REVIEW: In Light as a Feather, Generic Teens Face Generic Horror

Based on a young adult novel originally published on the online serialized fiction service Wattpad, Hulu’s teen horror series Light as a Feather (premiering October 12) unfolds in similar bite-size installments, with episodes that run only about 23 minutes each. Despite the short running times, though, each episode feels nearly twice as long, with labored, heavily telegraphed plot twists, annoying, self-absorbed characters, and hokey, awkward dialogue. Created by former The Lying Game and One Tree Hill writer-producer R. Lee Fleming Jr. (working from the first in Zoe Aarsen’s series of novels), the show combines sub-Freeform high school drama with cheap jump scares and generic supernatural menace.

Liana Liberato stars as McKenna, a popular girl at her idyllic suburban high school, where she spends all of her time with her best friends Olivia (Peyton List), Candace (Ajiona Alexus) and Alex (Brianne Tju). Their lives seem perfect on the surface, but of course each girl has her own secrets and struggles, all of which will eventually be exploited by creepy new kid Violet (Haley Ramm). Violet seems shy and uncomfortable at first, and so McKenna convinces her friends to let Violet join them in their traditional Halloween get-together at a local cemetery.

Violet, in turn, convinces the girls to play a variation on the traditional slumber party game “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” in which one person lies on their back and is lifted by the others with just their fingertips. Violet insists that before each girl is lifted, Violet will tell a story about how that girl will die, predicting deaths by car accident, choking, and drowning for three of the friends. Will these eerie premonitions come true? Is Violet just misunderstood, or does she have dangerous, evil powers?

The show doesn’t waste much time with ambiguity, and once one of the girls dies in exactly the manner predicted, there’s never a question that Violet is behind it all. Although there are twists and turns in the plot over the course of the first six episodes (out of 10 total), Violet is singled out as the villain early on, and she’s so blatantly scheming and manipulating the rather naïve main characters that there’s no reason to care about what happens to her or what her motivations might be. The camera is constantly capturing Ramm giving devious looks to no one in particular, just in case the audience has forgotten in the last few minutes that Violet has sinister intentions.

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Not that Light as a Feather's other characters are much more engaging. McKenna is whiny and indecisive, stuck in the middle of a requisite YA love triangle between her soulful bad-boy neighbor Trey (Jordan Rodrigues) and Olivia’s hunky tennis-player older brother Henry (Dylan Sprayberry), neither of whom seems worthy of her affections. Bratty rich girl Olivia is the kind of character who would be the villain in a typical teen drama, and Candace and Alex are one-dimensional hangers-on with virtually no character development (Alex’s sexuality is referenced in a single line that seems inserted solely for the purpose of giving her one distinctive trait).

There are multiple other love triangles and teen-angst subplots, and the supernatural dangers consistently tie back to heightened teenage emotions. That can be an effective strategy for this kind of story, reflecting the emotional turbulence of adolescence in the horrors of the unknown. Movies like The Craft (a clear influence here) and Ginger Snaps have used the supernatural to embody the complex inner lives of teenage girls, but the teenage girls of Light as a Feather don’t seem to have inner lives at all.

The four main characters are meant to be lifelong friends, but there’s never any sense of their bond or shared history, and the actors never manage to bring the stiff writing to life. A show ostensibly about teenage female friendship is way more interested in whether McKenna will choose Trey or Henry, or whether Candace will betray Olivia by making out with Olivia’s boyfriend behind her back. Violet, too, is just as invested in sowing jealousy among the main characters as she is in doing actual physical harm, making it hard to take her seriously as a threat.

As the danger from Violet escalates, it seems especially absurd for the characters to get so worked up about who’s smooching whom. Shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer have managed to balance typical teen obsessions with larger supernatural forces, but Fleming and the other writers can never bridge the gap between the two. The show’s tone gets increasingly absurd and melodramatic as the story progresses, with soap-opera-style twists alongside the deadly supernatural developments. It’s all more than a bit laughable, but the show also has no sense of humor about itself, and its camp value is pretty minimal.

As a basic introduction to horror for tweens, much like amateur online fiction, Light as a Feather succeeds only in providing a gateway to much better, more sophisticated fare.