As if the name didn’t suggest such, Shadow Falls is a creepy small town. Located somewhere in the Midwest, it apparently died in the mid-’80s after something terrible happened at its local hospital. Now it appears to be all but deserted, but an evil still populates within its borders. Billed as the first horror TV series made for the Internet, the first eight episodes have made it to DVD as SHADOW FALLS: VOLUME 1.

With many strikes against it from the outset (ultra-low budget, shot on video, no-name cast and crew), I was as skeptical as anyone to check out this Horror Channel show, but it’s surprisingly pretty good. For one thing, it contains a great air of mystery. For another, most episodes are under 10 minutes in length, so they have little chance to bore. Each stands alone, but as becomes evident about midway through, there are threads woven and clues embedded in each that eventually will come to an all-makes-sense end (in episode 32, according to writer/director Kendal Sinn in the extra-feature interviews).

The first episode, “Jabberwocky,” seems utterly random: A little girl all alone in a classroom – except for her teacher – recites Lewis Carroll’s poem of the same name, and is rewarded with a disembodied human hand on which to snack. The end. On the surface, there appears to be no story, but stylistically, the seeds of the series have been planted.

Next is “Dead to Me,” in which a man is interrogated by someone unseen about a disastrous trip to the town; its final shot chills. “The Man from Lod” has a carful of teenagers stranded on its outskirts at night (car trouble will be a recurring theme of the series), and is the one episode I wouldn’t want to watch in the dark while home alone. Although initially humorous (”Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, FRIDAY THE FUCKING 13TH!”), it has a genuine scare and tension to burn.

“Daddy” brings a man to Shadow Falls, in search of his daughter who’s been missing for 20 years. “Crazy Joe’s Haunted Videotape” is the most overtly comedic, setting up a CLERKS-type scenario between two slacker store workers, but the enigmatic VHS they screen sets up a lot of mythology that gives you the most backstory thus far, and is creepy. In “My Pixie Valentine,” a girl is brought back to the town’s fields by the arrival of a letter from a past lover. But you just know she isn’t going to find roses awaiting her.

“Nurse Lemming’s Responsibility” concerns a dresser at a garage sale with a key hidden within its drawers, taking its discoverer to Shadow Falls’ graveyard, and “The Funny Scream of Nurse Karen” is an exchange between a seemingly insane doctor and his tied-up prey. Played out partly as grainy security-cam footage, this episode hints at more horrific things to come, but it’s also the season-ender.

The acting ranges from decent to amateurish, but Sinn smartly lets the silence permeate much of the running time. The shorter the episodes are, the better they seem to be, and that also goes for the ones with the least amount of dialogue. It’s the mood these create that makes SHADOW FALLS mildly addictive. Although I had better things to do, I couldn’t stop myself from watching “just one more.”

Season two was supposed to start running last fall; hopefully it’ll start soon, because I’m anxious to see what further secrets the town holds. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

The damned thing is that MASTERS OF HORROR: THE DAMNED THING has the nerve to call itself an adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s classic short story. In that 1894 tale, a group of men in a cabin hear a chilling account of the death of a man by an unseen force in the forest that ripped him to shreds. In this one-hour episode … well, at least someone gets ripped to shreds. Similarities, you end there.

This THING opens 24 years ago, when – shortly after black goo drips from the ceiling – a dad goes nuts, shoots his wife dead and almost kills his son, too, but he gets eviscerated and does whirly-loops as his guts spill out on the ground.

Surviving Kid grows up to be a small-town sheriff with a permanent limp, played by Sean Patrick Flanery (THE YOUNG INDIANA JONES CHRONICLES), and his obsession with events of the past have driven off his button-cute wife (Marisa Coughlan of TEACHING MRS. TINGLE) and their only child. At least he has a right to be, because with the anniversary of That Night coming up, the people around town are starting to act crazy.

How crazy? Oh, like kill-yourself-with-repeated-blows-of-a-hammer crazy.

With a script by Richard Christian Matheson, THING errs in many ways, including trying to find a credible explanation for the monster. Bierce’s was ingenious, revealing only that it exists in a plane of color human eyes cannot see, but this show leaves nothing to the imagination, giving us a Sandman-style petroleum-based beast.

Director Tobe Hooper – responsible for two certifiable scare classics (POLTERGEIST and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, of course) and other flicks on the other end of the quality spectrum – is not at the top his game here, although production values are strong. His camera forever swirls about, scenes go on too long and – worst of all – it isn’t the least bit frightening. He gets off a couple of good gross-outs – the aforementioned toolbox murder and an encounter with a car-crash victim – but that’s about it.

Bierce’s story would be challenging for anyone to adapt without going into it knowing it’s all in the suggestion. But the MASTERS OF HORROR team has made so many alterations, the title no longer fits. Even if it weren’t based on a pre-existing piece of literature, the THING has little life to it. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.