechir Clemmons (Kevin Carroll), is a recent arrival, and he soon gets fed up with the creepy events taking place, but if his wife, Chelle (Sipiwe Moyo), gives birth to their first child in Widow's Bay, the sheriff's family will also become permanent residents whether they like it or not.

The trope of "there's something horribly wrong with this small town" is extremely common in horror, with Widow's Bay drawing particular inspiration from John Carpenter's 1980 classic, The Fog, in which the sins of the founders literally come back to haunt the community's present day inhabitants, but also Halloween (1978) and The Shining (1980), among others. There's a strong evocation of Jaws, too, thanks to the mayor's willingness to put both residents and tourists at risk, with the connection to Spielberg's iconic blockbuster made especially obvious in the seventh episode, "Seasickness." There are, in fact, lots of things horribly wrong with Widow's Bay, and we only get full episodes about some of them in the first season. There's a haunted hotel, a predatory sea hag, a serial killer called The Boogeyman, the town's cursed founder, an ominous church bell that shouldn't be able to ring, and a mysterious underground chamber, just to name a few of the more prominently featured terrors. Casually tossed lines from locals hint at centuries of similar weirdness, from the catastrophe-filled genealogy recited by Rosemary (Dale Dickey) to comments from the elderly Ruth (K Callan), who talks about the bizarre fates met by her family members and friends over the decades. (I really hope we're going to get a second season episode about the guy who was bitten by an animal and then became that animal.) Whatever can be scary and wrong with a small town, Widow's Bay has it, so much so that part of the dark comedy stems from the sheer variety of horrors one little island can contain.

Most people, of course, wouldn't choose to stay in such an awful and dangerous place, but the real knife-twist of Widow's Bay is that native-born islanders cannot physically leave without dying as a result. For every person who has ever escaped their own personal small town hell, this component of the horror story is by far the most disturbing. Like a lot of ambitious youngsters from the rural South, I left the small town where I grew up as soon as possible and would never move back, so the idea that I couldn't leave a place like that is absolute nightmare fuel. I wasn't even born in the town I longed to escape, but still the show's depiction of permanent imprisonment in an isolated community fills me with dread. In most horror stories, the survivors escape the cursed location, but Widow's Bay never lets its children break away, as we see depicted in several tragic incidents over the course of the season. Tom's foolhardy desire to bring tourism to the island is partly the result of his knowledge that his son is a prisoner there, and Tom thinks he can improve Evan's life by getting a little more of the outside world to come to him. That, however, ends up being more of a "misery loves company" situation, as the tourists inevitably encounter some of the island's terrors in the episodes "Beach Reads" and "Emergency Shelter." They, at least, can depart the island and never return, but it remains to be seen if locals like Evan and Wyck will ever be able to say goodbye to Widow's Bay. The show will undoubtedly maintain this worst and most central aspect of the town's cursed nature until the very end so that viewers and characters alike continue to experience the claustrophobic terror of being trapped in a place that wants to destroy them. My fellow small town escapees might find those future seasons easier to experience far from their own personal hells, preferably in the safe harbors of their own choosing.

If you've enjoyed the first season of Widow's Bay, be sure to check out some of the horror movies that inspired it, starting with The Fog. Kate Dippold, the creator and showrunner of Widow's Bay, co-wrote the 2016 Ghostbusters movie and wrote the 2023 horror-comedy treatment of Haunted Mansion, which I did think was a big improvement over the 2003 version starring Eddie Murphy. For a truly terrifying story about a small town nobody can escape, read the original version or see the 1961 Twilight Zone adaptation of Jerome Bixby's short story, "It's a Good Life." Peaksville, Ohio, almost makes Widow's Bay look cozy in comparison, but we'll have to wait to see what's actually inhabiting that strange container in the underground chamber.

Cult Classics: THE FOG (1980)

Horror movies got much gorier after the advent of the slasher, and the most iconic chillers of the 1980s tend to lean into that genre and its enthusiasm for arterial spray, but John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) is an atmospheric throwback to the subtler style of horror master Val Lewton, the hands-on producer (and often uncredited writer) behind moody RKO masterpieces like Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). The Fog is a very different picture from other Carpenter projects like Halloween (1978), The Thing (1982), and They Live (1988), which is the reason it's one of my favorite movies from the director's oeuvre. Fans of eerie but bloodless classic horror will find a lot to appreciate in the way this movie unfolds its tale of long-simmering supernatural revenge, and those looking for more female-led stories will enjoy the emphasis on Adrienne Barbeau as the DJ heroine with Jamie Lee Curtis and her mother, Janet Leigh, also playing major roles.

