There was no reason to make another polite, faithful version of “Cape Fear.” Thankfully, Creator/Showrunner Nick Antosca had no interest in one.

Apple TV’s “Cape Fear” is sweaty, violent, emotionally ugly, and pitched somewhere between a domestic thriller and a full-blown hyper-violent fever dream. The show takes the basic machinery of the 1962 film and Martin Scorsese’s operatic 1991 remake, pulls it apart, and rebuilds it as a ten-hour nightmare about privilege, resentment, marriage and the strange gravitational pull of a charismatic monster.

Or, as Antosca rather happily described it during his recent appearance on The Playlist’s Bingeworthy podcast, “It is the lurid nightmare that we set out to make.”

Mission accomplished!