It’s not too often that I watch TV shows. They are such a large commitment! You have to contribute many hours of your time across several episodes of a show, and the payoff is, what? That there might be another season some two or three years later these days? Where you can watch more episodes after having already forgotten everything that happened on the previous season? I don’t know; it doesn’t feel particularly rewarding to me. Even if we are living in the new golden era of television shows, and I totally accept that to be true. I just count on my wife to watch everything and force me to watch with her if anything is particularly good.

To be fair, the reason I’m even here today is because of trickery. I received a screener from Screambox for episode one of their new anthology television series, Tales From The Void. I watched it because I had mistakenly assumed it was a new movie coming to the streaming service, and I’m always on the lookout to increase my movie count for the year. But, no… it turns out this was just the first offering in a new series they are releasing.

Episode one is subtitled “Into The Unknown”, and it is based off of a Reddit story originally called “The Black Square”. It appears as though all episodes from Into The Void are going to be culled from Reddit’s NoSleep subreddit of short horror stories. The episode as I saw it was approximately thirty minutes long and ended with an interview of about twelve more minutes with the writer of the original tale.

“Into The Unknown” is the story of Harris, a young college student living on his own in an apartment building. One night a strange, one-dimensional, eerily black square appears in the yard of the complex. Everyone seems a little taken by it of course, but few moreso than Harris who quickly becomes obsessed with it and trying to figure out what it is.

There is another tenant named Bill who is also compelled by the floating phenomena, but his passion for it is much darker, as he eventually decides it is a weapon planted there by the government. He decides it is his job to protect everyone from the square. This leads to Harris and Bill butting heads over Harris’ desire to study it, and eventually everything escalates from there.

As a short story, Into The Unknown is fine. Characters don’t necessarily behave the way normal humans would, but it’s not a ninety minute feature film, so this is trying to get in and out with as much efficiency as possible. Sure, everyone in this building WOULD be calling the cops and the news and the government, but that’s not our story, so we just accept that only Bill tries any of those, and he is immediately rebuffed by the 911 operator.

For a tale of terror and horror, the ending is satisfying, too. It works at getting under your skin and having a darker conclusion.

It will be curious to see how well Tales From The Void does against other horror anthologies like Black Mirror or the Alter channel on YouTube. Can the market sustain a glut of short story format horror? We certainly have a lot of options for it at our fingertips.

But that said, I did enjoy this one. It was very well-made and looked much better than what I figure its budget to be. The interview with the original creator at the end was a nice touch, too–I hope that becomes a staple of the series.