It’s not been too bad this year, I must say. Normally by the halfway point in October the TV schedules are crammed with schlocky horror stories, documentaries about the types of people who believe in ghosts and whose bathos is more terrifying than anything that could reach out from beyond the grave (“And this is where the teapot fell down, David, just as we were talking about teapots. It was like the teapot poltergeist of West Malling absolutely knew, David. You can still see the stain.”)
But this year – perhaps because it is so clearly a godforsaken one – there is room between The Fall of the House of Usher, the Interview With a Vampire adaptation and repeats of Uncanny for Halloween-haters to breathe. So for once I find myself with tolerance for this rotten, tat-filled season to spare, even when faced with the likes of The Burning Girls, a six-part series based on C J Tudor’s bestselling book of the same name, that has risen up to greet us on the home straight.
It has everything statutorily required of a six-part series commissioned for mid-October. A tortured protagonist (here, a vicar with a secret who left her last parish under traumatic circumstances); a charming English village (the tortured vicar’s new berth) beneath whose chocolate-box veneer beats a malevolent heart (Chapel Cross, Sussex, which is haunted – metaphorically! But maybe literally! – since 1552 by the spectres of two Protestant girls burnt at the stake when Bloody Mary was doing her thing); a cadaverous church warden who is hostile to the new vicar; an arrogant posho who rules the rural roost (but whose own family hides a welter of secrets); iffy phone and wifi connections; a stroppy yet vulnerable teen; some bullies for her; a parcel from a mysterious sender (containing an unsettling Bible quotation and an ancient, possibly bloodstained, exorcism kit); flickering candles; a grim backstory for the priest the tortured vicar is replacing (he was obsessed with the case of the two girls who went missing from the village 30 years ago, and killed himself in the church); a large budget apportioned to the purchase of bloodied nightgowns; and finally, roadkill and an extended eviscerated-rabbit motif thereafter. Need I add there are also hints of sapphism, sexual abuse, domestic violence and the sense of something nasty lurking in every woodshed in a five-mile radius? I don’t think I do.
The bespoke detail is that the vicar (played by Samanthan Morton, in an uncustomarily straightforward part) is called Jack so people can be wrongfooted by her being a woman, although this trope has been absolutely ruined for ever by the Vicar of Dibley. But it helps encourage the cadaverous warden Aaron (David Dawson) in his hostilities towards Jack, which she can add to her pile of sanity-eroding pressures. They include getting off to a bad start with the posho (Rupert Graves) because she assumes that a girl drenched in blood has had a terrible accident when in fact she is his daughter who just got overinvolved in the pig-slaughtering! Jack also sees ghostly apparitions in the pews, when not flashbacking or hallucinating a girl from her past who occasionally tears her cuddly rabbit limb from limb with her teeth. And then there is the question of what happened in her former parish. The stroppy teen is Jack’s daughter, Flo (Ruby Stokes) and a photographer, which doesn’t make her any less wearisome but does mean we spy her collection of 8x6s of their previous vicarage, across whose unassuming frontage someone has daubed “Killer” in large white letters.
Oh, and a very frightening-looking man has just been released from prison and I cannot think that he has great plans to add to the sum of human happiness, either.
It’s all very – well, atmospheric is the word if you like that sort of thing, and dull is the word if you don’t. A lot is evoked – then evoked again – but the clues and twists and mini-revelations before the big ones come more slowly than in the book, which moved along at a fair old clip. But it looks good, moves itself and us confidently through its paces and it’s got Jane Lapotaire as a sooth-speaking old lady sitting like a spider at the centre of Chapel Croft’s web of intrigue. You can stay for her alone. Solid, spooky, sanguinary fare. Buy shares in bloodied nightgowns.
• The Burning Girls is available on Paramount+
