Agatha Christie and Gothic Horror: Adaptations and Televisuality (Horror and Gothic Media Cultures) 9463725784, 9789463725781

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H O R R O R A N D G O T H I C M E D I A C U LT U R E S

Stuart Richards

Agatha Christie and Gothic Horror Adaptations and Televisuality

Agatha Christie and Gothic Horror

Horror and Gothic Media Cultures The  Horror and Gothic Media Cultures  series focuses on the influence of technological, industrial, and socio-historical contexts on the style, form, and aesthetics of horror and Gothic genres across different modalities and media. Interested in visual, sonic, and other sensory dimensions, the series publishes theoretically engaged, transhistorical, and transcultural analyses of the shifting terrain of horror and the Gothic across media including, but not limited to, films, television, videogames, music, photography, virtual and augmented reality, and online storytelling. To foster this focus, the series aims to publish monographs and edited collections that feature deep considerations of horror and the Gothic from the perspectives of audio/visual cultures and art and media history, as well as screen and cultural studies. In addition, the series encourages approaches that consider the intersections between the Gothic and horror, rather than separating these two closely intertwined generic modes. Series editors Jessica Balanzategui, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia Angela Ndalianis, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia Isabella van Elferen, Kingston University London, United Kingdom Editorial Board Dr Adam Hart, North Carolina State University Professor Adam Lowenstein, The University of Pittsburgh Dr Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, University of Kent Associate Professor Bernice Murphy, Trinity College Dublin Associate Professor Caetlin Benson-Allott, Georgetown University Dr Julia Round, Bournemouth University Dr Kristopher Woofter, Dawson College Montreal Associate Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Auckland University of Technology Associate Professor Mark David Ryan, Queensland University of Technology Professor Stacey Abbott, University of Roehampton London Associate Professor Valerie Wee, National University of Singapore

Agatha Christie and Gothic Horror Adaptations and Televisuality

Stuart Richards

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Joanne Emery Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 578 1 e-isbn 978 90 4855 664 9 doi 10.5117/9789463725781 nur 670 © S. Richards / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2024 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Dedicated to Josh, with love.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

9

Introduction: Dark Moods and Deadly Puzzles

11

1. And Then There Were None and Fantastic Horror

49

2. Ordeal by Innocence and the Uncanny

81

3. The Pale Horse and Folk Horror

115

4. The Detective’s Psyche in Witness for the Prosecution and The ABC Murders

143

Conclusion: Agnus Dei

179

Bibliography

191

Index

213

Acknowledgements This book has been an absolute pleasure to get lost in. I would first like to thank Amsterdam University Press, Maryse Elliott and staff for their support. To series editors Angela Ndalianis, Jess Balanzategui and Isabella van Elferen, thank you for your support. Angela, you have long been a mentor of mine, right from my early days at the University of Melbourne. Jess, working with you on this project has been an absolute dream. I would also like to thank everyone at the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre at the University of South Australia, particular thanks to Susan Luckman, Jess Pacella, Kim Munro, Rosie Roberts, Sam Whiting, Jess White, Jeanne-Marie Viljoen, Craig Batty and all my other colleagues. Special mention must be made to my fellow Screen Studies colleague Saige Walton, whose advice and mentorship has guided me through my time at UniSA and this project. To my family in Melbourne, particularly my Mum and Dad, Brendan, Cameron, Jennifer, and Calum, thank you for your support. To my friends, particularly Liv Monaghan, Katherine Copsey, Claire Miller and Mikhaila Clemens, whose love and support has always been invaluable. To my dear friend Liz Robinson-Griffith, who suggested I read And Then There Were None in my first year of university, I am the Ariadne to your Hercule (or should that be the other way round?). I owe my love of Christie to you. Finally, to my husband Josh, thank you for your love, support, and patience as I fell down this Agatha Christie rabbit hole.



Introduction: Dark Moods and Deadly Puzzles Abstract In the introductory chapter, I posit the book’s core argument—that the increasing engagement with Gothic horror aesthetics is not new to Agatha Christie adaptations. These darker moods, however, have the potential to compete with the centrality of the puzzle in Christie’s stories. First, I establish the importance of the puzzle in Christie’s work. Second, I provide an overview of Agatha Christie adaptations that draw on the horror genre. This provides a historical overview of Agatha Christie adaptations for the small screen. I engage with television aesthetics and how Christie adaptations increasingly display a stylistic excess. This grounds my use of the horror and Gothic mood. I will argue that the debate on fidelity will always be relevant and a topic of concern because it matters to audiences and critics. Finally, I establish the subsequent chapters’ arguments and conceptual frameworks. Keywords: Agatha Christie, crime fiction, mood, aesthetics, genre studies, fidelity, adaptation studies, Gothic horror

We begin by closely examining the moving hands of a clock. Dorothy Squires’ “Anything I Dream Is Possible” warbles faintly in the background. The next shot in this opening montage pans across a newspaper clipping that depicts a woman surrounded by smiling children. The article’s title tells us that she is “The Orphan’s Saviour.” The screen then cuts to black with the sound of a WHACK and a THUD. Dorothy Squires is slowly drowned out by menacing, low-pitched strings. This is followed by a blurry sequence of the woman, the “orphan’s saviour,” on the ground, arm up, feebly attempting to stand. When we return to being in focus, we are given an extreme close-up shot of blood dropping onto fabric; it lands with a loud sizzle as if it burns to the touch. Blood drips down a more recent photograph of the woman with her now adult children; a smiling young man has his arm around her in an embrace.

Richards, S., Agatha Christie and Gothic Horror: Adaptations and Televisuality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024 doi 10.5117/9789463725781_intro

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Cut. We are now outside under the bright moonlight. That same man in the photograph exits the household grounds. A sign indicating the estate’s name ironically reads “Sunny Point.” The man seems to be in a total panic and hurriedly stops a car. When we return to inside, we first see the pendulum of a grandfather clock ticking. The camera tilts up to the face of the clock where we see the reflection of another woman screaming, having discovered the murder scene.

And so, Ordeal by Innocence (2018b) begins, and the series’ gloomy tone is established. The miniseries is adapted by screenwriter Sarah Phelps from Agatha Christie’s novel as part of her quintet that she has adapted for the BBC. Her other titles include The Witness for the Prosecution (2016), And Then There Were None (2015), The ABC Murders (2018a) and The Pale Horse (2020). These series, often dubbed “grim” and “gross” by critics, are a far cry from the quaint family-friendly murder that we have become accustomed to from Agatha Christie adaptations (see Hale 2019; Haigis 2019; Rabinowitz 2018). In this book, I will argue that these television series draw on varied generic codes to achieve a dark and gory aesthetic, ultimately challenging the conventionally charming treatment of Christie that we may be familiar with. They are adaptations that raise the indignation of Christie diehards. While Agatha Christie is no stranger to darker territory; it is rare that her mysteries are so consistently depicted with Gothic horror aesthetics. An exception to this rule, and a key case study of this book, is And Then There Were None, which has long been associated with the horror genre well before Sarah Phelps’ adaptation. The primary focus of this book is television. In doing so, I aim to advance knowledge on how these controversially dark Christie television adaptations contribute, not just to contemporary studies of Christie’s work, but more broadly to adaptation studies, television studies and genre studies—specifically horror, the Gothic and the murder mystery. This book resides in the junctures in which these fields intersect. Attention will also be paid to adaptations in other media forms of note. And Then There Were None, for instance, has been adapted into both a graphic novel and video game, both of which draw on horror imagery. Christie has long been primarily associated with television. Cosy British-set murder mysteries are a televisual staple, such as Midsomer Murders (1997–present), Vera (2011–present), Shetland (2013–present), Inspector Morse (1987–2000) and so on. As Mark Aldridge notes in his monograph Agatha Christie on Screen, “many people’s first experience of Agatha Christie is not through her original texts, but through adaptations of her work for film and [in particular] television” (2016, 1). The

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enduring popularity of small screen adaptations of Christie’s work is all the more ironic given how much she hated television. “Entirely a personal idiosyncrasy,” she wrote to her agent Edmund Cork. “I have to admit I am not television-minded” (Christie, qtd in Aldridge 2016, 35). Agatha Christie adaptations are perhaps best known as charming made-for-television whodunits set in either “exotic” locations or quaint British villages. David Suchet is beloved as Poirot as are Geraldine McEwan, Julia McKenzie and Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. The evolution of Agatha Christie on television is a study on the evolution of television itself. Agatha Christie’s stories feature heavily in the contemporary media landscape; reruns of various incarnations of the ITV series regularly appear in television schedules and her influence on the murder mystery genre cannot be overstated. Most recently, a key element to the solution of Knives Out (2019) draws heavily on Crooked House (1949). Her work is consistently liberally adapted, much to the anger of Christie’s diehard fans the world over. One must only look at the denigration of Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express (2017), dubbed “self-indulgent and thoroughly unnecessary” (Orr 2017, para. 9), to see how dear her stories are to her fans. Typical iterations of Agatha Christie aren’t strangers to controversy, though, as these series have also been known to deviate from the source text. For instance, a lesbian couple is introduced into The Body in the Library (2004), an episode of the series Agatha Christie’s Marple, and several changes were made to the 2005 adaptation of Cards on the Table, including the addition of a gay tryst and the identity of one of the killers being altered. Bold is the adapter who messes with Poirot and plays with Christie’s puzzle logic. While ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Marple and Phelps’ adaptations do have notable fans, the matter of fidelity for some Agatha Christie diehard fans concerns how her detectives deal with this puzzle format. Do the clues remain the same? Is the ensemble of suspects faithful to how they are presented in the source text? And, most importantly, how does an engagement with a darker tone impact upon the untangling of these puzzles? Implications being: Can style detract from a complex narrative? It may have come as a shock for diehard Christie fans when Sarah Phelps’ adaptations were all heralded as considerably grislier than their charming predecessors. While the first three miniseries were generally viewed positively by critics, scoring 82, 79 and 71 on Metacritic, respectively, the critical response to The ABC Murders was considerably more mixed, achieving only a 58. Her most recent adaptation, The Pale Horse, has received only mildly favourable reviews, receiving a 69. The social media backlash against The ABC Murders was noticeable, so much so that Sarah Phelps, herself, took to

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Twitter to respond to criticisms, albeit in a derisive manner: “And thanks to all of you, those who enjoyed it and those who didn’t. See you next time when I rewrite Pride and Prejudice in a crack den. You’re all lovely. A bientot, mes enfants. #TheABCMurders” (Phelps 2018c). Upon the release of Phelps’ And Then There Were None, author Sophia Hannah (2015) observed that “some people still see Christie as a writer of cozies—fun puzzles that are all surface and plot, with little depth or substance to them.” Phelps, herself, likens this divisiveness to “manufactured outrage” (qtd in Ling 2018, para. 4). In his review of The ABC Murders for the New York Times, Mike Hale took issue with the emphasis on everything being grimmer and grosser, writing that the adaptation is so “suffocatingly revisionist that what’s left isn’t really Christie at all” (2019, para. 4). The grimy, shadowy tone that worked for The Witness for the Prosecution, And Then There Were None and Ordeal by Innocence is seen as a distraction in The ABC Murders. This Gothic horror twist rebels against the association of Christie’s stories with quaintness. In this book, I argue that Phelps’ quintet, namely And Then There Were None, The Witness for the Prosecution, Ordeal by Innocence, The ABC Murders and The Pale Horse, draw upon a broad cross-section of Gothic horror to generate a gloomy mood that permeates through the texts. Rather than being a genre, the Gothic is a tone that employs political and cultural discourse to make us uncomfortable (Smith 2008). As Catherine Spooner notes, the “Gothic remains an incredibly fertile and diverse cultural form.… [It] continually reinvents itself, and is reinvented” (2007, 196). This book explores this “Gothicisation” of Agatha Christie’s work. Fred Botting defines the Gothic as signifying excess, gloomy atmospheres and the past haunting the present, where these threats are “associated with supernatural and natural forces, imaginative excesses and delusions, religious and human evil, social transgression, mental disintegration and spiritual corruption” (1996, 1). Christie’s murder mysteries are fertile grounds for these themes to be explored.

The Puzzle Agatha Christie largely adhered to a puzzle-like formula in her stories, which quickly became her trademark. The detective was largely a channel through which the reader could decipher the puzzle. In an obituary for her in 1976, Time wrote that she was “the genre’s undisputed queen of the maze.” Her work was born out of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which is cited as occurring anywhere between 1918 and 1945 (Curran 2011, 21–30;

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Rowland 2010, 119). These clue-puzzle narratives, Knight (2010, 91) writes, gave the reader enough information to try to solve the mystery without offering much in terms of plot or style; a charge applicable to Murder on the Orient Express (1934), but perhaps unfair to more atmospheric mysteries, such as Sleeping Murder (1976) or And Then There Were None (1939). Works published during the Golden Age were highly stylised and featured both a murder and a detective, someone positioned externally to law enforcement. Writing on the mystery novel, Brooks argues that they are “pursued both for the solution of enigmas and their prolongation in suspense, in the pleasure of the text: the best possible case of plot for plot’s sake” (1984, 170). Agatha Christie was particularly known for her “Closed Circle” mysteries. These featured a murder in a closed off location which was ostensibly impossible for anyone to come and go from the scene except for the suspects in question. This location could be a manor (Ordeal by Innocence), an island (And Then There Were None) or a moving train (Murder on the Orient Express). The detective and their confidants go to great lengths to outline how no other suspects could be considered. As the clues unravel, early assumptions are proven to be false. Obvious suspects are either killed off or proven to be unmistakably innocent. This model is an extension of the “lockedroom” mystery, of which Christie wrote a rare example of with Murder in Mesopotamia (1936). The game between the text and the reader is that the solution is possible to be solved before the detective outlines how it was all done in the final pages. Agatha Christie was famous for having her two detectives, Poirot and Miss Marple, reveal the solution in the denouement with the concerned parties present. Palmer writes, however, that while the reader has the chance to solve the mystery, “(a) the author weights all the chances in the detective’s favour; and (b) the narrator, whether first person or third, may be unreliable” (1991, 131). While many clues are foregrounded in the plot, fundamental components to the cause-and-effect nature of the crime are buried throughout the narrative only to be drawn attention to by the awe-inspiring detective. There were rules for writers working within the Detection Club, a social and dining society founded in 1930 by a group of authors who wrote Golden Age mysteries. Agatha Christie notably broke many of these rules, perhaps most famously with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) (Makinen 2010, 417). These were established by Ronald Knox, a Catholic priest, theologian, author and radio broadcaster who was a member of the club, and they dictated that stories must have as their primary interest the “unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end” (1929, 9).

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Stereotypes are used in the puzzle formula in unexpected ways to fool the reader (Munt 1994, 8). In Queering Agatha Christie, Bernthal argues that by using recognisable stereotypes, “Christie both fools the reader as to ‘whodunit’ and undermines the certainty and reality of normativity” (2016, 265). This results in oppressive systems and structures being questioned, such as Poirot’s subversion of the law in Murder on the Orient Express. This is a far cry from those that view her “stereotyped characters and picturesque middle-class settings” as creating a “literary landscape that was unlikely to shock or surprise—a reassuringly conservative world view” (Symons, qtd in Bernthal 2016, 1). The carnivalesque upheaval of relations in Ordeal by Innocence, for instance, is one such example. These narratives are often about subverting normality. The charming whodunit was constructed largely through the BBC adaptations, such as Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple in the 1980s, a “nostalgic articulation of Englishness” that was perfect for Thatcher’s Britain (Mortimer 2021, para. 2). Accordingly, the relationship between the Christie puzzle and ideology has always been in flux. The central interest lies in the interrogation of clichéd suspects. This frames these stories as being game-like, a contest between the author and the reader. Later adaptations often adhere to this emphasis on the puzzle but update Christie to contemporary mores. As Bernthal concludes in his monograph, “[a]s Christie remains in the public eye, her seriousness as a writer and her relevance to contemporary audiences is being continually reasserted, while her institutional status is becoming less static and stereotyped than it has in recent decades” (2016, 267). Phelps’ adaptations are a fascinating example of her work being “less static and stereotyped.” This darkening of Christie, however, reduces the centrality of the puzzle in the adapted narrative in order for a deeper exploration of the detective’s psyche. The ending of The Witness for the Prosecution, for instance, is more melodramatic than Christie’s hurried conclusion as it explores the impact of trauma on the main players. This extended conclusion shifts the focus of the whole miniseries to be primarily about protagonist John Mayhew’s psyche, as he deals with post-traumatic stress and guilt from war, rather than the source text’s focus on Romaine’s hoodwinking performance. In a tender early moment between Mayhew and Leo, where Mayhew becomes less stand-offish with the accused, Leo shares his despair in life after returning from the war. “We thought we’d get more,” Leo says despondently, of his belief that they would return heroes. “We are what happens when you butcher the young,” the lovers say in a final confrontation as they label Mayhew as equally as monstrous as them.

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This leads Mayhew to have a fight with his wife as he forces himself on her, only for her to reveal that she never forgave him for their son not returning from battle. Typically, once the puzzle itself is solved, Christie concludes her stories quickly. Characters hastily profess their love for each other in closing paragraphs or in brief epilogues. This shift in focus to characters’ psychological development is a consistent theme in Phelps’ work and, I argue, a motif in the Gothicisation of Christie’s novels. This dichotomy between rationality and irrationality, the order of the puzzle and the disorder of the detective’s psyche, are indicative of the detective narrative and the Gothic being heavily intertwined (Spooner 2010). While the central puzzle in The Pale Horse (1961) remains largely unchanged, Easterbrook’s true intentions are the focus. In the book, a middleman makes a bet with the client who want someone murdered. That client then visits the witches who, in turn, pass this information onto Osborne, who murders the victims with thallium poison. In the adapted text, Osborne seeks out the clients and uses spies to find out the names of the victims when they meet the witches. In this version, the witches don’t knowingly contribute to the murders. The series concludes with Easterbrook entering his house to the discovery of his wife’s body, as he always does in his nightmares. Here, he reads the newspaper detailing his untimely death. As stated above, this ambiguous conclusion suggests that the witches have committed him to an eternity of torment in purgatory. The solution to this complex puzzle is glossed over quickly in the final confrontation with Osborne, leaving many viewers confused over the puzzle’s details (Griffiths 2020; Keene 2020; Longridge 2020; Mellor 2020). The real crescendo here is Easterbrook’s guilt over Delphine’s murder and Hermia’s realisation of his violent misogyny. It’s Easterbrook’s unravelling psyche that is the emphasis of this adaptation. The changed ending in Ordeal results in several clues present in the book being removed or altered. Christie’s version sees Kirsten, the maid, revealed as the killer, in a lover’s pact with the victim’s son, Jack, while the killer in Phelps’ version is Leo Argyle, the victim’s husband, who commits the murder so he can be with his young secretary, Gwenda. Jack has now become Kirsten’s illegitimate son conceived through Mr Argyle raping her when she first started working at the household. The ending in the book is very quick with the denouement lacking the drawn-out finesse of a Marple or Poirot story. Shortly afterwards, Kirsten stumbles out of the house with the Argyle surviving family members remaining behind. Phelps’ miniseries concludes once the surviving Argyle children visit Calgary in a psychiatric hospital and it is revealed that Kirsten is keeping the killer locked up in the

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bomb shelter. The actual crime is solved while an entire sixteen minutes remains of the episode. This is considerably longer than more traditional adaptations of Christie’s work. Likewise, since The ABC Murders is primarily about Poirot rather than the puzzle, the ragtag “legion” of investigators is removed from the source text. The book sees Poirot assemble key supporting figures who are connected to each murder. Alice Ascher’s niece, Mary Drower; Betty Barnard’s f iancé and sister, Donald Fraser and Megan Barnard; and Carmichael Clarke’s brother and secretary, Franklin Clarke and Thora Grey. These legion members become active in the deliberation process, which is in fact a ruse by Poirot to further investigate them. With the legion subplot removed, these characters become mere suspects. The crime scenes all have some relevance to Poirot, whose experience in World War I is key to the series’ thematic development, where it is revealed he was in fact a priest, rather than a Belgian police detective. Phelps uses the 1930s setting to explore the parallels between the British Union of Fascists and a contemporary post-Brexit Britain, positing that the rising fascist fear of the outsider resides in both climates. This distrust of outsiders is evident in the book (see 38–39, 48, 64, 68). This atmosphere, however, does not relate to the central puzzle. This xenophobia is paramount to developing Poirot’s character. The central mystery is engulfed by this character development; the suspects and victims are just catalysts to explore Poirot’s isolation and trauma. This importance of the puzzle, or lack thereof, places an emphasis on the role of the narration in Christie adaptations. Viewing Christie, the viewer must piece together the broader story of the crime, be it during a feature-length film or across multiple episodes. Drawing on the difference between fabula (story) and syuzhet (plot) from Russian formalism, Bordwell defines film narration as “the process whereby the film’s syuzhet and style interact in the course of cueing and channelling the spectator’s construction of the fabula” (1985, 53). From the sequence of events provided in the plot, the viewer must mentally paint the picture of the story, ideally before the detective beats them to it. Clues are integral to this. This slow reveal of the story is what creates suspense for the viewer. While the long-form format of seriality allows for complexity, which is fundamentally a redefinition of “episodic forms under the influence of serial narration” (Mittell 2015, 18), the embracing of these conventions, I argue, can downplay these clues and displace the centrality of the puzzle. This embellishment of mood is directly connected to the characterisation of the detectives rather than the piecing together of the puzzles.

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Fidelity: The Challenge of Reworking Mysteries Agatha Christie’s stories have always been about the questioning of norms and values in British society. Darker adaptations only drive these challenges further. In Christie’s mysteries, one of the suspects is a killer and is often described by the detective as evil. This core attribute perfectly lends itself to horror, which for Wood (1985) is fundamentally about the suppression of “the other,” either within oneself or society. The Gothic draws on the fear of the repressed past to terrify the present. With this in mind, Phelps uses the Gothic as a framework in these adaptations to critique the present. Julie Sanders draws on the power of resistance from Adrienne Rich in describing adaptations as a form of “re-vision, the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction … not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (qtd in Sanders 2005, 12). Adaptations can be a form of defiance, identifying fissures, absences and silences of canonical texts. Perhaps relationships between characters can be explored further than they are in the source text; maybe some characters are more sinister than what we first thought. This shift can be seen in some adaptations making a character more sympathetic, such as Gwenda Vaughn being a victim in ITV’s Ordeal by Innocence as opposed to the catty mistress in Sarah Phelps’ later adaptation. The Sarah Phelps quintet depart from many conventions that Christie is known for, particularly the centrality of the puzzle for the reader to solve. These adaptations embellish the depths of the evil that is at the core of these crimes, a departure of what we are used to. The economics of television production, as Aldridge notes, are to blame for the “typical Christie” (2016, 43). Many early televisual adaptations in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Three Blind Mice (1947), were modelled on radio broadcasts. While changes were made for the visual medium, many clues were emphasised in the dialogue. BBC’s later miniseries in the 1980s only cemented this style, thus building pre-conceived expectations of the audience with the quintessential televisual model of Agatha Christie. The puzzle and the necessary clues were key to these “typical Christie” miniseries. Christie’s daughter, Rosalind Hicks, was closely involved in the development of BBC’s adaptation of the Miss Marple novels, often commenting on scripts resulting in what Aldridge notes as “cosy nostalgia” (2016, 220). Resistances to these quaint televisual conventions manifest in the acceptance of what is negative, low or monstrous. In this book, I will explore how these aforementioned “grimmer and grosser” moods of the adaptations are drawn from sources beyond Christie’s work. I will be exploring the adoption of horror and the Gothic through the lens of adaptation studies. The negative response of fans to these adaptations are

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centred largely around fidelity, which holds a curious place in adaptation studies. Scholars have long argued against the notion of fidelity being the arbiter of whether an adapted text is any good. In “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” Bazin notably argued against the “faithfulness of form” and advocates for a process of adaptation that seeks cinematic “equivalences of meaning” (1997, 20). The greater meanings of a novel exist beyond the confines of surface style and can, therefore, coexist with different formal equivalences. In a contemporary post-structuralist approach to adaptation studies, as identified by David Kranz and Nancy Mellerski (2008, 4–9), there is a movement away from the binary of original and copy, that meanings drawn out of adapted texts are from multiple sources. Hurst (2008, 172) draws on Derrida in her critique of the role of fidelity and the binary in adaptation studies. She argues that to assert an essentialist difference between the two mediums is to reinscribe the oppositional structure along with the hierarchy. And yet, fidelity informs the critical responses of Agatha Christie fans to adaptations of her work, because, as Christine Geraghty argues, “faithfulness matters when it matters to the viewer” (2008, 3). For many fans of Agatha Christie, Phelps’ adaptations are judged according to the degree to which they conform to their source text. Since they diminish the role of the puzzle in favour of an exploration of what is repressed, they are fundamentally different. For Catherine Grant, adaptation is a matter of reception, as screen texts require their audiences to “recall the adapted work, or the cultural memory” (2002, 57). Given that Christie’s own signature is branded across the promotional material for these series, audiences are invited to recognise Christie’s work in these versions. This anchoring of Christie as the primary author gives Phelps’ work cultural and economic value. As such, even though this analysis moves away from the original/copy binary, how the copy strays from the original and is shaped by Gothic horror is an important component to consider. We can never escape the original. This analysis of Phelps’ adaptations is informed by Robert Stam’s (2000) work on fidelity, which sees adaptation as a process of translation, where the story is decoded into a new medium. This argument sees new forms of grammar being used to express the essence of the story. Gérard Genette informs Stam’s work on textuality to argue that we should consider adaptation as a dialogue, with transtextuality being “all that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts” (Genette, qtd in Stam 2000, 65). Adaptation is then a form of transtextual dialogism between the literary and the screen. These adaptations are an “ongoing whirl of intertextual references and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, transmutation,

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with no clear point of origin” (Stam 2000, 66). This will become clearer in my analysis of Phelps’ work, where the miniseries clearly draw on generic codes beyond Christie’s work. Screen adaptations are “mediated by a series of filters—studio style, ideological fashion, political constraints, auteurist predilections, charismatic stars, economic advantage, evolving technology” (Stam 2000, 68–69). Consequently, Phelps’ adaptations are new texts while simultaneously reminding the viewer of Agatha Christie’s original writing. These are her stories but not as we know them, as they are in dialogue with other screen generic conventions. There is pleasure in viewing an adapted text through the identification of repetition; they are “second without being secondary” (Hutcheon 2006, 9). The knowing reader or viewer enjoys the intellectual pleasure of intertextuality, in seeing your favourite stories in new forms. Kim Cattrall as Emily French in The Witness for the Prosecution is like Samantha Jones from Sex and the City; Rufus Sewell as Mark Easterbrook in The Pale Horse is reminiscent of James Bond. Phelps’ characters transgress sexual decorum in new ways. The more desperate the guests become in And Then There Were None, for instance, the more raucous they are. The four supposedly remaining survivors, Claythorne, Lombard, Armstrong and Blore, all drink to excess, snort cocaine and howl like animals; Armstrong and Blore dance in each other’s arms and Claythorne and Lombard have sex, something which does not happen in the source text. Literary and screen texts use different forms of grammar to express story elements. The creators of the adapted screen text must consider how literary texts look and sound and they need to adjust the story for new commercial parameters. In the case of The Witness for the Prosecution, for instance, Phelps has adapted a short story of only twenty or so pages to almost two hours of television content. The self-reflexivity of intertextuality allows us to consider the different production contexts of both the original and adaptation. According to Jellenik, “[a]daptations allow us to critically explore the aesthetic, political, industrial, and cultural drives behind texts—the ways that genre and culture alter and construct content. Through this lens, the act of adaptation becomes a critical component of cultural construction” (2017, 40). Using Gothic horror, these adaptations are a fascinating critique of British society. A key part to the crime in Ordeal, for instance, is the abuse of the household servant, a significant reworking of how she appears in the book. Andrew Smith warns that the Gothic “should not be read as a form which passively replicates contemporary cultural debates about politics, philosophy, or gender, but rather reworks, develops, and challenges them”

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(2008, 8, my emphasis). The Gothic, then, is a useful framework to rework and reconsider Christie’s writing. Arguing against the “manufactured outrage” of the backlash from Christie diehards in the Radio Times, Phelps is a firm believer that Christie would have made her stories more explicit if she could have: She might not have written any sex or swearing and drug taking and whatever, but I’m sure she would have it if she could.… Don’t tell me this woman was a stranger to controversy and that she’s a stranger to blood and guts and a stranger to all the strange complex weirdness that makes up human motivation and human behaviour. She knows. (Phelps, qtd in Ling 2018, para. 5)

For Phelps, this darkness is the essence of Agatha Christie’s work. According to this logic, Phelps is not changing the story but expressing the essence of Christie’s using aesthetics drawn from Gothic horror. Adapting Christie in the socio-cultural climate of the 2010s allows Phelps to explore the extremities of evil. Where does the inspiration for the grammar of these new mediums come from? An examination of these transtextual dialogics does not necessarily discount the study of fidelity, particularly for adapted texts that identify the original author so explicitly. A study of faithfulness allows us to explore this tension of a screen text that emphasises the original author while simultaneously proclaiming that this text “deserves a brutality” that wasn’t there beforehand (Phelps, qtd in Kanter 2020). Phelps’ position, here, can be read as reflecting the Gothic sentimentalities of Christie’s writing. Gothic stories are not just about threatening older men and vulnerable heroines in partially ruined castles. They are also about tormented characters within a household often isolated from the outside world, as is encountered in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) or Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817). Agatha Christie’s crime fiction was a key example of middlebrow gothic, as her stories reflected middle-class concerns of the day, which were looking towards the “re-establishment of social structures following the disruption” of World War I (D’Cruze 2006, 52–53). The middlebrow novel, Humble argues, was “a powerful force in establishing and consolidating, but also in resisting, new class and gender identities” after the war (2001, 3). As such, the turmoil faced in the Gothic middlebrow novel reflected the instabilities of domesticity, “where aspirations towards progress had to negotiate some rather disturbing aspects of modernity” (D’Cruze 2006, 47). Christie’s ensembles of characters must all face the social upheaval that follows a crime.

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These series embellish the downplayed Gothic horror found in the novels. In many stories, such as Sleeping Murder, The Sittaford Mystery (1931) or, indeed, The Pale Horse, Christie uses supernatural elements, often ghosts or evil spirits, to establish mood. These supernatural elements are almost always imagined by the characters, however. These Gothic horror tropes are always rationally explained away through the logic of the detective. The Gothic, Rowland writes, functions as a “threatening state which detecting is meant to map and recuperate” (2001, 116). Such depictions of Gothic horror in Christie’s writing are often a narrative device to misdirect the reader. Phelps’ adaptations don’t explain away these elements. Instead, they are embraced to further establish mood. The witches in The Pale Horse really do have dark powers and ghosts do appear in And Then There Were None and Ordeal by Innocence through visions. And yet, there are even further Gothic concerns to be found in Christie’s novels. Often, Christie’s novels are about violent evil lurking within the picturesque English village or a stately, upper-class family home. The Gothic novel, Modleski (1982, 20) argues, is fundamentally domestic, concerning familial relationships, often between women, within the home. In this cultural imagining of the home, the Gothic novel is often centred around what separates the domestic sphere from “the abuses and exploitations that are seen as inextricably linked with an experience of the public sphere” (Davidoff et al. 1976, 140). Cultural constructions of the “ideal home” are dependent upon the disavowal of anything violent (Blunt and Dowling 2006). The Gothic text, however, often subverts this distinction, with evil now being found within this ideal home. As such, Sarah Phelps’ adaptations are valuable case studies to explore these Gothic underpinnings found within Christie’s original writing.

Horror Aesthetics Through looking at the relationships between Agatha Christie and Gothic horror aesthetics, this book takes a post-structuralist approach to adaptation. The Gothic, Lawn writes, is a mode rather than a genre as it is “a way of doing and seeing, adaptable across dislocations of culture, time, and space, rather than a substantive category” (2006, 14–15). These adaptations are not how we expect Agatha Christie stories to look and sound but rather a new way to appreciate Christie’s original writing. The dominant adaptations of Christie, such as those featuring David Suchet and Joan Hickson, feature murders that are stylistically akin to melodramas rather than to thrillers or horror.

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There are a few Agatha Christie adaptations that do draw on horror forms, with death scenes stylistically evoking dread. Aldridge (2016) provides extensive annotations on Christie film and television adaptations with a focus on American and British output. Aldridge cites several examples that draw on horrific tones, such as the score for the pre-title card opening of the short television drama Three Blind Mice (1947). Another example is the television episode of “The Red Signal,” which ran as a part of the halfhour anthology series Suspense (1949–54) on CBS. The short drama deals with themes of paranoia and the macabre as several characters, including one guilty of a crime, attending a séance, a recurring narrative device in Christie’s work. The American production keeps the British setting and cast. According to Aldridge, it evokes the gothic horror of British literature as well as its contemporaries—while this séance may be taking place in what is ostensibly the present day, it carries with it connotations of old dark houses and centuries of ghost stories. (2016, 57)

As many Christie stories do, “The Red Signal” shifts from the fear of the paranormal to a crime thriller free from anything supernatural. Other example includes ITV’s “The Last Séance” (1986), adapted from The Hound of Death short story collection, which also features a séance infused with a creeping sense of dread. A film adaptation of Ordeal by Innocence (1985) experiments with horror aesthetics. The first cut of the film was not received well by test audiences with the original score composed by Pino Dinaggio, who was perhaps best known for his work for Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973). His score was reportedly “reminiscent of a ghost story” (Aldridge 2016, 199), embellishing the unease of characters haunted by the past. Sadly, and perhaps strangely, the soundtrack was replaced with a Dave Brubeck jazz score. Another example can be found in the ITV series Agatha Christie’s Marple, which featured a very loose adaptation of The Sittaford Mystery in 2006, where an ensemble of characters learns of an impending murder through a séance. The rising music during the séance builds the tension and the scene ends abruptly, as we shift back to the dramatic form. The allusion to horror here, like many of Agatha Christie’s associations with horror screen aesthetics, is partial and fleeting. And Then There Were None has long been associated with the horror genre. The story has been known under several names due to its offensive original name with previous titles being Ten Little Ni***rs and Ten Little Indians. René Clair’s 1945 And Then There Were None emphasises the inescapable

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nature of death with the murders being “gruesome in their description if not depiction” (Aldridge 2016, 80). NBC’s telemovie Ten Little Indians (1959) is mostly a crime thriller. Midway through, however, the five survivors begin stumbling across dead bodies in a quick succession which “changes the tone from a slow-burn mystery to outright horror, as it mirrors the later slasher films more than the understated, unsettling nature of the original story” (Aldridge 2016, 63). For Aldridge, this “shift in genre” is due to “timing, pace and the nature of live production” (2016, 63). It’s ultimately a shift part-way through, however, as horror isn’t embraced holistically throughout. The horror text is fundamentally about fear. More broadly, Wood argues that “normality is threatened by the monster” (1979, 14) whereas Carroll (1990) defines horror as being art-horrified, where we have an emotional response, often that of fear or disgust, at something monstrous that defies scientific explanation. Both concur on the presence of a monster (or something monstrous) as being key to the horror form. In exploring the difference between the horror film and the science fiction film, and why they both often intersect, Vivian Sobchack (2004) argues that while both involve chaos, the horror text involves disruptions to the moral order while science fiction texts involve disruption of the social order. This distinction speaks to the importance of interpretation of aesthetics; or, to draw on Bordwell (1989), to consider “historical poetics.” A discussion of aesthetics and their “historical poetics” contextualises them “as part of different filmmaking and broader artistic traditions, or when viewed by different kinds of audience at different times” (Thomson-Jones 2008, 93). Genres are in a constant state of flux. Many genre theorists have articulated key stages of development, such as Schatz’s (1981) four cycles—experimental, classical, refinement and baroque. For Grant (1986), genre cinema is a commercial model that engages in repetition and variation of conventions for a knowing audience. Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), for instance, repeated identifiable tropes of the slasher film while surprising audiences with key variations to the subgenre’s model. When we refer to the horror genre, often we refer to quintessential examples, which clouds the categorisation process for screen texts on the periphery. For slasher films, we would refer to Halloween (1978) or Scream; for the zombie film, we would refer to the work of George A Romero. This focus creates the prototype effect for prominent horror films (Bordwell 1989, 148); i.e., key “go to” examples of the genre. But what about forms of horror that exist on the periphery? Leeder (2018) argues that this core/ periphery model is a useful approach to consider the many incarnations of the horror genre. This also allows for an exploration of the many intersections between genres, such as the sci-fi/horror hybrid Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979).

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For screen texts that aren’t wholly prescribed to the horror genre, where do these associations with the genre generate? In Film/Genre, Altman identifies the semantic and syntactic components of a genre, which aid us in identification and interpretation. “The semantic approach,” Altman writes, “stress the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged” (1984, 10). As such, the association of Agatha Christie with horror requires an examination of both of these semantic and syntactic arrangements. A knife or dark lighting, for instance, would feature in multiple genres other than a horror film. They could feature in a melodrama, a medical procedural or a Western. How these signs associate with other formal elements indicate how these murder mysteries could be interpreted as being Gothic and/or horror texts. They could also give rise to the reading of slasher films that finds their origins in the murder mystery novel. These texts on the periphery of horror are perhaps best described as having particular tones or moods. In his essay on the aesthetics of mood, Sinnerbrink draws on the concept of Stimmung to explore the “expressiveness of the film and the affective responsive of the viewer” (2012, 149). Moods imbue fictional worlds with aesthetic significance. Sinnerbrink argues that “a film-world must be aesthetically disclosed or rendered meaningful through the evocation of appropriate moods in order for such cues to show up as affectively charged with meaning in the first place” (2012, 154, his emphasis). Moods prepare us for an emotional engagement with a film that, according to Smith (2003), rely upon a series of cues that are diffused throughout a text. For television, it is not necessarily the narrative content but the aesthetic dimensions of an image that allow for these peripheral texts to have horror tones. The adaptations of Agatha Christie that are discussed in this book aren’t “horror takes”—they aren’t “Agatha Christie, except creepier or scarier.” Rather, they treat horror aesthetics as a form of tone, mood or atmosphere. The audiences of these miniseries, dare I say, are not entirely the same as those that would identify as horror or cult cinema fans (see Leeder 2018, 148). These are atmospheres created to further develop narrative strategies and characterisation. This also speaks to many scholars who argue against genre films as being one coherent group. We must move away, argues Cherry, from thinking of horror as a single, coherent genre but as “an overlapping and evolving set of ‘conceptual categories’ in a constant state of flux” (2009, 3). These aesthetics are an example of a text existing on the periphery of the horror genre. Through their combination of narrative, sound and image, horror produces an affective experience. While some horror scholars argue that the genre

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wants to shock us with “startle effects” (Baird 2000; Donnelly 2005), Hutchings (2009) argues that the genre is too varied to quantify what it does to the viewer. This leads us to embodied studies of our responses to horror. Many scholars have looked at the affect of horror (Hanich 2009; Brinkema 2014; Dudenhoeffer 2014; Reyes 2016). Ndalianis (2012a) explores this affective response of horror to what she refers to as the “sensorium.” In particular, she looks at the visceral disgust of “New Horror” cinema: New Horror, like all horror, relies on the sensorium, an integrated unit that combines cognition and the senses, the mind and the body. Horror media offer us a gamut of experiences—horror, laughter, fear, terror, the cerebral pleasures of intertextual play—and, depending on the sensory, emotional and intellectual encounters each example throws our way, we perceive, sense and interpret the fictional spaces of horror in diverse and distinctive ways. The sensorium, therefore, refers both to the sensory mechanics of the human body, but also to the intellectual and cognitive functions connected to it. (Ndalianis 2012a, 16)

It’s a combination of sensory and cognitive engagement with the text that typifies what horror and the Gothic do to us. Here, aesthetics is linked to the body and our cognition and, I argue, speaks to the impact of the uncanny. We feel uneasy when immersed in the Gothic horror text. We dwell on this unease. Ndalianis draws on Susan Buck-Morss, who posits that aesthetics are a “form of cognition, achieved through taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell—the whole corporeal sensorium” (1992, 6). Our senses are actively involved in the structuring of the information around us. This visceral element of aesthetics speaks to the haptic nature of sound and vision, something that Elsaesser and Hagener refer to as “the body-based nature of the experience” (2010, 178). This is far more complex than just a semiotic analysis of what we view but a consideration of all the formal components of screen culture. Haptic images don’t just invite “identification with a figure but encourage a bodily relationship between viewer and image” (Marks 2002, 3). Our senses and our awareness of these responses are key to how we respond to aesthetics, when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. We are disgusted, uncomfortable and shocked, but we are also aware that we are disgusted, uncomfortable and shocked. For some, there might be pleasure in having these negative emotions under control while for others, our curiosity of forms of monstrosity can be satiated. Beyond the interpretation of images, we rely on our senses to give meaning to the fictional geographies created by film (Ndalianis 2012a, 30). There is a deeper social purpose to how we

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respond to aesthetics that shock, disgust and terrify us. The role that mood plays in connecting to the sensorium is key to this analysis.

