I knew straight away that Midwinter of the Spirit (Wednesday, STV, 9pm) was going to be spooky because there was a woman on the opening credits going "ahhh, ahhh, ahhh" in an ethereal voice. Women going "ahhh, ahhh, ahhh" in ethereal voices is one of the signs things are going to get scary. The other sign is a cello. If you hear a cello, particularly in a wooded glade, run for your life. If you hear a violin, you're already dead.
As it turned out, the music was not the only cliché of the horror genre in Midwinter of the Spirit. It opened with a priest reading from the bible and holding a crucifix. The weather was also bad (horrific things don't happen on sunny days) and there was an isolated house, high up on a hill and a long way from help, which is one of the other tropes of horror (only slightly adjusted for the digital age – the house now has to be out of mobile phone range as well).
The writer of Midwinter of the Spirit, Stephen Volk, may not have had much choice in including these cliches (the drama is adapted from the novels by Phil Rickman) – indeed, I suspect if it was up to Volk he would have gone for something much more original. In the 1990s, he wrote the rather wonderful Ghostwatch for the BBC, which featured a spirit in exactly the opposite of an isolated house – a suburban semi. The ghosts also famously got into the cameras themselves and properly spooked half the audience, including me.
Volk also showed he knew what was going on by bringing up the horror clichés and playing around with them a bit. In the opening few minutes, for instance, the lights in the house went out, but it turned out there was no spiritual intervention – just a problem with the fuses. That's the kind of exposure and subversion of expectations Wes Craven did in the Scream horror films and it's not easy to do because you also have to scare people.
As for Midwinter of the Spirit, it did manage to scare us at least once and it happened when a hospital patient being tended by the vicar/detective/exorcist Merrily Watkins (Anna Maxwell Martin) died then suddenly sat up in bed again. One moment, there was the long beep of the machine that tells you you're dead; the next, there was the sound of a dead man talking. It was a genuinely scary moment.
It was also probably the best moment in a drama that had a few issues with pace and originality. The basic premise was that Merrily Watkins was a modern form of exorcist – no holy water or screaming at spirits to begone, just a bit of counselling and social work – which was fine, but the rest of it didn't spark with enough that was new. Merrily's teenage daughter was the usual sulky door slammer and some of the lines were Scooby-Doo silly ("He's dead but his evil is still alive").
In trying to create the atmosphere of a crime thriller with ghosts, Midwinter of the Spirit also wrestled with the usual problem, which is how to handle the subject of possession and spirits without it all becoming a bit daft. Even the finest films in this genre – The Exorcist for instance – struggle with the fact that some people will scream and some people with laugh. Midwinter of the Spirit's tactic was to leave the option open that everyone might be mentally ill rather than possessed, but Midwinter is still a take-it-of-leave-it drama. Some viewers will look at Merrily Watkins and see Sarah Lund from the rather fine The Killing; others will look at her and see Yvette Fielding from the rather ridiculous Most Haunted.
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