Netflix's 'Brand New Cherry Flavor' is the perfect horror binge to welcome fall (2024)

Some folks are sad to kiss the final days of summer goodbye. But to us hobgoblins who feel most at home in the cold dark months of the year, that only means one thing: Spooky season is upon us again at last.

With fall fast approaching, we finally have our annual excuse to binge all the horror all the time without any shame. And if you're looking to start your blood-soaked streaming extravaganza this year by diving right on into the deep end, then look no further than Netflix's Brand New Cherry Flavor.

An eight-part limited horror series released on Aug. 13 (that's Friday the thirteenth for those paying attention), it takes you on a journey that's as deranged as my soul feels after surviving eight months of 2021. Taking place in Los Angeles during the Christmas season, the setting even mimics that strangely cursed clash of seasonal vibes that defines early fall, as we hobgoblins get a head start on autumnal rituals despite it still being a breezy 85 degrees and sunny outside.

Now, Brand New Cherry Flavor certainly is not for everyone, especially those with weak stomachs, low tolerance for body horror gore, or in too delicate a headspace for potentially triggering content around gendered violence against women (both emotional and physical). I must admit though that even I, an implacable veteran consumer of hardcore horror, found myself occasionally squirming through scenes at times. But for lovers of absurdist Jungian nightmare fuel that pushes you to your limit, this series is pure catnip. If a Netflix original horror series that feels like Mandy, The Love Witch, Eraserhead, and Velvet Buzzsaw all got together to puke out a slimy kitten fetus sounds like your thing, then strap in.

An adaptation of Todd Grimson's 1996 novel by the same name, Brand New Cherry Flavor stars the captivating Rosa Salazar (from Alita: Battle Angel) as Lisa Nova, a young, talented, and ferociously hungry filmmaker hellbent on directing her debut film in Hollywood. Lisa meets up with acclaimed producer Lou Burke, who promises the LA newcomer exactly what she wants. But Lisa's dreams quickly sour from surreal euphoria into traumatizing nightmare, escalating to a fever pitch that goes down a primevally horrific rabbit hole fueled by revenge, psychedelia, and witchcraft.

Over the years, Netflix has accrued a library of some of the best horror originals on any streaming platform. It covers a wide range of tastes, from big, fun multi-release event-ized titles like the Fear Street trilogy to far more niche arthouse hidden gems like I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Brand New Cherry Flavor falls somewhere in between those, or outside that spectrum altogether.

It's a campy horror spectacle, never taking itself too seriously even while pontificating on very pretentious headass meta-questions about the nature of film, art, Hollywood, and human nature.

At first, Brand New Cherry Flavor can come across as just a hyper-stylistic mishmash of genre tropes with an equally clichéd narrative setup. I mean, how else does a post-MeToo audience expect the story of young female Hollywood talent left at the mercy of a predatory Weinstein-type producer to end, right? But absolutely nothing is ever as it seems with Brand New Cherry Flavor, which keeps the artificially fruity taste of its title fresh — before it then rots your teeth right out of your head.

The entire series is designed to lull you into a false sense of rote predictability, only to swivel its decomposing head 180 degrees into a grotesquery of the unexpected.

Take the characters, for instance, each seemingly more archetypal and stereotypically LA than the last. You've got the inexperienced yet precocious Strong Female Lead in Lisa Nova, a fierce Brazilian-born beauty willing to sacrifice anything for her art. One cannot help but assume she'll be pigeonholed into playing the conventional victim of the story, or at the very least fulfill the role of sympathetic hero.

But Lisa Nova is really neither the heroine nor the anti-heroine here. She's grayer than gray, painted in the far more complex hues of a real human being that rejects every box we as the audience want to flatten her into.

In the context of the film's allusions to the predatory Hollywood systems that the MeToo movement has shed light on, Lisa instead challenges the myth of the "perfect victim" of sexual harassment or assault. She doesn't have to be an innocent sacrificial lamb or any model of morality to be a victim, nor does being victimized preclude her from also perpetuating the same systems of corrupted power that prey upon her. Similarly, her relationship to producer Lou Burke throughout the series subtly dismantles an argument that Harvey Weinstein's real-life lawyers tried using to discredit the women who testified against him at trial.