Horror Aesthetics and Television I do not want my labelling of earlier televisual adaptations of Christie’s works as “quaint” or “charming” to be read as a value judgement. Rather, I refer to the medium-specific qualities and production contexts of earlier television content. Increasingly, the aesthetics of film and television, and indeed other mediums, intersect. Regarding adaptations and the changing perception of television as an artistic medium, Griggs writes: For the adapter working with densely layered narratives of pre-existing texts, contemporary TV seriality lends itself to a more labyrinthine unravelling of and/or potential expansion of existing story worlds within a TV production context that is less rigid and less time-constrained than its cinematic or theatrical counterpart. (2018, 4)

The serial form has long offered the opportunity for adaptations to embrace the complexity of Christie’s puzzles. The 1985 BBC miniseries of A Murder Is Announced featuring Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, for instance, has a slow unravelling of all the clues from the original novel, such as the dead flowers and the positioning of the suspects in the darkened room. What has shifted, however, is how these adaptations have drawn upon an increasing array of intertextual references. I do hope that this analysis of how these adaptations draw upon cinematic codes, to use Geraghty, does not reconstitute “common-place evaluative hierarchies within television studies” (2003, 33). To do so, this book draws upon Mittell’s work on narrative complexity, the development of which was built upon the “changing perception of the medium’s legitimacy and its appeal to creators” (2015, 31). Shifts in the television industry in the 1980s and 1990s reinforces strategies of complexity and the opening up of narratives (Ndalianis 2012b). In analysing the relationship between Agatha Christie and horror screen aesthetics, I hope to engage with the increasing “aesthetic experience” of television. As Cardwell writes: First, sense experience and perception are key: “aesthetic vision” (contrasted with “ordinary vision”) entails a heightened alertness to the formal, sensory and “design” qualities of the artwork under scrutiny. Second, the observer experiences a specific kind of fulfilling emotional engagement

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with the work. Put simply, the observer apprehends formal qualities within the work that give rise to the response. (2013, 32–33)

This acknowledgement of the horror tone in Phelps’ adaptations of Christie draws out this elevated engagement. This is a considerable departure from engagements with television that are deemed to be “regular” and “ordinary,” by which I mean television that is deemed every day, familiar and routine (Bonner 2003, 29). There have been many adaptations of Christie’s work that contain narrative elements that allude to horror subject matter, such as The Sittaford Mystery, Hallowe’en Party (1969), Endless Night (1967) and Sleeping Murder. Earlier adaptations, I argue, do not offer this horror-related “aesthetic experience.” I am wary here in my language, to avoid describing these television adaptations as just being “cinematic.” This is a highly sceptical term, according to Jaramillo: First, it perpetuates an audio-visual media hierarchy that is hopelessly antiquated. Second, it does not advance our understanding of where the look and sound of television are going in any meaningful way. Finally, it implicitly argues that film has a clearly understood essence that can compensate for television’s lack thereof. (2013, 67)

As discussed above, Mark Aldridge outlines several examples in televisual adaptations of works by Christie that are elevated, albeit briefly. The television form can draw on cinematic codes, or aesthetics akin to the medium of cinema, without reinforcing notions that film is a more valued form of art. It is folly to assume that television has a “zero-degree style” as all television in fact has a style “born of a confluence of economic necessity, industry trade practices, aesthetics, and network standards” (Butler 2009, 26). Some texts, such as those deemed to be quality television, draw on a form reminiscent of film. While this book focuses primarily on television, it will draw upon the relationships between these mediums. Horror television is often discussed as being stylistically experimental, elevated or, to the frustration of many television scholars, cinematic. Writing on Penny Dreadful (2014–16), Griggs notes that like several other contemporary period series (Peaky Blinders, The Knick, Taboo), it “aspires to and attains a cinematic quality in its on-screen realisation of a particular period” (2018, 20). She draws on the influential work of Wheatley (2006) and Ledwon (1993) to argue that Gothic television has long had the tendency for cinematic experimentation, striving to represent the uncanny and supernatural no

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matter the production constraints. Writing on Hannibal (2013–15), Ndalianis argues that heightened sound and vision create a “disturbing feast of the senses that simultaneously makes us, as much as the show’s characters, co-victims of Hannibal’s machinations” (Ndalianis 2015, 280). Horror television borrows heavily from cinematic tropes. Penny Dreadful showrunner John Logan, writes Griggs, likens his “style aesthetic with that of populist cinematic horror” (Griggs 2018, 24). Wheatley (2006) draws on Caldwell (1995) to ground her analysis of Gothic television with shows such as Twin Peaks (1990–91), Millennium (1996–99) and American Gothic (1995–96). She argues that this cinematic experimentation in horror television, or “cinematic ecstasies” (Caldwell 1995, xi), is a result of what Caldwell has defined as televisuality. “Cinematic values,” argues Caldwell, “brought to television spectacle, high production values, and feature style cinematography” (1995, 12). Televisuality is typified by a highly complex visual style, a “structural inversion … [of] formal and presentational hierarchies [of] … narrative and discourse, form and content, subject and style” (Caldwell 1995, 6). Televisual television shows are products of industrial transformation, including a time of increased competition and the formation of new audiences. And yet, horror television as an identifiable category, according to Matt Hills, has long “been rendered relatively invisible” within the history of TV production (2005, 111). This marginalisation of horror television is built on the assumption that television is not a medium for “intense emotion/affect, or of depicted monstrosity, or of the subversive lifting of repression” (Hills 2005, 119). Since his writing, however, with shows such as True Blood, The Walking Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, American Horror Story, Lovecraft Country, The Last of Us and so on, “TV is at last able to realise on the small screen narratives that embrace the content and visual excess of its cinematic counterpart” (Griggs 2018, 37). We have long been in the midst of a golden age of horror television. As many television scholars, such as Jason Mittell, Sarah Cardwell and John Caldwell, have noted, television has long been recognised as stylish. One only needs to explore the extensive scholarship on quality television to see this. My point, here, is that this golden age is indicative of horror television embracing televisuality.

Chapter Structure: Moods of Horror Sarah Phelps’ adaptations draw out Gothic elements in Christie’s writing. This “Gothicisation” is largely achieved through televisuality. Each subsequent chapter of this book explores different elements of Gothic

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horror, all of which Phelps’ adaptations embellish. Each chapter will be grounded in the history of how the Gothic is evident in previous iterations of Christie’s work. Through the employment of a Gothic mood, these adaptations embrace what Thomas Schatz refers to as “genres of order” (1981, 35). These expressions of mood are attached to a larger value system that centres on an “individual, [often] male protagonist, generally a redeemer figure who is the focus of dramatic conflicts within the setting of contested space” (Schatz 1981, 35). The conflicts here are “externalised, translated into violence, and usually resolved through the elimination of some threat to the social order” (Schatz 1981, 35). While Schatz’s analysis of genre focuses primarily on how Hollywood genres “continually renegotiate the tenets of American ideology” (Schatz 1981, 35, his emphasis), these Christie adaptations explore British notions of class, gender and societal trauma in Christie’s texts. Through the violent conflict of murder, these grand isolated houses and familial relationships become ideologically unstable. This instability does occur in Christie’s writing, but cinematic signifiers of genre are used to emphasise this instability in new ways. And Then There Were None and Ordeal by Innocence both evoke Gothic horror, The Pale Horse conjures Folk Horror, while The Witness for the Prosecution and The ABC Murders are Gothic detective thrillers that draw on the tradition of noir. I argue that the dark moods these adaptations embrace shift the emphasis from the puzzles to explore the inner turmoil of the central players. In chapter 1, I explore how Christie’s None is framed around the Fantastic, arousing a sense of dread stemming from the fear of the unknown. According to Suzanne van der Beek (2016, 23), Christie’s novel overthrows the dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural, creating a Fantastic detective novel. This use of the Fantastic is the first trope of Gothic horror explored in this book. I will explore Phelps’ adaptation of None by comparing it to earlier adaptations using Todorov’s (1975) theory of the Fantastic, which argues that the Fantastic genre is a liminal one that relies on the space between the real and the imaginary. The Fantastic, Todorov argues, is evoked when a narrative event occurs that cannot be conclusively explained by natural law. This exists between the uncanny, where natural causes are given, such as hallucinatory drugs, and the marvellous, where a supernatural world is created: The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of imagination—and the laws of the world remain as they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then

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this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. Either the devil is an illusion, an imaginary being; or else he really exists, precisely like other living beings—with this reservation, that we encounter him infrequently. (Todorov 1975, 25)

Todorov’s use of the uncanny has an ambivalent similarity to Freud’s use of the term, as both pertain to a sense of uneasiness, “where the familiar seems strange and the strange familiar” (Nelson 2010, 105). Todorov’s use of the term is in relation to the Fantastic screen text, which sees any supernatural events explained. This approach is particularly relevant to the Gothic due to the centrality of an uncanny event that sparks the descent into uneasiness. Key here will be the use of the Fantastic within horror. Carroll moves beyond Todorov’s categories concerning the Fantastic to explore supernatural tales “that indulge art-horror and those that don’t” (1990, 16). For Carroll, art-horror is an affective response to a fictional monster that challenges our logical understanding of the world. Not all Fantastic-marvellous films are horrific. Some, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), are more sublime than horrific (Carroll 1990, 17). This chapter’s exploration of the Fantastic looks at the horror film’s use of the uncanny. For Carroll, our emotion in the art-horror film is focused on the monster that defies nature. “Horrific monsters,” he writes, “embody the notion of a violation of nature” (Carroll 1990, 57). Dudley Andrew argues that cinema is perfectly suited for this in-between state of the Fantastic, “for the cinema is at once exact in its reproduction of the minutiae of everyday life (belief) yet eager to startle its audience with tricks in optics, chemistry, and mise-en-scène (doubt)” (1984, 114). He continues arguing that the power of the Fantastic lies in our imagination: What makes the Fantastic function so perfectly in the cinema is the coincidence of these technological propensities and the nearly religious need for ambiguity present in our culture. The Fantastic makes us at home with the idea that our lives are crossed by possibilities we seldom attend to. It makes us at once anxious and grateful; more important, it tells us to consider our lives as smaller than the mysterious powers that surround us, so that we may survive such powers or participate in their ultimate ascendancy. To see the world as shimmering with the vaguely supernatural is at once satisfying and debilitating, for it enervates any impulse we might have to shape our destiny. After all, the Fantastic shows us that the world we live in is already a destined universe, one we can enjoy but one we must fear. (Andrew 1984, 114)

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The Fantastic horror explores the depths of this uncertainty, making the audience ponder the potentiality of a supernatural event. For both the original and Phelps’ adaptation of None, this uncertainty is spurred on by the guilt of the surviving players. The uncanny here lends the series to the Gothic mode where the dwindling guests lock themselves in their rooms at night and are tormented by an unknown, monstrous force. In turn, this monstrosity is revealed to be their own guilt, which is the reason behind their invitation to this island. For instance, after MacArthur’s murder, Emily Brent is writing in her diary, with a “pencil [that] struggled drunkenly in her fingers,” she writes: “THE MURDERER’S NAME IS BEATRICE TAYLOR.” When she awakes with a start, she ponders to herself in a low voice “Did I write that? Did I? I must be going mad…” (187). In the adaptation, a bloodied and scarred Beatrice Taylor spooks Emily Brent, to demonstrate her increasing sense of guilt. In the second episode, we have a medium close-up shot of Brent praying, reciting the lines of Psalm 23:4. Taylor’s voice joins in, in unison with Brent’s. Brent is silent as the non-diegetic orchestral score swells. Brent turns her head and we cut to a reverse shot of Taylor kneeling beside Brent on the bed. She turns her head slowly to reveal the bloodied scar on her right cheek left by the train she threw herself in front of. The reveal of the scar is in sync with the rising score. We cut back to Brent as she closes her eyes and prays with an increased intensity. The Gothic mode is centred on the return of the repressed past haunting the present (Lancaster 2008). It should be stated that Christie’s oeuvre is no stranger to the Gothic as her work regularly employed Gothic subgenres via nineteenth-century interlocutors, such as the use of the haunted house trope in Sleeping Murder. Further to the Gothic mode here is the sense of being trapped when encountering these monstrous beings. Goddu, for instance, argues that “if the gothic is the repository for cultural anxieties, then the specific form and site of its conventions have much to say about its cultural effects” (Goddu 1999, 126). The Gothic monster of the European text is often a fictional being who is used to signify broader socio-cultural concerns. Informing this argument will be Cohen, who argues that the “cultural fascination with the monster is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens” (1996, viii). By “Gothicising” these texts even further, these adaptations interrogate overly romanticised British cultural identities and give voice to those hidden between the lines in Christie’s earlier writings. The second chapter will extend the discussion of the uncanny to explore how it is represented through the use of space. The unknown does not evoke a Fantastic sense of dread in Ordeal as it is made clear early on that one of the

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surviving household members is the killer. The fear stems from the potential monstrosity of the suspects. The house in Ordeal becomes an uncanny space, a departure from the happy ideal presented in some flashbacks. As is often the case in Christie narratives, an opposition is established between order, rationality, intellectualism and all matters representative of the Enlightenment, and the transgressive, the dystopian Gothic mode. Narrative tension arises from the conflict of these two modes, often utilised through the past and present. Often, Christie’s original books are concluded with the re-establishment of order. In Phelps’ adaptations, however, the dystopian Gothic remains and the series conclude with unsettled tones. According to Mighall, the Gothic concerns the unwanted residue of the violent past bleeding into and haunting the present, arguing that the Gothic dwells in the historical past, or identifies “pastness” in the present, to reinforce a distance between the enlightened now and the repressive or misguided then. The tyrants and monsters of this mode represent an attempt to exorcise the ghosts of the past. (1999, xviii)

Foucault’s theory on heterotopia will be employed to examine how the dark house functions in the Agatha Christie text. The heterotopian space is an “othered” space, a placeless place, which, for Foucault (1971), can be a parallel space where disagreeable subjects are contained in order to make utopia possible. The heterotopian space can be a mirror that reflects our own world. It can, however, alter, disfigure, or disrupt what is being reflected. Lukić and Parezanović (2020) argue that heterotopias can be threatening places and that this is a useful theoretical construct to consider space in the horror film. “The actual genesis of horror,” they argue, “is being derived from the interaction between ordinary and Heterotopian spaces” (Lukić and Parezanović 2020, 1148). The space between these ordinary and heterotopian spaces is a dark one, that manifests “transgression and the fulfilment of the previously promised danger, which exerts its power over all other spaces, be they heterotopic or not, by transfiguring them or forming a completely different superimposable reality” (Lukić and Parezanović 2020, 1148). This will further draw out the uncanny in darkened adaptations of Agatha Christie’s work, as heterotopian aesthetics allow us to explore “the dissolution of the ideological bounds separating the Same and the Other” (Manning 2008, 2). This chapter will examine how these family members, no longer presumed innocent, engage with one another in the space of the house. Like Phelps’ previous efforts, aestheticism is interpreted in particular ways to fit certain

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genre requirements. The Argyle house is characterised in Christie’s source text as a “characterless modern house, gabled and porched. It might have stood on any good-class suburban site, or a new development anywhere” (14) The house in Phelps’ miniseries, however, is significantly more Gothic, with its appearance being considerably darker. The grounds at night, where several confrontations occur, are thick with fog under the moonlight. The houses in Ordeal and None draw on the iconography of the “terrible house,” popularised in many Gothic horror narratives. Wood writes that the house represents an extension or “objectification” of the personalities of the inhabitants.… [W]hat the “terrible house” (whether in Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, in Psycho, in Mandigo…) signifies is the dead weight of the past crushing the life of the younger generation, the future. (1985, 212)

The creepiness of the house is the manifestation of traumatic pasts haunting the survivors and suspects in the present. The third chapter explores The Pale Horse through the lens of Folk Horror. While many critics claim that the term “Folk Horror” was coined by Mark Gatiss in his 2010 BBC docuseries History of Horror, it was in fact used in a 1970 piece in Kine Weekly, where Rod Cooper labelled Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw as a “study in folk horror.” While the 1970s Folk Horror films, including The Wicker Man (1973) and Witchfinder General (1968), can be seen as a movement away from what Gatiss calls the gothic clichés of the 1960s Hammer horrors, many Folk Horror films exhibit deeply Gothic themes. In looking at these films’ thematic concerns, it’s clear that they are born out of a Gothic horror tradition (Newland 2016). The Folk Horror film deals with the rural, and often British, landscape exploring the countryside’s folklore and its superstitions. While many key examples are British, there are many, popular, non-British Folk Horrors, such as Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) in contemporary Sweden, The VVitch (Robert Eggers, 2015) in colonial New England (in North America), and Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006), set during the Spanish Civil War. The horror of this genre stems not from the outsider (often a protagonist from the city) but from the evil that lurks in the rural location itself. Underneath the quaint countryside exterior lies paganist rituals, witchcraft and ancient curses. Saige Walton argues that Eggers’ The VVitch “alerts us to the centrality of mood in Folk Horror and the non-human materiality of mood itself” (2018, para. 20). What distinguishes Folk Horror here is the “mediation of horror in and through landscape” (Walton 2018, para. 15). Fear of the supernatural power is associated with rurality and the products of nature.

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Adam Scovell’s (2017) identification of a chain of themes embedded in the Folk Horror text informs this chapter. First, and foremost, topography is integral to the Folk Horror text as the landscape often has “adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants” (Scovell 2017, 17). Second, isolation draws out Gothic themes and cuts off protagonists from the “established social progress of the diegetic world,” which leads to Scovell’s third motif, “skewed belief systems and morality” (2017, 18). Finally, Scovell’s Folk Horror chain culminates in the horrific fallout of the “happening/ summoning.” Much like the Gothic, the horrific past is permeated through the landscape. Scovell identifies the landscapes in British Folk Horror as palimpsestic, where these topographies provide “a permeable essence for the narratives to slip between times”; histories are figuratively buried in the earth with “potential pasts under the surface top-layer of the landscape” (2017, 46). Indeed, the folk element of this horror subgenre often lends itself to folk being “an adjective meaning ‘traditional,’” bound up in the practices of “intergenerational transmission and localized culture” (Bronner 2017, 1). The Pale Horse adaptation draws out these Folk Horror sentiments, where the rituals of the rural setting draw out violent pasts. When Easterbrook visits Much Deeping with Hermia, a parade descends upon them. Local townspeople are wearing masks of wickermen and animals, such as sheep, rabbits and goats. This Folk Horror aesthetic—the evil residing in the rural landscape and fear of the female power of the witches—is all the more ironic because the true violence in the story comes from the two city-residing men, the serial killer Zachariah Osborne and wife killer Mark Easterbrook. The opening title sequence sees three ominous straw dollies being formed, alluding to the power and omnipresence of the three witches. Ribbons twirl across fields of wheat curling around the bending twigs and straw. The score, filled with female vocals, becomes increasingly menacing as the sequence ends with a low-angle shot of the straw dollies catching fire. These same straw dollies are discovered by the witches’ supposed victims before their untimely demise. These references to the rural space often suggest or are a substitute for the witches’ presence. Keetley argues that in studying the Folk Horror text, we need to examine the “power of the specific ‘bundle’ of human and nonhuman that constitutes each environment as distinctive” (2020, 10). While Folk Horror often concerns the supernatural, such as witches, the focus of these texts is rather “a society that believes in witchcraft” (Groves 2017). This community, Scovell argues, often turn out to be the monstrous ones, thus blurring the line between normality

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and monstrosity. This chapter will examine the presence of this mutual entanglement in this rural Gothic take on The Pale Horse. Using The Witness for the Prosecution and The ABC Murders, chapter 4 will examine the relationship between the detective genre and the Gothic. Investigative narratives are often intertwined in the Gothic, particularly through themes of fearing the unknown, death and psychological deterioration (Miranda 2017; Serafini 2020a). There is a significant history to Gothic fiction developing tropes in the detective narrative, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). These authors were instrumental in developing detective fiction while presenting a combination of horror and reasoning. According to Michelle Miranda, they took cues from their own periods in history to isolate existing social anxieties to cause both fear and relief within the same tale of mystery—fear of the unknown clarified by the use of reasoning and logic, sometimes at the hands of the narrator-turned-investigator and other times at the hands of the detective. (2017, 2)

The work of Horsley (2001, 2005) and Spooner (2010) on the history of these two genres will guide this chapter. Spooner argues that “there are traces of Gothic in most crime narratives, just as there are crimes in most Gothic novels” (2010, 246). She argues that both the detective narrative and the Gothic rely on themes of duality, excess and the return of the past. Duality is caused by the unstable protagonist, whose “instability places the pursuit of knowledge enacted by the detective narrative under question, often surrounding the process of rational and moral judgment with doubt” (Spooner 2010, 250). The detective is often linked to the central killer/monster motif, akin to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Horsley argues that this doubling is crucial to Gothic fiction, where the detective/killer duality evokes the uncanny; the familiarity of the detective becomes unfamiliar and untrustworthy. The detective’s psyche is challenged as they lead us “from a social space, troubled by fantasies of power and disempowerment, to a space of adventure that serves as the escape from social oppression” (García-Mainar 2013, 14). Space here is not just physical, as it also has an ideological dimension. Both Mayhew and Poirot, in Phelps’ retellings, struggle with social exclusion and disempowerment in various forms. The detective character is an isolated figure whose intervention resolves the key narrative conflict (Schatz 1981; Gates 2006). Phelps adaptations here isolate

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these figures more than what they are in their source text. Pathos, according to García-Mainar, is created through anxiety over the “contemporary dissolution of the social space” (2013, 24). For Mayhew, it is his isolation (and suggested suicide) spurred on by post-war trauma; for Poirot, it is a mix of xenophobia as well as post-war trauma. As Botting notably argues, “Gothic signifies a writing of excess” where “imagination and emotional effects exceed reason” (1996, 1, 2). The Gothic crime narrative, as Spooner (2010, 252) notes, places rationality under threat for the majority of the narrative. This is represented through the excessiveness of the crime or the dark imaginations of the detective/killer duality and Phelps’ minimisation of the puzzle’s centrality. Many traditional detective narratives play extensively with the supernatural (Horsley 2005, 48), such as Peril at End House (1932), The Sittaford Mystery and Sleeping Murder. “The positioning of traditional detective fiction as anti-Gothic,” Spooner argues, is more about the rational, modernist aspirations for writers to be seen to be detached from deeply unfashionable Gothic traditions rather than “essential properties of the text” (2010, 248). Finally, both genres have a preoccupation with the return of past to the present, something Skenazy dubs as “gothic causality” (1995, 114). Charles J. Rzepka refers to this trope as a Gothic vestigiality structuring the “hardboiled” detective fiction (2005, 221–25). Skenazy argues: Both gothic and detective fiction … share common assumptions: that there is an undisclosed event, a secret from the past; that the secret represents an occurrence or desire antithetical to the principles and position of the house (or family); that to know the secret is to understand the inexplicable and seemingly irrational events that occur in the present. Both forms bring hidden experiences from shadow to light. (1995, 114)

This chapter will argue how Phelps’ adaptations of The Witness for the Prosecution and The ABC Murders seemingly appear to be traditional detective miniseries while fundamentally leaning into the Gothic crime tropes of duality, excess and the return of the past. The Witness adaptation focuses on past traumas resurfacing. Leonard, Romaine and Mayhew were all impacted by the war. Mayhew’s wife has never forgiven him for the loss of their son during this period. Further, Mayhew’s bronchitis, resulting from his inhaling mustard gas during his service, develops to serious levels. Romaine and Leo cite revenge for the violence impacted on their generation as motivation for their crimes. The women are shown to be further victims of this trauma via their damaged partners: Mayhew’s grieving wife and

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Romaine’s expulsive shout of “fucking men” in her courtroom outburst. This war-inflicted trauma is also explored in The ABC Murders, where Poirot’s history clouds his investigation.

Conclusion: Puzzles and Aesthetics These adaptations are arguably a celebration of Christie entering into newer, darker and lower territories. These transtextual works are shaped by multiple influences beyond the original. They draw on varied generic codes to achieve this dark and gory aesthetic, ultimately defying the traditionally quaint treatment of Christie with which we may have become accustomed. The murders in Phelps’ versions are much grislier; her take on Ordeal is notably more camp than earlier adaptations. These dark, gory adaptations can be thought of as lurid in how they resist the original desires of the source text (Grossman 2015, 1–2). They are not the charming whodunits that we have come to expect. As argued by Flint-Nicol, Phelps’ adaptation of And Then There Were None shifts the television crime drama from a whodunit that unmasks the killer’s identity to a study on “the psychology of criminality and the morality and ethics of justice” (2019, 152). Granted, previous adaptations of Christie’s work have of course strayed from their source texts. Poirot and Miss Marple are inserted into stories where they didn’t originally appear, such as the ITV version of Ordeal by Innocence, where Gwenda, who is notably more sympathetic in this version, invites her former employer Marple to attend her wedding to Leo. What separates Phelps’ adaptations, and perhaps raises the ire of Christie purists, however, is their embracing of darker genres. Phelps embellishes this grimy aesthetic. These adaptations are grim in terms of their darker aesthetics, moods and narrative emphases on the ramifications of murder. These adaptations are gross through the representation of blood, corpses and gore. By focusing primarily on the psyche of the detectives—saving for None, where there is no detective—these adaptations break the rules of the original Detection Club, as they are no longer primarily about the puzzles for the viewer to solve. The source texts are games between the author and the reader; Phelps’ adaptations are explorations into what drives these detectives, embracing the dark potentialities of these crimes. Gothic fiction uses horror tropes—violent memories, hallucinations of victims and the spooky house—to explore the fears and anxieties of society. Eugenia C. DeLamotte writes that in the Gothic text, “the perils of the soul in its darkest night reflect, in magnified and revealing forms, the quotidian realities of life in the

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daylit world” (1990, vii). The uncanny complicates these puzzles. Likewise, the detective thriller sees the investigator explore these changing social spaces. In focusing on these ideologically uncertain terrains, these adaptations become less and less about the central crime, less “Christie-esque.” These crimes reveal chaotic interpersonal dynamics and changing social mores, which the detective battles to navigate. In Phelps’ take on Christie, our expectations of traditional notions of Englishness are brutally inverted. The puzzle is made secondary as a result. This is central to the displeasure many felt in response to some of these adaptations. This of course doesn’t make them of any lesser value than the “typical Christies” that we might be more accustomed to.

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Munt, Sally R. 1994. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. London and New York: Routledge. Ndalianis, Angela. 2012a. The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses. London: McFarland. Ndalianis, Angela. 2012b. “Lost, Fan Culture and the Neo-Baroque.” Anuario calderoniano 5: 35–50. Ndalianis, Angela. 2015. “Hannibal: A Disturbing Feast for the Senses.” Journal of Visual Culture 14, no. 3: 279–84. Nelson, Andrew Patrick. 2010. “Traumatic Childhood: Todorov’s Fantastic and the Uncanny Slasher Remake.” In American Horror Film, edited by Steffen Hantke, 103–18. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Newland, Paul. 2016. “Folk Horror and the Contemporary Cult of British Rural Landscape: The Case of Blood on Satan’s Claw.” In British Rural Landscape on Film, edited by Paul Newland, 162–79. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Orr, Christopher. 2017. “Murder on the Orient Express Is a Ride Worth Skipping.” The Atlantic, November 10, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/2017/11/murder-on-the-orient-express-review/545501. Palmer, Jerry. 1991. Potboilers: Methods, Concepts and Case Studies in Popular Fiction. New York: Routledge. Phelps, Sarah, exec. prod. 2015. And Then There Were None. Mammoth Screen and BBC. Phelps, Sarah, exec. prod. 2016. Witness for the Prosecution. Mammoth Screen and BBC. Phelps, Sarah, exec. prod. 2018a. The ABC Murders. Mammoth Screen and BBC. Phelps, Sarah, exec. prod. 2018b. Ordeal by Innocence. Mammoth Screen and BBC. Phelps, Sarah [@PhelpsieSarah]. 2018c. “And thanks to all of you, those who enjoyed it and those who didn’t See you next time when I rewrite Pride and Prejudice in a crack den. You’re all lovely. A bientot, mes enfants. #TheABCMurders.” Twitter, December 29, 2018, 8:00 am, https://twitter.com/PhelpsieSarah/ status/1078780335901552640. Phelps, Sarah, exec. prod. 2020. The Pale Horse. Mammoth Screen and BBC. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1841. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Graham’s Magazine, April. Rabinowitz, Dorothy. 2018. “Ordeal by Innocence: Review.” Wall Street Journal, August  9, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ordeal-by-innocence​ -review-a-suspect-in-the-family-1533852189. Reeves, Michael, dir. 1968. Witchfinder General. Tigon Pictures. Reyes, Xavier Aldana. 2016. Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership. London and New York: Routledge. Roeg, Nicolas, dir. 1973. Don’t Look Now. British Lion Films. Rowland, Susan. 2001. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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Rowland, Susan. 2010. “The ‘Classical’ Model of the Golden Age.” In A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley, 117–27. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Rzepka, Charles J. 2005. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sanders, Julie. 2005. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge. Schatz, Thomas. 1981. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: McGraw-Hill. Scott, Ridley, dir. 1979. Alien. 20th Century Fox. Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing. Serafini, Stefano. 2020a. “The Gothic Side of Golden Age Detective Fiction.” In Gothic Metamorphoses across the Centuries: Contexts, Legacies, Media, edited by Maurizio Ascari, Serena Baiesi and David Palatinus, 117–30. New York: Peter Lang. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2012. “Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood.” Screen 53, no. 2: 148–63. Skenazy, Paul. 1995. “Behind the Territory Ahead.” In Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, edited by David Fine, 103–25. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Smith, Andrew. 2008. Gothic Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Smith, Greg. 2003. Film Structure and the Emotion System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Oakland. University of California Press. Spielberg, Steven, dir. 1977. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Columbia Pictures. Spooner, Catherine. 2007. “Gothic Media.” In The Routledge Companion to Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, 195–97. London: Routledge. Spooner, Catherine. 2010. “Crime and the Gothic.” In A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley, 245–57. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Stam, Robert. 2000. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogues of Adaptation.” In Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, 54–76. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1886. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Strickland, John, dir. 2005. “A Murder Is Announced.” Agatha Christie’s Marple. Written by Agatha Christie and Stewart Harcourt. ITV. Symons, Julian. 1980. “‘Puzzle Maker’: Review of A Talent to Deceive by Robert Barnard.” Inquiry, November 24, 29–30. Thomson-Jones, Katherine. 2008. Aesthetics and Film. London: Bloomsbury.

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Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Unwin, Paul, dir. 2006. “The Sittaford Mystery.” Agatha Christie’s Marple. ITV Studios. Aired on April 30. Van der Beek, Suzanne. 2016. “Agatha Christie and the Fantastic Detective Story.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 34, no. 1: 22–30. Walton, Saige. 2018. “Air, Atmosphere, Environment: Film Mood, Folk Horror and The V Vitch.” Screening the Past 43, https://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-43-dossier-materialising-absence-in-f ilm-and-media/ air-atmosphere-environment-film-mood-folk-horror-and-the-vvitch/. Wheatley, Helen. 2006. Gothic Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wilson, Andy, dir. 2005. “The Body in the Library.” Agatha Christie’s Marple. ITV Studios. Aired on April 17. Wood, Robin. 1979. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Flim, edited by Robin Wood & Richard Lippe, 7–28. Toronto: Festival of Festivals. Wyndham-Davies, June. 1986. “Agatha Christie’s The Last Séance.” Shades of Darkness. ITV Studios. Aired on September 27.

1.

And Then There Were None and Fantastic Horror Abstract In this chapter, I explore Phelps’ adaptation of And Then There Were None by comparing it to earlier adaptations using Todorov’s theory of the Fantastic, which argues that the Fantastic genre is a liminal one that relies on the space between the real and imaginary. By “Gothicising” these texts even further, these adaptations interrogate overly romanticised British cultural identities and give voice to those hidden between the lines in Christie’s earlier writings. Key scholars employed beyond Todorov will be Noël Carroll, Dudley Andrew and Teresa Goddu. Keywords: Agatha Christie, crime fiction, the Fantastic, adaptation studies, Gothic horror

“The house isn’t—haunted, is it?… You’ve never felt or seen anything yourself? Nobody’s died here?… Perhaps I am a bit psychic,” thought Gwenda uneasily. “Or is it something to do with the house?” —Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder (1976)

Many Agatha Christie stories features ghosts, hauntings and illusions of the dead. In most instances, Christie’s characters are figuratively haunted by the dead. In several adaptations of her work, retellings embrace these morose encounters with violence and death. And Then There Were None’s (1939, hereafter None) enduring popularity demonstrates how closely Agatha Christie is aligned to the Gothic. This book demonstrates the impact that themes of death, hauntings and the Fantastic have in Christie’s work in order to illuminate her relationship to the Gothic and the horror genre. For instance, the following analysis of None explores the influence Christie has had on the modern horror genre through the relationship between None’s narrative and the slasher film. The Fantastic, a key framework of this chapter, is this Richards, S., Agatha Christie and Gothic Horror: Adaptations and Televisuality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024 doi 10.5117/9789463725781_ch01

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uneasy liminal space between the supernatural and real environments. In the Fantastic narrative, the focalised character, and the viewer, are positioned in a questioning state as to what is real and what is the figment of one’s imagination. Horror and gothic aesthetics are utilised to achieve this mode. The story of the book itself has evolved dramatically throughout its various incarnations. Previous titles Ten Little Ni***rs and Ten Little Indians were rightfully scrapped due to their racist language. Upon its publication in the United States in 1940, publisher Dodd, Mead and Company used the final line of the children’s poem that structured the story. The book was first adapted by Christie herself for the stage in 1943. In this version, the ending was changed to be less nihilistic, where Lombard and Vera are proven to be innocent of their crimes; they survive and fall in love only to live happily ever after. Prior to Phelps’ adaptation, all English-language adaptations were licensed versions of the play, thus enforcing this happier ending. The book has since gone on to be adapted more than any other of the works by Agatha Christie. The first film adaptation was René Clair’s 1945 film followed by a BBC broadcast in 1949 under the original UK title. An ITV production followed in 1959, with a 1965 film by George Pollock and a 1974 film by Peter Collinson. International productions included the 1965 Hindi film Gumnaam, the West German Zehn Kleine N****lein (Hans Quest, 1969), a French television episode of Au théâtre ce soir in 1970 and a porn parody in 1985 called Ten Little Maidens. The 1987 Russian version Desyat’ N*****tyat was rare for its use of the novel’s original ending. A PC game was made in 2005 by the Adventure Company, which was later ported to Wii in 2008. In this version, the killer is different. A woman pretending to be Emily Brent is a psychotic former actress seeking revenge on her former lover, Edward Seton, the man put to death by Justice Wargraves. A HarperCollins graphic novel adaptation was released in 2009 and BBC Radio 4 produced a full cast dramatisation of the novel in 2010, the first one since the 1947 version. The impact of this story on the cultural landscape is substantial.