Barbeau leads as Stevie Wayne, a late-night DJ in the town of Antonio Bay. Stevie's overnight shifts in a lighthouse allow her to witness and report the arrival of a mysterious fog that coincides with the disappearance of three local fishermen, including the husband of town mayor Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh). As the coastal California town prepares to celebrate its centennial, the local priest, Father Patrick Malone (Hal Holbrook), discovers his grandfather's diary and learns that a cabal of six founders started the community with a shocking act of betrayal, which is now literally coming back to haunt the townspeople on the hundredth anniversary of the crime. Meanwhile, hitchhiker Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis) gets a ride into Antonio Bay with town resident Nick (Tom Atkins), and their efforts to find out what happened to the fishermen lead them to numerous close encounters with the supernatural threat.

Despite reshoots that bowed to the increasing expectation for gory ghosts and peril, The Fog remains a classic haunt at its core, with the eerie titular fog getting a lot more screen time than the spectral mariners. The opening campfire tale, also a late addition, sets the mood with John Houseman telling a group of children about the wreck of the Elizabeth Dane, a ship carrying a colony of leprosy victims to the bay. Between the introductory ghost story and the diary found by Father Malone, we know pretty much everything we need to know about why these murderous spirits are emerging from the fog to avenge themselves a century later. The fog and its ghosts are not so much mysterious as they are unstoppable, a conjoined force of fate that moves at its own pace, slowly but surely descending on Antonio Bay until the town's debt is fully paid. The goriest scenes happen early, with the murders of the fishermen and the subsequent discovery of just one corpse by Elizabeth and Nick, but these are pretty tame compared to Jaws (1975) or other horror films of the era, and mostly the mariners are shadowy figures who drag their victims away into the fog. John Carpenter has talked about his desire to make a movie inspired by Val Lewton's subtle but chilling horror classics (see this 2022 Collider article for more on that), and it's easy to see their influence even after the additions meant to appeal to the horror-going audiences of 1980.

While I love the Lewton-inspired atmosphere of The Fog, I also appreciate its commitment to agency and variety for its female characters. Co-writers Carpenter and Debra Hill offer us more women than men as our central characters, with Carpenter's wife at the time, Adrienne Barbeau, in heroic mode as a single mother who strives to protect the community and also find a way to save her young son as the fog closes in on him and his elderly babysitter. In a different horror movie, Jamie Lee Curtis's hitchhiking Elizabeth might be condemned to a gory death in her underwear, but instead she's smart, empathetic, and able to recover quickly from each close call. Janet Leigh doesn't have any scenes with her daughter until the third act, but her character is also presented as a fully realized individual, and despite her small town political status she's far more likeable than the mayor in Jaws. She's prickly with her assistant but grateful for her all the same, and she strives to forge ahead in her mayoral duties even as she worries about her missing husband. The two male leads, Hal Holbrook and Tom Atkins, seem perfectly comfortable with their female costars, and their characters both eschew the casual sexism exhibited by the fishermen and weatherman Dan O'Bannon (Charles Cyphers). Not every character who gets killed by the ghosts deserves that fate, but the picture doesn't see women as obvious victims just because they're women, and several of the male victims give us little reason to mourn their loss.

For more great ghost stories, try The Uninvited (1944), The Haunting (1963), The Changeling (1980),  and Lady in White (1988). Adrienne Barbeau also appears in Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981), Wes Craven's Swamp Thing (1982), and George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982). Jamie Lee Curtis became an iconic scream queen in the 1980s thanks to films like The Fog, the Halloween series, and Prom Night (1980), but over the decades she has proven herself a versatile actress and great comedic star, eventually winning an Academy Award for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Her mother, Janet Leigh, is of course best remembered for Psycho (1960). For my other favorite John Carpenter movies, see Escape from New York, Christine (1983), and Big Trouble in Little China (1986). 

As of October 2025, you can watch a wide range of John Carpenter films on the Criterion Channel, which is celebrating the director with a curated collection of his work. 

See also: "Hogarthian Gothic: Imagining the Madhouse in Val Lewton's BEDLAM"