Marvel Studios is airing Agatha All Along on Disney+. While the WandaVision spin-off seems like the perfect fit for spooky season, I’m becoming skeptical if the series will deliver on its horror premise.
WandaVision and Agatha All Along Have a Genre Problem
WandaVision is no doubt one of the most inventive projects in all of the MCU. As the first Disney+ Marvel project, WandaVision leveraged Television as a medium to tell a unique story. The series’ most fascinating aspect was its tour through decades of TV sitcom tropes, ranging from homages of I Love Lucy to Modern Family. This was more than just a gimmick, and was instrumental to the telling of the series story. Until it wasn’t.
WandaVision soon let go of its intriguing premise and format in favor of a more standard MCU finale, which saw Wanda and Agatha fighting in a sloppy CGI final battle.
Agatha All Along also briefly dove into genre homage, with a section of its premiere emulating gritty detective dramas (pictured above). However, my greatest fear for the rest of the series is that it too will shed the spooky aesthetic and energy it has been marketed with in favor of making way for Agatha and/or her supporting characters to appear in future MCU projects.
How Agatha All Along Works Against Its Own Tension
The thing that often makes any work in the horror genre effective is its tension. There is great fear in the unknown, and some of the best scary movies of all time know this and play to it as a strength. Building a sense of dread, tension and mystery is vital to get viewers invested in and scared by horror.
This is even harder to do in television than on film. While movies often get the chance to hold an audience in a theatre and command their full attention, Television has several things working against it. Regardless of all the distractions viewers may have going on in their own home, TV episodes have two major things with break their tension and momentum; commercials and episode breaks.
The first is particularly egregious for viewers trying to save some money by watching on the Disney+ ad supported option. In my own experience, I’ve had Agatha All Along interrupted by an advertisement for itself several times within a single episode. Ironic and frustrating enough as this is on its own, seeing glimpses of scenes from later in the episode I’m watching or future installments against my will has often ruined the surprise and tension necessary to stay immersed in a show that is trying to be scary.
There is also some stereotypical MCU pacing issues which often break up the tension in Agatha All Along. The expected MCU humor is present here, but at times extremely out of place. Fans who rewatch recent Marvel movies at home are likely to notice awkward gaps where the action stops for a beat to give audiences a chance to cheer and settle down in theaters. Oddly enough, it seems at times that this pacing has infected Agatha All Along, with needlessly long beats to linger on jokes. This disruption of pace breaks up the tension needed for horror to scare or have stakes, and evokes the same uncanny feeling of viral fan-made edits of Ross from Friends coming off as a creep in the absence of a laugh track.
Agatha All Along Can’t Decide What It Is
Perhaps the biggest thing working against Agatha All Along is just how long it has been since the show it spun off of released. WandaVision premiered on Disney+ nearly four years ago at the top of 2021. As such, it takes most of the runtime of its two-episode premiere to catch viewers up. The time since WandaVision will likely lead many viewers to forget callbacks that are necessary to understand the layers of fear in moments like a particularly unsettling Episode 3 beat involving Mrs. Hart.
There are certainly moments of the first few episodes with genuine fear factor. The appearance of the Salem Seven and their unnatural movements is truly unsettling, and fan theories around the true Aubrey Plaza’s villainous character have me hopeful the series will become more frightful as Agatha and her coven march further along the Witches’ Road. However, with true scares few and far between and the Road so far featuring uninventive aesthetics, it seems as though Agatha All Along is a half-step between family-friendly Disney Channel Halloween classics like Hocus Pocus and something truly terrifying.
With all this being said, there have been few moments where Agatha All Along has committed to horror as of yet. In addition, the MCU’s track record of sacrificing genre play to feed into itself doesn’t have me hopeful that the series won’t continue to disappoint horror fans.
New episodes of Agatha All Along premiere Wednesdays on Disney+
Published: Oct 4, 2024 05:00 pm