RICHARD MARTIN REVISITS THE MASTERS OF HORROR: HOMECOMING

21/5/2021

REVISITING THE ‘MASTERS OF HORROR’ BY RICHARD MARTIN homecoming

Revisiting the ‘Masters of Horror’, Homecoming

We are living in a golden age of horror on TV. Shows like ‘The Walking Dead’, ‘Supernatural’ and ‘American Horror Story’ have effectively taken the genre mainstream, offering weekly doses of gore and mayhem to the masses. Go back a decade or two however, and genre fans had far fewer options to choose from. Anthology shows, like ‘Tales From the Crypt’, ‘Monsters’ or ‘Tales From the Darkside’ were king during the horror heyday of the 1980s, providing cheesy and cheerful tongue in cheek horror in half hour bites. It wasn’t until 2005 that the TV horror anthology show got serious, and delivered arguably the most consistent, memorable and scary anthology show to date.

The brainchild of horror legend Mick Garris, the show’s title is no hyperbole. ‘Masters of Horror’ brought together the best horror talent Hollywood (and beyond) had to offer. Episodes directed by undisputed genre luminaries such as John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento and Stuart Gordon were like hour long movies brought to your TV screen. High production values, A-List talent and a free reign to do whatever they pleased resulted in some truly unforgettable work from a group of horror legends let off their leash. These are stories that have stayed with me in the fifteen years since many initially aired and, in this series, I’ll be revisiting all twenty-six episodes, one at a time, to shine a light on a fondly remembered and undeniably influential moment in horror TV history.
Join me as I take a look back at;

Homecoming
Directed by: Joe Dante
Starring: Jon Tenney, Thea Gill, Wanda Cannon, Terry David Mulligan
Original Air Date: 10 February 2006
Synopsis: Set during President George W Bush’s re-election campaign, the story follows his speechwriters and campaigners during a zombie uprising, where fallen soldiers of the ongoing war come back to life to make their voices heard.

If you’d asked me before I’d started my recent re-watch of Masters of Horror what my least favourite episode was, or which I was least excited to revisit, ‘Homecoming’ would be it. This is no comment on the undeniable talent involved with this particular episode, being directed by Joe Dante, the man behind ‘Gremlins’, ‘The Howling’ and ‘Piranha’. The reason the episode didn’t connect with me back in 2006 was the subject matter. The episode is overtly political and has a very clear moral to the story and, being firmly based on (then) current US hot topics, as a UK based horror fan, the episodes message just didn’t resonate with me. I was pleasantly surprised when watching it again how much more I enjoyed it and was taken aback by how relevant its message is today, fifteen years on. Perhaps as I’ve gotten older I have more appreciation for the complexity of the subject it’s trying to tackle, but there was a lot about ‘Homecoming’ that hit home for me that passed me by initially.

The episode opens with David (Jon Tenney) and Jane (Thea Gill) driving down an empty road at night before hitting a wounded soldier with their car. Something is not quite as it seems as Jane seems hellbent on running him over and it doesn’t take long to realise why. The man they have hit is very, very dead, but that doesn’t stop what’s left of him (mostly just his decapitated head) from crying out to them as it sits atop their car windscreen. More zombies, all clad in camouflage, make their way towards the pair from a military truck as Jane opens fire on them using the semi-automatic rifle she keeps in the trunk.

Before we find out what happens next, we cut to a talk show taping (presumably set prior to the zombie outbreak) where David (Jon Tenney) and Jane (Thea Gill) are discussing ongoing war protests with host Marty Clark (Terry David Mulligan). Both are right-wing advocates and while Jane is depicted as extreme in her views (going so far as to refer to the anti-war protestors as ‘ugly, stupid and clueless’) David is shown to be more insidious, justifying clearly troubling actions of protestor suppression with some impressively reasonable sounding spin.