The Fantastic This chapter will explore how Phelps’ adaptation of None embraces horror aesthetics. This will be understood through the lens of the Fantastic. A term defined by Todorov, the Fantastic occurs when an event exists in the liminal space between nature (the uncanny) and the supernatural (the marvellous). This liminal space is difficult to define where no solution is provided, as Todorov explains:

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The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of imagination—and the laws of the world remain as they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. Either the devil is an illusion, an imaginary being; or else he really exists, precisely like other living beings—with this reservation, that we encounter him infrequently. (1975, 25)

There are three conditions for the Fantastic to be achieved: First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work—in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude toward the text: he will reject allegorical as well as “poetic” interpretations. These three requirements do not have equal value. The first and the third actually constitute this genre; the second may not be fulfilled. (Todorov 1975, 33)

The hesitation is achieved through the focalisation on a character who is navigating the event. They are the perceptual and epistemological channel for the reader (Todorov 1975, 31). The relationship between the Fantastic and horror, Petterson writes, is “less about punctual jolts and more about a pervasive atmosphere of uncertainty” (2021, 243). While Petterson is writing specifically on the Fantastic mode in French film and television, his argument still raises pertinent points for contemporary television, as seen in shows such as Les Revenants (2012–15), which engage with “a pervasive uncertainty about what is happening on screen that may or may not be resolved” (Petterson 2021, 244). Petterson draws on Met (2012), who provides a somewhat reductive difference between the two modes: While the Fantastic is “un art de la litote et de l’ambiguïté quant à la nature exacte des événements de la diégèse” (“an art of the understatement and the ambiguity as to the exact nature of the events of the diegesis”), horror is “une esthétique plus frontale privilégiant la monstration explicite et l’exhibition plein cadre” (“a more frontal aesthetic favouring explicit display and full-frame exhibition”) (Met 2012, 25, my translations). This mode is present in Christie’s novel, as is outlined by Suzanne van der Beek (2016,

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23), who examines the novel as an example of Fantastic detective fiction. The extent that a detective novel could be Fantastic is limited. As Van der Beek notes, detective fiction often requires a final solution that explains all. Van der Beek rightfully points out, however, that a few elements aren’t neatly explained in the novel. The storm that isolates the inhabitants, for instance, can’t be predicted or controlled by the killer. Internal thoughts of the characters are provided without commentary or narrative direction. It’s as if their past and repressed feelings are bursting out into the present. These are a tinge of the Fantastic in Christie’s novel that are integral to “shaping … the tone and character of the story” (Van der Beek 2016, 28). Todorov argues that both the detective genre and the ghost story position the reader/viewer to question the rational/irrational elements of the narrative, as the events in question are often beyond any reasonable solution. Through coupling the Fantastic mode with horror aesthetics, this allows Phelps’ adaptation to demonstrate how closely aligned Christie’s work is to horror and the Gothic. It’s this uncanny event that begins the descent into apprehension for the characters. The use of aesthetics to further establish this mood is even more prescient in this adaptation, as Andrew argues that “for the cinema is at once exact in its reproduction of the minutiae of everyday life (belief) yet eager to startle its audience with tricks in optics, chemistry, and mise-en-scène (doubt)” (1984, 114). It’s the guilt of the increasingly dwindling characters that births the Fantastic. As they lock themselves in their rooms at night, the characters are tormented by a potentially unknown force. Is someone or something on the island out to get them? Their own guilt torments them. The victims of their previous crimes return to haunt them. At first, these hauntings are mainly through memories, cutting into present day. As the events unfold, however, these victims literally return, and appear as ghosts in front of them. Much like Henry James’ Turn of the Screw (1898) and its wonderful adaptation The Innocents (1961), it’s unclear if these appearances are psychological or supernatural, which places the reader/viewer in the Fantastic liminal space. Todorov’s account of the Fantastic is a useful framework to consider narrative and aesthetic choices made in the adaptation of None. This rupture of realism becomes a point of consideration for both characters and the audience—is something else at play on this island? Are the past victims really coming back to haunt the survivors? Todorov’s model of the Fantastic has been critiqued by Jackson for being overly simplistic and failing to “consider the social and political implications of literary forms” (1981, 3). In Jackson’s work on the Fantastic mode, she positions the fields beyond just the poetics of the form to incorporate the

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politics of form. The unreal and unamiable facets of the Fantastic mode are made to be so due to the sociocultural conditions of the day. This is a reconsideration of Todorov’s two groups of identification—“I” and “not I.” Danger can come from two sources, either within the self, such as “through excessive knowledge, or rationality, or the mis-application of the human will” (Jackson 1981, 33) or from an external source, where the self is attacked and made part of the other, such as vampires or zombies. Through a semiotic analysis, Jackson posits that this otherness, negation and unnameability suggests mythic readings of the Fantastic text that deal with deeper cultural issues. Through considering the sociocultural conditions of these texts, we can consider further implications of this Fantastic hesitation. In upending societal norms in the text, Jackson claims, the Fantastic suggests an unspoken desire. It’s imperative, she writes, that we consider “the ways in which [the] material represents the relations between ideology and the human subject” (Jackson 1981, 36). This return is a key feature of the Gothic as well. As Goddu argues, “if the gothic is the repository for cultural anxieties, then the specific form and site of its conventions have much to say about its cultural effects” (Goddu 1999, 126). The Gothic monster, be it Frankenstein or Dracula, is a repository for cultural anxieties. “Cultural fascination with the monster,” Cohen argues, “is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens” (1996, viii). As will be argued in this chapter, the history of adaptations of None have long explored the darker notions of British cultural identities. Writing on the original use of the name, Alison Light writes that the effect “conjure[s] up a thrilling ‘otherness,’ a place where revelations about the ‘dark side’ of the English would be appropriate” (1991, 99). By “Gothicising” these texts even further and embracing horror aesthetics, this adaptation of None extends this critique even further. These experimentations with the Gothic have been increasingly popular with “elevated” television. The rise of genre television, such as fantasy and horror, reflects broader movements in television, where the “social reality is continually set against subjective, individual, and multiple perspectives” (Creeber 2004, 14). To return to Carroll’s concept of art-horror, spectators have an emotional response to horror narratives and the monsters of these films. In his key book Philosophy of Horror, Carroll argues that “characteristic structures, imagery, and figures in the genre are arranged to cause the emotion” (1990, 8). This is a rather limited definition of horror, however, as not all horror films, or films that employs these genre markers, involve monsters or the supernatural. Many examples from film and television, as

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Sauchelli (2014) notes, evoke horror moods. These moods, he defines, “are affective states that are not elicited at specific objects” (Sauchelli 2014, 42). He likens this as being angry at a specific narrative element versus a general depressive malaise. These moods, much like Sinnerbrink’s proposition, employ aesthetics to create background states that colour our experiences. “The stylistic features,” Sauchelli writes, “determine the capacity of a work to elicit the H-mood [her term for this affective state] in their audience change in relation to each form of art” (Sauchelli 2014, 43). Mood, here, is key to how we become oriented to key elements of the horror text. Writing on Gothic television, Helen Wheatley argues that makers have “consistently explored new ways of translating the unconscious to the screen, in order to represent the extreme states of feeling/emotion associated with the Gothic genre” (2006, 165). This embracing of the Gothic is a marker of televisuality, that is, dramas that employ narrative and stylistic tropes of the Gothic to produce content that moves towards “stylish, intelligent, ‘knowing’ drama” (Wheatley 2006, 165) and moves away from “network, catch-all, ‘lowest common denominator’ programming to niche marketing of specific products to attract different segments of the audience at different times of the day” (Nelson 1997, 236). To recall Caldwell (1995), televisuality is a result of competition, whereas innovation with style and narrative is employed to make programmes distinctive from other faire. I argue that the Fantastic in None is a result of earlier innovations and changes. The “cinematic ecstasies” that Caldwell (1995, xi) writes of is now commonplace for most high-end drama. When Caldwell writes of stylistic excess, or of cinematic television, he is referring to “high production values, and feature style cinematography” (1995, 12). To return to Wheatley’s argument, the formal organisation of Gothic television evokes an uncanny return through narrative repetition. She draws on Dyer’s (1992) work on the pleasure associated with the anticipation of a return to the familiar. Wheatley, however, argues that in the case of serial Gothics, “serial pleasure is also underpinned by a kind of serial uncanniness, whereby the repetitions of the serial reinforce an uncanny feeling of dreadful recognition” (Wheatley 2006, 180). We recognise narrative elements and anticipate dreadful occurrences. Key to Todorov’s model is that of the “fantastic hesitation” (Carroll 1990, 144). For Carroll, this is fundamentally about plotting. Carroll doesn’t see the “pure fantastic plot” as being an example of horror, while acknowledging that the two aren’t completely alien from each other, in that “many horror stories begin, so to speak, as Fantastic narratives, but become horror as soon as the fact of the monster’s existence is revealed to and acknowledged by the reader” (Carroll 1990, 145). Carroll refers to this as the Fantastic-marvellous

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plot. A foundational proposition of this book is that many screen texts aren’t holistically one screen genre or the other. Many exist on the periphery, as Leeder argues (2018), of the genre. As such, while None might not be the “go to” pure example of horror television today, that doesn’t discount the fact that the series employs horror semantic building blocks to construct a Fantastic text. To build upon Altman’s (1984) work, this horror iconography is syntactically employed to generate this Fantastic hesitation in the spectator. Cinematic devices are employed to generate this Fantastic hesitation. The Innocents (1961), for instance, sees the governess character begin to believe that the house she is working at is haunted by two ghosts. Narratively, she is isolated in this belief because no one else claims to be able to see them. Other characters, namely the maid, Mrs Grose, and the children under her charge, increasingly view her as psychologically unstable. Stylistically, however, her isolation in this belief is cemented further using point-of-view shots when the ghosts appear on screen. This is one such strategy that can “render the information presented in the film ambiguous” (Carroll 1990, 151). This unreliable narration forces the viewer to question the validity of the ghosts themselves. Reliability, as David Bordwell (1985) defines it, suggests that objectivity is not impeded by range or depth of knowledge. As the governess becomes increasingly erratic, we question her stability even though we can clearly see the ghosts from her perspective. Other films suggested by Bordwell, such as Rashomon, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Stage Fright, all present narration that is framed from a particular character’s perspective.

Agatha Christie and Fantastic Horror A number of Agatha Christie stories briefly engage with the supernatural and the Fantastic mode. Most of these instances of the supernatural feature in her short stories, where she is more experimental, such as premonitions in “The Hound of Death” and ghosts being alluded to in “The Gypsy,” “The Last Séance” and “The Lamp.” Writing for the official Agatha Christie website, Chris Chan suggests that the character of Harley Quin in The Mysterious Mr Quin is a “conduit between the worlds of the living and the dead” (2018, para. 2). Many curses are disproven for more rational methods, such as in several shorts stories in Poirot Investigates (1924). As with most of her stories, the supernatural is often a ruse to confuse the victims and detectives, such as the séance in The Sittaford Mystery. Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case (1979) is perhaps one of Christie’s most notable stories that play with the presence of ghosts. Agatha Christie

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supposedly locked the book away, alongside Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case in a vault only to be opened following her death. The book was bequeathed to her husband, Max, ensuring that her two notable detectives would live on after her death. While the manuscripts were held back from publication, they were often looked at by Christie and her family. Curtain was published in September 1975, before Christie’s death in January 1976. In Sleeping Murder, the newlyweds Gwen and Giles buy a house in Dillmouth, a seaside town in Devon. Upon moving into the house, Gwen begins to have flashes or premonitions of murder and senses that evil resides in the house. At a production of The Duchess of Malfi with relatives, including Miss Marple, she hears the lines “Cover her Face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young” and has visions of a man saying these words whilst strangling a blond woman named Helen; she screams. The reader is faced with the possibility that the ghost of Helen is now haunting Gwen in the new house. Indeed, many adaptations of this book, such as the ITV 2006 production or the 2001 BBC radio play, with June Whitfield as a marvellous Miss Marple, play up the ghostly apparitions of Helen. All adaptations, however, are faithful to the book, where it’s revealed that Gwen grew up in the house and the murdered woman is in fact her stepmother. These ghostly visions are in fact memories returning to Gwen. This solution of Sleeping Murder is consistent with many of Agatha Christie’s writings that play with Fantastic potentials; according to Todorov’s logic, they would fit into the Fantastic-uncanny category. They allow the reader to suspect the potential of supernatural occurrences, only to conclude with the detective proving their rational superiority and providing the solution.

The History of And Then There Were None As outlined, None has been adapted more than any other Agatha Christie story. The idea for the story is remarkably similar to the play-turned-pre-code film The 9th Guest (1934), which features a cast of devious characters invited to a penthouse and threatened by a voice over the radio that they are to meet their ninth guest: Death. One by one, the characters are murdered by an unknown figure. They all have sins and crimes that they are guilty of, although it’s revealed that their true sin is having wronged the secret killer in some way. The film is a psychological crime thriller with the occasional hint of noir, such as high-contrast lighting and long-cast shadows in hallways. Certainly, with this film, there are no hints of supernatural causes. Whether Christie took inspiration from The 9th Guest, however, is contestable.

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René Clair’s 1945 adaptation of None is the first screen adaptation. The film is a self-reflexive playful take on Christie. Several characters break the fourth wall while introducing themselves to one another. Likewise, Blore directly addresses the audience right before his death with “I get it!” The film consciously plays with the viewer. When Vera returns from the beach having “killed” Lombard, the camera cuts to a billiard ball being hit on the pool table. The camera tilts upwards to the killer. Wargrave initially appears behind a lamp shade, thus concealing his identity that little bit longer for the viewer. While there are certainly creepy elements and the desolate nature of the island is emphasised, the film embraces the thriller genre more than Gothic or horror. The score is lyrical in some parts, such as when Emily Brent spies on other guests as they explore the island, and is bombastic in others, as the orchestra reaches crescendos during dramatic moments. This adaptation emphasises the mystery of the narrative. The ten soldier ornaments dominate many shots in the dining room with their porcelain whiteness clearly emphasised in the foreground. When the guests are sitting down for lunch following Mrs Rogers’ death, there are clearly seven figures remaining, meaning that a third guest is dead. The repetitive horns blaring as lightning and thunder roars while Wargrave declares, “Mr N. Owen is one of us,” is more adventurous than spooky. The promotional material, however, plays up the macabre with the connotations of the haunted house being key, with the surrounding disembodied heads, as Aldridge argues (2016), has allusions to the work of Edgar Allan Poe. At the time, however, Bosley Crowther reviewed the film for the New York Times as having a “humor with a light macabre touch” (1945). Following a Halloween screening, Crowther writes that the film is “perfect for black cats and Hallowe’en goblins.” While the film resists any gore or monstrosity, with many deaths and violence occurring off camera, the narrative’s dread drives the bulk of the mystery. In particular, the performances of Louis Hayward as Lombard and June Duprez as Vera Claythorn are reminiscent of the detective noir films of the day. As Armstrong and Wargrave confront each other over the billiard table, the swinging light adds an uncertainty to the argument. George Pollock’s 1965 take on None moves the mystery to an isolated Austrian ski lodge. Pollock had previously directed the four Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple adaptations. This film was aimed at a more youthful audience with singer Fabian as Michael Raven (based on Anthony Marsten), The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955–61) star Hugh O’Brian as Lombard, model and actress from Goldfinger (1964) Shirley Eaton as Ann Clyde (based on Vera Claythorn), actress, singer and model Daliah Lavi as Ilona Bergen (very loosely based on Emily Brent). Eaton’s Ann, in particular, embraces

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the sexually liberated 1960s woman. A scene in which Blore (Stanley Holloway) spies a half-undressed Lombard (Hugh O’Brian) through a keyhole undoubtedly has queer connotations. Reviewing the film for the New York Times, Crowther wrote that the film was for a “youthful (and unfamiliar) audience” (1966). The film builds upon the 1945 version’s reflexive nature of the mystery film by featuring a “whodunit break,” with key clues being replayed for the audience before the killer is revealed. In his historical contextualisation of the film, Aldridge argues that the film “fails to capture renewed expectations for horror and thriller films” (2016, 116). The film is also a notable example of the reception of an adaptation being compared to other adaptations of the source text, with Stanley Walker asking in the Evening Standard, “Do you remember how much better René Clair did it all in 1945?” (1966). This is one of many adaptations that shifts the location. Another notable entrant is the 1989 film that transports the guests to an African safari, though this latter film is judged by Aldridge as having “nothing to say and no artistry to explore” (2016, 204). A 1974 European co-production, featuring Orson Welles as the voice on the tape recording, is situated in an extravagant hotel in the Iranian desert. This adaptation is reminiscent of Italian giallo films in certain parts. Bruno Nicolai, who worked across many genres, such as comedies, Westerns (Indio Black, 1970), thrillers (Défense de savoir, 1973) and, more notably, giallo, such as All the Colours of the Dark (1973), composed the film’s score. While the score is confusingly jaunty during the accusation scene, the dread certainly increases as the base bellows coupled with staccato keys during their search for “Mr N. Owen” in the darkened corridors of the hotel. The transnational adaptations of None see a variety of versions embracing the cultural codes of non-Western national contexts. The book has been adapted extensively for television for foreign markets, such as in Brazil in 1957 and 1963, West Germany in 1969, France in 1970 and 2020 (the latter of which is discussed below), Lebanon in 1974 and 2014, Greece in 1978, Spain in 2011 and Japan in 2017. There are several notable films for foreign markets. Gumnaam (Anonymous) (1965) is an unauthorised Bollywood version, which sees a collection of guests stranded on an island after their plane departs following a fake emergency landing. The promotional material bills the film as “India’s first suspense thriller,” “a new high in screen horror,” and a “chill down the spine as you clutch the edge of your seats.” Naturally, this horror is coupled with uplifting Bollywood dance music on sets laden with Egyptian-inspired statues that light up as disco lights. Writing on Gumnaam and the success of Christie adaptation in international markets, Smith (2016) argues that the bare bone plots of Christie’s work allow

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for successful translation to other cultures, where local sensitivities can fill out the narrative for local audiences. India has long been a successful market for Christie films with a further adaptation of None in Tamil, Nadu Iravil (1970), soon following. Smith uses the spreadability of the meme as a metaphor to understand this transnational adaptation of Christie. The remediation of Gumnaam continues with a sequence going on to feature in the opening credits of Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001) extending this Christie text even further. Desyat’ N*****yat, the 1987 Russian adaptation, was the first film to keep the book’s original, grim conclusion where Vera shoots Lombard and dies by suicide. The film is revered amongst Christie fans for capturing the horror and paranoid tone of the book (Aldridge 2016; Hollmann 2017). This is also a notable adaptation of None that embraces the Fantastic. As Emily Brent goes to sleep one night, Beatrice Taylor begins banging on the window out in the rain. As if transported back in time, Brent gets out of bed and ventures to the window yelling at Taylor that she has been fired, throwing her Bible through the window. “The murderer’s real name is Beatrice Taylor,” she whispers to herself. While most likely a memory, the realistic nature of Taylor appearing at Brent’s bedroom window makes her reminiscent of a ghost. The colour grading of the shot of Taylor at the window matches the present day of Brent’s bedroom. When only four remain, Vera thinks she hears Cyril in the hallway at night, though, Cyril only appears in flashbacks on the beach. One notable shift in this version is Lombard raping Vera when she visits him after hearing Cyril in the hallway, further adding to the level of violence not seen in previous versions. Many slasher films base their narratives on None. Director Renny Harlin (2005) acknowledges his film Mindhunters (2004) has its plot structure directly taken from None. The film sees a group of FBI profilers engage in a final training exercise on a remote island. One by one, the characters are murdered in elaborate and gruesome scenarios. One victim is frozen with liquated nitrogen, another smokes an acid laced cigarette, another is drugged, and their blood is drained. Much like the key twist to the book, the killer fakes their death and returns in the explosive finale. James Mangold’s Identity (2003) cleverly transports the ensemble of victims to an abandoned motel where they are murdered one by one. Many slasher film tropes can be traced back to this plot structure. The ensemble of characters is isolated and unable to seek help; the characters are murdered one by one; the killer is revealed to be one of them; paranoia sets in amongst the survivors as they realise one of them is the murderer. Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) and The Blackening (2023) both use this plot structure with the exception of

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the killer’s reveal being markedly different. One critic even reviewed Bodies Bodies Bodies as being “Agatha Christie by way of TikTok” (Zemler 2022). In The Blackening, the killer is revealed to be one member of the group who supposedly died earlier in the evening’s events. The film is also a comedic critique on the racial dynamics of the slasher, with the tagline “They can’t all die first.” Other slasher films that are modelled on None are Indian films Aatagara (2015) and Aduthathu (2011). In considering the various film and television versions of None, it’s clear that the story has consistently engaged with horror narrative elements and aesthetics. The story is often presented with a macabre, unsettling tone as the isolation-infused paranoia increases. While earlier versions of None, from Clair’s 1945 version to the 1987 Russian adaptation, are far from horror, we can see the influence that these tropes have had on the slasher genre. Many slashers from the second wave onwards are reminiscent of this plot structure, where one of the characters from the central cohort is revealed to be the killer. Finally, a notable adaptation of None is the recent French-Belgian sixepisode miniseries Ils étaient dix (They were ten), which streamed on French subscription network Salto, La Une in Belgium and RTS in Switzerland. The series stands out for its contemporary retelling of the story and obvious use of slasher tropes. The series is also reminiscent of Lost, with several characters stranded on an island that has deadly secrets for them to explore. Flashbacks are introduced with the character staring off camera as an aural woosh marks a flashback that establishes their past crime. The characters are loosely drawn from the original ten. While some original murders have remained the same, some have been attributed to other characters and some are entirely new by drawing on contemporary socio-political contexts. Instead of Mr and Mrs Rogers, in charge of the domestic duties is Myriam Berto (Isabelle Candelier), who had previously murdered the woman that her son had raped, thus stopping the victim from notifying the police. Assisting her on the island is Eddy Hamraoui (Samy Seghir) who had previously driven a truck of migrants across the border, only for his passengers to all die of heatstroke. Xavier Troussaud (Samuel Le Bihan) is clearly drawn from General MacArthur, who organises the accidental death of his wife’s lover during a military training exercise. Nina Goldberg (Matilda Lutz) is drawn from Vera Claythorne, who murders the child of the man she loves, as it’s the only thing tying him to his wife. Victoria Deshotel (Romane Bohringer) is drawn from Dr Armstrong, who has a patient die after she pushes herself to exhaustion in order to impress her father. Eve Lombardi (Marianne Denicourt) is loosely based on Judge Wargrave, a detective who has become disillusioned by the justice system failing to

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prosecute individuals for murders she believes they clearly committed. Her late husband was a successful artist but “looked homeless” in his appearance. After having a heart attack, many passers-by left him to die on the pavement. After being unable to charge these onlookers for murder, or even manslaughter, for failing to help, this frustration drove her to concoct these murders on the island to deliver her own form of justice. Key plot points are recreated. Eve works with Kelly Nessib (Manon Azem) to fake her death so that she can spy on the others. Nina falls for the suave Malik Alaoui (Nassim Si Ahmed), a character who has the same function as Lombard. This series is complicated, however, by the B-plot of two detectives, Mathieu Le Gof (Mathieu Demy) and Leonie Baptista (Wendy Nieto), on the Caribbean mainland trying to track them down. In the first episode, before the guests fly off to the island, Nina has her bag stolen by a random thief. Once it’s recovered, Le Gof, a scruffy detective who spends most of the early episodes following a hunch more than anything else, begins to suspect that Nina is in danger in the penultimate episode. These cuts to the mainland interrupt the sense of isolation and increasing paranoia that is meant to be generated on the island in these adaptations. The contemporary retelling contributes to the horror framework. When the detectives arrive on the island, they discover the basement, which was earlier revealed by Victoria and Kelly, with all the props and screens monitoring the island. The recording on these screens allows for Baptista to play Eve’s confession to Kelly—before murdering her, of course. Likewise, these screens are live feeds, which allow for characters to realise that someone else is in danger somewhere else on the island. What is interesting, however, is the significance which this series places upon horror aesthetics and tropes. More than anything else, this series is presented as a slasher. The series was directed by Pascal Laugier, a horror filmmaker who also previously directed Martyrs (2008) and Ghostland (2018). The island is dilapidated and draws heavily on voodoo aesthetics.1 The shacks are made with Indonesian Sumatran wood and the resort is inspired by a blend of English, Indonesian and Caribbean cultures, so proclaims Myriam as she gives the guests their first tour. Rather than soldiers or Indian figures, the centrepiece is a shrine featuring ten African wooden sculptures of men. The notion of voodoo superstition is brought up earlier between the detectives, with Le Gof mocking Baptista’s wariness. Repetitive, fast-paced tribal breathing features on 1 And yet there is a sensitivity to racial dynamics in the narrative. Upon seeing Del Piero’s braided hair, Kelly sneers that she hates white guys going for a look. Malik is a black junior associate under pressure in a high-end law firm made of mostly white employees.

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the soundtrack as terrified characters walk down dark hallways looking for someone or something that they have heard. Much like Sarah Phelps’ adaptation, visions of the guests’ victims haunt them. One of the immigrants killed in Eddy’s truck appears in several scenes, terrifying the young man, with her chador offering a ghostly silhouette. This island, named Devil Island, serves the purpose of many slasher environments. By night, the resort is creepy and dark. Phone reception is unavailable, thus isolating the guests further. To ensure that no one will reach them, Eve leaves a bottle of poisoned champagne for the pilot—this version’s Narracott—to ensure his death. The killer wears a black raincoat with her hood up while wearing a black face covering, thus making her appear faceless. As she runs towards her victims, the coat flies behind her as if it were a cape. Indeed, the murders are all more violent, gory and shocking than earlier adaptations of None. The killer bursts out and slices Victoria’s neck. When Gilles Delfour (Guillaume de Tonquedec) is murdered, he is tied to the bed and scorpions begin crawling up his body. When the guests discover him and question how he was killed, his jaw opens and a close-up shot reveals the scorpions crawling out of this mouth. There are several jump scares throughout beyond the murders, such as Nina falling into a snake pit or loud, unexpected knocks at the door. Overall, Ils étaient dix demonstrates how closely aligned None is to the slasher—a group of characters, stranded in an isolated environment, are murdered one by one by a killer who is soon revealed to be one of them.

Sarah Phelps’ And Then There Were None To begin with, Phelps’ adaptation of None (2015) embraces the grim history of its telling. As has been established, many versions tell the story of the ten murderers on the island through emphasising the paranoia and fear that the survivors experience. Phelps develops this mood further through utilising prominent horror aesthetics, notably through the trope of the haunted house and nightmares where their guilt comes back to haunt them. The haunted house trope is clearly drawn from beyond Christie’s work. None is not a preeminent example of contemporary horror television and yet, as I will argue, the series clearly displays horror aesthetics. To return to Sinnerbrink, the use of these aesthetics evokes particular “affective responsive of the viewer” (2012, 149). To explore the impact that the Fantastic has on character and the social dynamics that unravel, the island must be “aesthetically disclosed or rendered meaningful through the evocation of appropriate moods

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in order for such cues to show up as affectively charged with meaning in the first place” (Sinnerbrink 2012, 154, his emphasis). The evocation of horror here is pivotal to the development of tone, mood and atmosphere. Flint-Nicol analyses the Gothicisation of Sarah Phelps’ adaptation of None, arguing that the series “draws upon, and manipulates, conventions, concerns, and iconography of staple British TV fare, both crime and heritage dramas, the Female Gothic drama, and the Christmas horror tradition, that had been revived by the BBC in recent years” (2019, 142). She notes, however, that while this adaptation draws upon the Gothic mode, there are notable distinctions, particularly in regard to the series being an example of the female Gothic, as outlined by Tania Modleski (1982) and Diane Waldman (1984). First, the series is not entirely focalised from Vera’s perspective. Second, Vera is not positioned as the woman in peril in this narrative. The House Aesthetics are a framing device employed to orient the spectator into an uneasy position. Spratford and Clauson (2003) identify key features of the haunted house story as another form of orientation. First, we ask why the spirits cannot rest. Second, we identify how they are a manifestation of the characters’ inner turmoil. The house as a haunted place reflects a historical shift towards the domestic space within the Gothic text. Christopher Gruneberg argues that “[t]he house functions as a matrix for memory and the exploration of its hidden rooms, forbidden spaces, locked doors, closet, and cupboards,… summons to consciousness displaced and undigested experiences and dreams” (1997, 176). The emphasis on the haunted house imagery then is a useful device to explore memory and guilt in this narrative. Of note, however, is that these ghosts are not “bound to the architecture of the house, but rather are mobile apparitions tethered to the individual characters” (Flint-Nicol 2019, 147). Flint-Nicol argues that the plot’s resolution makes it clear that the house is not haunted, i.e., that the narrative is ultimately an uncanny one in terms of Todorov’s model. I argue, however, that the visions of these ghosts are never wholly explained, thus remaining this adaptation in the Fantastic space. Key to this framing of the narrative is the opening credits sequence. In this opening sequence, we hear strings playing with a fast cyclical rhythm. As the pitch of the violins heightens, the cello reverberates at the lower level. This score emphasises the suspense of the story, an uneasiness and the expectation of death permeates throughout. The camera tracks across ten emerald green sculptures, which are moulded to signify the

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ten different guests. Some are hunched over, while others stand tall. The green f igures are illuminated by a projected light with the words from the titular nursery rhyme emblazoned across their bodies. As the cello’s volume increases, the sculptures begin to shatter and crumble. One by one, they collapse into rubble. The f inal shot that includes the title “Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None” tracks forward towards the debris of green shards. Sitting on top of this “island” is the house, where the guests will meet their doom. This opening sequence positions the house as an icon of the series and draws on much of the haunted house trope. As the guests travel to the island, the sequence is framed as the ensemble entering a dangerous territory. A low-pitched cello plays as Narracott steers the boat to the island. Shots of this journey are interspersed with close-up shots of Mr and Mrs Rogers preparing for the guests. Mrs Rogers is cutting up lobsters while Mr Rogers places glassware on the table. A camera moves upwards as Mr Rogers sets the table, where we see the ten sculptures as the centrepiece. This rising movement is repeated as a crane shot rises high and looks down upon Mrs Rogers throwing scrap meat into a seemingly bottomless hole. The shot of the sculptures signifying the ten guests is positioned alongside the scrap meat being discarded with the movement of the camera being in parallel. Following this sequence, the camera flies towards the island. This is an establishing shot that is repeated throughout the series. This shot establishes several elements for the narrative, such as the changing weather that sets mood and isolation, the time of day and how secluded the house is on the sparse island. The Rogers greet the guests as they arrive on the beach—“Welcome to Soldier Island!” Mr Rogers bellows. The two servants appear atop a cliff, perhaps the one that Armstrong is pushed off of later on in the proceedings. The costuming and performance of the Rogers could be straight out of an old Gothic horror. Noah Taylor plays Mr Rogers with slicked black hair and a menacing glare, while Anna Maxwell Martin plays Mrs Rogers as terrified, and vision impaired with dark spectacles. She is passively hunched over. A wide shot captures the ensemble walking towards the house across an open field. There are no trees or any other structures where someone else could hide. Narracott drops two bags and turns back for the boat. “That’s as far as my fee will take me,” he says, walking off without any chance of a reply from the group. As the group continue, the strings’ volume and pitch increase as we conclude the sequence with a shot of Narracott looking at the guests in fear. Here, he is akin to the harbinger in the slasher film, the old character warning the group of impending danger who is often ignored. While Narracott doesn’t

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offer any warnings, his refusal to go any further and look of fear establishes the house as a “bad place” and that the ensemble is in danger. The house as a “bad place” is fully realised as the guests become increasingly frightened during their stay. As the remaining survivors go to bed on the second night, Emily Brent tells the others, “Good night. Trust in God but perhaps also we should lock our doors.” The survivors are all standing at their doors in the hallway. The storm rages outside with thunder and lightning causing the lights to flicker in and out. The survivors enter their rooms and lock their doors. The lights continue to flicker with whispers being faintly heard. Are these non-diegetic sounds or evidence of ghosts haunting the guests? A later sequence where Vera discovers Emily Brent’s dead body further embellishes this haunted house trope. The scene features a low, non-diegetic hum. The lights have been switched off, so an uneasy darkness shrouds the interiors. Vera and Wargrave are drying the dishes. “I rather enjoy domestic tasks,” he says. “Very normal.” Maeve Dermody exhibits very little emotion in this scene as Vera. “I will just be a moment,” she says slowly as she collects a lamp and leaves the room. This is a quiet and understated scene. She moves through the hallway, which is lit by her single lamp. A mid-shot captures Vera walking from the back door by the stairs through the hall to the door on the left, which is presumably the lounge. She walks off screen leaving us with a few seconds of nothing. We wait for her to return. The non-diegetic hum continues and thunder rumbles in the distance. She returns into the shot and stands there. The camera tracks towards her as high-pitched violins begin playing, creating suspense and fear in the viewer. In a subsequent shot, the camera follows her as she uneasily walks down the darkened hallway. We cut to a close-up of the statues. Only five remain. The camera tracks to the right, with Vera and her lamp out of focus in the background behind the statues. She returns to the hallway and bashes the dinner gong—another person has died. Maeve Dermody continues to play Vera as devoid of emotion. The next scene begins with a mid-shot of Brent’s corpse. The camera tracks backwards as the survivors enter the room through the door behind her. They are all holdings lanterns which light the room with a glow that doesn’t overcome the scene’s cool palette. Vera notices the knitting needle pierced into Brent’s neck. A label marked “EB” is attached to its end, which is a nod to the poem—“a bumblebee stung one and then there were five.” This moment is an interesting shift from the book. In the novel, the killer leaves a bee flying in the room to suggest Brent’s death has happened according to the poem; a touch of whimsy covering the fact that she is killed through the injection of poison into her neck with a hypodermic needle. By stabbing Brent with the knitting needle, her death

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is more physical and removes any quirk from the scene. There is nothing cute found here. The final shot ends the scene with Vera paraphrasing the nursery rhyme while the men stand by in shock. As is common for many Agatha Christie adaptations, the death sequences embrace horror aesthetics. As Anthony Marston chokes to death, the score quickens, the characters move about the room and the camera moves with quick cuts, further emphasising the panic. Marston audibly chokes and coughs up blood all over Vera. A sharp cut to his dead body being covered with a sheet emphasises his quick death. When Mrs Rogers is poisoned at night, she is in bed alone. After hearing a knock at the door, she responds with “Yes?” Silence bar the low rumbling, ghostly score. We cut to an external shot of the ocean illuminated by a full moon. A close-up shot of a plate of meat, what looks like liver, with Mr Rogers cleaning up in the background. We return to the full moon and then the darkened, quiet hallway. These moments of key household items being the focus of the camera signify death in various manners. When Mr Rogers is collecting wood in the shed, an uneasy cello increase in volume as the camera tracks towards the axe, the weapon that will be used to kill him the following morning. Following MacArthur being found bludgeoned to death, the following shot features an albatross flying into the wind, an animal often used as a metaphor of a psychological burden or curse, such as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The subsequent establishing shot sees storm clouds forming over the house. Here, the albatross signifies MacArthur being unable to shake the burden of killing his wife’s lover. The Fantastic This adaptation of None further embraces horror aesthetics through developing the Fantastic narrative framework. To recall, the Fantastic occurs when there is hesitation experienced by a character between the natural and supernatural. Todorov states that the reader will “reject allegorical as well as ‘poetic’ interpretations” (1975, 33). This liminal space is focalised, perceptually and epistemologically, through the character and creates an uneasy atmosphere for all involved. The source novel’s use of the Fantastic is evident but limited (Van der Beek 2016). Phelps’ adaptation, however, revels in this uncertainty and hesitation around the supernatural. As highlighted above, the haunted house motif, complete with darkened hallways lit only by the odd lamp or the seemingly non-diegetic whispers, establishes the tone for the possibility of the supernatural. There are several moments where

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the victims of the house guests appear and torment them. This hesitation, however, increases as the series develops. For instance, towards the end of the first episode, Vera looks down a hallway where, through a shot that shows her perspective, we see Cyril’s mother, Olivia, crying in the doorway, saying, “Thank you for coming.” This is a moment that is clearly a memory crashing into the present. A sound bridge introduces the mother and Cyril talking to Vera, where we soon cut to the past where they are at the beach. This is the moment where Vera meets Hugo, the man who stands to lose his fortune due to Cyril inheriting it all. In a medium shot, we see Vera looking up at him, and she is bathed in a warm light. With a quick cut, we return to Soldier Island, where the colours are cold, dark and drab. Even Vera’s hair is flat and her costume dark. We cut back to the doorway, where Cyril’s mother has disappeared. We don’t hesitate with Olivia appearing as, first, she is not Vera’s victim and, second, it’s more logical that this is an element that introduces the flashback to her meeting Hugo. Allegorically, this appearance insinuates Olivia’s grief as following and tormenting Vera. MacArthur is another character who is visited by his victim, Henry Richmond. Following the deaths of Marston and Mrs Rogers, the guests are packing for Narracott’s supposed return—all except MacArthur, who is resigned to his fate. As he looks around his room for a lighter in the background of a shot, an army helmet comes into focus in the foreground. Much like Olivia’s appearance of Vera in the abovementioned scene, this object is a function of memory rather than the Fantastic. This is a link to the subsequent flashback where MacArthur is back in the trenches, where he finds a love letter from his wife to his subordinate, Henry Richmond. Following a conversation with Richmond, MacArthur draws his gun as Richmond turns his back. With a crack of thunder, we return to the modern day and MacArthur has his arm drawn, imitating pulling the trigger. The score is dramatic, and MacArthur is panting in confusion. This all precedes the appearance of Richmond to MacArthur on the beach. After Vera has implored him to pack his bags, MacArthur is alone looking out to the ocean. The score begins to rise, and MacArthur looks into the distance. Henry Richmond is shown in a long shot in the distance, walking towards the camera in his soldier’s uniform. Smoke is rising from the ground. This landscape, however, is not the battlefield. The craggy rocks, sand and grass is evidently Soldier Island. The sounds of shots and bombs falling can be heard along with MacArthur’s heavy breathing. These two scenes build to two significant scenes of ghosts returning to haunt their killers. The first, a moment discussed in the introduction of this

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book, is when Beatrice Taylor appears next to Emily Brent while praying on the second evening. Shot 1: A medium shot of Emily Brent kneeling by her bed praying. Her speech is rapid. Shot 2: A medium shot of Lombard in his dark room. A hard moonlight splashes across his body. He sits by the door with his gun drawn. The camera slowly tracks forward. The strings’ volume and pitch rise. Shot 3: A long mid-shot. The camera tracks right as Mr Rogers hears the window blow open. The lights blink as the storm continues to rage. He moves over to the right of the space. The camera tracks back and Mr Rogers reads the poem framed on the wall. Shot 4: A medium over-the-shoulder shot of Mr Rogers looking at the poem. The lights go out and Mr Rogers turns around in panic. Shot 5: We return to a close-up shot of Miss Brent praying. Beatrice Taylor’s voice is now heard in unison with Brent’s. Brent looks up terrified. Shot 6: We quickly cut to a close-up of a shot of Taylor. We see her in profile with her hands clasped in prayer. She lowers her clasped hands and turns her head in slow motion as a drone-like hum reaches a crescendo. The other half of her face is now visible. It is mutilated with a huge scar from the train tracks that killed her. Shot 7: Miss Brent gasps and repeats the line of her prayer: “I will fear no evil.” She repeats this line as she closes her eyes in panic. Shot 8: A medium shot follows as she rests her head in her arms and cries. Shot 9: We cut to a shot of the sculptures on the dining table lit by the lightning and moonlight. There are seven. Shot 10. An external shot of house and the island in the storm. Waves crash against the rocks loudly. Shot 11. Another external shot of the night sky. Clouds are now covering the moon. Lightning flashes behind them.

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Shot 12: A third external shot. Clouds roll past the moon. The strings are low. Shot 13: A high-angle shot looking down at the entrance way on the ground floor. The camera moves downwards. Armstrong runs in and bangs the gong, screaming, “Get up! Get up! Get up!” His voice cracks in the shrieking. Shot 14: The camera cuts quickly to a slight high-angle shot. Mr Roger’s bloodied corpse is found on the ground. His guts are spilled out in a pool of blood. A non-diegetic sound bridge emphasises the sudden shock of the cut and seeing the corpse.