I wouldn't categorize Brand New Cherry Flavor as a "feminist" film, necessarily, mostly because I don't think it's interested in that label. But there's no denying that it's rich with commentary about power and gender — and there's a lot to sink your teeth into if you're into feminist Freudian film analysis (lotta milk baths, as well as tons of symbolic womb and hole imagery throughout).

Lisa isn't the only seemingly clichéd character who flies in the face of audience expectations, either.

Catherine Keener delivers a phenomenally fun performance as the caricature of a crystal-obsessed, tarot-reading witchy white lady with a stranglehold over Los Angeles' elites that's as undeniable as it is inexplicable. (If you don't buy that this type of person is a real, relevant, and powerful part of Hollywood subculture, check out this exposé on a beloved witchy LA goth bar.) Like Lisa, we want to believe this dark fairy godmother hag archetype is the answer to regaining the power stolen from a male-dominated industry that preys upon women and girls. But like real-life breaking news stories about the questionable behavior of certain Time's Up leaders, simply giving #girlbosses more power over the same exploitative Hollywood systems isn't really the solution to anyone's problem.

Brand New Cherry Flavor reveals how flawed this logic is when applied to a variety of other abusive power structures in filmmaking, like debates over the "male" versus "female" gaze. There's a recurring motif with eyeballs and voyeuristic filmmaking, best captured in the cover image of Lisa with a bloody eye in her mouth. Lots of thinkpieces (some of which I've written myself) continue to praise cinema that merely gender swaps out the domineering "male gaze" for a more feminine version of it.

But Brand New Cherry Flavor challenges us to see beyond the issue of gender inequality in Hollywood, instead focusing on the larger problem of a culture obsessed with mythologizing genius film auteurs. It's not great when any person, of any gender, is celebrated for indiscriminately dehumanizing and abusing everyone around them so they can fulfill their brilliant artistic vision.

I usually despise movies that are about movies, since they tend to feel like navel-gazing exercises in artistic masturbation — just Hollywood stroking its already overinflated sense of self-importance at the cost of art that says anything of significance about the larger world. But this horror series is no Under the Silver Lake or La La Land, meaning that it's not just a self-congratulatory love affair with an idealized version of Hollywood filmmaking overstuffed with LA in-jokes.

Instead, Brand New Cherry Flavor focuses on the human underbelly of this global epicenter of cultural influence that is Los Angeles, and what it means to be such a powerful force in how everyone in the world sees themselves and each other. It evades any narrowness that the premise suggests by broadening the story to be about more universal social dynamics around power, or the deeply human fight to claim and impose it on others across all time.

Unlike a lot of other LA-focused cinema, this show only uses filmmaking and Hollywood as a familiar setting we can recognize. At its core, it's far more concerned with exploring the far-reaching concepts of generational trauma, victimization begetting victimization, cyclical betrayal, the corrosive side of grief as creative catharsis, and art as an act of selfish destruction rather than selfless creation.

With that said, it's extremely unfortunate to see an almost exclusively white, white-passing, or light-skinned cast in a movie very much centered around the mythologies and spiritualities of South American, African diaspora, and indigenous cultures. As a Brazilian-born woman myself, I do appreciate the demonstrable influence of Brazilian director Gandja Monteiro in at least two episodes, contributing a level of authenticity to our culture's representation that Hollywood rarely bothers getting right. (I felt my own childhood pang when Guaraná soda was used to remind Lisa of home.)

But for a movie that's so consumed by the relationship between art and exploitation, of sacrificing others at the altar of your own expression, you'd think Brand New Cherry Flavor would know better. I guess in a meta (likely unintentional way), it proves its own point about the inherent flaws of filmmaking.

Brand New Cherry Flavor is now streaming on Netflix.

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