'Following' takes a creepy journey

What's your favorite form of escapism?

Is it science fiction; romance; fantasy; silly comedy? Or maybe you like tales of the supernatural, vampires, zombies and the like?

Me, I gravitate toward horror of the human kind when I want to lose myself for an hour or two — chilling stories of murder that say something about both the psychology of the perpetrator and the determined justice-seeker who is his or her pursuer.

I'm a sucker for Alfred Hitchcock; Clarice and Hannibal; Sherlock and Moriarty; “Masterpiece Mystery!” and the more interesting true crime on the ID Channel.

“The Following” (debuting 8 p.m. Monday on Fox), which has a charismatic serial killer at its center, is my latest guilty pleasure. I say “guilty” because I started to feel a stab of conscience during talk here about the proliferation of media violence. More than one TV critic hammered home that the timing couldn't be worse for such a series in the wake of the heartbreaking school shootings in Newtown, Conn.

However, as Fox entertainment chief Kevin Reilly stressed at a session here, it really “trivializes (a happening like Sandy Hook) to try and link it to television.”

“We haven't pushed broadcast standards,” he said of “The Following.” “I think that the show is intense because of the psychological nature of it.”

I agree. The drama is very creepy and gory at times, but it's also one of the most intriguing cat-and-mouse crime series I've seen in a while. One reason is the intensity of its two central characters — Joe Carroll, a serial killer obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe, and Ryan Hardy, the alcoholic former FBI agent bent on stopping him.

It doesn't hurt that both are portrayed by actors with special oomph: Kevin Bacon, in his first TV series, plays Hardy, and James Purefoy is the charismatic Carroll.

There's also a mesmerizing twist: Even behind bars, Carroll has found a way to continue his grisly work via a network of cultlike followers, young people who are missing something vital in their lives and hope that their connection with Carroll can fill it.

“If you can find someone that can fill that space in you and warm you and make you feel your life,” creator Kevin Williamson (“Scream,” “Vampire Diaries”) said at a press session, “then you might be willing to follow them to a really dark place, and I think that's the terrain of the show.”

“The Following” starts out with Carroll escaping from death row and former FBI agent Hardy getting pulled back in to help catch him. Hardy, after all, is an expert on all things Carroll; he even wrote a best-selling book about him.

Years before, he also was responsible for the killer's capture after Carroll, a Virginia college literature professor, murdered 14 female students. Most of the lawmen on the case initially consider Hardy, who still bears the wounds of that original hunt, a liability. However, as the search for the killer continues, they start to recognize his worth. The tension rises when Hardy realizes Carroll is after the one woman who survived his attack ... to finish what he started.

Suave British actor Purefoy, whose portrayal of Carroll is as seductive as it is chilling, is the perfect fit for what Williamson described as “the most evil, crazed, brilliant psychopath that I could possibly come up with.”

Williamson especially loves the “dead man walking” hero that is Hardy.

“He carries the weight of every victim on him, and he has that compulsion to save lives,” he said. “He goes blind with saving people.”

Bacon, who was looking for a TV project, found the drama the perfect vehicle.

“I thought it was such an interesting character,” he said. “And given the fast paced, kind of heart-pounding nature of it, it still had a lot of great heart and a certain kind of almost sentimentality that I really responded to.”

“The Following” definitely is not for everyone, particularly not the squeamish. Its killer, after all, believes that the eyes are the windows to the soul, so he removes them from his victims before slaughtering them.

However, if like me, you are drawn to entertainment that makes your palms sweat and your heart jump, “The Following” should be right up your dark alley.



Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/entertai...#ixzz2IWu47WX1