The second notable scene features Cyril attacking Vera. Vera sees Cyril increasingly throughout the series. Notably, in the book, Vera thinks of Cyril often. Dialogue from him often breaks her focalised narration. Shot 1: Vera has left the group and is walking up the upstairs hallway. A long mid-shot captures her with a candlelight. Thunder roars and wind blows the candle out. She is now backlit from the window behind her and a slight key light just illuminating her face. She enters a room and exits the screen to the left. There is a moment of stillness before a silhouette of a boy runs from the right to the left in the background. Shot 2: Vera is in her room now. A long mid-shot captures her quickly walking to the fireplace as she frantically looks for matches. Shot 3: A medium shot captures Vera lighting the candle. This creates a warm glow to the space. Shot 4: A behind-the-shoulder shot. We see Vera’s reflection. Shot 5: We see a close-up shot of the faucet. The sound of the water through the pipe is interspersed with bird sounds. Shot 6: We cut to a low-angle close-up of Vera’s face looking down at the water. Dermody plays Vera as visibly distressed. Is she imagining these bird sounds? Are they linked to a memory of the beach? Shot 7: We return to shot 4: Vera bends over to splash water on her face. Lightning flashes and we see Cyril in his bathers behind her. His hair

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is wet from his drowning. She rises up again and looks at herself in the mirror, regaining her composure. She bends over again, and Cyril is now gone. The strings’ pitch increases, and they become more anxious. Shot 8: Window shutters bang off camera in the wind. This sound is a sound bridge from shot 7. We now have a long mid-shot on Vera’s side. She is leaning over the sink as her upper torso turns around so that she can see the window. She is frightened. A muddy hand rises from the sink and grabs her neck. Shot 9: We return to the framing of shot 4. The strings reach a peak in intensity. Vera screams as the hand strangles her. A slight cut to shot 9 breaks continuity and is unsettling. Shot 10: A medium shot captures Vera on the beach. The colour is notably greyer from the previous, more romantic flashbacks to this period. She has just been rescued and is draped in a towel. Shots 11–13: Cyril’s mother runs towards the scene. She is distraught but her voice is drowned out by the low timbre of the strings. Two men lay Cyril’s body on the sand by a moored boat. Shots 14–16: Vera is sad. She looks up. Hugo reaches the scene and looks at Vera suspiciously. Vera looks despondently down off camera in Cyril’s direction. Shot 17: We quickly cut back to modern day to an extreme close-up of Vera on the bathroom floor. Wet hair covers her face. The shot ends with a sound bridge of one of the other men calling her name to get her to come to.

These scenes push this adaptation into a further liminal space. As literary scholars from Todorov to Jackson note, key to this Fantastic narrative is hesitation in the viewer. Many detective texts that employ the Fantastic do so only temporarily, until the plot moves into pure horror/marvellous or uncanny territory. None, however, remains in this Fantastic mode. Prior to these two scenes, the presence of the victims, along with other figures and objects from the guests’ pasts, such as a helmet or Cyril’s mother, could very easily be passed off as allegorical of guilt and memory. These are firmly psychological. Beatrice Taylor scaring Miss Brent and Cyril Ogilvie Hamilton attacking Vera causing her to lose consciousness are both moments that

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rupture realism too much to just be psychological. Further, both feature aesthetic and aural cues that borrow heavily from the haunted house genre— a rising score framing the reveal of Beatrice’s mutilated face, candlelight providing dark shadows so that a silhouette of Cyril can appear briefly in the background, thunder and windows clattering so that the soundscape is staccato. These moments of horror, and the potential for ghosts, further focalises the experiences of the guests and allows for a consideration of what they are guilty of and why they committed such crimes. These guests have all carried out injustices in the past and are attempting to move on and forget them. These ghosts are physically returning to remind the killers of their crimes. To draw on Jackson, who argues for the political ramifications of the Fantastic, we must consider the socio-political conditions of these ruptures.

Gothic Return The adaptation of None features several moments where the past returns forcibly into the present through memory. These previous murders were all carried out by people with an imperial sense of morality and superiority. Lombard, for instance, murdered twenty-one men of an African tribe. The flashback to the massacre is one shot. The camera tilts up his body as he stands in a field. Fire is just off camera with smoke billowing into the background and muffled screams are heard. Lombard menacingly stares directly into the camera as he takes a drag from his cigarette. The other guests are horrified: Emily Brent: Terrible man! Terrible, terrible man! It’s people like you who put our missionaries in such danger! Philip Lombard: Your missionaries with their God and their syphilis! I am not the only white killer in Africa, Miss Brent! John MacArthur: You, sir, are a bloody butcher! Philip Lombard: And I’m holding my head up high to it. So, either I’m embellishing a story for shocking effect or I’m the only the only one telling the truth in a room full of liars!

Many of the guests either refuse to admit guilt or admit their crimes with little remorse. “What sort of parent lets their kids play out in the dark!” Cries

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Marston, moments before he is poisoned. When Mr Rogers smothers Miss Brady, his employer, Mrs Rogers peers through the doorway. After Brady is dead, Mrs Rogers cries out, “We’re damned.… We’re going to hell!” only for Mr Rogers to slap her to the ground. The narrative here implies that she is just as guilty as he is for not intervening. Vera murders Cyril after hearing that Hugo, the man she has started seeing, won’t receive a penny due to antiquated inheritance laws giving everything to the young boy. Blore beats poor James Landor to death for being gay. “That’s what I should have done, innit,” Blore says to Landor and us. “That’s what I should have done. But I didn’t.” This scene returns to a shot of Blore struggling to sleep. The relationship between Beatrice Taylor and Emily Brent is one founded on misogyny and abuse. In discussing Taylor with Vera, Brent says that she was a “foundling girl, an unwanted from the war,” i.e., abandoned and in need of adoption: I believed her to be a clean, decent modest girl. I taught her needlework skills. We made quite the little home…. [End of sequence.] Then she got herself into trouble in the family way as her own loose mother had with her. She begged me for help. Naturally, and quite properly, I refused.

Brent’s story is delivered primarily through voice-over and it’s through this clash of sound and image that Brent’s hypocrisy is revealed. The two women are sitting under a tree that stands in a golden wheat field. Beatrice is practicing her needlework as she pricks her finger. The women are facing each other, and each shot has the woman look directly into the camera. Emily Brent looks lovingly at Taylor and us. Gently grasping Taylor’s hand, she sucks her bloody finger without breaking eye contact. The reverse shot of Taylor has her looking uneasy in return. This flashback reveals a predatory nature of Miss Brent, which contravenes her religious beliefs and the image she presents to the other guests. As the guests’ experience begins to unravel, ideological differences are exposed. The difference in age is first identified by Marston, who mocks the older men with Lombard: Anthony Marston: Are you a betting man, Lombard? At some point this evening, one of those crumbling old relics will start talking about the war and then they will ask us if we aren’t damned sorry to have missed the last one and that we should be gung-ho to do our best in the next. Not that there is going to be a next one.

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Philip Lombard: There’s always a next one. Anthony Marston: So how about it? The bet.… Philip Lombard: The odds are too short. [Lombard is in the foreground looking over his right shoulder at Vera in the background. She knows she is being looked at.] Anthony Marston: They still think they mean something. No one would notice or care if they just.… [Mimics them disappearing with his hand.]

Later, during their first dinner together, the older men begin talking about the war. Marston rolls his eyes. “For god’s sake, it’s over,” he says. This generational divide is identified further when Dr Armstrong realises that it was Marston who ran him off the road while driving to the dock. “You drive slower than my old aunt!” Marston mocks. Class is regularly a source of tension between the character. Flint-Nicol argues that the “adaptation’s focus on the characters simmering psychopathy, misogyny, domestic violence, homophobia, racism, and classism subverts the usual ‘cosiness’ of television crime thrillers and projects a rejection of nostalgia for the time” (2019, 144). Here, she draws on noted Gothic scholar Botting (1996, 1–2) in reminding us that the Gothic mode is ultimately about the act of revealing all that is irrational, immoral and unstable. Following Marston’s death, many assume it’s an accidental drug overdose. “Perhaps we should get rid of the stimulants out of respect for his family?” Armstrong suggests. “It’s a police matter now, Doc.” Blore replies. “It’s the same set of rules whether you’re posh or not.” Blore embodies an English working-class outlook. Upon discovering a chandelier hook in Vera’s bedroom, Blore is dismayed. “That’s posh people, innit,” he says. “They’d put chandeliers anywhere. They’d put a chandelier in a pigsty if the fancy took ’em.” In his notes, he labels Lombard a Fenian, a historical derogatory word for an Irish Catholic and one who fights for the Irish republic—a term Dr Armstrong also hurls at Lombard. Blore labels Edward Landor a “degenerate pansy.” “You never touched him?” Lombard asks. “I wouldn’t want to be near one of those dirty bastards.” Blore replies, which follows a brutal, slow-motion flashback of Blore beating Landor to death. The Rogers are also representatives of the working class. For instance, Mrs Rogers asks Vera to go back upstairs as she isn’t part of the help. The Rogers are often spoken down to by the guests. Following Mrs Rogers’ death, the guests are short on sympathy:

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Emily Brent: “Dreadful news about Mrs Rogers. She was a wonderful cook. Such a shame.… This egg is precisely four minutes is it? Mr Rogers: [Pause] “Yes, it is.” [Noah Taylor’s performance shows disdain.] William Blore: Condolences, Mr Rogers. When are you expecting Narracott?

Even upon the discovery of Mr Rogers’ mutilated corpse, Dr Armstrong still discusses him in terms of service: “I was looking for him. I was wanting a coffee and I found this. It wasn’t me. I just wanted a damned coffee. It wasn’t me!” Professions are also used to expose class divides. This above accusation angers Dr Armstrong because he believes, as a result of his respectable profession, that he should be above suspicion. When he makes an alliance with Judge Wargrave, Dr Armstrong evokes the respectability of their professions. “We have sharp minds,” he says. “Actual intellect. We should stay together.” Dr Armstrong: I’m not being searched like some grubby criminal. Emily Brent: Then why doesn’t the General go with him? He is an honourable man.

Following his bag being searched, Dr Armstrong continues his anger at Vera: Dr Armstrong: Who the hell do you think you are? I’m a doctor, you’re a secretary!

Emily Brent states that she “can imagine crossing paths with a doctor, a judge, but not someone like Mr Lombard.” She also presumes that “Jews are at the bottom of it.” While, this anti-Semitism seems like a throwaway comment, it speaks to the discriminatory nature of the ensemble. Another source of tension is the expectation pertaining to gender. Following Lombard staring up Vera’s dress on the train, she confronts him once on the island: “Mr Lombard, you seem to be under the impression that I am a particular kind of woman and I assure you that I am not. I do not like being looked at.” For the guests, there are correct ways of being a man and a woman, and incorrect ways. After Mrs Rogers’ death, Vera is the first to identify that the deaths are following the poem. “Hysterical women are so boring,” Armstrong sneers. This label of hysteria is a particularly gendered

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remark, which implies that being a woman is to be irrational. This is ironic, given that here Vera functions like the “final girl” figure in a slasher film in that she is the first to call attention to the presence of a serial killer. Following Emily Brent’s death, Armstrong becomes the hysterical one accusing Vera of poisoning the tea, who in turn calls him an idiotic cretinous bastard. In the panic following Mr Rogers’ death, Armstrong becomes the most hysterical. “There is no hive! You’re fucked, Mr Unknown! You’re fucked!” He laughs maniacally until Vera slaps him. This is an interesting shift from the book, as it’s actually Vera being the hysterical one and it is Dr Armstrong that slaps her. “You will get dressed,” Vera orders calmly. “We will all get dressed and I’ll make a coffee.” These social tensions all seem to cease briefly at the party on the third night. The final four survivors—Blore, Armstrong, Vera and Lombard— accept their fate on their final night and have a party. The sequence is interesting as they all appear to give in to their desires and inhibitions. The dialogue for the scene is mostly muffled. A record is playing jazz music loudly. Dr Armstrong is talking about the war. “Bodies! Bodies! Bodies! Bodies! Bones! Blood! Skulls!” he screams, almost poetically. “Just this this this parade of endless of shattered, shattered meat. Just standing there cutting off legs and arms and guts everywhere and bodies….” We see a montage of slow-motion close-ups of the characters swigging their drinks, lighting cigarettes and snorting cocaine. They all have glazed-over looks. They play the accusatory record. “How do you plead?” it asks. “Guilty!” They all scream in jubilation. The sequence then returns to Armstrong’s monologue. Time and space are warped. “The noise! The noise! The noise!” he cries. Blore howls and barks like a dog. The camera continues to go in and out of focus. The jazz music is drowned out by a drone-like hum. Armstrong glares directly into the camera. We cut to his perspective: Blore is dancing by himself in a stumble. Lombard and Vera are dancing intimately. In the next shot, this aesthetic of drunkenness stops and a realistic tone is established. In an over-the-shoulder shot, we have Armstrong glaring at Vera and Lombard dancing. He is a dancing with Blore, who has his head gently resting on Armstrong’s shoulder. “Look at them,” he says. Thus, the amicable party is over.

Conclusion As with all of Sarah Phelps’ adaptations of Christie, these darker tones shift the series from being puzzles to being about the inner turmoil of the

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central characters. Indeed, after Wargrave is revealed as the killer, there is no flashback or explanation as to how he successfully murdered each victim. How does he sneak the poison into Marston’s drink without anyone noticing? How did he stab Miss Brent while only seconds later being able to help Vera with drying the dishes? What did he tell Mrs Rogers to successfully poison her? The ruse of faking his own death is particularly difficult as he had to steal make-up for the wound, Miss Brent’s wool for the judge’s wig and the gun. By not explaining any of these details, and thus demonstrating how the puzzle all worked out, this conclusion cements the ambiguous and near impossible nature of the plot. This is within the Fantastic liminal space after all. As Van Der Beek (2016) argues, the Fantastic-ness of the book is limited as all mysteries require explanations. This really doesn’t happen here. Nor do we get any clear answer as to whether Beatrice Taylor or Cyril are in fact ghosts. The use of the haunted house, these ghostly visions and the macabre aesthetics allow us to view None as a Gothic horror series. This is also a useful framework to explore the socio-political dynamics of text. In her chapter on Christie, conservative culture and modernity, Alison Light argues that None is an exploration of the darker side of British culture, that the events in the book are a “metaphor for the corruptions of insularity… that those who live on an island must beware of becoming cut off” (1991, 98). Further, the racist nature of the book’s original name evokes “earlier imperialist literature” such as Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899). The island is separated from the British mainland while also being very much a part of it, with its anxieties about race, gender and class being exposed through violence. This adaptation, Flint-Nicol writes, captures the “decline of British colonial power and the impending war” (2019, 144). These ideologies of violence, misogyny and class power are allowed to violently play out on this island.

References Aldridge, Mark. 2016. Agatha Christie on Screen. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Altman, Rick. 1984. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3: 6–18. Andrew, Dudley. 1984. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bogart, Paul, Philip F. Falcone and Leo Farrenkopf, dirs. 1959. Ten Little Indians. NBC. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London and New York: Routledge.

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Caldwell, John T. 1995. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Taylor & Francis. Chaitanya, K. M., dir. 2015. Aatagara. Dwarakish Chitra. Chan, Chris. 2018. “Agatha Christie: Horror Writer.” AgathaChristie.com, September 27. Christie, Agatha. 1924. Poirot Investigates. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1930. The Mysterious Mr Quin. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1931. The Sittaford Mystery. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1939. And Then There Were None. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1975. Curtain. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1976. Sleeping Murder. London: Collins. Clair, René, dir. 1945. And Then There Were None. 20th Century Fox. Clayton, Jack, dir. 1961. The Innocents. 20th Century Fox. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Collinson, Peter, dir. 1974. And Then There Were None. Variety Distribution. Creeber, Glen. 2004. Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. London: BFI Publishing. Crowther, Bosley. 1945. “And Then There Were None, with Barry Fitzgerald, at Roxy.…” New York Times, November 1. Crowther, Bosley. 1966. “10 Little Indians: Agatha Christie Story Is Filmed Again.” New York Times, February 10. Dega, Bruno, and Jeanne Le Guillou, dirs. 2020. Ils étaient dix. Salto, La Une and RTS. Dyer, Richard. 1992. Only Entertainment. New York: Routledge. Edelman, Louis F., and Robert Sisk, exec. prods. 1955–61. The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. ABC. Flint-Nicol, Katerina. 2019. “‘There’s a Secret behind the Door. And That Secret Is Me’: The Gothic Reimagining of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.” In Gothic Heroines on Screen: Representation, Interpretation, and Feminist Enquiry, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald and Frances A. Kamm, 141–53. New York: Routledge. Gobert, Fabrice, dir. 2012–15. Les Revenants. Canal+. Goddu, Teresa. A. 1999. “Vampire Gothic.” American Literary History 11, no. 1: 125–41. Govorukhin, Stanislav, dir. 1987. Desyat’ N*****yat. Odessa Film Studio. Gruneberg, Christopher. 1997. “Unsolved Mysteries: Gothic Tales from Frankenstein to the Hair Eating Doll.” In Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art, edited by Christoph Grunenberg, 213–160 (backward pagination). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Hall, Edward, dir. 2006. “Sleeping Murder.” Agatha Christie’s Marple. ITV Studios. Aired on February 5. Hamilton, Guy, dir. 1964. Goldfinger. United Artists. Harlin, Renny. 2004, dir. Mindhunters. Dimension Films. Harlin, Renny. 2005. Mindhunters [DVD commentary]. Dimension Home Video. Hollmann, Walter L. 2017. “You’re Doomed: Desyat Negrityat 1987.” The Silver Screening Room, October 26, http://www.silverscreeningroom.com/2017/10/ youre-doomed-desyat-negrityat-1987.html. Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge. James, Henry. 1898. Turn of the Screw. London: The Macmillan Company. Laugier, Pascal, dir. 2008. Martyrs. Wildbunch. Laugier, Pascal, dir. 2018. Ghostland. Kinology. Leeder, Murray. 2018. Horror Film: A Critical Introduction. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Light, Alison. 1991. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars. New York: Routledge. Mangold, James, dir. 2003. Identity. Sony Pictures Releasing. Martino, Sergio, dir. 1973 All the Colours of the Dark. Variety Distribution. Met, P. 2012. “Fantastique et horreur à la française: une (re)naissance?” In L’Invention d’un genre: le cinéma fantastique français ou les constructions sociales d’un objet de la cinéphilie ordinaire, edited by F. Gimello-Mesplomb, 25–46. Paris: L’Harmattan. Modleski, Tania. 1982. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. New York: Routledge. Nawathe, Raja, dir. 1965. Gumnaam. Ultra Films. Neill, Roy William, dir. 1934. The 9th Guest. Columbia Pictures. Nelson, Robin. 1997. TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values, and Cultural Change. New York: Springer. Parolini, Gianfranco, dir. 1970. Indio Black. Produzioni Europee Associati. Petterson, David. 2021. “Les Revenants: Horror in France and the Tradition of the Fantastic.” French Screen Studies 21, no. 3: 239–57. Phelps, Sarah, exec. prod. 2015. And Then There Were None. Mammoth Screen and BBC. Pollock, George, dir. 1965. Ten Little Indians. Warner-Pathé. Quest, Hans, dir. 1969. Zehn Kleine N****lein. Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Reijn, Halina, dir. 2022. Bodies Bodies Bodies. A24. Sauchelli, Andrea. 2014. “Horror and Mood.” American Philosophical Quarterly 51, no. 1: 39–50. Seeman, John, dir. 1985. Ten Little Maidens. Excalibur Films. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2012. “Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood.” Screen 53, no. 2: 148–63.

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Smith, Iain Robert. 2016. “Bollywood Adaptations of Agatha Christie.” Alluvium 5, no. 4. Spratford, Becky Siegel, and Tammy Hennigh Clauson. 2003. The Librarian’s Guide to Vampires, Killer Tomatoes and Haunted Houses. Chicago: American Library Association. Srinivasan, Thakkali, dir. 2011. Adulthathu. Kothanda Ramaiah. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Trintignant, Nadine, dir. 1973. Défense de savoir. Lira Films. Van der Beek, Suzanne. 2016. “Agatha Christie and the Fantastic Detective Story.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 34, no. 1: 22–30. Waldman, Diane. 1984. “‘At Last I Can Tell It to Someone!’: Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of the 1940s.” Cinema Journal 23, no. 2: 29–40. Walker, Stanley. 1966. “10 Little Indians.” Evening Standard, February 3. Wheatley, Helen. 2006. Gothic Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Zemler, Emily. 2022. “Bodies Bodies Bodies Is Agatha Christie by Way of TikTok.” Observer, August 2, https://observer.com/2022/08/bodies-bodies​ -bodies-is-agatha-christie-by-way-of-tiktok/. Zwigoff, Terry, dir. 2001. Ghost World. United Artists.

2.

Ordeal by Innocence and the Uncanny Abstract This chapter extends the discussion of the uncanny from the previous chapter to explore how it is represented through the use of space. The house in Ordeal by Innocence becomes an uncanny space, a departure from the happy ideal presented in some flashbacks. Foucault’s theory of heterotopia will be employed to examine how the dark house functions in the Agatha Christie text. As is often the case in Christie narratives, an opposition is established between order, rationality, intellectualism and all matters representative of the Enlightenment, and the transgressive, the dystopian Gothic mode. Narrative tension arises from the conflict of these two modes, often utilised through the past and present. Often, Christie’s original books are concluded with the re-establishment of order. In Phelps’ adaptations, however, the dystopian Gothic remains, and the series concludes with unsettled tones. Keywords: Agatha Christie, crime fiction, the uncanny, adaptation studies, Gothic horror

The whodunit is a staple subgenre of detective fiction and is often a hybrid with other genres, such as drama, horror or comedy. Series such as The Afterparty (2022–present) and films such as See How They Run (2022) and both Knives Out films (2019, 2022) demonstrate the potential for the whodunit to blend with the comedy format. Likewise, the films Brick (2005), Shutter Island (2010) and Prisoners (2013) and the television series Mare of Easttown (2021) are popular examples of the whodunit working in the darker drama format. As highlighted in the previous chapter, the slasher genre, particularly examples from the 1990s cycle beginning with Scream (1996), are a hybrid of the horror and whodunit genres. As such, it is the contention of this chapter that Sarah Phelps’ adaptation of Ordeal by Innocence (2018b) demonstrates the potential for the Christie whodunit to embellish the Gothic potential of the source text. Many of Christie’s novels were examples of the middlebrow Gothic, as they concerned the yearning for the “re-establishment of social Richards, S., Agatha Christie and Gothic Horror: Adaptations and Televisuality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024 doi 10.5117/9789463725781_ch02

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structures following the disruption” of World War I (D’Cruze 2006, 52–53). The disorder faced in the Gothic middlebrow novel, such as Ordeal, reflected the upheaval of domesticity following changes to social understandings of class and gender “where aspirations towards progress had to negotiate some rather disturbing aspects of modernity” (D’Cruze 2006, 47). The ensembles of characters in Ordeal must all face the communal disturbance that follows the revelation that the youngest son was in fact innocent of murdering his mother. Ordeal is a Gothic text through the role of the uncanny effect, which occurs when something familiar begins to feel frightening, unfamiliar and, ultimately, unhomely (Corrêa 2019). The frightening aspect here is important, as this emotion or mood is spurred on by experiencing something as incongruous to our past experiences (Windsor 2019). As such, the whodunit subgenre of detective fiction speaks to this tenet of the Gothic, as space, and often the domestic space, is an important component to the development of anxiety. Tropes such as the locked room and the closed circle manifest a sense of confinement to these narratives. In this chapter, I will ultimately analyse Ordeal according to these themes regarding the hybrid fit between the Gothic and the whodunit. In doing so, this study of hybridisation will shed new light on the expansiveness of Christie’s influence on the whodunit. Narrative techniques such as the flashback allow for the past to bleed into the present day. The house itself becomes a confined, dark heterotopic space for its inhabitants, whose strange behaviour results in an uncanny effect in the series. Finally, Phelps’ changed ending can create a frightening and unusual viewing experience for the diehard Christie fan as the solution to the puzzle is fundamentally different to the novel. In this adaptation, the character who we suspect as being the killer is revealed to be the detective who solves the central crime.

Middlebrow Gothic in Christie’s Writing Detective fiction is informed by the Gothic. Gothic writing in the midnineteenth century became a blueprint for suspenseful crime thrillers through their heavy use of reason and heightened emotions (Pérez 2021). The detective story, according to Percec (2021), is the result of a “double permutation.” First, it’s a legitimate offspring of the Gothic, where the “fantastic and demonic prevalent in Gothic fiction [gave] way to the merely disruptive (morally and socially)” (Percec 2021, 24). Second, the genre was born at a junction between an emerging rationalism and a past romantic

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taste for mystery. This position is supported by Ascari, who writes that the roots of the subgenre can be traced back to Gothic novels: Combining an emphasis on rational detection that we can regard as a fruit of the Enlightenment with a resurging interest for the criminal mind, under the aegis of the sublime, this novel was both preceded and followed by other specimens of Gothic narratives that paved the way for the rise of detective fiction proper. (2020, 27)

The Gothic framework is a useful tool to critique the British cultural politics in detective f iction. To return to Smith (2008), the Gothic allows us to rework, develop and challenge cultural debates. As Phelps has suggested in interviews, Christie is no stranger to “complex weirdness that makes up human motivation and human behaviour” (Phelps, qtd in Ling 2018, para. 5). The darkness of the human psyche is at the essence of many of her stories. It is the contention of this book that horror and Gothic aesthetics and narrative devices are employed to explore this dark essence. Agatha Christie’s writing explores key themes of the Gothic. Themes of isolation, torment and the return of past horrors are important to her narratives. As discussed in the previous chapter on And Then There Were None (1939), Christie was no stranger to hinting at supernatural elements of the types often found in Gothic tales to establish narrative tone. Supposed sightings of ghosts, witchcraft and the use of séances have been employed to generate an air of mystery. This is a point that will also be discussed further in chapter 3 regarding witchcraft and The Pale Horse (1961). The supernatural, however, is often rationally explained by our trustworthy detective. Logic and the supernatural exist in opposition in these source texts. Gothic, however, isn’t always about the supernatural. The past can return through social disintegration. Rowland argues that this past will embody “horrifically distorted premodern or feudal practices” that is often a response to social change (2004, 28). The violence in these texts creates an upheaval in the communal and familial relations in these spaces. This domestic space is the cornerstone of the middlebrow Gothic novel (Modleski 1982, 20), which disrupts the cultural conception of the ideal home as being the source of violence. In his analysis of Agatha Christie’s work as an important example of middlebrow Gothic f iction, Yiannitsaros (2021) argues that her oeuvre is in dialogue with both modernity, drawing on Light’s (1991) work, and traditional English domestic novels. He builds upon Ritchie’s (1972) analysis of detective thrillers, where he argues Christie draws upon the work of

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Mrs Henry Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Beatrice Harraden, Elizabeth Lynn Linton and Elizabeth Gaskell. Christie’s continuation of this era, Yiannitsaros argues, sees strains of the Gothic carrying over from Victorian literary culture. Christie’s writing also exists within this middlebrow terrain, a product of popular culture that is not considered highbrow (see Humble 2001; Sullivan and Blanch 2011). The Gothic is a useful structural device for detective fiction, where the detective figure has the objective to restore a rational order to the story’s world. For Rowland, the primary driver of the Gothic mode is to “trouble boundaries, whether they be of family, gender, caste, and respectability, or those of the law, the borders of knowledge, belief, representability, and culture” (2004, 27). Rowland continues arguing that the Gothic obscures modernity, exploring “what is repressed or ignored by the social privileging of reason, consciousness, masculinity, materialism, and the law” (Rowland, 27). While many works of detective fiction, and indeed many of Christie’s novels, have the objective to solve everything in a neat fashion, there others that conclude with what Rowland refers to as a “gothic mood of indeterminacy,” such as Ordeal, where the killer wonders off into the night with the presumption that they will be caught or die by suicide. All crime fiction, Rowland writes, is shaped by the Gothic mode as this genre offers a sense of textual excess while the detective purges their world of “gothic tropes of social and psychic instability” (2004, 31). The detective strives to restore the social order present before the crime takes place. As is often the case in Christie’s writing, however, such as in Ordeal, the surviving players are forever changed by the social cracks that form during the investigation. Much like Rowland’s analysis of Allingham’s country house mysteries, this rupturing that occurs during the investigations in Christie’s writing centralises the “myth of social stability beset by gothic shadows of occult feudality and/or Victorian oppressions” (Rowland 2004, 34). Agatha Christie’s writing extends many of the traditional Gothic paradigms into new forms. In his essay “Unhomely Counties,” Yiannitsaros (2021) argues that the home isn’t necessarily the boundary between captivity and release. In Christie’s villages, such as in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and The Moving Finger (1942), they are extensions of the domestic space’s dark panoptic core; there is an interiority to these villages. This reading of the Gothic spaces in Christie’s writing sees the village plagued by entrenched malevolence, building upon contemporary Gothic scholarship that surveys the “importance of margins and the provinces in gothic discourses and literatures” (Hughes 2018, 33) and feminist readings of the Gothic genre situating terror in the middle-class family home (see DeLamotte 1990; Ellis 1989; Modleski 1982). While characters aren’t locked

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up in these villages, themes of incarceration and being under surveillance are employed through more subtle means, such as nosey characters like Miss Marple spying on her neighbours through the curtains. These anxieties can stem from the failure to live up to an ideal home, where coercion and violence no longer exist in the outer world only (Ellis 1989, 45). Importantly, the Gothic is a useful lens to explore the narrative dynamics in Christie’s writing beyond it being seen through supernatural iconography, such as ghosts or witches. Christie’s writing often engages with these more typical Gothic conventions and tropes only to reject them for a rational conclusion (Norman 2016, 89). Her true evocation of the Gothic, however, writes Yiannitsaros, primarily concerns the undercurrents of “darkness, brutality, and evil” in these homely spaces (2021, 79). The Gothic novel, Yiannitsaros argues again, is a nightmarish inversion of the ideal family home. Wallace supports this contention, that “possession, confinement, penetration, loss of identity” are Gothic tropes that haunt the domestic space (2016, 75).

Gothic and the Uncanny Theory This unease with the familiar in Gothic fiction is attributed to the effect of the uncanny. While the term “uncanny” is as nebulous as the Gothic genre itself, it nevertheless remains a central concern in Gothic studies (Botting and Townshend 2004; Masschelein 2012; Punter and Byron 2004; Spooner and McEvoy 2007). To recall Todorov’s theory of the Fantastic, he defines the uncanny as being the opposite of the supernatural, where this unease is a result of an “illusion of the senses, of a product of imagination—and the laws of the world remain as they are” (1975, 25). In other words, supposed supernatural events are explained through laws of reason. These uncanny events, however, are still “incredible, extraordinary, shocking, singular, disturbing or unexpected” (Todorov 1975, 46). His structuralist approach is different to the one coined in Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” which defines the term as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” and what “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (1919, 219). Freud derives this term from unheimlich, which is defined as something that has been kept secret that has come to light. This return can be a feeling, such as déjà vu, a sense of dread, or it can be literal, such as being haunted, or secrets being exposed. Corrêa speaks to the importance of the uncanny thusly:

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By making something familiar feel frighteningly unfamiliar, by revealing something un-homely at the heart of home, the uncanny is at the core of Gothic theory and aesthetics, especially because most of its fiction deals with the private or intimate sphere of family relations. (2019, 180)

In analysing Heidegger’s approach to the uncanny, Withy (2015) argues that the uncanny state is when our sense of being in the world (Dasein) is an unheimlich (unhomely) one that causes feelings of apprehension (Angst). Corrêa (2019) also reminds us that the word “uncanny” actually derives from the Scottish word “canny,” i.e., knowing. As such, uncanny “becomes associated to unknowable” (201, their emphasis). This uncanny effect is the creation of a state of uncertainty with one’s once familiar surroundings. In her analysis of Gertrude Stein’s Blood on the Dining Room Floor, PreisSmith argues that the murder mystery is informed by the uncanny because “unexpected brutality and violence” erupts in a cosy, “warm and secure middle-class interior” (2010, 24). The uncanny effect is arguably the key element where the Gothic mode has informed the detective genre. Both have “the same macabre atmosphere,” writes Băniceru, “the fascination with the evil and corrupted human nature, the dead body, both subject and object of obsessive scrutiny, and the past that haunts the present” (2021, 36). The detective, particularly, those from the era of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, signified the power of reason to triumph over this feeling of the uncanny. In many incarnations of Christie’s work, however, and indeed many whodunits, the side effects of the uncanny remain. The Uncanny on Screen In considering the adaptations of these middlebrow Gothic novels, narrative devices and aesthetics are the language employed to express this upheaval. The form of these adaptations creates the unease of this disturbance; this is what Buck-Morss (1992) refers to as the whole corporeal sensorium. Cognition of this form is achieved through the “body-based nature of the experience” (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 178). A haptic-based relationship is encouraged between the screen and audience (Marks 2002). This unease sees the rise of the uncanny, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and we take pleasure in disgust. Our sensorial interpretation of this form allows for a comprehension of mood created by these screen texts. Mood is key to this domestic Gothic landscape. As Wheatley (2006) notes in her monograph Gothic Television, the Gothic text is compatible with television drama as they both concern, and are

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situated within, the domestic space. As noted above, the uncanny effect situates the Gothic within the domestic space. Much like the whodunit, Gothic television is also a matter of genre hybridity and engaging with it is not necessarily about finding pure examples. Wheatley draws upon Graeme Turner, who argues that “television genres are notoriously hybridised … and becoming more so” (2001, 6). In defining the genre, Wheatley provides the following overview: The label “Gothic,” when applied to the television text, has been variously used to identify either those programmes which utilise a Gothic narrative form, featuring key figures and/or events associated with the genre (e.g., the victim-heroine and villainous anti-hero, or the presence of a disturbing secret from the past), or those which deploy a Gothic style, which exploit key elements of the Gothic image repertoire and which are characterised by a certain darkness or gloominess. (2006, 12)

Wheatley argues that the above narrative tropes are often coded in complex narratives that are “structured around flashback sequences, memory montages, and other narrative interpolations” (2006, 3). Regarding aesthetics, Gothic television often looks dark with a “mise-en-scène dominated by drab and dismal colours, shadows and closed-in spaces” (Wheatley 2006, 3) and positioned through visuals and sounds that offer subjectivity. The uncanny effect is evident in the structure of Gothic television, as Wheatley writes, is [l]ocated in its repetitions and returns, in an aesthetic which combines traditionally realist, familiarizing programme making and non-naturalistic disorientating filming and editing, in Gothic television’s familiar characters and plotting … and even in the generic hybridity of the Gothic text. The uncanny is therefore located in the moments in Gothic television in which the familiar traditions and conventions of television are made strange. (2006, 7–8)

The uncanny is not just a feeling of strangeness, however. In his definition of the uncanny, Mark Windsor offers the following: I experience x as uncanny if and only if (1) I experience x as some concrete object or event; (2) I have an experience of x that is incongruous relative to what I believe is possible, which (3) causes me to have uncertainty about x, which (4) causes me to direct feelings of anxiety towards x. (2019, 60)

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Regarding the f irst principle, for there to be uncertainty over whether something is real, “a fictional world must be sufficiently congruous with the actual world to have uncanny potential” (Windsor 2019, 61). Windsor’s second condition presupposes that an experience with a particular object renders the world strange. This allows for the third condition to arise, which sees the need to revise one’s belief around this contradiction. In the uncanny state, however, there is often no simple resolution. Thus, the uncertainty that arises from particular objects creates affective responses such as shudders, chills or one’s hairs standing on end. Uncertainty alone is not enough for this state to be uncanny; this uncertainty must create feelings of anxiety, either for the fictional characters involved or the spectators. The uncanny object, Windsor argues, poses a “psychological threat … to one’s grasp on reality,” resulting in “themes of madness and delusion in narrative works” (2019, 62). Windsor’s model is not a catch-all definition, as this model concerns object-focused emotion. This builds upon Carroll’s (2003) distinction between an emotion and a mood, where emotions are directed at certain objects in the diegesis and moods are all encompassing, colouring everything that comes into one’s horizon. While Windsor’s definition concerns object-focused emotions, he notes that the uncanny can also be “an existential mood of alienation or unhomeliness” (2019, 56). Thus, in analysing a fictional representation of the uncanny, we must analyse how narrative and aesthetic choices create this anxiety-inducing uncertainty.

