while I think that, from a purely artistic standpoint, the statements in s5 are lacklustre, I do appreciate one key element: the shift from supernatural horror to social horror.

the buried is ‘the crushing pressure on [one’s] guest becom[ing] literal’ and violent competitiveness; the vast is literally a mass of people twisted into one another; the slaughter trench is of a war that has ‘always raged deep in the hearts of the powerful and those that thirst to see bodies piled high in their name’; the corruption village, the stranger carousel and the hunt are of other humans turning against you to accuse or abandon or betray or kill; the flesh garden is fertilised and the web play, fuelled by harsh words from those supposed to love you; the lonely is no one wanting to be around you, and when you do find someone to talk to, you can’t bear to keep them company; the dark is parents not helping you and even childhood’s innocence turning vicious; the desolation is just capitalism, innit; the spiral is, well, ‘bad therapists’; the end is about watching your loved ones die/dying alone with no one around to answer your calls for help.

even the extinction plays on there being no one else left to warn/turning your animosity on inanimate objects because that is all there is… well, except the scuttling thing with a ‘familiar’ smile.

and it’s not that social horror is better than supernatural horror, it’s just an interesting shift for a post-apocalypse world. the extinction has always been a fear of man-made catastrophe. and the archive is a collection of terror taken from humans/the Fears themselves are reflections of human terror, so their closest manifestation taking the form of specific, social-ties-based domains is neat.

there were social elements to the horror in s1-4, but it was caused by and manifested as the supernatural. but that ‘comfort’ is gone here; there is no room to rationalise. a bone-deep conviction is possible because it’s all us, just us, tearing each other apart.

and on a meta level, given how entities of cosmic horror lose power the more an intended victim knows about them, I suppose it makes sense that after four seasons of knowing, of acquiring data and specifications, the final season has narrow, human-adjacent horrors.