Review: The Living and the Dead

SPOILERS

I had been looking forward to watching The Living and the Dead for a while, knowing as I did that it was a period ghost story set in late 19th century England. That's got my name written all over it. However, about a week before settling down to watch I heard the news that it had been cancelled. This surprised me since I had assumed that there was nothing to cancel; that the show was a miniseries with a beginning, middle and end.

As it happens, you can watch The Living and the Dead as a complete story, with each episode including both a self-contained tale and elements of an overarching plot that's spread across all six parts. The ending is quite definitive, but in the show's final few seconds there's a tacked-on cliff-hanger – one so random and pointless that it feels more like a badly calculated attempt to get the show renewed rather than any organic continuation of the story.

And since the show didn't get renewed, its presence becomes even more annoying.

But until that misstep, The Living and the Dead is pretty captivating. I'm sure that creator Ashley Pharoah was heavily inspired by the likes of The Dunwich Horror and The Wicker Man and other such works in the folk horror genre, as it reaches for the same underlying mood: namely that the country is not some pastoral Arcadia, but a place poised on the edge of civilisation, a confluence of superstition, madness, family secrets, gruesome history, and hostility towards both strangers and innovations.

This fear of the rural is explored on-screen in many ways: by emphasising isolation (both geographically and psychologically), by casting pagan ceremonies in a darker light, even in the repetitive utterance of words like "harvest" and "reaping", which thanks to shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural – heck, even Torchwood with that shitty Countrycide episode – have been imbued with ominous connotations.

As such, The Living and the Dead revels in its own aesthetic: autumn leaves, wet earth, murky ponds, wheat fields, old trees, heavy swaths of mist. The plots are almost secondary to this atmosphere, which – like any self-respecting ghost/horror story – exists largely to mirror the internal conflicts of the characters. It's a landscape of loss and grief, which is very much the underlying theme of the show in its entirety.

In 1894 Nathan Appleby and his young wife Charlotte return to his ancestral home in the tiny hamlet of Somerset to visit his dying mother, only to end up staying when Charlotte takes an interest in the estate's farm. Nathan is happy to join in, but as a psychologist with a reputation in the highest London circles, soon finds new patients in the village to attend to.

It's only a matter of time before things start to go wrong: Nathan is bewildered by the behaviour of the vicar's daughter, whose parents believe her to be seriously disturbed. Charlotte is frustrated in her attempts to modernise the farm thanks to the old-fashioned opinions of the farmhands. And there's something else going on in the village; a barely controlled sense of hysteria as strange occurrences start to build up – all of them triggered (or so it would seem) by Nathan's longstanding grief over the loss of his son Gabriel.

Of course, the show never spells this out explicitly, but it's a dot that's easy to connect to all the supernatural phenomena once you look at the recurring subject matter of each episode. Repressed grief, repressed sex, repressed guilt – it's all here, from Nathan's inability to accept the death of his child, to the little girl (now grown) who falsely accused a woman of witchcraft, to the inevitable closeted lesbian and her unrequited love. 

Yet as the ghostly occurrences become more and more unexplainable, the show itself gets a little confused as to what kind of story it's trying to tell. It frequently crisscrosses the line between Victorian ghost story and full-blown horror, not to mention psychological drama when Nathan becomes increasingly unhinged after frequent sightings of his dead son. Then another curveball is thrown into the mix when it becomes obvious that at least one of the apparitions is a young woman visiting from the future.

It's an uncomfortable mix that's held together by the consistency of the show's atmosphere – yet by the final episode it's impossible to make any sort of sense of what the conclusion offers. Now before you say "maybe that's appropriate for a ghost story", I'm here to tell you that between the genre mash-up and the truly incomprehensible "twist" in the final episode – it's not.

Here's the secret to any decent ghost story: it has to maintain a balancing act between the creepy and the rational. Fear is derived mainly from the unknown, and the unknown is inherent in anything that feels random or inexplicable. Someone in the midst of a ghost story doesn't understand what's happening or why it's happening, and the supernatural is scary because it exists outside our understanding and control of how things are supposed to be.

And yet a ghost story must also have rules and clues. There has to be a certain amount of sense to any haunting, though the pieces of its underlying structure should be metered out carefully, just as a detective gradually uncovers clues in a mystery novel. Fear may derive from the unknowable, but any satisfying story needs a degree of internal logic. Without it, the whole thing is just messy and arbitrary.

The secret to the formula is that there ARE rules, but the characters don't know what they are. What terrifies them (and us) is their ignorance regarding how to proceed and what they can rely on.

(Incidentally, any ghost story will ironically become less scary as it goes on, as the protagonist learns more about their situation and arms themselves with knowledge of how to handle it – this is why so many third acts of ghost stories either turn to violence and action, or withhold their shocking final twist until the last few minutes).

And as it happens, The Living and the Dead stumbles because it breaks the rules – or at least doesn't provide a solid foundation for them. Introducing the time travelling element of a young mother whose family has been haunted by Gabriel Appleby throughout the generations and whose return to the family estate leads to her appearing to Nathan in his own time only throws the whole story out of whack. Suddenly we're not dealing with the dead, but with timeslip adventures. Is Nathan even seeing his dead son, or just images of him before his death?

In the final minutes of the last episode, a rusted car is pulled out of the swampy ground on Appleby's land – the car that Lara crashes, killing her and uniting her spirit permanently with Gabriel. But... if it crashed in the present how did it get buried in the past? 

It's like when the cast of Legends of Tomorrow decided to kill Vandal Savage in three separate points of time, even though the only one that really mattered was the one that chronologically came first. I mean if he dies then, how can he possibly turn up later? Time travels comes with a very specific set of its own rules; rules that belong to a different genre entirely, and throwing it into a ghost/horror story only messes with the show's internal logic.

Yet for all of this, I'd recommend The Living and the Dead. I'd rather watch a show that fails bravely in trying to do something interesting than one that succeeds in following a tried-and-true formula. As a fan of folk horror I was engrossed by the ambiance and imagery despite the wonky melting pot of genres, and I can easily see myself watching it again at some point in the future.

Miscellaneous Observations:

Another prominent theme/motif is the ongoing contrast of the old and new, the scientific and the pagan. Almost every shot is infused with ancient tradition, whether it be the washing of a dead body, the stopping of the clock after a death, the hanging of protective herbs on the door, or a solstice bonfire. On the other hand, we have Charlotte (the personification of the modern world) who introduces a traction engine to the farm, shows a keen interest in photography, and certainly acquits herself like a woman of our age rather than her own.

There's something of a Merlin reunion here, with Colin Morgan in front of the camera and Alice Troughton directing behind the scenes. I actually think the first three episodes are the best due to her involvement; some of her creative choices are more unpredictable and thereby unsettling.

It's nice to see Colin Morgan in a role where he gets to be assertive and take-charge (though don't kill me, but I think he occasionally overplayed Nathan's descent into madness) and Charlotte Spencer is charming as a woman just a step out of time (figuratively speaking). Other familiar faces include Robert Emms from Atlantis (so he'd have worked with Alice Troughton before too) and David Oakes, again playing a decent fellow instead of his usual despicable rapist role.  

In the show's final moments Nathan is woken from sleep and heads downstairs for another timeslip encounter: this time with a group of party-goers from the 1920s holding a séance. They take the opportunity to ask him why he killed his wife – and that's where we end things. I was left wondering if the "wife" in question was not Charlotte at all, but Nathan's first wife who we learn absolutely nothing about in any of the six preceding episodes. So as well as being tacked-on and unnecessary, the scene is also frustrating since we'll never get a decent answer.