The Locked Room and the Closed Circle In the whodunit narrative, space and time play key roles in the development of anxiety. It is the position of this chapter that these tropes of confinement are important to the Gothicisation of the whodunit. Here, briefly surmising the core tenets of detective fiction is an important segue. In his chapter on the typology of detective fiction, Todorov argues that a duality occurs in the whodunit’s narrative. We undergo a slow apprenticeship, examining “clue after clue, lead after lead” (1971, 139). He writes: We might further characterise these two stories by saying that the first—the story of the crime—tells “what really happened,” whereas the second—the story of the investigation—“how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it.” But these definitions concern not only the stories in detective fiction, but also two aspects of every literary work which the Russian formalists isolated 40 years ago. They distinguished,

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in fact, the fable (story) from this subject (plot) of a narrative: the story is what has happened in life, the plot is the way the author presents it to us. (Todorov 1971, 140, his emphasis)

As we read/view the whodunit, the detective uncovers these clues in the plot as they uncover the past crime that has already happened. Detective fiction is just as concerned in the reconstruction of space as it is in time (Heise 2020; Schmid 2012). The initial crimes of the detective novel are “the instigators of narrative causality” (Plain 2001, 31). A prominent feature of the detective novel is the locked-room trope—an impossible crime, one that is a “logic defying situation” (Shiloh 2011, 6). This trope stems from Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), where the detective, Dupin, is tasked with solving the crime in a sealed room. Often identified as the first detective in fiction, Dupin uses logic to deduce that a murder cannot occur when no one can enter or exit. Thus, he is able to find the solution to these conflicting facts, that (a) a room can’t simultaneously be locked from the outside and be able to be exited and (b) that the perpetrator was able to exit through the window. This is the core tenet of the locked-room mystery. Ultimately, there is no supernatural occurrences or mystery and only the detective’s correct reasoning is required. Subsequent examples include Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892) and “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903), and Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). The aim for the detective here is to address these inconsistencies and “restore wholeness and order before time and space were thrown out of whack” (Heise 2020, 220). A spatial extension of this trope is that of the closed circle, a common occurrence in the cosy murder mysteries that many are accustomed to. In this scenario, a crime is committed, and a certain number of possible suspects are identified through limited opportunity. Immediately after the crime is committed, it’s almost always established that there was zero opportunity for a violent intruder to have entered the crime scene. “Christie’s murderers do not lurk ‘out there’ in the unknown urbanized world of crime,” writes Makinen, “but are ensconced within the circle of friends and family” (2010, 417). Often, we have a large English manor, an extravagant hotel, an island or a moving train. Occasionally, environmental events can also create this “closed” space, such as the storm in And Then There Were None. Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921), is one of the earliest notable examples of this trope. Many authors of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction also engaged with this device, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. Thus, the closed circle mystery, or

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the “country house mystery,” is again like a puzzle for the reader/viewer to solve. “In crime fiction,” writes King, “place is that which gives the crime and the investigation meaning, especially those tangible and intangible elements that provide some understanding of the society and the culture that, while not explaining the crime, make it possible” (2020, 212). Drawing on Tuan (1977), King argues that the detective, through their investigation, makes the space legible. This sense of confinement contributes to the impact of anxiety. In his analysis of time and space in crime fiction, Heise (2020) draws upon Lefebvre’s notion that the “truth of space” begins with viewing space as a social product (1991, 102). “The detective reads space,” writes Heise, “and the reader of detective fiction reads this reading” (2020, 221). From the whodunit to the hard-boiled detective subgenre, these subgenres of crime fiction are a “spatial operation to gather evidence … [of] something larger,” than just the space of the crime, “an interrogation of the social itself—its structures, ideologies and human and spatial relations—of which crime is only a symptom” (Heise 2020, 221). As such, I argue, that Foucault’s (1971) theory on heterotopic space is a useful framework to analyse the confined spaces of the whodunit. Foucault’s model sees heterotopian space as an “othered” space that contains the disagreeable subject. This space is a distortion of our world. The heterotopian space coexists in relation to everyday sites where we perform our daily routines. Foucault begins his definition of the heterotopian space by first defining utopia as an unreal space that projects perfection. Utopia, according to Foucault, can only be imagined and not actualised. In “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault (1986) uses the mirror as a metaphor, where the reflection is the utopian space, unable able to be fully enacted in the real space. It is a “placeless place.” The mirror functions as a heterotopia, as it positions us in this reflection of reality, unable to crossover to the projected space. The reflected image is also not an accurate one to reality. In connecting this concept to the horror film, Lukić and Parezanović write that this reflection “has the curious heterotopian ability to invert, distort, or otherwise warp the reality one is experientially accustomed to” (2020, 1139). Foucault refers to heterotopias of crisis as spaces that are out of site from society, filled with circumstances that deflect from civil society, from prisons to a honeymoon rendezvous in a motel room. “The implication,” Lukić and Parezanović write, “is that these places contain … a lurking danger the release of which might threaten and utterly shatter the conventional social order” (2020, 1139). As such, the heterotopia as a threatening space is a useful framework to consider Gothic spatiality. “The actual genesis of horror,” Lukić and Parezanović argue, “is being derived from the interaction between ordinary and heterotopian

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spaces” (2020, 1148). In the space between the civil and heterotopian space, “the dissolution of the ideological bounds separating the Same and the Other are surveyed” (Manning 2008, 2). Lukić and Parezanović use Foucault’s theory to propose a dark heterotopia in their analysis of the television series Twin Peaks (1990–91) and Stranger Things (2016–present). In this theory, “dark Heterotopias possess the capacity to invade ordinary places and transfigure them into equally threatening ‘other’ spaces” (Lukić and Parezanović 2020, 1140). This model sees this othered space violently overspill and invade the regular space and community. The convergence of these two spaces in Twin Peaks is precipitated “through the uncanny and perpetuated by certain characters within the narrative” (Lukić and Parezanović 2020, 1148). In Stranger Things, this doesn’t necessarily occur through a particular character or object but rather through a chaotic and poisonous mirrored copy of the regular world through the “upside down” narrative that builds across the seasons and ultimately breaches open. In Lukić and Parezanović’s model, this is used to analyse the spatial dynamics in the horror film. In my analysis of the whodunit subgenre, I will use this model to explore how the resurgence of the violent past creates these dark heterotopian spaces.

Dark Heterotopias in Christie’s Writing As is evident in the aforementioned dark heterotopian model and the example of Twin Peaks, uncanny characters and situations can give rise to dark heterotopian spaces. Several uncanny tropes arise in Christie’s writing. First, the dark, unsettling house is reminiscent of the iconography of the haunted house. This setting of the supposedly haunted house creates an atmosphere of unease for the remaining suspects and a feeling of dread that something unsettling will occur. The use of the closed circle trope is particularly relevant here as several suspects often remain in the location for the duration of the narrative. This is evident in several of Christie’s stories, such as And Then There Were None, The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Peril at End House. A Pocket Full of Rye (1953), in particular, demonstrates this trope as once the initial murder occurs, albeit externally in the victim Rex Fortescue’s office, the unhappy undercurrents of the house boil to the surface. In this novel, Miss Marple notices that the murders associated with the Fortescue household are being carried out according to the “Pocket Full of Rye” nursery rhyme. Initially, the house is described as an old stately home with a beautiful garden and a long driveway lined with yew trees. The house is described as warm and inviting. The main living room has a large fireplace, a piano and comfortable furniture.

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It’s revealed at the autopsy that Rex Fortescue was poisoned with taxine, which he would have ingested at breakfast. The house is coincidentally called Yewtree Lodge, named after the tree that taxine derives from. After the death, both the victim’s wife and the parlourmaid, a former employee of Miss Marple, are also murdered. It’s these coincidental aspects of the deaths that lead Miss Marple to realise the connection to the children’s rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” Miss Marple’s former parlourmaid, Gladys, is even found with a peg on her nose to mimic the blackbirds pecking off her nose. Once questioned about their knowledge of blackbirds, several house members comment on the practical jokes being played upon Rex Fortescue, such as dead blackbirds being left in his office or being baked into a pie. As is often in Christie’s whodunit, the fallout from the initial murder reveals the angry and often violent past that is trying to be forgotten. It’s revealed that Rex Fortescue had previously gained his wealth through murdering his former business partner upon discovering a gold mine, called the Blackbird Mine, in East Africa and claiming the riches for himself. In conversing with one suspect, Miss Marple notes: “It’s nice in here today,” she said. “With the fire and the lamps and you knitting things for babies. It all seems cosy and homely and like England ought to be.” “It’s like England is,” said Miss Marple. “There are not so many Yewtree Lodges, my dear.” “I think that’s a good thing,” said Pat. “I don’t believe this was ever a happy house. I don’t believe anybody was ever happy in it, in spite of all the money they spent on the things they had.” “No,” Miss Marple agreed. “I shouldn’t say it had been a happy house.” (304)

This reading of Yewtree Lodge is emphasised further in the 1995 BBC radio dramatisation starring June Whitfield: There is a line in Alice in Wonderland that goes, “they are all unpleasant people,” which very accurately summed up the Fortescues. They were selfish and grasping, and utterly without moral scruples.… No, I cannot say that I warmed to the Fortescues; and yet I had the impression that they were all frightened, frightened of what inspector Neil might find out about them.1 1 This reference to Alice in Wonderland is originally made by Inspector Neele in the original novel.

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This speaks to the intertwining of crime fiction and the Gothic. As Spooner advises, cultural context is key as “as each genre is positioned differently at different periods in history” (2010, 247). In the twentieth century, the Gothic suggests irrationality, a shift from the privileging of rationality over evil in earlier periods. Using Peril at End House as an example, she draws on Horsely, who argues that while “traditional detective fiction ultimately acts as a repudiation of the gothic (eschewing supernatural explanations, throwing light into dark recesses),” it may also “play extensively with it” (2005, 48). In these investigations, the dark nooks of these supposedly warm and welcoming houses are exposed. Yewtree Lodge’s warmth is exposed as a violent and unhappy household. The act of the murders functions as the breaking through the barrier and allowing the heterotopic space to overflow, creating a paranoid household that is revealed to be, and I quote Miss Marple here, “utterly without moral scruples.” Another theme of the uncanny revolves around the notion of strangeness. Christie’s mysteries are established with strange coincidences and strange behaviour. Her puzzles often begin with random coincidences that end up being crucial to solving the crime. Much like the supposedly haunted house, these moments create an unease in the reader, allowing one to question whether these events are indeed truly random. Characters in her mysteries often behave in unusual ways or against type. In the Golden Age whodunit, the reader engages in a playful dynamic with the puzzle that the narrative puts forward, often on the lookout for these uncanny moments. Significant examples include Poirot being in the location where the crime takes place amongst all the suspects, such as Death on the Nile (1938), Evil under the Sun (1941) and Murder on the Orient Express. In Death on the Nile, it’s revealed that the killers have plotted to follow Poirot onto the luxury cruise ship whereas in the other two scenarios, it is indeed chance that Poirot is in the location of the crime. In The ABC Murders, victims of the serial killer are murdered alphabetically where Poirot deduces that it is a pattern rather than coincidence. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the book’s narrator, Dr Sheppard, happens to be at the scene of the crime and is Poirot’s assistant in the investigation only to be revealed as the killer. In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938), two suspects from another country are pretending to be someone else. It is often these coincidences that create unease, that there is an underlying logic that we aren’t privy to. It’s the rationality of the detective that ultimately brings light to this feeling of the uncanny. Coinciding with coincidences, strange behaviour is also a component of this anxiety. Dr Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd makes several odd remarks that Poirot later reveals to be clues. The victim in The Murder at the

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Vicarage, Colonel Protheroe, behaves oddly during the day leading up to his death. He arrives at the vicarage asking for the vicar’s assistance with a private matter only to abruptly change his mind and leave. In At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), Miss Marple begins to suspect foul play due to the stranger behaviour of the other guests and their eerie resemblance to notable celebrities and royalty. The ensemble of suspects exhibits strange behaviour in The Mysterious Affair at Styles following the murder of household matriarch. The eldest son, John Cavendish, is rude to his mother and stepfather. Cynthia Murdoch is friendly but constantly eavesdrops on other characters. The victim’s new younger husband, Alfred Inglethorpe, is often seen sneaking around the house at odd hours and refuses to reveal his alibi. Several characters in Peril at End House are increasingly erratic during the investigation, which causes Poirot and Inspector Japp to question their motives. In the novel, Nick Buckley, the central character and new owner of End House, requests Poirot’s help because she believes someone is out to kill her. Even so, she is careless of her own safety and becomes increasingly distracted. Charles Vyse, a guest at the nearby hotel, is obsessed with the history of End House and becomes increasingly fitful. Nick’s friend Freddie becomes increasingly flighty and emotional. Likewise, Nick’s devoted housekeeper becomes increasingly strange, prompting the detectives to question if she is hiding something. Finally, unease and distrust are further espoused through the unreliable narrator. In these moments, the narrator may be hiding something or offering a different/skewed perspective to the events of the story. For instance, The ABC Murders is retold through the notes of Captain Hastings, who is often not privy to Poirot’s observations, which results in him jumping to several incorrect conclusions. In the locked-room mystery Cards on the Table (1936), the narration switches between four different characters, with each section offering a different perspective on the evening’s events. Thus, the reader must deduce what the truth is between the conflicting observations. The narration in And Then There Were None is third-person omniscient, which provides us access to the characters’ thoughts. For instance, several characters begin to question the motives of other survivors, which further casts doubts on the narration we are receiving. The final twist further cements that we were receiving an unreliable narration throughout from one character in particular. These moments of unreliable narration create uncertainty and misdirection in the reader. Ordeal by Innocence Now that it has been established that there is evidence of the Gothic and the uncanny effect in Christie’s writing, I will turn to how this occurs in

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Ordeal by Innocence. In the novel, Rachel Argyle is the matriarch of a large household with five adopted children. After her murder, one adopted son, Jacko, is charged with the crime. Due to Jacko’s wild nature, everyone believes him to be guilty. It isn’t until two years later that a geologist, Arthur Calgary, arrives at their home, Sunny Point, to reveal that he is in fact Jacko’s alibi for the night of the murder. Arthur was unable to come any earlier due to him being on an expedition. This revelation sees the household descend into a spiral of anxiety as one of the remaining household members must be the killer. This narrative adheres to the closed circle trope with much of the action occurring at Sunny Point. In the original version, Arthur functions as the primary detective and reveals the long-time housekeeper, Kirsten, to be the killer. It turns out that Jacko had a history of initiating affairs with older women and then taking their money. On the evening of the murder, he had persuaded Kirsten to murder Rachel in order to get her money via inheritance. Jacko had, in fact, been secretly married the entire time and had just used Kirsten in his evil plot. The first adaptation of Ordeal was in 1985 and is often remembered mostly for its score by Pino Donaggio, a composer known for his work on horror soundtracks, notably several Brian De Palma films, including Carrie (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), Body Double (1984), Raising Cain (1992) and Blow Out (1981). Donaggio had originally composed much of the film’s music, with high-pitched strings and suspenseful, low cellos matching the film’s tension and emphasising the terror and unease in the house. After he submitted the score the film went through major edits, but Donaggio was unavailable to make further changes to his music. To replace Donaggio, the film’s director, Desmond Davis, selected jazz musician Dave Brubeck, whose resulting score was showy and often at odds with the film’s visuals. Donald Sutherland’s portrayal of Calgary takes the film into noirish territory akin to his work in Don’t Look Now. The film was a distinct counterpoint to the Joan Hickson Miss Marple series that were airing throughout the 1980s, which were examples of the BBC heritage production (McKee 2002). This film demonstrates the Gothic potential in earlier adaptations. The next adaptation of Ordeal by Innocence was for the 2007 Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple television series on ITV featuring Geraldine McEwan in the title role. Marple doesn’t feature in the original book but takes on the lead investigative role here with Calgary being relegated to a secondary position. Juliet Stevenson plays the character of Gwenda Vaughn, the secretary of Mr Argyle, with whom he later falls in love. Vaughn is presented more sympathetically in this adaptation. She writes to her former employer, Miss Marple, inviting her to their imminent wedding. This establishes Gwen as

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having grown up in an orphanage with Miss Marple being the only person that she considers family. Once Marple is a guest in the Argyle manor, Arthur Calgary arrives, delivering the news of Jacko’s innocence. While the killer remains the same, it is Gwenda who ends up being murdered for knowing too much rather than daughter Mary’s volatile husband, Phillip Durant. Once the murder has happened, the household descends into the state of panic. This liminal period places hierarchical positions into chaos, which are only corrected once Marple succeeds in exposing the killer. Like the 1985 film, Calgary, and this time, Marple, are outsiders to this household. The revelation is not a happy one for the surviving members. Kirsten and the adopted children rally around their father, isolating Gwenda, wishing her to be the killer due to her not being a family member. This sympathetic position of Gwenda is evident in the book, where she is described as displaying “warm-heartedness [and] enthusiasm” for Leo (77). Overall, this series is indicative of the quaintness that Christie adaptations were known for. McEwan is charming as Marple, and the grand mise en scène is opulent and cosy. Likewise, the 2014 BBC Radio adaptation uses similar musical motifs associated with the cosy murder mystery to frame the vocal performances. Sarah Phelps draws out the Gothic themes in her adaptation for the BBC. What follows is an analysis of the series according to key themes of the Gothic. Namely, I use the uncanny effect and dark heterotopian spaces as a framework to analyse how this adaptation draws out themes in the source text. First, I will examine the key Gothic trope of the past bleeding into the present. Second, I will examine the house as a heterotopian space. Third, I will examine how the uncanny shapes this return of the repressed. Finally, I will develop the uncanny effect further by considering the experience of watching an adaptation that changes key plot elements.

Flashbacks and Memory The mystery at the centre of Ordeal by Innocence is largely established through piecemeal flashbacks. These memories slowly reveal the painful memories that the adopted children have experienced in the house. Initially in short bursts, they repeat, with each repetition developing the memory further. Flashbacks tend to be jarring in nature as they break temporal and spatial continuity. As outlined by Wheatley (2006), a common device in Gothic television is to structure the troubled family through the flashback. In offering a cognitive approach to contemporary film theory, Gordejuela (2021, 3) argues that we are naturally narratively driven in our way

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of thinking and thus, modes of sequentiality, or the cause/effect narrative model, make experiencing screen texts easier. We understand flashbacks through several interrelated layers (Persson 2003). We understand through forms of perception, such as characters, setting and objects. Concurrently, we also make sense of more abstract meanings, such as thematic and symbolic significance. Finally, according to Persson, we make aesthetic evaluations on the purpose of a flashback. Sternberg (1971) argues that the flashback can be either expositional or subjective. In terms of exposition, this concerns the ordering of story events in particular ways for effect; namely, according to Sternberg, curiosity and suspense. For instance, in a whodunit, it’s often important to include the scene revealing the killer committing the murder at the end of the plot during the denouement, although television shows such as Columbo and Poker Face are known to disrupt this pattern. The second use of the flashback is to aid in subjectivity, which primarily concerns character memory. What horrible memory haunts the particular character in question? The flashbacks in Ordeal differ to the traditional use of the flashback in the whodunit. Often, flashbacks are used expositionally to reveal clues and motives for murder. Phelps’ And Then There Were None, for instance, uses clues to reveal the crimes of the house guests. Vera Claythorne’s flashbacks, in particular, slowly reveal her guilt over several scenes. In Ordeal, however, these flashbacks have a different function. The flashbacks develop the familial dynamics of Sunny Point. The series opens with a montage of events that set up the mystery. We have a shot of a newspaper clipping title “The Orphan’s Saviour,” followed by the sound of a blow and the blurred vision of Rachel struggling on the floor; close-up shots of objects on her desk—a blood-stained carafe, an Egyptian cat paperweight, a statue of Anubis staring into the screen; blood drips onto the tablecloth and down a family photograph of Jacko wrapping his arm playfully around Rachel’s neck. We then cut to Jacko leaving the gates of the property out on the road. It’s dark and gloomy. He stops a car and hitches a ride. Kirsten screams upon discovering the body. Events in the montage proceed quickly now. A sheet is draped over Rachel’s body; the carafe is dusted for fingerprints, Jacko’s head is pressed down onto the desk as his prints are taken at the police station; in prison, he pleads with his father to find the person who could provide him with an alibi. With a crescendo of strings, the opening segment cuts to members of the household lined up by Jacko’s coffin. “I hoped that one day he might understand what he had done to us,” Leo Argyll says despondently. “I had hoped your brother might one day be sorry.” A close-up of Jacko has his face half covered with a

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sheet, covering the disfigurement from fatal injuries he received in prison. This sequence sets up the current state of the family. Rachel and Jacko are dead, and the family are trying to move on. The series then cuts to the first instance of a recurring flashback. In slow motion, five young children run through the woods up to the house. “He wasn’t,” a voice-over of Leo says. “But we forgive him because we loved him.” The shots of the children running in slow motion are interspersed with the adult versions of the children. The women have their faces covered in black veils. As Leo bends over to kiss Jacko’s lifeless forehead, another flashback quickly cuts to Jacko spitting at the glass partition separating him and Leo in prison. The montage continues with mournful strings playing as the children continue running through the woods. The trees clear to reveal Sunny Point and Rachel, happily standing at the other end of the field, waiting for them as she rings a bell in a bright blue dress. The shots of the house are bright and colourful. The house is covered in vibrant wisteria. A slow-motion shot of a young Jacko looking back at Rachel infers the significance of their relationship. This opening montage continues with a close-up of Rachel’s face smiling directly into the camera. Blurred in the background are her children walking down the stairs and joining her for a family portrait. A quick cut to Leo sees him setting up the camera. The third shot of this scene sees the family viewed upside down through the camera lens, a telling motif that the subjective memory we are viewing is skewed, perhaps a nod to the unreliable narration in many of Christie’s novels. The fourth shot returns the family to being viewed through the right way up; the camera zooms outwards, and Jacko puts his arm around Rachel’s neck, revealing that this is the photo we see in the opening of the montage. The slow-motion ceases now. “Everybody ready?” Leo asks. “That’s quite tight, Jack.” A return to the close-up of Rachel sees her struggling with Jack’s grip. “Smile, mother.” He kisses her on the cheek. “So everyone knows we are happy.” The photo is taken with their “best faces,” and the opening title cards begin. The flashback in this opening montage is both expository and subjective. It reveals the tense relationship between Jacko and Rachel but also begins the aesthetic development that we see throughout these memories. Sunny Point in present day becomes increasingly drab, whereas the initial flashbacks to the Argyle children depict Sunny Point as bright and happy. This initial subjectivity likens the opening façade of the household with all of them putting on their happy faces in an ideal family portrait. Subsequent flashbacks, however, reveal Rachel’s cruel nature and her strained relationship with all her children. When Christina attempts to hug Rachel after its agreed that she will move into town, Rachel shrugs her off.

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“None of that,” she says. “I have trained you better than that.” Mickey, it’s revealed, has been self-harming since he was a child, bullied by Rachel in their home-schooled lessons. In another confrontation on the night of the murder, Mary pleads with her, asking, “Why did you get me if you weren’t going to love me?” Rachel chastises her in response, finding her neediness intolerable. “I was sad, Mary.” Rachel sneers. “I thought you could make up for that sadness. It’s not your fault you couldn’t.” When we first meet Hester, she is wearing a childlike, bright pink dress. She is on a swing in the garden, in slow motion, which is a similar aesthetic to happier flashbacks of her childhood. Strings stir as she swings in a “Mickey Mousing” effect. She looks up as she hears Gwen calling for her. She sighs, and then returns to swinging, once again moving in slow motion, as if she is yearning to return to a childish state. A subsequent scene of her discussing Gwen’s behaviour with Mickey sees her looking into the mirror and struggling to smile. A quick flashback reveals snippet of a conversation with Rachel sitting in a small, rundown kitchen in a luxurious fur coat. “I’m not cross, Hester.” Rachel says calmly. The menacing low-pitched cellos return. “It’s Christmas Eve. How can I be cross?” Quick cuts to a brief shot of her dead body are followed with Hester at the funeral and Hester splashing water on the mirror in the present day. These flashbacks are disruptive bursts, establishing the current malaise of the household and its inhabitants. Further flashbacks present the children as having unhappy memories. Mary is presented as an unhappy wife. Much like the motif of the upsidedown photographic lens introduced earlier, we are first introduced to her as she talks to her husband, Philip, followed by a cut to an upside-down image of the two of them on their wedding day. Once again, this upside-down motif is used to imply that the subjects getting photographed are not as happy as they seem. A later flashback sees Kirsten running with the children in the woods, a scene similar to the one that introduces the children in the first episode. “Run wild!” Kirsten encourages. “Make all the noise you want.” A younger Mary, however, refuses. It seems she has always been an unpleasant child. A bird’s-eye shot spins, looking down on the group as they lie down on a rug in a circle, a visual repetition of the circular paper children from the opening shot. Kirsten gets the children to scream and, again, Mary refuses. Many flashbacks are initially presented in brief bursts, as if traumatic memories are exploding into present day. It isn’t until the final episode, as household members get closer to the truth, that these flashbacks are played in longer, complete sequences. Beyond flashbacks, Rachel’s presence in the house is made constant throughout present-day scenes. In Gwen’s introductory scene as she walks

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through the grounds and house, one shot captures her walking down the central staircase, calling for Hester. She looks up at Rachel’s large portrait, which looms over the grand central stairwell. “I don’t know why you’re smiling,” she smirks. “It’s my house now.” Menacing, low-pitched cellos indicate a potential motive for murder. A similar scene is repeated in a later episode, with Gwen unhappily trudging down the stairs. A low-angle shot captures her stopping with Rachel’s portrait looming in the background. “Stop breathing down my neck, bitch!” Gwen grumbles. Other props function as reminders of Rachel’s brutal murder. After Calgary delivers the news of Jacko’s innocence, he sits with Leo in the study to discuss the matter. As Calgary waits for Leo to enter, extreme close-up shots of Leo’s Egyptian trinkets, such as the Anubis and sphinx paperweights, are given particular importance. All characters, with the exception of Leo, have some form of trauma that pertains to World War II. It’s revealed that Arthur Calgary’s fragile state is caused by his guilt for writing a formula that contributed to the creation of Fat Man and Little Boy, the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The children, with the exception of the unwanted Mickey, were also war orphans. The bunker below Kirsten’s kitchen also speaks to this wartime paranoia and is a space for characters to go to when overwhelmed, such as Kirsten when she is reminded of Jacko’s innocence and Rachel when she has a panic attack after Christina attempts to hug her. The threat of nuclear war is also heard over the radio in the kitchen with the sound coupled with images of fish heads, bubbling jam and Kirsten chopping up meat. Jacko uses this bomb shelter as evidence that is mother is not coping: Jacko: You smile as though nothing is wrong. But you built a nuclear bunker in case the bombs start falling. So I know you are terrif ied. I know you are a mess. Just admit it. Stop smiling, stop pretending and, in return, I will stop. Rachel: You won’t break me, Jack. [She walks away.]

The House Aestheticism is integral to these adaptations’ engagement with the Gothic mode. In Christie’s novel, the house is described as a “characterless modern house, gabled and porched. It might have stood on any good-class suburban

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site, or a new development anywhere” (14). The Argyle house in Phelps’ miniseries, however, is considerably grander. As the narrative develops, the representation of the house and its surrounding gardens becomes darker. Much like And Then There Were None, this house draws upon the iconography of the Terrible House, which, to recall, “represents an extension or ‘objectification’ of the personalities of the inhabitants” and connotes the “dead weight of the past crushing the life of the younger generation, the future” (Wood 1985, 212). While secrets are exposed and the household is under increasing pressure, the darkness of the house envelopes the family. The acts of revealing everyone’s secrets expose the household as always being an unhappy one. Rachel and Leo’s cold and brutal parenting results in this dark heterotopia. This public image of the “saviour of orphans” functions as the mirror image in Foucault’s model. The opening credits are also integral in establishing the mood of this dark heterotopia. A high-angle shot flies over a darkly lit forest made out of newspaper. Childish figures are cut out of newspaper clippings that repeatedly feature the word “murderer.” The figures are in a circle, and they spin as they fall, a nod to the flashback of Kirsten playing with the children. The disintegrated clippings fall into the forest. Finally, a shot tracks out from a model of the Sunny Point house burning and its paint peeling off. In the series, the house’s geographical location is also revealed in several establishing shots. Initially, it’s shown in a lush green forest on the edge of a cliff in daylight. In later establishing shots, it’s at night, barely visible bar for the brightly lit windows. This isolation is both literal and figural. This disintegration extends to the well-being of the household members, who are initially hesitant to believe Calgary’s news as they try to maintain a façade of innocence. This is, of course, with the exception of Philip, who tries to stir everyone up. “Warning Calgary off doesn’t appear to be beyond reproach,” he goads everyone else over breakfast one morning. “Quite the opposite. Don’t you think?” The animosity between the family members can’t be contained, however. “You know what I think? I think it’s a shame you got out of that car crash alive,” Leo replies. The social disintegration of the household is clear now. At this breakfast scene, Gwenda offers a bit of camp humour, which is at odds with the scene’s proceedings—“I’m just trying to eat my grapefruit, actually!” Philip is repeatedly awful to his family members. He forcibly kisses Hester against her will and he bullies his wife repeatedly: Philip: Your breath smells. It’s all those pills you take. It dries your mouth. You’re dried up!

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Mary: Why are you so cruel to me? Philip: It’s like kicking a stray dog. It’s easy. And the dog expects it. That’s what you are, Mary. A whipped dog. Licking the hand that beats you.

To further the theme of disarray, Calgary is also depicted in this adaptation as struggling with his mental health. Much like the brief flashbacks of the children that are expanded with each repetition, we are repeatedly shown shots of him being committed to an asylum against his will. When he first remembers the evening, quick cuts make his memories fragmented. Given that he is intended to be the story’s detective, he is repeatedly presented as being unreliable. In an extended flashback of his time at the asylum, the doctor asks him what he is so afraid of. “The end of the world,” he replies. This is followed by a quick succession of cuts of the same shot of him, with only a slight shift in camera angles. The music swells. “What have I done?” he cries. “I am damned.” One nightmarish shot sees him sitting by a locked door of his padded cell with a bombed-out background, smoke engulfing the door behind him. Calgary is trapped in his own mind for much of this investigation. This aesthetic builds the nihilistic framing of this Gothic mode. The central staircase is a motif for this dark heterotopic space, the setting for the ideal family photo with all their “best faces.” The positing of all the suspects is repeatedly shown throughout the evening. Hester is upstairs, leaning over the banister, her nightgown covered in blood; Mary is rocking back and forth, banging her head against the wall; Gwenda is standing down the hallway, blood pouring from her nose. At the conclusion of the first episode, these shots of the evening occur in a montage with the music swelling increasingly with each cut. A crane shot swirls upwards as we see the several characters equally distraught. The staircase maintains a central position for animosity throughout the series. Several flashbacks reveal Jacko sitting on the landing, watching several family members come and go. He smiles in delight as Mary is brushed off cruelly by Rachel. “Naughty Daddy!” He mocks Leo after Rachel catches him with Gwenda. In the present day, Leo tries to lift Christina’s spirits by saying “I need my best girl at her best,” only for the camera to track out of the room to reveal Mary eavesdropping in jealous horror in the hallway. Once the family believe Calgary is telling the truth, Mary asks them to meet in their usual spot, “where they won’t be heard.” The conversation with the children takes place at night in the forest beyond the manicured garden. They are only visible through the moonlight and their torches.

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Here, the siblings take it in turn to angrily confront one another. This aesthetic is repeated throughout several external scenes of that evening, such as the confrontation between Rachel and Christina and Mickey. The garden here extends this dark heterotopia, with Mickey pursuing a distraught Christina, begging her to stay. On another evening, Rachel asks Christina if she is indeed in a relationship with Mickey. The two are in the green house, with moonlight streaming through the glass window in the background. Here, Rachel reacts by appearing to be physically queasy. “The love I wasted on you, you whore!” She screams. “You disgust me, you repulse me! You are f ilth! Filth! Filth!” These settings for these confrontations speak to the importance of aesthetics to establish mood. To return to Sinnerbrink, mood establishes these moments with darker significance. The disintegrating nature of Sunny Point and the household is made more meaningful here “through the evocation of appropriate moods in order for such cues to show up as affectively charged with meaning in the f irst place” (Sinnerbrink 2012, 154, his emphasis). These darker flashbacks establish that it isn’t Rachel’s murder that is the turning point that the household faces, but rather her cruel attitude towards her children.

Strangeness The BBC adaptation of Ordeal extends the Gothic tone of Christie’s novel largely through moments of the uncanny. Christie was known for filling her ensemble casts with clichéd attributes that were ultimately undermined throughout the investigation (see Bernthal 2016; Pamboukian 2016). Gwenda is introduced in a bright blue summer dress and flaming red hair. She is calling out to Leo, who is f ishing on the lake. As she walks away, she trips on the pier. The post-credit sequence shifts as the camera cuts to Calgary, then, as he is introduced travelling to Sunny Point from the bus. The jarring cut here between Gwenda and Calgary is significant. The tone of the score alters as low-pitched strings begin to play. He picks glass out of his bloody hand; a wound caused by the smashing of his glass pill bottles because they made him numb to the world. For those who have read the book, this is a slightly confusing introduction to Calgary, as he is supposed to be the detective of the story. Yes, Christie’s source book and the various adaptations of Ordeal have him as the stereotypical befuddled scientist, but he has always been an assured individual and the representative of rationality in the narrative. As has been established

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above, Calgary is presented here as an unstable person. In one sequence as Calgary visits Sunny Point, a long shot captures him standing in front of the house, appearing as a typical, confident detective. The subsequent cut to a flashback of him being committed to the psychiatric institution whilst yelling, “I’m damned!” weakens his reliability. The undermining of authority figures continues with Chief Inspector Gould, who conspires with Leo to frame Jacko. His source text counterpart, Inspector Huish, is a co-investigator with Calgary, another rational man. Gould is motivated to have Jacko killed in prison because he had been sleeping with Mrs Gould for money, a nod to Jacko’s nefarious ways in the source novel. In one flashback, Jacko accuses Gould of being a paedophile as he sucks on his fingers and forcibly kisses him. “That’s what you like,” he goads. “I am a bit old for you though aren’t I, pervert?” Once the revelation of Jacko’s innocence has been established, it’s clear that none of the adopted children are coping at Sunny Point. This is something Mary says to Mickey as she pleads with him to help her get rid of Gwenda: Mary: I’m the only one that cares that Dad is marrying that bloody secretary. Tina is like a ghost; Hester is playing the innocent baby. It’s like mother never existed.… Daddy isn’t thinking clearly. He is blinded by S.E.X. Mickey: Mary, you need to lie down in a cold dark room for just about the rest of your life.

The children’s uncanny behaviour is caused by Rachel’s cruel approach to parenting. It’s established that Mickey has a long history of self-harming as a result of Rachel’s bullying. No one hated Rachel more than Mary, who desperately sought her adopted mother’s approval. Christina is cold to all her siblings, even when they seek her comfort. In one scene, she sits on the top banister of the grand staircase dangerously peering down. “One little push,” Mickey says as he comes to greet her. In one flashback to Mary and Philip’s wedding, Rachel chastises Mary for spending too much time with her siblings, only for Jacko to mime throwing an empty beer bottle at his mother as she walks off. “One day,” he sneers. “One day just to crack the shell to see if there is anything inside.” The menacing leitmotif of the low-pitched strings sound to infer evil intent. Philip also has a disregard for civil behaviour whilst in public. In one scene where he is pitching a blackmailing scheme to Calgary at a restaurant, Philip pees in a vessel under the table. “I was a God,” he despairs.

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The Uncanny Effect of Adaptation Beyond the unsettling behaviour of the Argyle family, the changed ending results in an uncanny experience for the viewer who is familiar with the source text. Considering reception is vital as screen adaptations invite the audience to “recall the adapted work, or the cultural memory” (Grant 2002, 57). To recall Hutcheon’s (2006) important work on adaptation, the knowing audience member can indulge in seeing the adapted work as a form of repetition without seeing it as secondary. There is an intertextual pleasure in identifying how core elements of the story have translated onto the screen. As has been established in the introduction of this book, there was a frustrated response from “Christie diehards” with how Phelps changed the ending of the story. In the source text, Jacko had been manipulating older women into giving him money and had persuaded Kirsten, the housekeeper, into murdering Rachel. Christie describes Kirsten as hovering, waiting like a “watchful dragon” (15). Originally, she is described as constantly eavesdropping and intruding in conversations to warn Calgary off. In both versions, interestingly, she is positioned as a cultural outsider. Originally, she is Swedish whereas in this adaptation, she is Scottish. It is ultimately revealed that rather than being lovers, Kirsten is Jacko’s mother, a result of a rape committed by Leo when she first arrived to work at Sunny Point: Jacko: Poor mother, you should have left me at the orphanage. Rachel: I didn’t get you from the orphanage. The woman who gave birth to you is in the kitchen. You’ve known her all your life, little boy. With your temper tantrums, you’ve no idea what it takes to keep going.

Throughout Phelps’ adaptation, Kirsten is repeatedly depicted as being the watchful dragon in the background. At a cocktail party to celebrate Leo and Gwenda’s impending marriage, a slow-motion shot tracks across the siblings with the recurring suspicious, low-pitched leitmotif. Mary breathes out smoke from her cigarette and looks over to the screen’s right. The shot cuts to Kirsten behind a table, pouring a drink as she looks up suspiciously at the gathering. Through Kirsten’s rageful glares in the background of shots and her escaping to the bunker when visibly overwhelmed, it’s clear that she also has a painful secret akin to the Argyle family members, except in this instance, we never have any brief flashbacks to offer any hints. For the knowing viewer, it’s inferred that this secret from her past pertains to

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her guilt. “She’s piped up!” Philip laughs during the breakfast argument scene. “It’s always the servants who know more than they say.” There are several moments where this “knowing” hints at her potential guilt, as if this adapted text is trolling the viewer. When Calgary phones Leo to threaten him that he is going to the police, Kirsten listens in on another telephone. In the final episode, as the children watch from the dining room window at Leo and Calgary talking, they openly ponder whether Calgary really is Jacko’s alibi. A subsequent shot shows Kirsten eavesdropping in the hallway with the threatening low-pitched cellos returning. Following this shot, Kirsten returns to the bomb shelter in a panic, breathing heavily. In another flashback to the evening of Rachel’s murder, Kirsten is again shown to be watching in the background. In this sequence, as the camera tracks towards Kirsten, she pours a drink at Leo and Gwenda’s engagement. She looks up and glares intently off camera. Several guests walk past the camera in the foreground. We then cut to a low-angle shot of Rachel standing in front of the study and leaning over the banister on the night of the murder. “You’re leaving, Jack,” she orders. The camera then cuts to a high-angle shot looking down at Jacko, who is slouched on a couch. “God almighty, Mother,” he sighs. Kirsten is then shown with a slight, high-angle shot walking up the central staircase carrying linen. Her presence is ignored by Rachel and Jack. A medium close-up shot of Jacko shows him smirking at Rachel. The scene then returns to the shot of Kirsten at the engagement party. She looks down at the table as the shot then cuts to a close-up view of a cigarette dropped into a champagne glass. This sequence establishes Kirsten’s memory of Jacko has being key to the mystery. This sequence appears in the first episode and establishes that Jack’s death haunts her during the present-day investigation. Kirsten repeatedly appears at key moments in the unravelling of the mystery, which further cements her status as a detective. “Do you know the bomb you just dropped?” Philip asks Calgary after his return with Kirsten entering the room in the background during this line. “If Jack is innocent, then one of them did it.” Rather than being revealed as the killer, the narrative subverts the knowing viewer’s expectations by placing her as the detective that solves the crime. Kirsten: His prints were on the decanter, the murder weapon. Calgary: Then it must have been something else.

Given the repeated lingering shots of Kirsten eavesdropping and looking on with a suspicious expression, it’s clear the in the closing episode that

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Calgary’s revelation has slowly confirmed her suspicions that something is not quite right. This is of course coupled with the fact that Calgary is an unreliable and unstable investigator, who turns up repeatedly with no plan and is ultimately re-committed to his psychiatric institution, another heterotopic space. In the final scenes as Kirsten unravels the crime, the score’s rhythm quickens, suggesting that Kirsten’s thoughts are racing. As she moves in the study, the low-pitched cello notes return as close-up shots of Calgary’s Egyptian ornaments appear, a nod to the opening of the series. A loud drone-like sound is heard as a crack on the Anubis is shown, proving that the decanter, which was supposedly used to establish Jacko’s guilt, was not the murder weapon. One particularly clever shot is a deep spaced, long shot of Kirsten in the study. The camera then tracks left to show Leo walking quickly down the hallway towards the room. As he enters, the camera follows Leo and pans over to the study, looking through the doorway with Kirsten hidden from view. Kirsten has now been the central detective, putting herself at risk to solve the crime. In the flashback sequence that depicts Leo handling the aftermath of the crime, the fast-paced track returns once Leo tells Gould that “Jack was here.” The music dies out once the extended, and now complete, flashback of the conversation between Leo and Jacko begins. This scene fulfils this theme of “the demon seed”: Jack: I will ruin you. I will sow your fields with salt. I will drink from your hollowed skull. I know exactly what you are Leo Argyle … and by the time I am done so will everyone else. I am your plague. And I am coming for you.

