Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Out There: Crimes Of The Paranormal’ On Hulu, A Docuseries That Examines True Crime Cases With Paranormal Elements

Out There: Crimes Of The Paranormal , produced by, among others, Jay and Mark Duplass, examines different true crime cases that had significant paranormal elements to them. Among those occurrences are ghosts in San Francisco’s Chinatown, an ape-like beast kidnapping a boy in the Smokey Mountains, witches in New Jersey and a UFO crash on Long Island. All of these will be related to crimes that occurred, with the series’ filmmakers looking into the cases a bit deeper than the media might have done at the time.

‘The Menendez Brothers’: Netflix’s Upcoming Documentary Will See Erik And Lyle Menendez “Revisit” Their Trial “In Their Own Words”

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Little Miss Innocent: Passion. Poison. Prison.’ On Hulu, Where Kaitlyn Conley Speaks Out From Prison About The Killing She Still Claims She Didn’t Commit

Opening Shot: Shots of Nashville, then a 911 call that says there are warnings going out over a loudspeaker to evacuate the Second Avenue area.

The Gist: In the first episode of Out There , a 2020 explosion in downtown Nashville is tied to a man, Anthony Quinn Warren, who was one of the many who believed the “lizard people” conspiracy theory. It’s the theory that shape-shifting lizard-like beings are on Earth, feeding on humans and taking their form. The theory is that the “reptilians” have infiltrated the highest levels of government and corporate America.

CLICK HERE TO GET EMAILS FROM DECIDER

Interviews with experts, including reporters and historians, explain that the theory has been around for millennia, but came into modern focus during an incident in South Carolina in 1988, when a young man reported a human-sized lizard-like creature climbed on top of his car. That incident rocketed across the mass media of the time, and the advent of the World Wide Web a few years later gave that theory fuel to be exposed to exponentially more people. That combined with the isolation caused in part by social media, it has become one of the more prevalent conspiracy theories.

Director Lukas Cox also speaks to Pamela Perry, who became close with Warren in 2017, but started to distance himself after he took her on a hunt for lizard people in the woods outside the city, then described to her the “plans” he had, which included an RV parked outside his home. News reports after the explosion, where Warren was the only fatality, called Perry his girlfriend, something she vehemently denied. But she certainly wishes she could have done more to prevent the damage done by the explosion.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Out There: Crimes Of The Paranormal is Unsolved Mysteries crossed with In Search Of…

Our Take: The episode of Out There we watched was spooky to a degree, with creepy animated sequences adding to the descriptions of the phenomena. But what the show is trying to do more than anything else is discuss the roots of these beliefs, and how these beliefs can fuel criminal behavior.

The Duplass brothers aren’t going to get involved in a show that doesn’t root the paranormal phenomenon being examined in historical and societal perspective. What struck us about the first episode is that no one was buying into the “lizard people” conspiracy theory, but there were plenty of experts being interviewed who explained the origins of the theory and the possible reasons why it became popularized.

What the overall feeling of the episode was more sadness than anything else, for someone who had bought into the theory so deeply that he blew himself up as a result. We also felt pain for Pamela Perry, who got more caught up in this situation than she would have wanted, simply because Warren befriended her at a particularly vulnerable time in her life.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: “The only thing you can do with the monster is, well, you’ve gotta destroy it,” says a pop culture historian as we see video of the destruction Warren’s bomb created.

Sleeper Star: W. Scott Poole is the pop culture historian we just mentioned, and he sure knows a lot about the history of lizard people.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Out There: Crimes Of The Paranormal examines the intersection of crime and strange phenomena in a way that gives the phenomena their proper context, which makes the investigation into the crimes even better informed.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

For more entertainment news and streaming recommendations, visit decider.com