You can’t discuss this episode without mentioning the politics behind it, they are just too explicit and have the subtlety of a bulldozer. There is even a scene at the very end of the episode where zombie soldiers are marching to the beat of a drum with an American flag fluttering patriotically in the background. The right-wing campaigners are almost all stereotypical caricatures, lying and cheating through their every second on screen, and the zombies only talk when giving an impassioned speech about their voices not being heard by the current administration. Your personal politics notwithstanding, the message is loud and clear and as interesting and inventive as the concept is, I think a large part of my problem with this episode at the time is a sense I was being talked down to. A little more subtlety could have gone a long way without diluting its impact.

David is, unwittingly, the person who brings about the political zombie uprising when an impassioned speech while on air with a grieving mother whose son has been killed in action during the ongoing war efforts, during which he states that, if he had one wish, he’d wish that her son could come back. The spin here is that he wishes he could come back to justify the ongoing war, a point that the soldier’s mother is clearly about to disagree on before she is taken off air. David’s speech goes down so well with voters that the President himself uses the same speech in a public address later that week, the only difference being that the wish actually comes true, and dead soldiers do begin coming back to life.

If you think you’re in store for a Day of the Dead style zombie apocalypse, then you would be wrong. The zombies are shown as being peaceful and intelligent and have come back in order to… vote in the upcoming election. The zombies actually get very little screen time too, and this is where the episodes greatest strength comes into the play. The focus is squarely on David, Jane and Kurt (played with aplomb by Robert Picardo) as they try and figure out how to put a positive spin on people literally rising from their graves in order to vote against their candidate. It helps that all three leads are fantastic, and fully committed to their larger-than-life characters. It’s a great choice to see the zombie uprising from the perspective of three people who take it as a personal affront to their jobs and the episode gets a lot of mileage out of it.

Although Jane and Kurt never waver from their views, we do see David slowly begin to have a change of heart as he begins to appreciate the consequences of the lies (which he refers to in one memorable outburst as ‘horseshit and elbow grease’) he has been telling in order to further his own political career. A subplot involving his older brother who seemingly died during the Vietman war, giving some weight and explanation to his shift in opinion.

It is as the episode progresses that we see more of the spin machine in action, as Jane starts to take centre stage. We see the undead soldiers on television being rounded up and placed in internment camps as she justifies them as ‘health checks’. The party’s previous stance of respecting the voice of these fallen heroes taking a complete 180 shift as they go back on the Marty Clark show questioning a dead person’s legal right to vote. While the zombies are ultimately allowed to vote, in a surprisingly prescient scene we see that the party suppress their votes, allowing the Republicans to win an election that they would have otherwise lost.

This obviously does not go down well with the undead voters, who have only come back to have their voices heard, only to have them ignored when it mattered the most. The opening scene of David and Jane being chased down by a horde of angry zombies makes a little more sense now and it’s revisited for the finale where David kills Jane and changes his political allegiance to the zombies cause when he is reunited with his decades dead brother, who turns him. The ending of the episode doesn’t feel as grand as it should considering the whole episode has been about the fate of the entire country, but I do admit that it plays to it’s strengths by maintaining it’s focus on the lead characters until the bitter end.

Overall, I got a lot more out of ‘Homecoming’ on my re-watch than I did when I saw the initial airing back in 2005. While I’ve commented on the episodes lack of subtlety, it’s perhaps this transparent agenda which made it easier to appreciate as a piece of entertainment, so blunt is the show's ultimate point. Conversely, perhaps the events of the recent US election have made some of the more outrageous parodies in ‘Homecoming’ feel uncomfortably plausible and the message is no less relevant today than it was fifteen years ago regardless of how indelicately it may be presented.

Join me next time as I’ll be looking at episode seven of the first season, John Landis’s ‘Deer Woman’. See you then!

If you missed any of Richard's previous Revisting The Masters of Horror articles, you can find links to them all here on our handy landing page

The Masters of Horror

Richard is an avid reader and fan of all things horror. He supports Indie horror lit via Twitter (@RickReadsHorror) and reviews horror in all its forms for several websites including Horror Oasis and Sci Fi and Scary