Following this extended flashback confirming Leo’s handling of Jacko’s death, we cut to a shot of a black-veiled Kirsten leaning over Jacko’s coffin. She draws back the cloth partly covering his head, with a close-up of the extensive stitches across half his face. The leitmotif of the cello swells, suggesting Kirsten’s rising anger. She returns the cloth over Jacko’s face and breathes deeply, controlling her anger. In the final confrontation to Leo, she is reserved once again, except to tell Leo that “I told them … how he was mine … and yours.” While Kirsten doesn’t deliver much dialogue in this sequence, there are repeated shots of her with an angry expression. It’s her reaction that anchors this confrontation. This final episode is ultimately an uncanny experience for the knowing viewer as it proves to be the destruction of the puzzle at the heart of the original. As Windsor (2019) notes, the uncanny effect occurs when an experience of an object is incongruous with our previous understandings of it. This thusly

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causes uncertainty and heightened negative emotions such as anxiety and fear. For fans who come to this adaptation with a deep appreciation of the original, the changed ending can be the object that causes the uncanny experience. In the end, the ultimate theme of this adaptation is about intergenerational malice, that one can genetically inherit someone’s evilness. Philip, for instance, describes Jacko as a “little bastard, a demon seed.” In the final confrontation, we are also robbed of the detective displaying their prowess, unpacking for the ensemble cast and audience how the puzzle was done. In the end, with an underscore of the uncanny, this adaptation is not about Christie’s puzzle but a family overcoming parental darkness at the heart of a household.

Conclusion As outlined at the outset of this chapter, the whodunit is seen across multiple genres of popular film and television. The crime fiction subgenre is commonly hybridised with both drama and comedy. In this chapter, I have argued that the whodunit works well to draw out Gothic themes in Christie’s writings. Many of Christie’s novels fell into the middlebrow Gothic category, including Ordeal, as the ensemble of household members must navigate the carnivalesque upheaval following the crime. The uncanny effect is key to the further Gothicisation of Ordeal. Here, key elements that were meant to produce a source of comfort, such as home and one’s own family members, begin to become strange and unfamiliar, thus creating the emotions of fear and anxiety. The whodunit subgenre speaks to the role of space to this unhomely feeling. Narrative conventions of the locked room and closed circle, common features of the Christie novel, develop the anxiety and fear associated with the home. Phelps’ adaptation of Ordeal develops this Gothic mode further through drawing out the anxiety of the closed circle narrative. Every time that the flashbacks repeat, they extend, providing new information each time. These flashbacks thus have a dual feature, the provide further clues to what happened on the evening of Rachel’s murder but also establish the emotional disarray of the household. True to the form of the Gothic, the editing of these flashbacks allows for the traumatic past to disrupt any sense of progress in the present. The refusal to accept Calgary’s news places Sunny Point in a dark heterotopic space. Their refusal to engage with the violence of both Rachel and Jacko’s deaths clashes with their ability to reach the potential of the happy household, the mirrored reflection in Foucault’s analogy in his writing on heterotopian spaces. As such, this development further corrupts any sense of happiness for the household. Their home is now a source of discomfort,

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thus creating uncanny behaviour in everyone. Their only means of progress and resolution is to explore the past and accept Calgary’s news. In a further layer of the uncanny, however, the changed ending is a source of discomfort for many Christie fans, as they compare key elements of the puzzle to the original. Calgary’s psychological disintegration prevents him from making any progress. To their dismay, the significance of Kirsten lurking in hallways and eavesdropping by doorways is not because she is the “watchful dragon” but because her anger over her son’s death has forced her to take on the role of the whodunit’s detective. These key narrative clues of Kirsten’s constant presence in pivotal moments are subverted. The potential solution which is written off as silly in the original book is now established as the revelation. What begins as familiar for the knowing viewer becomes strange.

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Manning, Danielle. 2008. “(Re)visioning Heterotopia: The Function of Mirrors and Reflection in Seventeenth-Century Painting.” Shift: Queen’s Journal of Visual & Material Culture 1: 1–20. Marks, Laura. 2002. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Masschelein, Anneleen. 2012. “Uncanny.” In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith, 699. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley. McKee, Alan. 2002. “Miss Marple.” The Museum of Broadcast Communications, February 15, https://web.archive.org/web/20020215221213/http://www.museum. tv/archives/etv/M/htmlM/missmarple/missmarple.htm. Miller, Christopher, creator. 2022–present. The Afterparty. Apple TV. Modleski, Tania. 1982. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. New York: Routledge. Norman, Taryn. 2016. “Gothic Stagings: Surfaces and Subtexts in the Popular Modernism of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot Series.” Gothic Studies 18, no. 1: 85–99. Pamboukian, Sylvia A. 2016. “In the Apothecaries’ Garden with Agatha Christie.” Clues 34, no. 1: 72–81. Percec, Dana. 2021. “Extraordinary Occurrences and Strange Cases.” In Towards a Theory of Whodunits: Murder Rewritten, edited by Dana Percec, 24–35. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Pérez, Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo. 2021. “The Gothic Genre as the Father of the Suspense in Detective Fiction.” In Towards a Theory of Whodunits: Murder Rewritten, edited by Dana Percec, 2–23. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Persson, Per. 2003. Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phelps, Sarah, exec. prod. 2018b. Ordeal by Innocence. Mammoth Screen and BBC. Plain, Gill. 2001. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1841. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Graham’s Magazine, April. Preis-Smith, Agata. 2010. “The Uncanny at the Heart of the Country Household: Gertrude Stein’s Blood on the Dining Room Floor.” Polish Journal of American Studies 4: 17–32. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. 2004. The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell. Ritchie, John. 1972. “Agatha Christie’s England, 1918–39: Sickness in the Heart and Sickness in Society as Seen in the Detective Thriller.” Australian National University Historical Journal 9 (December): 3–9. Rowland, Susan. 2004. “Margery Allingham’s Gothic: Genre as Cultural Criticism.” Clues 23, no. 1: 27–39.

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Schmid, David. 2012. “From the Locked Room to the Globe: Space in Crime Fiction.” In Cross-Cultural Connections in Crime Fictions, edited by Vivien Miller and Helen Oakley, 7–23. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scorsese, Martin, dir. 2010. Shutter Island. Paramount Pictures. Shiloh, Ilana. 2011. The Double, the Labyrinth and the Locked Room: Metaphors of Paradox in Crime Fiction and Film. New York: Peter Lang. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2012. “Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood.” Screen 53, no. 2: 148–63. Spooner, Catherine. 2010. “Crime and the Gothic.” In A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley, 245–57. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Spooner, Catherine, and Emma McEvoy, eds. 2007. The Routledge Companion to Gothic. London: Routledge. Stein, Gertrude. 1948. Blood on the Dining Room Floor. New York: Banyan Press. Sternberg, Meir. 1971. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sullivan, Melissa, and Sophie Blanch. 2011. “Introduction: The Middlebrow: Within or Without Modernism.” Modernist Cultures 6, no. 1: 1–17. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1971. The Poetics of Prose, translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Place and Space: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, Graeme. 2001. “Genre, Hybridity and Mutation.” In The Television Genre Book, edited by Glen Creeber, 6. London: BFI Publishing. Villeneuve, Denis, dir. 2013. Prisoners. Warner Bros. Pictures. Wallace, Diana. 2016. “A Woman’s Place.” In Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 74–90. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wheatley, Helen. 2006. Gothic Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Windsor, Mark. 2019. “What Is the Uncanny?” British Journal of Aesthetics 59, no. 1: 51–65. Withy, Katherine. 2015. Heidegger on Being Uncanny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wood, Robin. 1985. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In Movies and Methods: An Anthology, Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols, 195–220. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yiannitsaros, Christopher. 2021. “Unhomely Counties: Gothic Surveillance and Incarceration in the Villages of Agatha Christie.” Gothic Studies 23, no. 1: 77–95.

3.

The Pale Horse and Folk Horror Abstract Using The Pale Horse as a case study, this chapter examines the links between Folk Horror and the Gothic. Adam Scovell’s work on Folk Horror informs this chapter. Scovell identifies a chain of themes embedded in the Folk Horror text. First, and foremost, topography is integral to it as the landscape often has “adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants” (Scovell 2017, 17). Second, isolation draws out Gothic themes and cuts off protagonists from the “established social progress of the diegetic world,” which leads to Scovell’s third motif, “skewed belief systems and morality” (2017, 18). Finally, Scovell’s Folk Horror chain culminates in the horrific fallout of the “happening/summoning.” The chapter examines how these tropes reside in the Sarah Phelps’ The Pale Horse. Keywords: Agatha Christie, crime fiction, Folk Horror, adaptation studies, Gothic horror

Mark Easterbrook: I’m not superstitious. That’s more for children and neurotic old maids. I’m a rational man. Thyrza Grey: The master of the universe! Bella Web: We’re all rational when the sun’s shining. It’s different when it goes dark. —Sarah Phelps’ adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse (2020)

This book explores how Sarah Phelps draws out the Gothic horror themes in Agatha Christie’s writing to reframe the sense of dread and themes of death. If the whodunit is traditionally a game between the text and the reader/viewer, then the use of these Gothic horror devices challenges our preconceptions of Agatha Christie’s stories. In her adaptation of The Pale Horse (2020), the series embraces the aesthetics and narrative devices afforded by the Folk Horror genre to reposition the role of women in the story. In Christie’s source Richards, S., Agatha Christie and Gothic Horror: Adaptations and Televisuality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024 doi 10.5117/9789463725781_ch03

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novel, a middleman makes a bet with clients who want someone murdered. That client then visits the witches who, in turn, pass this information onto Zachariah Osborne, who then murders the victims with thallium poison. In the adapted text, Osborne (Bertie Carvel) seeks out the clients and uses spies to find out the names of the victims when they meet the witches. In Christie’s version, they are nothing but hacks performing tricks on their clients; in Phelps’ version, the witches don’t knowingly contribute to the murders, an interesting twist on where evil is found in the Folk Horror text. Mark Easterbrook (Rufus Sewell) is presented as the hero in The Pale Horse only to be revealed as a violent misogynist who is ultimately condemned to an eternity in purgatory by the witches. This is a significant departure from the book, where he is the detective who solves the crime, in conjunction with his love interest, Ginger Corrigan, and proves there is no magic or supernatural force at play. The Folk Horror aesthetics of Phelps’ The Pale Horse couple the rural landscapes with female power and the supernatural. The power of the witch has long been associated with nature. As Barbara Creed argues: The witch is defined as an abject figure in that she is represented within patriarchal discourses as an implacable enemy of the symbolic order. She is thought to be dangerous and wily, capable of drawing on her evil powers to wreak destruction on the community. The witch sets out to unsettle boundaries between the rational and irrational, symbolic and imaginary. Her evil powers are seen as part of her “feminine” nature; she is closer to nature than man and can control forces in nature such as tempests, hurricanes and storms. (1993, 76)

This tradition of the witch is subverted in Sarah Phelps reworking of The Pale Horse, as the source of violence and malice stems from the two urbandwelling men, the serial killer Zachariah Osborne and wife killer Mark Easterbrook. This study of the how the Folk Horror framing is used in The Pale Horse pushes this study of Agatha Christie adaptations into new areas, building upon an increasing interest into Folk Horror. This analysis of The Pale Horse sheds new light on the relationship between Folk Horror and the Gothic.

History of Folk Horror So, in a bid to answer: “What is Folk Horror?” one may well attempt to build a box the exact shape of mist; for, like the mist, Folk Horror is atmospheric and

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sinuous. It can creep from and into different territories yet leave no universal defining mark of its exact form. (Paciorek 2015, 8)

Folk Horror is a cinematic genre, where rural monsters or spectral forces, seek vengeance through supernatural means on those representing modernity. The original Folk Horror trilogy features Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970) and The Wicker Man (1973) which, collectively, identified a cult aesthetic that spurred on the subgenre. While it seems that these were a radical shift from the Hammer horrors of the 1960s, many Folk Horrors engage with Gothic thematic concerns, such as the return of the repressed, Gothic monsters and isolation. Key to Gothic horror are the folklore and superstitions of the British countryside. Common in these films is an outsider, usually an urban-dwelling protagonist, uncovering the paganist rituals, witchcraft and ancient curses lurking in a quaint village. The analysis of The Pale Horse will be informed by the relationship between Folk Horror and Gothic, and the history of Agatha Christie’s relationship to this genre. Adam Scovell’s Folk Horror chain will structure my analysis of Sarah Phelps’ The Pale Horse by looking at topography, isolation, “skewed belief systems and morality” and, finally, the culminating “happening/ summoning” (2017, 18). The Folk Horror genre is a lens through which we can understand Phelps’ departure from previous associations of Agatha Christie’s mysteries. Scovell’s chain of Folk Horror elements should not be taken as literal. As Paciorek notes, while many Folk Horror films are set in rural landscapes, it’s the association of “the folk” with rustic and pastoral landscapes that is also important. This is a psycho-geographical approach to the art form. They can take these associations with them to other settings, such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) or Citadel (2012). Likewise, isolation is not necessarily literal. Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man, for instance, feels alone from the group he finds himself with, as their paganist beliefs are at odds with his. The origins of this term are not entirely straightforward. While Folk Horror is a genre associated with film and television, the roots of these stories are found in the much earlier British antiquarians (Cowdell 2019). The 1966 film The Witches, for instance, demonstrates the genre’s close links with the work of folklorists. As both Cowdell (2019) and Rodgers (2019) note, Scovell is dismissive of the genre’s origins in folklore studies. As Rodgers argues, Folk Horror is not typical of the broader horror genre and is creepier or unsettling rather than being horrifying. Instead, Rodgers proposes the use of the term “wyrd” as an “umbrella term to encompass Folk Horror, hauntology, and gothic subgenres of media texts that have folkloric content

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and an eerie effect” (2019, 135). This connection to the “wyrd” further bolsters the association of Folk Horror to the Gothic. The term “Folk Horror” was popularised in Mark Gatiss’ BBC Four documentary A History of Horror (2010), who uses the term to describe the three aforementioned films. Gatiss argues that these films, while each having their own differences, share a fixation on the “British landscape, its folklore and superstitions.” Gatiss’ use of the term seems to derive from an earlier interview with The Blood on Satan’s Claw director Piers Haggard, who explicitly uses the term in an interview published in Fangoria: To me the countryside was terribly important. I grew up on a form and it’s natural for me to use the countryside as symbols or as imagery. As this was a story about people subject to superstitions about living in the woods, the dark poetry of that appealed to me. I was trying to make a folk-horror film, I suppose. Not a campy one. I didn’t really like the Hammer campy style; it wasn’t for me really. (Cited in Simpson 2004, 72)

The term has actually been deployed earlier, however, making Folk Horror a simultaneously old and new genre. The term has been used sporadically to describe works of literature and art. An article in The English Journal from 1936, for instance, refers to superstitions and Folk Horror. We also see these Folk Horror themes in earlier literature such as Eleanor Scott’s Randall’s Round (1929), Grant Allen’s short story “Pallinghurst Barrow” (1892) and Algernon Blackwood’s short stories “The Wendigo” (1910) and “The Willows” (1907). The English countryside was key to the ghost stories of M. R. James, such as “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904). In 1981, James Twitchell describes Calmet’s work as being an anthology of Folk Horror stories. Regarding the moving image, the term was first employed in a 1970 Kine Weekly article reviewing The Devil’s Touch (later renamed The Blood on Satan’s Claw). Several television films and episodes demonstrate themes that would be retrospectively labelled Folk Horror, such as The Stone Tape (1972), Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968), which is based on James’ short story, and the five-part Doctor Who serial “The Dæmons” broadcast in 1971. Regardless, following Gatiss’ documentary, the term “Folk Horror,” Scovell argues, has since “spun down several alleyways which only seem to marginally touch upon its descriptive character; where the re-appropriation of past culture, even that which is still within living memory, now attains a folkloric guise and becomes described as Folk Horror” (2017, 7). Indeed, retrospectively, there are many films which could be collectively rethought as being in the Folk Horror genre—The White Reindeer (1952), Captain Clegg

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(1962), Marketa Lazarová (1967). These films draw on folkloric tales and aesthetics to retell history and culture. As discussed in the introduction to this book, the Folk Horror text is increasingly set beyond the British landscape. With Midsommar (2019), The VVitch (2015) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) all offering new forms of engagement with these folkloric themes. The terror in these films stems not from the outsider protagonist but from the evil that awaits them in the pastoral location itself. As Kier-La Janisse notes in her excellent documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021), Folk Horror isn’t so much a cohesive genre but a lens through which themes are interlinked: “Folk Horror stories evolve and mutate to reflect the fear, belief and anxieties of the place and time that they are in.… [T]hey ironically help us to adapt to change.” The intersection between time and rurality are the cornerstones of the Folk Horror film. This is the landscape of hauntology, where the unresolved past returns to haunt the present. Drawing on Derrida (1993), Scovell argues that a horrific, repressed past rises up through the landscape, that the land in British Folk Horror brings about a “a permeable essence for the narratives to slip between times” so that histories are figuratively buried in the earth with “potential pasts under the surface top-layer of the landscape” (2017, 46). The communities of Folk Horror films are ones that have grown outside of modernity. To recall Keetley, it’s imperative that we survey the “power of the specific ‘bundle’ of human and nonhuman that constitutes each environment as distinctive” (2010, 10). For some Folk Horror scholars and cinephiles, this is referred to as psycho-geography, where there is a psychological relationship between people and place (Paciorek 2018, 13). Folk Horror’s clash between positions draws upon the cultural transition that was occurring in many Western countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as countercultural movements in film, art and culture more broadly were taking shape. For instance, many film historians have noted how New Hollywood Cinema resonated with many frustrated with the conservative mindset of the earlier generation; that the use of modernist strategies were disruptive on several levels (King 2002; Ray 1985; Schatz 1983). The popularisation of the Folk Horror film draws upon these social movements as they, largely, revise older ideas, Scovell argues, and result in an increased interest in “Folk Music and Folklore, Astrology, nineteenthcentury Transcendentalist ideals and Wicca Magic” (2017, 13). As noted in Woodlands, the original trilogy coincided with the Vietnam war. Much like the American new wave films during this era, such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), these films explored nihilistic themes that resonated with the disaffected youth of the day, much more so than the campy Gothic

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tropes of earlier Hammer horror films. With the contemporary popularity of Folk Horror stories, this chapter is a great opportunity to reflect on how these texts reflect the current pessimism about the future. We are seeing a similar nihilism that the original trilogy reflected. This return of the repressed evokes the Gothic mentality that is imbued in so much of Christie’s work. In the Folk Horror text, the traditional connotations of folk are often contrasted with notions of modernity, which is pitted against practices of “intergenerational transmission and localized culture” (Bronner 2017, 1). Key to analysing these texts is not necessary the supernatural elements themselves but the “society that believes in witchcraft” (Groves 2017, para. 4). Often, it’s the members of the community itself who are the monstrous ones. This mutual entanglement between modernity and monstrosity is key to Phelps’ reworking of these tropes in The Pale Horse. I am hesitant to just paint Folk Horror as simply being the antiquated rural folk clashing between the modern city folk. As The Pale Horse demonstrates, this distinction is rarely so simple. Likewise, The Wicker Man appears to have a modern authority figure control the parochial community while he is in fact being tricked by them. This evokes the aforementioned hauntological forces of Folk Horror, which refers to Jacques Derrida’s work in Specters of Marx (1993). Rather than a form of nostalgia for the past, it’s moments of time being “out of joint,” an allusion that Derrida makes to Hamlet. This spectre, writes Hägglund (2008, 82), is not fully present as it “has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet.” Mark Fisher defines this hauntological collision between past and present as the “confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future” (2012, 16). Likewise, Katy Shaw sees the “encounter with the spectre [as] the point at which multiple temporalities meet and cross” (2018, 15). According to Fisher, there are two forms of hauntology: The first refers to that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which is still effective as a virtuality (the traumatic “compulsion to repeat,” a structure that repeats, a fatal pattern). The second refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour). (2012, 19)

Time is thus broken according to this logic. The spectres of the past doom our future, or, as Fisher notes, limit our capacity to imagine any alternatives that don’t repeat what has come before us. The Folk Horror tradition builds upon this collision, as Calvo Alberto-Andrés (2021, 80) notes: “[J] ust like repressed and deferred meanings come back to haunt the text, so

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does Marxism endlessly return to haunt the hegemonic social system.” This fascination and repetition of the past uncovers contemporary social anxieties. Alberto-Andrés’ work here on hauntology and Folk Horror cinema is useful, as he helpfully distinguishes between nostalgia and temporality: “What ultimately defines hauntology is not the foregrounding of temporality itself but the ways in which this foregrounding takes place through formal devices concerned with the materiality of the work of art” (2021, 85). Drawing on Derrida and Fisher, Alberto-Andrés sees hauntological art as an exploration of this collision; this “time-wound” according to Fisher. For Calvo, it’s the formal techniques offered by the art that emphasise these temporal incongruities. The development of the song “Baloo My Boy” in Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, from folk tune to synth track, is used as a key example of his analysis. Fisher argues that this exploration of the time-wound is beyond an aesthetic eeriness, a point that I am one to disagree with. As Sinnerbrink notes, aestheticism contributes to mood and the affect produced by a text—a position that directs the viewer to consider themes in particular ways.

Folk Horror and Television Television has had a signif icant impact on Folk Horror. Contemporary filmmaker Ben Wheatley (A Field in England, Kill List) cites 1970s British television as influential, stating that “[s]eventies shows … [were] really impactful in a way that drama doesn’t seem to be any more. You felt your mind being scarred and you were never the same again afterwards” (qtd in Bonner 2013). He cites many creepy children’s shows of the 1960s and 1970s as having an impact on his f ilmmaking; shows such as Blake’s 7 (1978–81), Doctor Who (1963–present), Children of the Stones (1977) and The Owl Service (1969–70). Writing on this influence, Rodgers (2020) argues that these children’s shows and dark, adult television dramas, such as Robin Redbreast (1970), greatly shaped the modern Folk Horror aesthetic, which is a form of ostension. Here she draws on Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi’s (1983) use of the term, which sees folklore proliferate, where folk tales see one alter their actions or beliefs based on previously heard tales. As such, television, Rodgers argues, perpetuates these folk legends; the affordances of the visual medium shapes how they are told and how we envisage this folklore. As several folklorists, such as Geraldine Beskin, in Woodlands also argue, most spiritual and witchcraft practices in film aren’t based in fact but with what looks good on screen. It’s these films that shape how we

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understand folkloric practices to be. British television is a fundamental part of this “cinematic ostension,” Koven argues, which: Implicitly recognises an audience by encouraging some form of postpresentation debate regarding the veracity of the legends presented.… [Whether] believed or not, such veracity is secondary to the discussion of their possibility; which I would argue is an essential aspect of the legend in general. (2007, 185)

Adaptation, as such, plays a fundamental role in this continuation of folkloric screen texts. Folklore scholars have long debated the authenticity of representations of folk culture. Folklorism (or Folklorismus), according to Stanonik, concerns (1) a phenomenon which is examined in an ethnological study has ceased to be part of its authentic environment; (2) therefore, its original function changes; (3) having lost its local identity, the phenomenon acquires a broader character, such as regional identity. (1996, 72)

Folklorism is fundamentally about re-contextualsation, where the original context is altered and meaning mutates as a result. Regina Bendix argues that folklorism (or folklorismus, which is the term she uses), relates to visually and aurally striking or aesthetically pleasing folk materials, such as costume, festive performance, music, and art (but also foods) that lend themselves to being extracted from their initial contexts and put to new uses for different, often larger audiences. (2010, 537)

In these new contexts can see these folk narratives infused with the social and political currents of the adapter’s day (Bendix 1990). Writings on the folkloresque build upon this folklorism approach. The folkloresque, Michael Foster argues, is: Popular culture’s own (emic) perception and performance of folklore. That is, it refers to creative, often commercial products or texts … that give the impression to the consumer that they derive directly from existing folkloric traditions. In fact, however, a folkloresque product is rarely based on any single vernacular item or tradition; usually it has been consciously cobbled together from a range of folkloric elements, often mixed with newly created elements, to appear as if it emerged organically from a specific source. (2016, 5)

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The folkloresque stems from folklore’s relationship to literature, film, television and new media, which is fundamentally built upon adaptive forces such as “remediation, allusion, borrowing, and intertextuality” (Foster 2016, 12), or what Stam refers to as hypertexual connections between texts. The folkloresque sees characters, motifs, stories and fables reimagined to reflect the affordances of the medium being used. They are retold and infused with new social and cultural values to reflect the contemporary contexts. For contemporary Folk Horror stories, the televisual medium is a fundamental channel for this retelling. This can occur through the process of integration, which Foster sees as occurring through “allusion and pastiche, a hodgepodge suturing of bits and pieces of other things to create a coherent new whole” (2016, 15). Here, I argue, this sense of the folk, of this allusion to the Folk Horror mode, occurs through style. As such, mood continues to be a key framework. As has been stated by both Scovell and Paciorek, the Folk Horror text is more associated with a mood, atmosphere or tone than a prescriptive set of genre markers—even though, granted, Scovell provides a prescriptive set of elements in his key text on Folk Horror. Scovell’s chain link can indeed be found in a variety of films. Menacing rural landscapes, isolation and supernatural themes all exist in non-Folk Horror films in one way or the other. The Folk Horror text is found in the intersection between these themes with mood, or, as Paciorek argues, a “Folk ambiance and aesthetic that more often can be felt intuitively rather than defined logically” (2015, 11). The Folk Horror text, and its folkloresque quality, is an affective experience. To return to Sinnerbrink (2012), mood—equivalent to Paciorek’s ambiance—imbues a f ictional world with signif icance. He argues that “a film-world must be aesthetically disclosed or rendered meaningful through the evocation of appropriate moods in order for such cues to show up as affectively charged with meaning in the first place” (Sinnerbrink 2012, 154, his emphasis). This argument ties with the concept of televisuality, as it is the aesthetic dimensions of the image that imbues the text with the Gothic, not the narrative. Caldwell (1995) originally defined televisuality as production values that move towards a “film look.” When we intuitively feel the Folk Horror or the Gothic horror text, it is a mix of a sensory and cognitive engagement that makes us feel unsettled. Wheatley (2006) argues that Gothic TV is elevated because it draws upon the “cinematic ecstasies” of televisuality (Caldwell 1995, xi). Televisuality sees the elevation of style so that it becomes more than ordinary television, where we are moved by the structural inversion of formal hierarchies of “narrative and discourse, form and content, subject and style” (Caldwell 1995, 6). Television scholars have

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since argued that televisuality is more about the elevation of style rather than television being defined in opposition to film (Jaramillo 2002). As Sexton and Lees argue, this framework of televisuality “[n]ot only analyses how narrative is shaped and transformed by style in high-end drama but also demonstrates how systems of value can be used to interpret the meanings created by style in contemporary shows” (2021, 10). This style does not exist in and of itself. Much like David Bordwell’s (2008) model of historical poetics, televisuality is situated within contexts of production and reception, where style refers to what is expressed and the means of how it is communicated (Sexton and Lees 2021, 10). To recall the above discussion of the folkloresque, Folk Horror televisuality becomes meaningful through its social and cultural contexts and how it relates to antecedent texts. The televisual aesthetics of mood are key to this evocation of Folk Horror. As Folk Horror texts navigate the clash of a rational-minded protagonist and an isolated community, our emotional attachment is what drives our connection. Murray Smith argues that this identification is best understood through the experience of spectatorship itself, that we project ourselves into the particular situations and “hypothesise as to the emotion(s) they are experiencing” (1995, 97). Sexton and Lees draw on Smith’s approach here and argue that aesthetics “absorption” and “empathy” are useful tools to examine the affect of televisuality. In the context of the Folk Horror screen text, how is it that we come to identify with the protagonist and not the crazed community that threaten him—and I do use “him” here as more often than not, rationality in the Folk Horror text is represented through the white, cisgender, heterosexual male perspective. They are “[e] motional markers,” writes Smith, “configurations of highly visible textual cues for the primary purpose of eliciting brief moments of emotion” (1995, 118). Our responses to these textual cues are built upon our foreknowledge of the Folk Horror text. This is where the tales of witches, curses and ominous straw dollies becomes folkloresque; textual elements that have been cobbled together to inform our spectatorship experience.

Witches, Agatha Christie and The Pale Horse Witches have played recurring roles in Agatha Christie’s work. For the most part, however, their power is often undermined through logic and reason. While a witch features in Endless Night (1967), the old woman, Esther Lee, is ultimately used as a disposable decoy by the actual killer. The supposed appearance of ghosts is revealed to be the result of insanity caused by guilt. A

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collection of oddballs, including a queer-coded antiques dealer, are suspected of engaging in witchcraft, which is ultimately used as a distraction for the murders in Murder Is Easy (1939). Young girls dabble with witchcraft in Evil under the Sun (1941), Spider’s Web (1957) and Dumb Witness (1937). A séance is faked in The Sittaford Mystery (1931). The witch motif appears again in Nemesis (1971), where Miss Marple attempts to solve a crime mysteriously pointed to by her late friend Jason Rafiel in his will. In the novel Miss Marple recounts the time when her nephew Raymond took her to see a production of Macbeth: You know, Raymond, my dear, if I were ever producing this splendid play, I would make the three witches quite different. I would have them three ordinary, normal old women. Old Scottish women. They wouldn’t dance or caper. They would look at each other rather slyly and you would feel a sort of menace just behind the ordinariness of them.

This is no coincidence, however, as Miss Marple ends staying with three elderly sisters while on a walking tour, a ruse created by the late Jason Rafiel to point her in the direction of the crime that she must solve. When staying with Lavinia, Clotilde and Anthea, she isn’t quite sure why they remind her of the aforementioned witches of Macbeth until, lo and behold, it is revealed that they hide a dark secret. These three women are the ideal witches in Agatha Christie’s writing: they are familiar, friendly and, ultimately, deadly. Witches and supernatural powers in Agatha Christie’s writing often end up as a distraction; an illusion of magic is only ever thwarted by the detective’s reason, such as several stories in The Thirteen Problems (1932). In the short story “The Blue Geranium,” for instance, a supposed witch’s curse that resulted in a death is revealed to be nothing more than a clever ploy involving potassium cyanide disguised as smelling salts. A woman claiming to have the powers of a goddess in “The Idol House of Astarte” is revealed to be a red herring, distracting from the real killer’s actions. Spiritualist frauds in “Motive v. Opportunity” who con a man out of this fortune, are thwarted by the will being written in disappearing ink. In Death Comes as the End (1944), Agatha Christie’s mystery set in ancient Egypt, a family seemingly terrorised by a curse is in fact being terrorised by a jealous family member wanting the fortune. This denunciation of supernatural powers in her work is perhaps a result of Christie’s own misgivings regarding spiritualism. According to her autobiography, upon reading theosophical books recommended by a friend, she found them tedious, false and utter nonsense (Christie 1977). Spiritualism and witchcraft are used to develop tone and atmosphere but is ultimately undone by the rationality of her detectives.

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Themes of witchcraft have featured heavily throughout the history of The Pale Horse. Supernatural forces, however, are rarely treated seriously. The novel’s title is derived from Revelation 6:8: “I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death.” Beyond the three owners of The Pale Horse, witchcraft is a recurring theme throughout the novel. Early in the narrative, Easterbrook attends a performance of Macbeth with his snobbish girlfriend, Hermia. Following this performance, they dine with Mark’s friend, David Ardingly, a historian based at Oxford University, who comments that if he were to produce Macbeth, he would make the witches very ordinary—“Just sly quiet old women. Like the witches in a country village.” In the original novel, if the witches learn of any death, they are led to believe that their occult powers are in fact the cause. Bradley, the bookie, gives them modest fees for conducting the readings. In the original book, even though they are proven to be frauds, they are still treated as dangerous figures who pray upon people’s weaknesses. Early adaptations concluded with the witches being mocked and deemed powerless. The 1997 filmic adaptation of The Pale Horse for television featured Colin Buchanan as Mark Easterbrook—before he starred in Dalziel and Pascoe (1996–2007)—and Andy Serkis in a supporting role as Sergeant Corrigan. Supernatural themes are presented through both style and narrative. The film opens with Easterbrook watching the production of Macbeth with Hermia. When Tilly Tuckerton is introduced, we cut to a shot of a candle being lit against a black backdrop with a whooshing sound heard non-diegetically. Candles and a chicken are superimposed over Tilly’s death scene. The mise en scène in these sequences that feature the witches are reminiscent of the earlier Hammer horrors; the iconography of witchcraft is utterly camp. In a culminating scene after Easterbrook makes the bet, the witches are chanting “Death!” in a darkened candlelit room. A highangle shot captures Sybil in the centre; the camera is twirling, and we hear non-diegetic screams. Interestingly though, Much Deeping isn’t stylistically distinguished from the city. These supernatural themes are not embedded in the landscape. This unease, or creepiness, isn’t a product of an isolated, rural community. In conventional Agatha Christie fashion, the witches are mocked in the end. “I am a candle!” Sybil sneers as she is arrested. “Right, sling the candle in the back, boys!” Corrigan replies. Another notable adaptation of The Pale Horse features as a 2011 episode in the ITV series Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. In this version, the episode opens with Ms Marple listening to Macbeth on the radio, once again, introducing the presence of witchcraft into the narrative. Upon hearing of the death of her friend Father Gorman, Ms Marple begins investigating

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the murder, with the assistance of Easterbrook and Ginger. She ends up in Much Deeping staying at The Pale Horse hotel, owned and operated by three sisters, Thyrza, Sybil and Bella. Several of the characters, including Mr Venables, are also guests at the hotel, rather than them being residents in and around Much Deeping. As a result, it’s the hotel itself that becomes the uneasy space rather than the broader rural geographic area. The local community, largely represented by the residents of The Pale Horse, all attend the local “burning,” a celebration of witch burnings and ghouls. Allusions to Folk Horror feature throughout: Venables is an English folklore historian; Easterbrook meets Tuckerton’s sister in the churchyard under moonlight; and, finally, it’s suggested that Thyrza Grey, played by Pauline Collins, has the gift of clairvoyance. Much like the earlier adaptation, however, the witches and the supernatural forces are proven to be false and held up for mockery. During the final spell evocation, Easterbrook is present, and his reactions anchor the scene. He is the protagonist that we identify with here. It’s ultimately presented as modern jargon reinforced by superstition. Rather than magic being used, the victims were killed by the use of Spanish fly, a poison known for being a deadly exotic aphrodisiac. Finally, another adaptation of The Pale Horse features in the French series Les Petits meurtres d’Agatha Christie (2016), which are comedic adaptations of Agatha Christie’s works. The second season sets the central criminal puzzles in a 1950s setting with new detectives—Chief Inspector Laurence, a young journalist, Alice, and Laurence’s ditzy secretary, Marlene. While supernatural elements remain, the central Folk Horror elements are removed. Rather than three witches, there is one clairvoyant in a creepy fairground, Sybil, whose assistant, Irene, is killed early on. It should be noted that Irene is featured engaging in voodoo practices, something that terrifies Marlene and signals to the viewer that the witches are a dangerous force. As notable Southern Gothic scholar Maisha Wester argues in Woodlands, voodoo, often mixed up with hoodoo practices, are often depicted as a corrupting and malicious force in Western contexts. The central premise of the narrative remains, with a third party betting on someone’s life and the oddball Lucien Cornille, based on Osborne’s role in the crime, as being the secret thallium poisoner. The witch here is used in a manner to how witches are treated in Christie’s writings. They are a ruse for the detective to assert rationality in the narrative’s conclusion. Here, all things associated with the occult are largely treated as a farce. There is a minor subplot of Marlene buying a love potion from Sybil to use on Laurence. This is used as a form of humour and an opportunity to play up Marlene’s silly behaviour. The central Folk Horror elements, of the several divides that are at play in Sarah Phelps’ version, are absent here. Much Deeping is transported

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to a creepy fairground, that appears haunted by night only to be revealed as childish and silly by day. Les Petits meurtres d’Agatha Christie’s version of The Pale Horse doesn’t rely on ritual or community for the central crime. With these adaptations of The Pale Horse alongside Sarah Phelps’ version, we see the feminist associations of the witch. Rather than been a hag or a superstitious old woman proven to be useless, the witch in popular culture has long been representative of female power. “Re-remembering the witch as a monster,” writes Brydie Kosima, “enables the re-interpretation of texts as instances of the reclamation and revolutionary potential of rage” (2023, 252). The feminist connotations of the witch figure is evident in the enduring popularity of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), The Craft (1996), Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–20), Maleficent (2014), Hermione in the Harry Potter series, American Horror Story: Coven (2013–14). Even Teen Vogue has argued that that this resurgence of female rage on screen are “direct responses to painful real-world misogyny,” such as Louis CK’s comeback, the Brett Kavanaugh US Supreme Court confirmation hearings and Bill Cosby’s lenient sentencing (Stahler 2018, para. 3). “The witch is having a moment” of revival, writes Kristen Sollèe (2017, 13) in her book Witches, Sluts, Feminists. This revival sees a movement away from traditional folk associations of the witch as a reclusive hooked-nosed hag. Stories of witches in antiquity, such as Medusa, are primarily about disempowering woman (Beard 2017). In arguing in a similar vain to Creed’s “monstrous-feminine,” Wilson writes, that “women are so regularly aligned with the monstrous … that they are often not depicted in exaggerated form in horror texts, their mere female bodies being enough to construe monstrosity” (2020, 18). The modern-day witch reclaims this power and is frequently positioned “in conversation with male violence, sexual or otherwise … [and deal] pointedly with rape culture” (Wilson 2020, 133). As such, these narratives “posit that the targeting of the witch is part of a continuum of violence fuelled by the demonisation of female power, the disparagement of female sexuality, and the construction of women as rapeable object[s]” (Wilson 2020, 134). The witch is a conduit, then, for male anxieties over female power. Easterbrook’s pursuit of the witches in The Pale Horse, then, is symptomatic of this. It’s only in Phelps’ version, however, that the witch as a feminist icon motif is fully realised.

