‘Two Sentence Horror Stories’ Season 1 Review

I started this article as just a mini review/television series recommendation, but after doing my research on creator Vera Miao, it has hit so much closer to home for me.

Two Sentence Horror Stories is an anthology series that premiered on The CW television network back in August 2019.

The series includes 9 episodes with each plot being based off of just two terrifying sentences that describe the direction the stories can go. The idea of the show actually came from the infamous Reddit thread where users post their most spine-chilling horror stories, limiting them to only two sentences.

The powerhouse behind the show is Guam-born Vera Miao. As I mentioned earlier, this literally hits close to home since I’m from the same little island myself.

Miao was born to Taiwanese immigrant parents when they moved to Guam and had her in the ’70s. They eventually moved to New York City where she attended Barnard College. In 2013, she co-wrote, co-produced, and also co-starred in the short film Best Friends Forever, a post-apocalyptic road trip movie well-known and recognized by horror fans from around the world.

Miao then spent time working as an actress and other roles in film in the greater Los Angeles. Her big break finally came in 2017 where she was selected by the Tribeca Film Institute for the inaugural Through Her Lens: The Tribeca Channel Women’s Filmmaker Program.

In an exclusive interview with V Magazine, they published about Miao:

As a woman of color, however, getting to the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival wasn’t exactly something that was handed to her the moment she arrived in LA from her Long Island hometown. Working as an actress in the City of Angels for a number of years, Miao, a self-described impatient person, wasn’t going to settle for the typecast roles typically offered to Asian women in Hollywood.

“There [are] just no roles for Asian women that aren’t basically background or just moving the plot along,” Miao says, adding, “I started writing and producing my own stuff relatively early on, and directing kind of evolved out of that.” It is so inspiring to see someone born from where I’m indigenous to and to witness their great journey into getting into the world of film — a world where I’m striving to work in one day as well!

After finishing Two Sentence Horror Stories, the element of the series that stuck out to me the most was the very unique stream of events that happened in each episode. The twists and turns of each plot were definitely exciting to watch unravel. Every episode was well crafted in writing that I actually couldn’t predict much about what was to happen next.

Some of the acting seemed a bit too amateur for my taste and the background music in most episodes didn’t exactly match, causing confusion with the mood setting. However, the overall dialogue and plot points made every episode worth watching.

Without giving away any major spoilers, I believe Miao made major waves in episodes like “Squirm,” where a female character battles sexual harassment at work; as well as in “Legacy,” which is about an Asian woman dealing with the ghost of her abusive husband. There is also the episode “Scion,” where a gay male teenager discovers the horrors of society’s reaction to homosexuality.

The filmmaker gave a voice to these characters so that many others can be confident in who they are and that they aren’t alone in whatever they go through. Hopefully, the audience will become more aware of the “horrors” in everyday life and what we can do to overcome them or what we can learn when things really hit the fan.

The series was renewed for a second season in May of this year and is planning to premiere this fall! You can stream all episodes of the first season on Netflix.