Shudder digs into some Cursed Films

By Allison Shoemaker, Katie Rife | April 2, 2020 | 5:00am

TV Lists What's On Tonight

Screenshot:

Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Thursday, April 2. All times are Eastern.

Top pick

Cursed Films (Shudder, 3:01 a.m., series premiere): Shudder kicks off its five-part original series Cursed Films with an appropriately diabolical title: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Friedkin isn’t on hand to talk about the film, but star Linda Blair and her demonic double Eileen Dietz set the tone discussing the director’s despotic tendencies as talking-heads interviews with horror journalists lay out the many mysterious deaths associated with the film. That’s all well and good, but Cursed Films gets really interesting in its second half, where it pivots away from a standard horror documentary into a discussion of the psychology of religion with scholars—and one self-proclaimed exorcist. At a half hour, the episode is too short to really go deep on these topics. But director Jay Cheel approaches his sometimes eccentric subjects with an open, yet skeptical mind, lending both credulity and levity to the season premiere. Future episodes will cover Poltergeist, The Omen, The Crow, and Twilight Zone: The Movie, an intriguing blend of supernatural legends and real-life tragedy. For an extra dose of virtual camaraderie, Cheel (@JayCheel) will be hosting a live-watch of the episode Thursday at 9 PM ET on Twitter with the hashtag #ShudderShutIn, followed by The Exorcist on Shudder. [Katie Rife]

Regular coverage

Devs (FX on Hulu, 3:01 a.m.)
Brooklyn Nine-Nine (NBC, 8:30 p.m.)
Better Things (FX, 10 p.m.)
How To Get Away With Murder (ABC, 10:01 p.m.): final mid-season premiere

Wild cards

Broke (CBS, 9:30 p.m., series premiere p.m.): If you’ve been missing Jaime Camil since the departure of Jane The Virgin from our airways, CBS has got you covered with this sitcom, which seems to be operating on a sort of “If Schitt’s Creek was also The Conners” kind of philosophy.

Siren (Freeform, 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., third-season premiere, special time): This soapy, horror-influenced Freeform drama returns for a third season tonight, with the arrival of a new mermaid shaking up Bristol Cove’s tenuous order and igniting conflict within the mermaid tribes. Also there’s a mermaid baby with a surrogate and some cliffhanger drama. It’s ridiculous. Seems appropriate for the times.

Can you binge it? Yes. The first two seasons of Siren can be streamed through Freeform’s site, provided you’ve got a cable subscription, and are also available through Hulu.