Sarah Phelps’ The Pale Horse Sarah Phelps’ adaptation of The Pale Horse is markedly different to Agatha Christie’s novel, and I argue here that the Folk Horror framing is a useful

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lens through which to consider the thematic implications of these changes. First, however, it’s imperative to briefly convey the series narrative. The courageous character of Ginger, Mark’s budding love interest, does not feature here. Instead, Hermia is Mark’s second wife following the death of his first wife, Delphine. This shift is important, as Mark remains disaffected from Hermia and is isolated from everyone around him. The series opens with Delphine (Georgina Campbell) visiting the witches in an idyllic village, Much Deeping. “Am I going to make Mark happy?” She asks. In the following scene, Mark Easterbrook (Rufus Sewell) discovers Delphine’s body in the bathtub, a presumed suicide. A year later, he is married to the very proper Hermia, her class associations remaining throughout various adaptations of her character. Mark, however, is a playboy and is having an affair with the young burlesque performer Thomasina Tuckerton (Poppy Gilbert). One morning, he wakes up next to her dead body following a boozy night together. Meanwhile, another ill woman, Jessie Davis (Madeleine Bowyer) is murdered in the street, with a list of names hidden in her shoe, which includes the surnames Tuckerton and Mark Easterbrook with a question mark next to his name. The investigation of this list and their association with the witches remains similar to the book. Another man on the list, Zachariah Osborne is revealed as the killer who dispatches his targets with thallium poisoning. What’s interesting, however, is the relationship between Mark, Hermia and the witches, Thyrza Grey (Sheila Atim), Sybil Stamfordis (Kathy Kiera) and Bella Webb (Rita Tushingham). During the investigation, Mark discovers a bus ticket for Much Deeping in Ms Davis’ possessions. This is the same ticket that he finds in Delphine’s bag, except this has the name “Oscar” written on it—a loose adaptation of the red herring character Oscar Venables in the book. Mark is led to believe that Hermia has placed a curse on Mark, as other characters have done via the witches. It’s revealed, however, that after finding the bus ticket with Oscar’s name written on it, Mark had killed Delphine in a jealous rage by throwing the radio in her bath. Osborne is not the only killer in this adaptation. Mark tries to use the witches to place a curse on Hermia and the lead detective investigating the case. While Osborne kills the detective, the witches save Hermia and punish Mark to live in a form of hell, where he is forced to return to the moment of Delphine’s murder again and again, as he does in his nightmares. Folk Horror aesthetics and tonalities frame these differences. In this adaptation of The Pale Horse, conventions are inverted. Mark shifts from being the hero to being a wife killer tormented by his nightmares. The witches are proven to have power that is key to the solution here, as opposed

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to being unmasked as useless in the original version. This creates further shifts in the Folk Horror mode. Hermia is saved by the characters from the rural setting, whereas it’s the rational thinking “city men” who are the real source of evil.

The Topography of The Pale Horse A key tenet of the Folk Horror text is for urban-dwelling protagonists, who act with reason and are the ones that we identify with, to travel to rural villages and landscapes, only to be tormented by those they meet there. To draw on The Blood on Satan’s Claw, they are menaced by those that work the soil and from what is uncovered in the soil. Scovell argues that Folk Horror “has its own idiosyncratic relationships with topography and landscape, channelling a sense of the uncanny through subverting our pre-existing relationships with such recognisable types of place” (2017, 38). It’s interesting, then, that this Folk Horror framing is subverted even further by having the principle male characters in this series—Mark Easterbrook, Zachariah Osborne and David Addingly—all being the perpetrators of murder. The series establishes this city/rural divide through presenting the narrative primarily through Easterbrook’s perspective. The rural setting is represented by the fictional village of Much Deeping, an English village 15 to 20 miles from Bournemouth. This is where the three witches reside. The witches are emblematic of this perceived malice embedded in the rural setting. The opening title credits signal these witches as being products of their natural surroundings. The opening sequence begins with a soft piano playing isolated notes and a low voice singing. We track down a solitary strand of wheat. The following shot sees a red ribbon flying through this wheat field. Dark, unsettling clouds dominate the horizon. The ribbon tightens around the straw creating the iconic dollies that torment Mark throughout the investigation. Twigs bend as if they have a life of their own. A second vocalist begins on the track followed by a third. The vocalists start wailing. A scream is included. It’s as if these three straw dollies are singing. The credit sequence is a mix of close-up and medium low-angle shots looking up at the doll. The three dollies begin burning—an allusion to the punishment many women accused of witchcraft have faced throughout history. Rather than being about Mark Easterbrook and his crimes, it’s the treatment and powers of these witches which are signalled as key to this series. Importantly, they are represented through the products of nature. As Barbara Creed (1993, 76) has argued, the female witch is often aligned with

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nature. Likewise, in her analysis of Robert Eggers’ The VVitch, Saige Walton reminds us that in “medieval folklore, the witch is said to contaminate the very air, earth and water that surrounds her” (2018, 3). The power of the witches here is grounded in the landscape. The power of Much Deeping is juxtaposed with the modern life of 1960s London. On the evening of Jessie Davis’ murder at the hands of Zachariah Osborne, Mark Easterbrook is out partying with Thomasina Tuckerton. The montage is emblematic of city life. In a sequence akin to Scorsese’s New York, New York, neon signs pass over his windshield: The Hippodrome Theatre Restaurant, Nell Gwynne Review, The Society Restaurant and so on. “Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-Ko-Bop” by Little Anthony and the Imperials, a track reminiscent of The Platters, signals the thriving era of modernity. The blurry montage continues with cancan dancers, doomsday preachers and drunk people on the street. This distinguishing between Mark and the witches is further established with Mark’s first visit to Much Deeping towards the end of the first episode. As he drives towards the village, the score features a charming combination of stringed instruments. The streets are empty and the wind howls. Voices whisper along as if they are carried by the wind. As Mark passes The Pale Horse hotel, the sign creaks in the wind. This is a key shot for the narrative as The Pale Horse sign features across many adaptations and book front covers. It’s a key image to represent the narrative and of the witches’ malevolence. This first visit features a crane shot of Mark walking through the town, rising, emphasising the emptiness of the town. This first visit highlights Mark being the urban “fish out of water” here. There is a hint of otherworldliness to Much Deeping. When Mark visits Much Deeping to explore Jessie Davis’ and Delphine’s association with the village, their Lammas festival is being held, an event that dates back to the medieval era and features a procession of villagers decked out in flowers, ribbons, animal masks, life-sized corn dolls and ghostly child-brides dancing a devil’s step. The procession is completed with an effigy-beheading-by-sword ritual. What was once a quiet, empty street when he first visited is now bustling with townsfolk. The procession descends upon them in a dazzling array of Folk Horror iconography. As the townsfolk march towards Hermia and Mark, a crane shot rises from behind them with the townsfolk appearing in the background. The camera tracks towards them, with the drum beating diegetically. With a sharp cut, the camera tracks at ground level now towards the march of the pale girls in wedding-like dresses. Upon a reverse shot to Mark and Hermia, the camera tracks towards them in a menacing fashion with strings rising in the score. This is almost a stand-off until the two are pushed aside by the procession.

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As the march continues, the children with animal masks appear, akin to The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man. A ghostly howl sounds in the accompanying score, reminiscent of the vocals in the opening track. At the end of the parade, Oscar Venables, the red herring that has led Easterbrook to the village, is nominated to behead the effigy; village children scramble to grab the sweets that fall out of the head. Mark looks on in horror at this ritual, a nod to the urban “fish out of water” trope. Oscar Venables bows to someone off camera. We cut to a behind-the-shoulder high-angle shot of Mark, who looks behind him to see the three witches. The discovery of this association from Mark’s perspective appears to further strengthen his resolve that this place is full of malice. As he leaves the throngs of villagers, Mark passes the witches’ house and they offer to tell his fortune told, which he rebuffs: Mark Easterbrook: I’m not superstitious. That’s more for children and neurotic old maids. I’m a rational man. Thyrza Grey: The master of the universe! Bella Web: We’re all rational when the sun’s shining. It’s different when it goes dark.

This exchange evokes the centrality of Folk Horror in the broader field of the Gothic mode. Rationality, here, is juxtaposed against the mysticism of the witches. Their darkness is at odds with his reason. In further consideration of the connection between evil and space, Mark’s nightmares are a pivotal motif. They stem from the death of his wife. It appears at first to be a death by suicide, but it is later revealed that Mark killed Delphine in a murderous rage. The opening death scene features the recurring shot of the camera tracking forward towards the bathroom at the end of a hall. The Platters’ “My Dream” plays and will signal as being key to this memory for Mark. The interior is lowly lit. The power cuts out and the music transitions to an unsettling drone with Mark faintly calling out Delphine’s name. The following shot sees Mark crying and cradling a dead Delphine in his arms. This hallway shot, tracking towards the discovery of Delphine’s body, is a motif that recurs in Mark’s nightmares. This is directly associated with The Platters, ringing faintly in the background under ghostly whirs. As he enters this hallway, the interior is a darkened silhouette, with the bathroom often glowing in the background. The walls of Mark and Hermia’s apartment is blue, with Mark wearing matching blue sleepwear. When he is transported

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to this scene in his nightmares, the décor is pink and a hellish red. In one sequence, he wakes up in a fright only to roll over and have Delphine next to him dreamily looking into his eyes. She continues to haunt him, reminding him of his guilt. As these dream sequences reoccur, the “witchy” music from the opening credits becomes louder, and the realisation that this space is, in fact, where the evil lies in this narrative becomes stronger. In one dream, he wakes to the sound of someone knocking on his door loudly. He runs to open it. The camera alternates between eye level and a low angle looking up. When he opens the door, the straw effigy from the village march is waiting for him. The aesthetic associations of this apartment as being where evil resides is driven further after it is revealed that Mark has murdered Delphine. In one striking shot, we have a low-angle shot looking up to his building’s regal staircase. A high candelabra in the background creates a silhouette of him, as he walks slowly into the shadows. The leitmotif evil music returns and rings loudly. This combination of sound and image is the ultimate reveal that Mark Easterbrook is the evil figure in this tale, not the witches or anyone in Much Deeping. The fundamental trope to the Folk Horror genre is subverted. Following from this moment, when Easterbrook leaves Much Deeping following his meeting with the witches, where they have promised to supposedly cleanse him, the music is no longer menacing. Instead, it’s a more melodic tone. The series concludes with Mark returning to his house from visiting Hermia at the hospital where she is recovering from Osborne’s attack. He enters his hallway only to be transported back to his nightmare. The uneasy music returns. He reads the newspaper that has been delivered: “Mystery Death of Antique Dealer: Easterbrook Tragedy Strikes Again.” “Not again,” he cries. “Please. Please. Not again.” It seems that the witches have saved Hermia from death and have punished the true killer, banishing him to the true hellish landscape.

Isolation and Skewed Belief Systems in The Pale Horse Easterbrook’s misogyny, his “skewed belief system,” isolates him from those around him. Parochial belief systems in Folk Horror texts are often depicted as being a result of their isolation, with what Scovell refers to as “extreme locality and localism,… a hyper-extension of localism down a dark, parallel footpath” (2017, 21). The role of isolation as being the cause of these skewed belief systems is, in turn, subverted as its often the rural communities that are the embodiment of this trope. Mark Easterbrook looks at the inhabitants

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of Much Deeping as being dangerous and otherworldly, but it is he who is isolated and withdrawn from others. Mark’s character arc begins as a detective grieving the death of this wife, only to be revealed as a violent misogynist. The series largely sets up this oppositional value system. The series begins by establishing Mark as a broken man. Following the discovery of Delphine in the bath, the opening cuts to Mark sitting by her coffin. “I don’t know what to do without her,” he says despondently. The strings build with the cello reverberating as Hermia comforts him. This opening establishes Mark as a sympathetic figure. Immediately, however, the opening cuts to The Pale Horse sign creaking followed by the three witches in a darkened room. This cross-cutting suggests an association between the two spaces—that they are aware of, or perhaps even complicit in, Delphine’s death. The mystery at the centre of the adaptation unfolds further with the death of Thomasina Tuckerton. After a night on the town with Thomasina, he wakes up in her bed only to find her dead. The stylistic associations with Much Deeping and the witches continue here. A high-angle shot of the record player opens with a non-diegetic gasp. The score’s composition includes a low singular violin accompanied by ghostly vocals—the witches’ leitmotif. As Mark begins to panic upon discovering the body, the score’s rhythm increases with an acoustic guitar. A drum beat signals his quickening pulse. The vocals from the opening track return. As he returns home, we are given a shot of his hallway which parallels the episode’s opening shot of the hallway when he discovers Delphine. This time, however, he is throwing out his clothes to hide any association with Thomasina’s death—two similar shots of the hallway, both associated with the death of a woman. The first episode ends with Mark expressing his anger and frustration with those of Much Deeping. This continues to draw upon the established tropes of the Folk Horror narrative—that our protagonists, whom we are positioned to identify with, is established as the anchor of rationality and it’s the inhabitants of Much Deeping who are isolated from broader society and have a skewed belief system. After confronting Oscar Venables upon learning that he gave her a lift to the station, Mark walks through a field towards the witches’ house. The three women are working outside, and all look up at him at the same time. In piecing the puzzle together at this stage, it appears that Much Deeping has played a part in the death of Delphine and those on the list. That it was the witches that cursed her. This is particularly evident given the repeated flashbacks to Delphine accompanied by the creepy strings:

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Sybil: What would you like to know? Delphine: Am I going to make Mark happy? Sybil: It won’t last. By autumn he will be married to someone else.

The dominance of the detective genre continues with the opening of the second episode. As Mark drives to the Tuckerton manor, strings are jauntily plucked, a far cry from the aforementioned Folk Horror tones, suggesting that the supposed murder of Thomasina was not caused by the witches. It is only when Mark uses the words “Pale Horse” do the low, creaking strings return. “Witchcraft?!” yells Thomasina’s stepmother. Mark’s return to Much Deeping sees his further descent into madness. In a scene reminiscent to Marion’s late-night drive in Psycho (1960), the shots of Mark driving are accompanied by high pitched, repetitive strings and the witchy vocals return. “Is this where she sat?” he asks when he attends the reading. For the unknowing viewer, or even the viewer familiar with the original book, this visit is part of the investigation. When we learn that Mark murdered Delphine in a jealous rage, this is a selfish attempt to lift the curse that he thinks Hermia has placed on him. Mark is aware of his own guilt. After visiting Hermia at the hospital, he turns to a statue of Jesus and cries, “Punish me.” The remorse, however, is only short-lived as we sharply cut to a party: a close-up of a woman screaming facing the camera, Mark is kissing many women and is drinking heavily. The camera is titled, and the motion is slowed in segments. The sound and vision become increasingly distorted. Mark’s memories of Delphine’s death crash into the present through static edits as he pieces together several clues, realising that many of the deaths have involved Osborne. In his final confrontation with Osborne, Mark cries, “I believed I was cursed!” This is a final clash between these two genres. The detective music returns as Mark flips through the records. Tuckerton hadn’t yet been discovered dead when Osborne told Mark that everyone else on the list was dead—a clincher of a clue. There is more to the development of the investigation, however. By burning all the records, the family members who had organised the murder of their loved ones will now escape justice. The motivation for this undermining of truth and a sense of rightfulness are only made clear when Mark’s own culpability is considered. He is just as violent and cruel as Osborne. With the witches visiting the city and saving Hermia—ultimately doing the final good act of the story—it’s clear that the players that have been isolated

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due to their skewed belief system are Mark and Osborne, and indeed the characters, such as Thomasina’s step-mother and David Ardingly, who organised the murder of their loved ones. The story has ultimately frustrated our own expectations of the Folk Horror narrative by subverting how the moral order plays out in the urban/rural divide of the Folk Horror text. Violent misogyny is revealed to be the real skewed belief system in Sarah Phelps’ The Pale Horse.

Treatment of Hermia Mark’s misogyny is further evidenced in his disregard for the concerns of Hermia throughout the series. Mark continuously gaslights Hermia as their relationship becomes increasingly rocky. When he returns from his evening with Thomasina, only to discover her dead in the morning, Hermia happens upon Mark throwing out his clothes and is concerned only for Mark to reply that he hit an animal while driving—“Blood everywhere.” Later that episode, Hermia goes through the garbage, poised with yellow rubber gloves. She discovers the jacket and calmly lies it down on the ground. No blood. She looks down at it and we hear Mark’s voice-over reminding the viewer of his line—“Blood everywhere.” We begin the following scene with a close-up of Hermia’s face. She lifts a sharp knife into the foreground and runs her finger along it. Frank Glazer’s “Gossiennes No. 1” plays non-diegetically, which matches Hermia’s calm demeanour. She walks into the lounge, picks up a cushion and kneels on the ground. In this long shot, Hermia is now covered by the dining table in the foreground. All diegetic sound is removed as she begins to furiously stab the cushion in silence. Feathers fly everywhere. We then cut sharply to a handheld medium close-up that is tilted and looks up at Hermia. The diegetic sound returns and we hear her screams. Another sharp cut. We return to the dinner table and Hermia quietly eating dinner. The shift is jarring. Hermia has a glazed-over look, and she stares off into the distance. Mark’s hand appears in the foreground as it picks up a glass off the table. Hermia is now calm again. In a later argument between the two, Hermia’s anger can no longer subside as she suspects him of having an extramarital affair. She rips up his suits. “You still taking your tablets, aren’t you?” Mark asks calmly. “I’m not angry, just worried.” This scene is indicative of the intensifying nature of Mark’s gaslighting. While he is focused on investigating the witches and hiding his own violent nature, Hermia grows increasingly emotional and suspicious. This speaks to The Pale Horse emphasising key tenets of the Folk Horror

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narrative. Mark is the protagonist who embodies reason, as opposed to the irrationality of the predominantly female characters. It’s evidenced early on that behind Hermia’s calm demeanour is an angry, suspicious woman. Mark thinks of himself as a rational man. When Zachariah Osborne is berating Mark about the supposed victims of the witches, he yells “I don’t believe in magic, I don’t believe in magic, I believe in science!” only for Delphine to appear next to him, like a ghost or a memory. The opening song returns, indicating the irrational violence that lurks underneath his calm demeanour. And yet Mark is revealed to be the true violence at the heart of the series, alongside Osborne. The witches, in turn, are revealed to be innocent. In a revealing flashback towards end, Ms Davis is arguing with the witches, who have noticed that a lot of the folks discussed during their readings have all been killed. They start yelling out the names, all of which end up on her list. Thyrza Grey yells “What about Easterbrook? His wife is dead. Is he paying you, too?” In an ironic twist, his murder of Delphine is what caught the witches’ attention and resulted in him being on Ms Davis’ list. After Mark has discovered that Osborne has been using these readings to track down his victims, Mark burns all the files. This means that all those who took contracts out, get away with their role in the murders committed by Osborne. The witches are ultimately a force of good in the film. As Hermia wakes up following Osborne’s attempted poisoning of her, the witches are by her bedside. “And what about Mark?” Hermia asks. “What happens to him now?” Sybil sits on the bed opposite her and looks up sternly. A non-diegetic breath is heard which coincides with Sybil’s movement. This aural associations of magic remain. A sharp cut. Mark looks around him as he walks down the street to his apartment. He looks up and a crane shot rises up. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath as if is free from these associations of malice. He believes he has gotten away with murder. The final scene of the series coincides with the happening/summoning of Scovell’s model. Mark returns to his apartment only to return to the moment where he kills Delphine. The witches have ultimately won and banished Mark to a place of purgatory, where he must relive his evil act.

Conclusion To recall the connection between televisuality and Folk Horror, Sexton and Lees def ine original high-end drama as those that rely on a “set of dynamic criteria of difference and repetition that fulf ils the need for a

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predictable product that can be marketed, while simultaneously being disruptive of existing industry practices” (2021, 17). The Pale Horse is marketed as a conventional murder mystery. Rufus Sewell’s Easterbrook is introduced in familiar terms. He is akin to James Bond and appears to be a reliable narrator. And yet, as this adaptation embraces the Folk Horror aesthetics and narrative devices, our expectations are continuously undermined. As argued above, The Pale Horse achieves this disruption through breaking both the Folk Horror tradition and the expectations of an Agatha Christie text. We expect the witches to be powerless and to be the channel of evil in The Pale Horse and yet it is Mark’s violent misogyny that is the cause of death. Adam Scovell’s Folk Horror chain is a useful structure to consider The Pale Horse as a Folk Horror story. The London/Much Deeping divide sees the evil as appearing to be imbued into the landscape. From the opening credit sequence to the soundscape, the witches are aligned with nature and when they are presented as menacing, this draws upon the topographic expectations of Folk Horror. As the Folk Horror framework is disrupted, Easterbrook becomes increasingly isolated, and his misogyny is proven the be the skewed belief system as demonstrated through his treatment of his wife, Hermia. Finally, the happening/summoning moment, the culmination of Scovell’s chain, calmly and conf idently paid out by the witches as they sit by Hermia’s hospital bedside. Easterbrook never stood a chance in the face of the witches’ power.

References Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto, creator. 2018–20. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Netflix. Alberto-Andrés, Calvo. 2021 “Ghosts of Britain: A Hauntological Approach to the 21st-Century Folk Horror Revival.” REDEN 3, no. 1: 79–93. Allen, Grant. 1892. “Pallinghurst Barrow.” Illustrated London News Christmas Number. Aster, Ari, dir. 2019. Midsommar. A24. Barry, Christopher, dir. 1971. “The Dæmons.” Doctor Who. BBC One. Written by Barry Letts and Robert Sloman. Serial in five parts broadcast from May 22 to June 19. Beard, Mary. 2017. “Women in Power.” London Review of Books 39, no. 6, March 16, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n06/mary-beard/women-in-power. Bendix, Regina. 1990. “Folk Narrative, Opera and the Expression of Cultural Identity.” Fabula 31, no. 3: 297–303. Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Bendix, Regina. 2010. “Folklorismus/Folklorism.” In Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art, edited by Charlie T. McCormick and Kim Kennedy White, 537–39, 2nd ed. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Blackwood, Algernon. 1907. “The Willows.” In The Listener and Other Short Stories. London: Eveleigh Nash. Blackwood, Algernon. 1910. “The Wendigo.” In The Lost Valley and Other Short Stories. London: Eveleigh Nash. Blomberg, Erik, dir. 1952. The White Reindeer. Adams Filmi. Bonner, Michael. 2013. “The Blood in the Earth: An Interview with A Field in England director Ben Wheatley.” Uncut, July 3, https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/ the-blood-in-the-earth-an-interview-with-a-field-in-england-director-benwheatley-21055. Bordwell, David. 2008. Poetics of Cinema. New York: Routledge. Bronner, Simon J. 2017. Folklore: The Basics, New York: Routledge. Caldwell, John T. 1995. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Christie, Agatha. 1931. The Sittaford Mystery. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1932. The Thirteen Problems. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1937. Dumb Witness. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1939. Murder Is Easy. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1941. Death Comes as the End. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. Christie, Agatha. 1941. Evil under the Sun. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1957. Spider’s Web. London: Samuel French LTD. Christie, Agatha. 1967. Endless Night. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1971. Nemesis. London: Collins. Christie, Agatha. 1977. An Autobiography. London: Collins. Cooper, Rod. 2019. “Folk Horror Study: From Hemdale and Chilton.” Kine Weekly 633, no. 3262: 12. Cowdell, Paul. 2019. “Practicing Witchcraft Myself during the Filming.” Western Folklore 78, no. 4: 295–326. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Das, John, and Rachel Jardine, dirs. 2010. A History of Horror. Written by Mark Gatiss. BBC. Dégh, Linda, and Andrew Vázsonyi. 1983. “Does the Word ‘Dog’ Bite? Ostensive Action: A Means of Legend-telling.” Journal of Folklore Research 20, no. 10: 5–34. Del Toro, Guillermo, dir. 2006. Pan’s Labyrinth. Warner Bros. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York: Routledge. Eggers, Robert, dir. 2015. The VVitch. A24.

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4. The Detective’s Psyche in Witness for the Prosecution and The ABC Murders Abstract Using Witness for the Prosecution and The ABC Murders, this chapter examines the relationship between the detective genre and the Gothic. Horsley (2001, 2005) and Spooner’s (2010) work on the history of these two genres will guide this chapter. Spooner argues that “there are traces of Gothic in most crime narratives, just as there are crimes in most Gothic novels” (2010, 246). She argues that both the detective narrative and the Gothic rely on themes of duality, excess and the return of the past. This chapter argues that Phelps’ adaptations of Witness for the Prosecution and The ABC Murders seemingly appear to be traditional detective miniseries while fundamentally leaning into these Gothic crime tropes. Keywords: Agatha Christie, crime fiction, detective fiction, noir, adaptation studies, Gothic horror

Introduction The role of the detective shifts in the Gothicised whodunit. As this Gothic horror tone results in a shift in the borders of rationality, so too does the influence of the detective in the investigation. In her quintet, Sarah Phelps embellishes the dark moods of Christie’s writing, which results in the undermining of reason. Through an analysis of Sarah Phelps’ adaptations of The Witness for the Prosecution (2016) and The ABC Murders (2018a), this chapter will examine the relationship between the detective genre and the Gothic mode. As has been established, investigative narratives frequently explore the Gothic themes of strange occurrences, murder and psychological anguish (Miranda 2017; Serafini 2020a). Horsley (2001, 2005) and Spooner (2010) will be instrumental in establishing the important connection between the detective genre and the Gothic. Specifically, Spooner’s argument of this intersection’s reliance on duality, excess and the return of the past will Richards, S., Agatha Christie and Gothic Horror: Adaptations and Televisuality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024 doi 10.5117/9789463725781_ch04

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structure my analysis of these adaptations. Ultimately, embracing these Gothic traces results in a shift in emphasis from the puzzle to the psyche of the detective as they struggle with the shifts in their respective social spaces. The dichotomy between rationality and disorder is most emblematic between the duality of the detective and killer (Spooner 2010). Traditional detective fiction often exhibited anti-Gothic tendencies through the modern, rational control of the detective. When the puzzle is minimised in these adaptations, this dark excess has the power to take over. Both the Gothic and the detective genre share the pursuit of understanding the past, which forces one to “understand the inexplicable and seemingly irrational events that occur in the present” (Skenazy 1995, 114). It is the contention of this chapter that these adaptations of Witness and ABC draw out the traces of the Gothic found in the detective genre. In doing so, this chapter reveals how an understanding of the Gothic nature of these television adaptations illuminates the under-recognised reciprocity with the development of the detective genre.

Rationality and Irrationality Christie’s writing is often characterised as inherently anti-Gothic as many Fantastic moments are ultimately explained with the detective’s reason. This privileges reason and closure associated with the whodunit. As discussed earlier, the typical Christie is often associated with the closed room and closed circle/country house murders, where strict formations of time and space are reconstructed by the detective. Desirée Prideaux’s monograph Sleuthing Miss Marple (2022), for instance, explores how female enquirers in several Miss Marple novels, including They Do It with Mirrors (1952), Sleeping Murder (1976) and Nemesis (1971), overcome Gothic archetypes that traditionally disempower women. As outlined in the previous chapter, many associations with witchcraft and other supernatural occurrences are often debunked with real-world explanations. And yet, Spooner (2010, 248) writes that the “explained” supernatural was a feature of Gothic writing as early and as central to the tradition as that of Ann Radcliffe. So far in this book, my analyses of And Then There Were None (2015), Ordeal by Innocence (2018b) and The Pale Horse (2020) have established that Phelps doesn’t merely use and discard these Gothic associations but embellishes them to sustain these dark moods. A fundamental component of the Gothic text, which is also a key theme of these stories, is the return of what has tried to be repressed, where the present day is unsettled by “threatening reminders

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or scandalous vestiges” (Mighall 1999, 26). This crime of the past haunting the present demonstrates how “the generic boundaries between Gothic and detective fiction are irrevocably blurred” (Spooner 2010, 248). The dichotomy of rationality and irrationality has been weaved throughout these chapters. Here, this will be the foundation for Phelps’ adaptations of Witness and ABC as she further Gothicises these texts. In his seminal text A Counter-history of Crime Fiction, Maurizo Ascari (2007) argues that the historical distinction between crime fiction and the Gothic was artificially generated due to the Gothic being unpopular in the early twentieth century. In the push to make rationalism the focus in the modern literary puzzle, anything deemed too “marvellous” was excluded from the canon. One is not necessarily more conservative than other as context must always be considered (Horsley 2005). An interesting example of this is Gildersleeve’s (2016) analysis of the late Poirot novels Hallowe’en Party (1969) and Elephants Can Remember (1972), where social and cultural anxieties arise as a result of modernity. As Spooner notes, “in the early twentieth century, for example, Gothic stands for ‘irrational,’ despite the fact that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic almost invariably privileges the rational over the forces of darkness that seek to challenge it” (2010, 248). While readers enjoyed the “interplay between natural and supernatural elements, which engendered a fruitful tension between the domain of the intellect and that of the emotions,” (Ascari 2007, 2), in much of the criticism around crime writing of the twentieth century, rationality won over emotionality (Kotwasińska 2014). This need, though, for generic purity, writes Smajić, speaks to a metatextual anxiety for a genre that is in fact contaminated by “supernatural, occult, or irrational” (2010, 2). Likewise, Serafini argues that despite the ambition for generic purity that characterizes the theorization of detective fiction during the Golden Age, interwar novels subversively hybridize with a variety of different literary forms, particularly the gothic, which played a significant role in the evolution of the genre by virtue of the themes, imagery, and atmosphere associated with it. (2020b, 24)

The restoration of order is a fundamental component to the detective story. The detective’s solving of the crime is a key component to this restoration. And yet, the detective often causes significant chaos as they undertake their enquiries. In his analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four (1890), Nathanael Booth argues that Sherlock Holmes unsettles the social order while solving the crime, where he is a “facilitator rather than a resolver” (2019,

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16). Through his drug use and quest for adventure in a boring London, he “does not expel the disorderly; he evokes it” (Booth 2019, 17). A key takeaway here, then, is that in this quest for reason and order, according to Jarlath Killeen in his overview of scholarship on Victorian Gothic literature, the Gothic “cannot be reduced to either a modernising or a nostalgic ideology, as it contains both in an attempt to find a new way to be modern” (2009, 167). Killeen continues, arguing that a pervasive uncertainty is a core theme of the criticism on the genre: In practically all studies of the Gothic genre in the Victorian era, it turns out to be both conservative and subversive, misogynist and (crypto/quasi/ proto/explicitly) feminist, conformist and transgressive, homophobic and homoerotic, racist and attracted to foreign exoticism, closed and open, religious and secular, superstitious and enlightened, Catholophobic and Catholophilic. (2009, 167)

This “pervasive uncertainty” towards societal order/disorder, I argue, is a fundamental trace of the Gothic that remains throughout the twentieth century. Killeen argues that tracing the anxieties that emerge from this uncertainty allows for the ideological possibilities to arise. He draws upon Markman Ellis, who argues that the Gothic is fragmented between: On the one hand,… offer[ing] a critique of the enlightenment construction of history as a linear account of … the “progress and varieties of civilisation” [and],… on the other hand,… propos[ing] a scepticism not only towards supernatural experience and superstitious belief but towards all naive forms of credulity. (2000, 14)

With the intersection of crime and the Gothic from the nineteenth century onwards, reason was used to explain macabre themes of death and monstrosity. With early detectives such as Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, methods of deduction became important to make sense of the madness. These detectives reoriented the narrative from the “unknown to a rational, scientif ic explanation” (Miranda 2017, 8). The resolutions to these mysteries, however, don’t deny the importance or the seductiveness of the macabre to the establishment of mood. Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” (1927) and “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” (1927) all use Gothic horror tropes to evoke fear throughout the investigations. Although science and reason are utilised to debunk fear of the supernatural,

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they nevertheless “blur the real with the imaginary” with authors making “their fictional tales horrific by weaving in elements of moral panic and socio-cultural beliefs to give their macabre tales an air of reality” (ibid.). As such, with the interweaving of the Gothic and detective fiction, the tussle between order and disorder, rationality and irrationality, the known and the unknown, becomes newly significant.

The Detective: From the Whodunit to the Hard-boiled Following the popularity of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, the hard-boiled detective, or the private eye, came to the fore and offered a counterpoint to the clue-puzzle narrative. Writing on this shift, David Geherin argues that the “horrors of World War I and its aftermath cast a dark shadow over that assumption and led many to conclude that the world was neither as benevolent nor as rationally ordered as previously believed” (2020, 161). While the Golden Age was seen to react against the bloodshed of war with its detectives being emblematic of the traumatic landscape (Light 1991; Rowland 2010), the hard-boiled narrative directly engaged with this post-war anxiety further (Horsley 2010). American authors such as Dashiell Hammett with The Maltese Falcon (1930) and Raymond Chandler with The Big Sleep (1939) were prominent authors of this significant subgenre, which was seen as a response to the socio-economic conditions in the United States from the 1920s onwards (McCann 2000). These detectives were different from the amateur sleuths of the Golden Age in that rather than being driven by the intellectual challenge, they were driven by their individual code of ethics (McCann 2000). Chandler’s Philip Marlowe dominated the genre over a number of decades. In his overview of the genre, Andrew Pepper (2010) argues that the subgenre is neither wholly radical or conservative but rather fluid and ideologically ambiguous. He continues, arguing that the: Hard-boiled crime writing’s adaptation to, and reaction against, existing structures of power has manifested itself in two principal areas: first, as a macro-political response to the authority of the state and second, as an attempt both to unpick and to reconstitute white masculine heterosexual hegemony. (Pepper 2010, 142)

The hard-boiled detective is heavily intertwined with the Gothic, as they both share a preoccupation with the past tormenting present-day characters yearning for a new life. John Cawelti argues that hard-boiled detective fiction

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is “brilliantly atmospheric” like the Gothic novel but that the representations of terror have shifted, albeit with a limited view of what the Gothic is (1976, 156). Evil is no longer isolated from society in a castle or monastery but rather “endemic and pervasive,” crumbling the “very pillars of middle-class society” (Cawelti 1976, 156). This “Gothic vestigiality” is a noteworthy theme for many hard-boiled detective writers, such as Chandler and Ross MacDonald, writes Rzepka (2005), which is a broader movement in modern literature to feature the persistent reoccurrence of Gothic elements. Gothic vestigiality refers to the manner in which Gothic motifs and tropes continued to be used to explore themes of anxiety, fear of the unknown and alienation even after the decline of the traditional Gothic literary genre in the late nineteenth century. This liminal position between criminality and legitimacy, Christopher Breu (2005) argues, is attributed to the noir negativity that haunts the genre time and time again. As a brief aside, I want to clarify that I am not suggesting that these Christie texts and their various incarnations are products of noir in the classical sense. Rather, they feature traces of noir as a result of the Gothic’s influence on the genre. Vernet (1993) argues that the classical era of the American noir in the 1940s and 1950s found its roots in the Gothic film. Many scholars have noted that beyond prominent examples, noir is not a coherent genre. James Naremore has notably argued that, historically, film noir is in fact a more stylistically heterogeneous category than critics have recognized.… Although the available film stocks and camera technology had a strong influence on style, and although there was a broadly shared notion of what “mysterious” or gothic films should look like, there were no hard-and-fast rules for noir imagery. (1998, 168)

Likewise, Peter Hutchings argues that many female Gothic films of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), exhibited “noir-like stylistic elements” (2013, 118). Mark Jancovich writes on this genre slippage, arguing that in the 1940s with the rising popularity of noir, the term “horror” held a “different meaning to that which it has today,… virtually synonymous with ‘mystery,’ a generic term that was not limited to a concern with detection but was more concerned with the strange, eerie and uncanny” (2008, 28). Noir and the Gothic film, then, “share a common identity through their associations with mystery and … narratives of psychological disorientation, in which their protagonists find themselves trapped within worlds that are fundamentally illegible and unpredictable” (Jancovich 2008, 28). My forthcoming analysis of Phelps’ adaptations of Witness and ABC will highlight these themes.

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The hard-boiled detective represented individualism and a distrust of society. Sam Spade, Hammett’s protagonist in The Maltese Falcon, was emblematic of this morally ambivalent figure who is “a fully pathological version of American individualism” (Breu 2005, 1–2). John T. Irwin (2006) likens the hard-boiled detective to the cowboy of the violent frontier, typified by their resilient masculinity and their own ethical code. Even more so, he was a notable example of the duality of the detective and criminal which is key to the Gothic’s influence on the genre. The world of the hard-boiled detective is ultimately a discordant one, says Horsley, who uses The Big Sleep’s Philip Marlowe as an example, as with the conclusion that the novel is “unable to deal with the underlying forces of corruption and acknowledges the extent to which he himself has been tainted” (2010, 33). This moral ambivalence allows for the reader, according to Cawelti to engage in moral fantasies, where they can engage with heated social issues in accordance with traditional ethical constructs: [T]he hard-boiled detective is a traditional man of virtue in an amoral and corrupt world. His toughness and cynicism form a protective coloration protecting the essence of his character, which is honorable and noble. In a world where the law is inefficient and susceptible to corruption, where the recognized social elite is too decadent and selfish to accomplish justice and protect the innocent, the private detective is forced to take over the basic moral functions of exposure, protection, judgment, and execution. (1976, 152)

This position is contested by noted popular culture scholar Jim Collins (1989), who argues that all forms of fictional ideology exist in discursive arenas of intertextuality. All genres, including the detective genre, are continuously rewritten, thus shifting within their heterogenous ideologies. The moral ambivalence of the detective becomes the focus of detective fiction, Fredric Jameson (1983) argues, as the puzzle’s narrative function is increasingly diminished. The intellectual purpose is merely a temporal one whereas the form, which is one that ultimately demystifies death, is more spatial. In Jameson’s analysis of Raymond Chandler’s work, the label “murder mystery” is in itself a deception—rather, they are “descriptions of searches, in which murder is involved” (1983, 143). This emphasis on the dark urban underbelly, violence and death leads many hard-boiled detective stories to fit under the broader genre of noir thrillers. In his overview of the genre, Michael Walker (1992) outlines three dominant forms of noir narrative patterns; namely, the hard-boiled detective

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story, the seduction and betrayal narrative when the male protagonist falls for the femme fatale and, finally, the paranoid noir. In this final story type, the protagonist is persecuted and a victim of the injustices of a cruel society. Author Cornell Woolrich is an oft-cited example of this trope, although, overall, noir is perhaps best known for dominance in crime films.

