All my life, I’ve been waiting for someone and when I find her, she’s… she’s a fish.

With 13 nominations and expected to lead in overall wins in tonight’s Academy Awards ceremony, The Shape of Water is the film of the hour, and the popularity of the sea creature lore is at a peak right now.  Taking advantage of the interest in seafaring lore and gilled creatures, the Freeform channel (formerly ABC Family) is airing new trailers this weekend for its own new mermaid/merman series, Siren.  It’s not Splash or The Little Mermaid.  It looks like it may have more of the feel of The Creature from the Black Lagoon at least initially more so than The Shape of Water.  No, the new series Siren looks more like a thriller or horror series than a romance, something mixing Stephen King’s Haven with John Carpenter’s The Fog and The Thing, and the British space vampire cult classic, Lifeforce.  

Eline Powell (Game of Thrones, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword) plays Ryn, a mysterious girl who arrives in the Pacific Northwest coastal town of Bristol Cove, a town that boasts its local lore–a town once known for its mermaids.  Aylya Marzolf plays a mermaid leader, and Sedale Threatt, Jr. a warrior merman.  From its several preview trailers, Siren has a great, creepy look.  Art direction is by The Predator and The Returned’s Peter Mihaichuk.  Costumes were designed by Pirates of the Caribbean and The Exorcist’s Lorraine Carson and iZombie and The Flash’s Maria Livingstone.

Based on a story by Eric Wald and Dean White (originally to be called The Deep), marketing for Siren is evoking all the aforementioned films and TV shows in its key imagery–even the back of a man in a parka straight out of The Thing, a strange killer young woman as seen in Lifeforce and The Ring, a trapped creature being studied in an aquarium as in The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Shape of Water.  And it features that familiar coastal town seen in Jaws, Haven, and The Fog.

Check out these several previews for Freeform’s Siren:

The show also stars Fola Evans-Akingbola (Game of Thrones), Lost in Space and Black Sails’ Sibongile Mlambo, Ian Verdun (The Social Network), Rena Owen (The Orville, Star Wars episodes II and III, A.I. Artificial Intelligence), Alex Roe (Rings, The Calling), and Ron Yuan (The Accountant, Tron: Uprising).  

Ten episodes of the series Siren will begin to air with a two-hour premiere, March 29, 2018, at 7 p.m. Central on Freeform.

C.J. Bunce
Editor
borg.com