Screen Adaptations These televisual adaptations draw upon other textual cues beyond Christie’s source text. To recall Stam, screen adaptations are an “ongoing whirl of intertextual references and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, transmutation, with no clear point of origin” (2000, 66). These adaptations pass through several filters from the source text to the final adaptation. The nature of the detective character type and the televisual crime series have been heavily influenced by the hard-boiled narrative. Likewise, the industrial constraints and advantages of prestige television have also acted as cultural filters for these texts. Ivo Ritzer and Peter W. Schulze argue that a genre’s evolution sheds “light on the aesthetic, economic, and social dimensions of the particular conditions under which they were made and which they represent respectively” (2016, 9). Regina Schober uses the metaphor of the rhizome to draw attention to the non-linear connectivity of adaptive “nodes” within an open “rhizomic” network (2013, 100). This approach is akin to Stam’s dialogic model of adaptations. In applying Stam’s argument to crime adaptations, Neil McCaw argues that these texts “are multifaceted and shifting forms of text that are defined as much by their relations to other works as they are by any inherent features or characteristics unique to them” (2020, 49). Linda Hutcheon argues that by “treating adaptations as adaptations,” they will always be palimpsestuous; traces of previous versions of that text will always remain in the adapted work (2006, 6). This is not to recreate the focus of fidelity as being the core concern here, as adaptations are a form of “repetition without replication” (Hutcheon 2006, 7). Hutcheon sees adaptations as formal entities in their own right, as processes of creation and, finally, processes of reception that evoke intertextuality, where we experience adaptations “through our memory of other works that resonate through repetition with variation” (2006, 8). With this framing in mind, I argue that both ABC and Witness owe much of their cultural codes to the hard-boiled genre as they do to the Christie whodunit. As Heather Duerre Humann notes, the major expansion of crime fiction has occurred “in response to both globalisation and postmodernism,” arguing

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that this “rejection of rigid generic categories” has seen the genre become increasingly hybridised in form (2020, 58–59). With this framing in mind, I argue that both The ABC Murders and Witness owe as much of their cultural codes to the hard-boiled genre as they do to the Christie whodunit. The Witness for the Prosecution Witness was originally published as a short story under the name of “Traitor’s Hands” in 1925. Agatha Christie then adapted the story for the stage, opening on the West End in 1953 and then on Broadway in 1954. Prior to these performances, however, the play made its first actual debut on BBC in 1949 for a series called Triple Bill, where three one-act plays were performed in a single episode. In his overview of Agatha Christie screen adaptations, Mark Aldridge quotes the screenwriter Sidney Budd, who noted that there was room for expansion as “television viewers did not really have the same opportunity to process implied information that readers would have” (2016, 45). This is an early acknowledgement, Aldridge argues, that adaptation required more than just replication of basic plot points. While no script has survived from the production, Aldridge argues that it’s clear from production notes that the affordances provided by television were used advantageously to develop the relationships between characters. Subsequent adaptations for television occurred in NBC in 1949, CBS in 1950 and again for CBS’s Lux Video Theatre in September 1953. Aldridge draws upon personal correspondence from the Agatha Christie archives here to note that there was the fear that the repeated televised adaptations of this short story would negatively impact any chance of Christie’s newly written play from appearing on Broadway. As such, no further adaptations were made until the play’s success was assured. The first major screen adaptation, however, was Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution in 1957 starring Charles Laughton as Sir Wilfrid and Marlene Dietrich as Christine (changed from Romaine). More than being a whodunit, the film was billed as a legal mystery thriller with elements of black humour and tinges of noir. Notable independent producer Edward Small purchased the rights to the play and brought Wilder on to direct. Small had produced a number of A-list features, including the period adventure film The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) and the noir Raw Deal (1948). The screenplay, adapted from Christie’s play, was penned by Wilder along with Harry Kurnitz and Lawrence B. Marcus. The film is a prominent example of Wilder’s versatile oeuvre, even though Wilder himself likens it to a Hitchcock-like film, albeit with “an element of truth” (see Crowe 2001, 184). For instance, Stephen Farber identifies the parallels between Witness and Sunset Boulevard (1950), as both

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films feature a “parasitic relationship” between a young man and an older woman (1971–72, 17). Wilder also draws upon his noir credentials, as displayed in Double Indemnity (1944). Wood argues that like Double Indemnity, Witness presents a thrilling story about “the kind of people we read about so often in the less austere dailies” (1970, 184). The meeting of Christine and Leonard is modelled largely on A Foreign Affair (1948), which Wilder had previously made with Dietrich in the lead role, which saw an army captain torn between two women, an American congresswoman and Dietrich, who was a former Nazi cabaret singer. Steffen Hantke argues that while both films fix “post-war national stereotypes of Germany in the American collective imagination” (2011, 247), Witness encompasses these connotations further within the context of Cold War anxieties in the 1950s. In his overview of Witness, Gene Phillips (2010) contends that Wilder used a scene cut from A Foreign Affair’s screenplay as the expository flashback sequence in the war-torn cabaret club. This flashback, Phillips writes, “shows how Christine’s gratitude grows into love—much more clearly than Christie does in the play” (2010, 200). These inclusions work to build character motivation for Christine. As such, key to this adaptation process was moving beyond a focus on the puzzle. Upon reflecting on this shift, Wilder was “less interested in showing how the mystery was solved than he was in portraying the characters’ encounters with the evils of a corrupt society” (Crowe, qtd in Phillips 2010, 199). This was achieved largely through the increased focus on Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Charles Laughton) and his interactions with newly created character Elsa Lanchester as nurse Plimsoll, who badgers him about his health following a heart attack. Not only did this provide comedic relief for the film but also humanised Wilfrid by making him a flawed character (Dick 1996). A later adaptation for television was made in 1982 for the Hallmark network’s Hallmark Hall of Fame “made-for-TV” film series. As Aldridge (2016) notes in his book, these films tended to be more prestigious than standard “made-for-TV” films. While the film’s production was largely American, a large number of the cast were British, including Ralph Richardson as Sir Wilfrid Robarts, Deborah Kerr as Nurse Plimsoll, Wendy Hiller as Janet Mackenzie and Diana Rigg as Christine. Even though the film largely adhered to Wilder’s screenplay, the film was notably darker than the original. The meeting of Christine’s alter ego, for instance, occurred in a brothel thanks to the film no longer needing to adhere to the Production Code. This meeting draws out the noirish associations of the original short story, with the dark shadows, unsettling music and sordid back-alley streets. Finally, Phelps’ adaptation of Witness is the only notable screen version of the short story, as most have been modelled on Christie’s play, including

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Wilder’s film and the 1982 Hallmark semi-remake. In his investigation of the screenplay, Alistair Rolls (2019) uses the analysis of a vortex to consider the relationship between the original and the adaptation. Rolls reads the series as a form of circumnavigation of “popular conceptions of Christie and combating this nostalgia for things past (not only better times, perhaps, but also better detective fiction)” (2019, para. 5). In a later publication, Rolls (2022, 49) reads the series’ emphasis on the “desolate past” as means to survive and negotiate present day. He draws upon Chambers’ (1999) notion of loiterature to consider the meandering nature of Phelps’ adaptation. The embellishments of the series allow the viewer to loiter within the text longer, allowing them to consider the central theme of the mystery, thinking about versus knowing of Leo’s guilt. We should resist the end-oriented nature of detective fiction, he argues, and instead, we should loiter by considering the “the original shape” of the “pre-diegetic revelation” to consider the repeated emphases on Leonard’s guilt and the suggestion that John Mayhew knows this truth all along

Gothic and Noir Influences Sir Wilfrid (in the adaptations based on the play) and John Mayhew (in Phelps’ miniseries) function as the detective, or enquirer, in the narrative. The play and its subsequent adaptations are largely courtroom dramas with tinges of noir. Two of Michael Walker’s three noir narrative types are evident here. First, Christine/Romaine functions as the femme fatale character and Sir Wilfrid’s fear that something is not quite right with the initial verdict. These noir tropes continue in Phelps’ adaptation, particularly in relation to Mayhew’s outlook on the world. My reasoning here is similar to Leeder’s (2018) core/periphery model of the horror genre, which is useful to consider the hybrid nature of genres. Post-war noir films depicted psychology and crime, which reflected the trauma and cultural anxieties of the time (Biesen 2014). McRoy sums up noir’s features as thus: These invariably include: the presence of a femme fatale—a beautiful, carnal and predatory woman who is every bit as deadly as she is seductive; complex plotting infused with fatalistic undercurrents, double crosses and sudden bursts of violence; morally and ethically ambiguous protagonists fatalistically swept up in events beyond their control; first-person voice-over narration designed to render suspect everything we see and hear; cynical—at times nihilistic—tonalities informed by pop-culture

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existentialism and a “paranoid” mistrust of authority; and, lastly, a visual syntax comprised of exaggerated camera angles (e.g. extreme low- and high-angle shots, “dutch tilts,” etc.) and the frequent use of high-contrast, low-key lighting to produce rich, dark shadows. (2020, 38)

McRoy continues by arguing that historically, f ilm noir has been heavily influenced by the revival of Gothic art during the early twentieth century. He draws upon David Fine, who argues that “noir is a twentiethcentury manifestation of … [the] Gothic” (2014, 475). More importantly, f ilm noir was spurred on by the emigration of artists associated with German expressionism into Hollywood. This movement sees many core concerns of the Gothic—to quote McRoy, “fatalism, deception, entrapment, betrayal, alienation, the uncanny, and madness” (2020, 38)—feed into noir, in particular, hard-boiled detective crime fiction. This kinship sees complementary aesthetics occurring across both Gothic and noir (Morgan 2002). In a contemporary sense, noir has dispersed across a wide cultural arena of art and culture (Naremore 1998). Regarding contemporary television, Steenberg (2017) argues noir is often cynically used as a shallow branding tactic with little regard for actual content. In considering the contemporary interplay between noir and Gothic, Steenberg argues for the concept of simulacrum: It is a fusion of nostalgia and imitation that can never fully function as a generic category but nonetheless becomes a widely circulating way of identifying certain types of television shows. These shows feel familiar or resonant because they remind us of memories of certain kinds of cinema or crime literature. Television noir renders this simulacrum particularly visible because the television noir text (whether it is Nordic or Celtic) always reaches out for other media. (2017, 63)

This use of nostalgia links contemporary noir television to the broader remit of quality television as it alludes to popular film genres, such as early gothic and noir cinema, and includes elements such as the hard-boiled detective. Steenberg draws upon Modleski (1982), Hanson (2007) and Martin (2007) to urge us to consider the “exchanges of influences between the two types of films” as most texts labelled noir are often hybrids of the two (Steenberg 2017, 64). Contemporary usage of noir is about quality assurance, associating with popular Celtic and Nordic noir genres. Steenberg’s analysis of The Fall (2013–16), for instance, draws out the Gothic influences, such as the “homme fatal” figure being a result of this Gothic-noir intersection.

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The ABC Murders Phelps’ adaptation of The ABC Murders embellishes these noir traces further. The first screen adaptation was the 1965 film The Alphabet Murders directed by Frank Tashlin, who was perhaps better known for his work directing Looney Tunes cartoons. With Tony Randall playing a Pink Panther-esque version of Poirot, the film was more of a slapstick comedy than traditional crime drama. Randall breaks the fourth wall in the opening segment, as he repeatedly turns to the camera and says, “Don’t follow Poirot!” Much of the physical humour stems from those around Poirot making fools of themselves as he exercises his “little grey cells.” Another film of this era, Murder She Said (1961), was adapted from 4.50 from Paddington (1957) and featured a similar blend of mystery and comedy. Agatha Christie did not think too highly of these films, or 1964’s Murder Ahoy, and, as a result, was very protective of her intellectual property throughout the 1960s and 1970s and was dismissive of many screen projects. The novel has been adapted into several radio plays and television episodes. One particularly fantastic version is the radio dramatisation for CBS’s Suspense in 1943, starring Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. Suspense regularly featured thriller stories that occasionally ventured into horror and science fiction, with Hitchcock and H. P. Lovecraft’s work being adapted for the radio as part of this series. A subsequent 2000 BBC radio series featuring John Moffatt as Poirot included ABC. While the musical cues in the Suspense version feature the typical horror crescendos during key moments, the BBC version is consistent with the crime fiction sound effects of the rest of the Poirot series. An episode for ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Poirot aired in 1992 and featured the consistent televisual aesthetic akin to the British procedural dramas of the day. Two basic point-and-click video games have been made, which require the player to click on key items and crime scenes and interview key suspects. The Nintendo DS Game, Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders (2009) includes a feature that allows the players to change the solution, which subsequently changes the clues found throughout the investigation. A subsequent game was released for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016. Both games, however, were received poorly. Several international versions of the series also exist. A Malayalam Indian film, Grandmaster (2012), is loosely adapted from the novel while embracing more Bollywood conventions. The first episode (2009) for the camp French series Les Petits meurtres d’Agatha Christie is based on The ABC Murders. As discussed in chapter 3 with the series’ adaptation of The

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Pale Horse, the mysteries are taken from the source material, but the main characters replace the detectives. Like many contemporary procedural series, Les Petits meurtres d’Agatha Christie consistently features a f ine balance between comedic relief and thrilling drama at key plot points. A Japanese adaptation, Meitantei Akafuji Takashi, aired in 2005 in a twoepisode series that also included an adaptation of Murder on the Links (1922). The series was set in pre-war Tokyo and, like Grandmaster, embraces local televisual cultural codes through the adaptive process. Four episodes of the Japanese anime series Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot and Marple (2004–5) retells The ABC Murders faithfully, with the obvious exception of the recurring character Mabel West and her pet duck, Oliver. Once again, the cute appeal of Mabel West and Oliver speak to the malleability of Christie’s stories to local cultural contexts. To recall Smith (2016), the ease to which these series find success through cultural transnationalism speaks to the spreadability of Christie’s bare bone plots being filled out with local cultural sensitivities. Phelps’ adaptation of ABC sees the focus shift from the puzzle to the character of Poirot, played by John Malkovich in a noticeable shift from typical depictions of Poirot. Hastings is now superfluous and removed from the source text. According to Phelps: The point of Hastings in the book is to explain Poirot to us but I don’t want someone else there, I want Poirot alone. I want him vulnerable and ageing because then you see the measure of the man. If Hercule wants us to know anything then he’ll tell us. (Phelps, qtd in BBC 2018, para. 23)

The televisual format did not require Poirot to be filtered through Hastings, which sees his removal. The result is, however, that this further isolates Poirot. He no longer bounces his ideas of his sidekick. We learn of his history through sudden flashbacks, as Poirot tries to gather his thoughts throughout the investigation. The novel and series see a serial killer, dubbed “ABC” in his taunting letters to Poirot, murder his victims with alliterative names in alphabetical order, such as Alice Ascher in Andover, Elizabeth “Betty” Barnard in Bexhill, Sir Carmichael Clarke in Churston and so on. A British ABC Rail Guide is left by each victim’s body, opened at the victim’s respective letter. The key suspect, an epileptic travelling salesman, is revealed to be framed as the killer by Carmichael’s brother, Franklin, who wishes to inherit the family wealth. The crime scenes all connect to Poirot’s experiences in World War I are used to develop his experiences of trauma and isolation in a xenophobic Britain.

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Phelps’ Gothic Adaptations Return of the Past The return of the past is a common narrative feature that closely links Gothic and crime fiction. As Skenazy and Spooner both identify, this intersection places an emphasis on the past being dug up by the detective. “The genre is directed to the past,” Skenazy writes. “It develops a legend of failure” (Skenazy 1995, 113). Skenazy employs the term “Gothic causality” here in his analysis of the noir detective narrative. He continues: Both gothic and detective fiction … share common assumptions: that there is an undisclosed event, a secret from the past; that the secret represents an occurrence or desire antithetical to the principles and position of the house (or family); that to know the secret is to understand the inexplicable and seemingly irrational events that occur in the present. Both forms bring hidden experiences from shadow to light. (Skenazy 1995, 114)

Spooner (2010) identif ies this “return” as being key to the intersection of crime fiction and the Gothic. In adapting both stories, Sarah Phelps positions post-World War I trauma as being inexplicably linked to the central characters. The two Witness episodes have cold opens featuring the aftermath of war-torn Belgium. In the first episode, Leonard collapses into a bombed-out building, only to find Romaine, lying in the ruins. The second episode opens with Leonard and Romaine exiting these ruins; they look over a bombed-out war field holding hands. A romantic, adventurous score swells as the camera rises, dwarfing the two in the remnants of the war-ravaged landscape. John Mayhew is introduced as a sad, unwell, old man. After he meets Romaine, at her burlesque house, for the first time, he returns home to his wife, Phyllis, who sits silently on her son’s bed, waiting patiently for him, much like the maid, Janet Mackenzie, waiting for Ms French. The next shot looks through the silhouette of a doorway into their kitchen. Phyllis is looking down at her hands in her lap. She has kept his dinner warm, and he is eating quietly. The kitchen is small, dull and modest with a cold hue and low-key lighting. In the subsequent shots of this small, sad scene, John begins to cough violently; his wife looks up. A close-up of her fingers show that she is piercing herself with a needle. Blood drips down her finger. The kitchen’s clock ticks louder and louder, so that it dominates the sound of John’s coughing. Phyllis looks at him with a pained expression on her face.

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John’s coughing fits are a constant reminder of this vulnerability and his war experience. “Gas damage,” he later says to Sir Charles Carter, the prosecutor. “Nothing can be done about it.” Writing on the noir protagonist, William Luhr likens them to walking corpses, inhabiting “a half-world between life and death, with neither hope nor purpose” (2012, 29). Leonard and Romaine are victims of this war, waged by older generations that have robbed them of any prosperity. At one meeting with Mayhew, Leonard speaks to this pain: We thought we would get more. Didn’t we? That we would all come home heroes. Live in a house with roses around the door. Three meals a day with extra gravy. Any job you want. Money falling out your pockets. End up getting priced like a side of meat. And going along with it to pay the rent.

It can be interpreted here that Leonard reminds John of his son that didn’t return home from the war. “He died on the eve of his seventeenth birthday. Gas.” Mayhew tells Leonard despondently. This theme is revealed to be the motivation for their plan to murder Miss French. “We are what happens when you butcher the young,” they tell him at the conclusion of the series. “When you cheat us, when you lie to us, you expect us to be grateful just for being alive and you are no different from us, John.” John’s despair at this revelation, that he was fooled and that he can’t escape his trauma, sees him turn to his wife for comfort, only for him to attempt to rape her. She scratches his face and bites his arm. “Everything I have done is for you. All of it. To make you happy!” He screams repeatedly. She reveals that she has never forgiven him for letting their son lie about his age so that the father and son can enlist together. “You don’t want to be loved,” she cries. “You want to be forgiven and I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t forgive you. Because you came home, and he didn’t.” Phyllis wants the two of them to carry on supporting each other, without any love between the two of them. John, however, is unable to bury the trauma of his past and the series concluding shot sees him walk into the ocean, disappearing under the water, as Romaine’s voice-over swoons the tune to “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”—her song that seduced John in the burlesque house. In The ABC Murders, trauma from the wartime destruction of Belgium haunts Poirot. Like John in Witness, he is introduced as a sad, tired old man. He wakes up and sits on the side of his bed, shoulders slumped. Forlorn music plays. Poirot dyes his beard black with an oil that drips into the sink. The oil will drip onto his shirt in a later scene in front of Inspector Crome, causing embarrassment. This act of dying his moustache was once a jovial aspect

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of Poirot’s fastidious idiosyncrasies; now it’s a symbol of pathos for Poirot. The first letter he receives from “ABC”—the killer’s pseudonym—taunts him for being past his glory. Plenty will say that it’s vanity. That puffed-up pompous peacock Poirot, they’ll say. They’ll laugh at you behind your back. But I’m not laughing. I think you’re trying to roll back time to when you were a famous detective. When you were wanted. When you were loved. I have never been loved. But I will be feared. I will be a faceless beast, leading lambs to the slaughter.

As Poirot waits for Inspector Crome at the police station, a long shot captures Poirot on the right side of the entry thoroughfare, with Sergeant Yelland and Crome on the left. Crome ignores Poirot and climbs the stairs to his office. The score rises as Poirot realises his rejection. When the two finally meet, Crome asks Poirot if he still does “those murder parties, like when you were a celebrity. Odd thing to do!” Poirot’s outsider status from official law enforcement is further emphasised in this confrontation with Crome. “People don’t like it when the police are made to look like halfwits by a foreigner,” the inspector chides. Poirot’s fear of fascism from World War I is reignited as the visibility of the British Union of Fascists surges. A ticket inspector on the train wears the lightning bolt pin, the movement’s symbol. At Andover station, a campaign poster reads “March for England. We must stem the alien tide. March for your country and your blood!” As Poirot walks towards Alice Asher’s shop, a young blond boy fires his toy gun at Poirot. Poirot’s own neighbour wears the British Union of Fascists pin. It’s not Poirot she objects to, however. “It’s all the others,” she says. “The ones that breed like flies!” Poirot’s survival of World War I becomes key to the solving of the mystery as the first three locations chosen by the serial killer—Andover, Bexhill and Churston—are all connected to Poirot in some way. Some connections are trivial, such as dining at the café in Bexhill while others are connected to his role as a detective. For instance, he performed at Hermione Churston’s murder mystery birthday party, an event that saw him become a friend of the Churston family. He is initially puzzled by the choice of Andover only to learn that it is perhaps the most personal connection yet. He finds the following newspaper clipping at Alice’s shop: A train carrying refugees from Belgium was left at a siding waiting for a driver. One of the passengers got tired of the long delay and his mother went into labour. Luckily for mother and baby, Mrs Alice Asher, who owns

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a nearby tobacconist, was able to offer the newborn boy a full wardrobe of booties and shawls…. The baby was delivered by another passenger on the train, one M. Hercule Poirot, before continuing on his journey.

The serial killer’s obsession with Poirot is heavily intertwined with the rise of fascism and Poirot’s fear of being a “has-been” detective. He scoffs at the headline on Crome’s desk referring to “our new and cruel age.” “Such vapid nostalgia for the gentle past,” Poirot says. “Cruelty is nothing new.” One of the first letters Poirot receives speaks to the effect that this contemporary cruelty has on him. “You look old and tired. You walk as if your feet hurt,” ABC’s voice over says. “I was rather concerned for you.” This contemporary fascism triggers repeated flashbacks to Poirot’s past as a Belgian priest. Much like the slow reveals in Phelps’ Ordeal by Innocence, snippets of this scene collide into the present throughout the season, only to be played in full in the closing moments of the final episode, as if this traumatic experience is the true solution rather than the reveal of who the killer is. As a priest, Poirot ordered his congregation to hide in a church as it was a sacred space, only for the German soldiers to knock him out. Upon waking up, he sees his church burning with all his parishioners inside. For both Mayhew and Poirot, the contemporary investigations into a violent crime uncover and trigger traumatic memories of their experiences in the war. For Mayhew, his connection with Leonard reminds him of the son he lost. His attraction to Romaine makes him realise that his wife no longer loves him and blames him for their son’s death. For Poirot, ABC’s violence, and the evident rise of fascism on English streets, causes him to reflect upon his past, both as a famed detective who is perhaps no more and as a survivor of a war crime. The return of these traumatic pasts clouds the present-day rationality needed to solve these crimes; they are the foundations for the intersection of the Gothic and detective fiction. These vulnerable, damaged detectives also draw upon the influence of the hard-boiled detective on the genre. These are isolated men who are cynical about the world around them. Duality In her analysis of the intersection of Gothic and crime fiction, Catherine Spooner (2010) argues that the uncovering of the past caused by this pursuit of truth results in the protagonists becoming unstable, paranoid and psychologically disturbed. This disturbs the dichotomy of rationality and irrationality. “The protagonist’s instability,” she argues, “places the pursuit of knowledge enacted by the detective narrative under question,

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often surrounding the process of rational and moral judgment with doubt” (Spooner 2010, 250). She draws upon Horsley’s (2001) assertion that the noir thriller is like both Frankenstein (1818) and Jekyll and Hyde (1886) in that they are fantasies of duality. As highlighted in the chapter on Ordeal by Innocence, doubling, or the doppelganger, is a key example of the uncanny effect in Gothic fiction, where this mixing of the familiar and unfamiliar generates unease. In crime fiction, where there is a violent criminal and a detective, this doubling is particularly important. This plays into the Gothic’s preoccupation with the dichotomy of rationality and irrationality. Jack Halberstam argues that “in the Gothic, crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form—the monster—that announces itself … as the place of corruption” (1995, 2). Spooner builds on this point by arguing that this is a feature of “late twentieth-century Gothic, in which writers have a self-awareness of the literary and critical heritage and frequently a political agenda specific to postmodern culture” (2010, 254). Spooner traces how many Gothic crime novels were thematically shaped by John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), where the pursuit of knowledge has a damning effect, causing the detective to behave questionably according to their own code of ethics. This doubling effect has a long tradition in crime action cinema, where the hero’s status is questioned, such as Harry and Scorpio in Dirty Harry (1971) and Travis and Sport in Taxi Driver (1976). In both these examples, generic signifiers of the Western are blurred to suggest the dualities of these figures (Lichtenfeld 2007). In Phelps’ adaptations of both ABC and Witness, signifiers of the Gothic and noir are employed to create and blur the duality of the detective with the serial killer. Doubling occurs in Witness in two distinct ways. First, Phyllis and Romaine are presented in opposition in regard to their relationship with John. In one sequence at Romaine’s burlesque house, they are presented through the presence, or lack thereof, of desire. Romaine looks through a hole in the curtain to the accompaniment of high-pitched strings. We cut to Phyllis, alone at home, polishing trinkets along the shelves in her son’s room; the only sound is the loud ticking clock. As we look through the mirror in Phyllis’ son’s room, mournful music begins. Phyllis sits on the bed and the sound bridge of Romaine’s performance of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” begins. This aural intrusion of Romaine into the Mayhew home signifies her seduction of John; that Phyllis is alone in her grief while her husband is at the burlesque house. We cut to Mayhew looking happy in the audience. This recalls Sir Charles’ question of whether he would let his wife see the show. “Of course!” John exclaims after a brief pause. We cut to a long shot of the stage. Romaine is on the moon, singing her seductive song. The scene cuts

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back to Phyllis, alone on her son’s bed. This contrast cut emphasises John’s absence in the Mayhew home. Later that evening, Phyllis opens a present from her husband. There is no dialogue. She walks off camera. “Do you like it?” he asks her. Phyllis’ only response is to ask about the case. As they have sex that evening, Phyllis looks up with a blank expression. “People will hear,” she worries. John whimpers and then descends into a coughing fit, his remnant of World War I once again intruding between him and his wife. This absence of intimacy, however, was long established before this evening. The second duality occurs between John Mayhew and the killers, Leonard and Romaine. After Mayhew has discovered the two of them at the hotel in France, the two reveal their motivations for killing Ms French and why they covered it up. Romaine is almost unrecognisable in her bright red bobbed hair, a motif that reappears in ABC when Thora embraces her femme fatale ways. As highlighted above, their anger at the violence inflicted upon them in the war drove them to fight against their destitution. “You are no different from us, John,” Romaine says. In this confrontation, they outline the violence that John inflicted throughout the investigation. “You went after Janet,” Leonard says. “I wanted to give her money and you wanted her dead.” This implies that, much like the motivations of the hard-boiled detective, John’s motivation to pursue Janet for the crime wasn’t through the pursuit of justice or truth but the financial gain that comes with a successful case closed. Much like many noir protagonists (Luhr 2012), John violates the codes of the hero figure. Wilfrid, of earlier adaptations, knows something is up and continues enquiring whereas John opts to pursue an easier, albeit incorrect, solution for personal gains in wealth and a professional promotion. Leonard and Romaine outline his monstrosity: “You have a ruthless streak in you John.… [H]ere’s to John Mayhew. [They raise their glasses.] Fellow monster! You have made it all possible. You and your guilt. It wasn’t Leonard you wanted to be innocent, it was you.” This confrontation follows a montage of events throughout the case that led up to this moment: Janet being hanged, Romaine putting on her monstrous make-up to pose as a scarred Christine, Leonard killing Ms French. With the inclusion of Janet’s death in this montage, there is the implication here that John’s pursuit of her was just as immoral as Leonard’s killing of Ms French and Romaine’s subversion of the legal system. In the conclusion to Witness, John is just as much a monster, created by the violence and trauma of World War I. The theme of dualities is utilised in ABC through the positioning of Poirot and the serial killer, ABC. Franklin Clarke’s motivation to kill his brother is primarily for the title and wealth. If Carmichael were to remarry

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following Hermione’s impending death, all the wealth would eventually be bestowed to the new wife, presumably Thora Grey. With Carmichael’s death occurring before Hermione’s, the wealth is then transferred to Franklin upon Hermione’s death. While this motivation remains in the adaptation, a second motivation is also developed, that by creating this puzzle for Poirot, Franklin becomes a worthy foe for Poirot’s intellect; that he is the perfect partner to restore Poirot to his former glory. This is all established in the scene where Poirot meets Franklin for breakfast before the execution: Franklin: All that time you were looking for an enemy; someone who hated you. You never thought to look for a friend; for someone who loved you. Poirot: I doubt you know the meaning of the word.… Franklin: No that’s not true. I adored Hermione. And … Carmichael. Poirot: You killed him for his title and his money. Franklin: Well, yes.… There is that. Hmm. Poirot: And you killed Alice Asher and Betty Barnard to distract from his murder. Doncaster was another distraction. Franklin: Doncaster. What a cock-up. If that had gone right, I could have stopped. [He smiles.] Poirot: No, you couldn’t. Franklin: No, I couldn’t. You’re right. [Chuckles softly. Franklin stares menacingly into the distance.] Yeah, I got such a taste for it by then. So bloody exciting. Not the murders so much. No, they were appallingly messy. No, it was you. I never felt so completely alive than when you were chasing me. [Franklin pauses. Tears well in his eyes.] Knowing I was restoring you. Poirot: I did not need to be restored. Franklin: Oh, come on, you were ruined. You were disgraced, derided and reviled and I thought,… “Hmm,… not on my watch.” And the moment I saw Cust’s initials, the whole adventure came together, and I thought how

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you’d love it. Of course, it took a lot of organization and detective work, but it was worth it. Because look at you now, Hercule. Bright-eyed and bushy tailed. Revived and.… [Franklin raises his finger for emphasis.] Restored. Poirot: Franklin, five people are dead. Franklin: Well, people die all the time, don’t they? And really, it’s your fault. Poirot: How is it my fault? Franklin: Hermione’s birthday party. Those strange little games. How to get away with murder. The myriad ways to end a life. I was spellbound. I felt such kinship with you. That’s why I chose the costume you see. The dark, the light. The hunter, the hunted. Two hearts beating the same hot blood. You and your strange enchantments, Hercule. You didn’t know the knife you were sharpening. Poirot: Franklin, I didn’t cast a spell on you. You were kindling lying in wait for a spark. I fear your soul is a charnel house. I grieve for you. [Franklin looks away and stifles a sob.] Franklin [quietly]: I wanted so much for you to admire me. To be a worthy adversary, someone you could share your secrets with. Poirot: I do not have secrets. Franklin [shouts]: Don’t lie! We’re friends. What compels you, Hercule? Tell me. What drives you? Were you always like this? Is there another Hercule that got left behind? What dead did you give your word to? That scar looks deep; it must have hurt. How did you get it? [Whispering] Did it make you like this? Tell me. Tell me your secrets. I won’t breathe a word. I won’t be breathing at all. Poirot: I gave you the breakfast you requested. You get nothing else.

As Poirot stands, Franz Schubert’s “Piano Trio in E Flat, op. 100 (Second Movement)” begins. The opening beats sound like a funeral march. As the cello is introduced, the sad tone of the track continues through the repeated notes of the piano. This quiet opening makes the subsequent louder

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notes more emphatic. As Poirot stands, a significant long shot captures him standing in front of Franklin, thus denying him of this equal status. Franklin has used these crimes to pursue this duality with Poirot. Franklin appears shocked into silence. A silhouette of a priest holding a Bible is barely visible in the foreground. The sun shines through the prison windows in the background. Franklin slowly stands and throws his napkin on the table. He walks over to Poirot and runs his finger across the detective’s scar. “You are going to miss me, Hercule.” Franklin pats him on the back. The score’s piano becomes louder as Franklin is taken down the stairs by the priest. The camera tracks towards Poirot. The sound of Franklin being hanged is heard—clunking, his body thumps, and the rope creaks. The track ends. While the above dialogue implies that Poirot denies this duality, that he needed Franklin to be revived, the series itself demonstrates that Franklin is in fact correct. The investigation allows Poirot’s detective expertise to be, once again, acknowledged by the police force. Poirot is also able to process the violence inflicted by fascism, both during World War I and contemporary Britain. This investigation, particularly with the news clipping found in Alice Asher’s shop, allows Poirot to reaffirm his refugee roots and challenge the contemporary rise of xenophobia. He shuts the door on his neighbour who wears the lightning bolt pin and he tears up British Union of Fascists poster. While Poirot’s dialogue says that he did not need to be restored and that he doesn’t have any secrets, the flashbacks and stylistic choices demonstrates that these statements are lies. Franklin is able to read Poirot here, which, I suggest, terrifies the detective.

Excess The influence of the Gothic and noir are also employed through stylistic excess. Botting is noted as arguing that “Gothic signifies a writing of excess” (1996, 1, my emphasis). He argues that the representations of emotion and excitement exceed reason. “Ambivalence and uncertainty,” he writes, “obscure single meaning” (Botting 1996, 2). The Gothic on screen pushes these stylistic flourishes beyond narrative logic in order to achieve this heightened emotion. This excess is a key feature of Gothicised crime fiction, Spooner argues. This occurs through “either in the extremity of the crime itself, or the way that the narrative is told” (Spooner 2010, 253). I argue here that this excess occurs through style, which is indicative of the influence of televisuality, which, to reiterate, is a “structural inversion of formal hierarchies of narrative and discourse, form and content, subject and

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style” (Caldwell 1995, 6). Gothic television uses such moments of cinematic ecstasies to develop thematic concerns of the text (Wheatley 2006). Uses of sound, the camera and editing techniques are important in developing mood, which, in turn, establishes the characterisation of the detective. Sinnerbrink argues that “a film-world must be aesthetically disclosed or rendered meaningful through the evocation of appropriate moods in order for such cues to show up as affectively charged with meaning in the first place” (2012, 154, his emphasis). These moods cue us for particular emotional engagements with the role of the detective in the narrative. Excess of style situates Witness further in the Gothic and noir genres. An early moment of “cinematic ecstasy” is the death of Ms French. The camera slowly tracks towards her looking into the lounge, as she turns on the record player to play Jesse O’Mahoney and Theo Golding’s “She’s a Rainbow.” The lyrics “blue shoes, blue nails, a blue dress” sing out. The camera tracks back and across the hallway to the stairs, there is a flash of light. The music is drowned out by an easy drone-like sound. Janet Mackenzie is sitting on the stairs. Her hands are bloody and shaking. She is breathing heavily and quickly. The flashing continues. The camera pivots and turns back towards the lounge, which is now filled with police. The following sequence of shots follow: Shot 1: A close-up shot of Mimi, the cat, jumping down off the sofa. Her bell rings loudly. Shot 2: A close-up shot of Ms French’s bloody hand. A blur of Mimi walks across in the background. Shot 3. A medium shot of the pool of blood with the bloody ornament. Shot 4: A medium shot of Janet’s shaking hands. The camera tracks forwards then tilts up to her face. Janet lifts her head looking off towards the sound of Mimi’s bell. Shot 5: A medium shot of Mimi jumping up on Ms French’s body. Shot 6: A close-up shot of Ms French’s foot and shoe. Shot 7: A flash of the camera. We cut to Janet. She has an ambiguous expression on her face. She has been crying but looks angry and distraught. High pitched strings begin playing.

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Shot 8: Motion slows now. We see a medium shot of Mimi walking across a white rug. She is tracking bloody paw prints. Uneasy, discordant notes sound with each movement of Mimi’s feet. Shot 9: We return to a medium close-up of Janet with the camera tracking closer towards her face. She has the same expression. Shot 10: A close-up of Mimi licking her bloody paws in slow motion. The volume of the strings increases with uneasy notes played. Shot 11: We return to a closer shot of Janet. The drone like music increases with high pitched strings. Mimi’s bell reverberates. Shot 12: A closer shot of Mimi licking her bloody paws. The industrial tonal qualities of the score increase. Mimi looks up. Her bell rings. The music stops. Shot 13: An external shot of the outside pond. A loon and crickets sound. Shot 14: An internal shot looking out of the French doors. Janet is barely visible through the curtains. The camera tracks forward. A ticking clock can be heard. The inspector calls her name and enters through the foreground of the shot. Shot 15: A reverse shot of the inspector looking off camera towards Janet. “Ms McIntyre,” he repeats with increased volume. Shot 16: A shot over the inspector’s shoulder. Janet turns around with a crazed look on her face. “We are taking the body away now,” the inspector says. “You will be coming with us to make your statement.”

At this moment, Janet says that she had already told them who did it. “He did it!” she yells. “He was here! I told you his address! It was him! It was Leonard Vole!” This scene has narrative significance later in the series, as Janet’s melodramatic performance here, and her bloody hands becoming clean, lead John to believing that she is guilty. More than this though, the act of dwelling in this moment further emphasises the violence of the murder. The juxtaposition of the white, fluffy cat and the bright red blood further accentuates the violent tone of the series. Several external shots of London’s streets establish the noir tones, extending this theme of excessive style. As Romaine walks towards her

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burlesque house, the lights of the theatre emit a warm glow. The backlighting of the streetlights creates shadows and silhouettes of Romaine and the pedestrians. Fog lifts from the pavements. Similar aesthetics are shown as Janet Mackenzie details her flashback of arriving home to find Ms French’s body. Fog clouds most of the street. Leonardo is an eerie figure on the other side of the street with his coat’s collar hiding most of his face. As Janet enters the house, the score rises in intensity. Suddenly, all that is heard is the crackling sound of the record player. No other diegetic sound, such as her scream, is heard. A heightened visual style positions Romaine as the femme fatale figure. In the meeting between her and Leonard following the first day’s court proceedings, the aesthetics of Leonard’s cell establishes iconic noir chiaroscuro lighting. The low, hard lighting sets the depth’s Leonard’s despair. Romaine leans into Leonard’s face and whispers “Hang” softly and then spits in his face. As John follows Romaine out into a dark alleyway, the dim street lighting creates barely visible silhouettes of all the figures. Footsteps echo loudly on the pavements. The camera tracking behind her gets closer and she slows to a stop. “You shouldn’t be here.” John accuses Romaine of lying and pushes her against the wall. “You are sending him to the gallows,” he cries. “He loves you!” John becomes highly emotional while Romaine remains calm. A soft, warm glow now lights up her face, while half of John’s is hidden in darkness. She mocks him: Oh, you are a romantic. Of course, you are. Weeping over a sentimental song. Crying and crying as though your heart would break. Now it’s so much worse than that. You are crying and crying as if your broken heart could heal.

As Romaine’s dialogue continues and becomes more pointed, her head tilts slightly to the left of the shot, which creates a chiaroscuro effect on her face. Romaine’s taunting here goes beyond her performance as the witness for the prosecution. Here, she is taunting John and his overall sad demeanour, as she knows her singing has seduced him. The score here shifts from melodramatic strings to a low-pitched rumble. “As though there is hope,” she continues. She tilts her head to the other side, further into the light. Her demeanour becomes softer as well, accentuating this final line and its perceptiveness. “As if there really is such a thing as love.” She kisses him. A long shot captures the two in profile with a streetlight in the background creating a greenish hue as they are in silhouette. The rumbling that marks this statement gives way to uneasy strings and a piano. “You have the look of a guilty man, John.

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And it makes you so very easy to hurt.” With this final accusation, Romaine leaves. The final shot of the sequence captures a side profile of a stunned John, with Romaine walking off into the shadows. John’s meeting of Romaine’s alter ego, the iconic scene in all variations of Witness, is typified by this “excess of style,” or “cinematic ecstasies,” to draw on Caldwell (1995). After receiving a note about meeting up with a stranger “to ruin her,” John ventures out in the evening streets. The mise en scène is consistent with the noir tone in all external shots: fog, dark lighting, shadows and the back alleys of an industrialised city. As he ventures down an alley, the score repeats a series of notes in a circular-like fashion. Heavy breathing can be heard, as if through a gas mask. Her heavy footsteps thump onto the steps. This sharp shift in mood that is accentuated by noir prepares us for this significant rendezvous. With her dirty shawl, hidden face and cockney accent, Romaine conjures up a horror story’s representation of a haggard old witch. As Barbara Creed (1993) notes, the witch has long been associated with the abject and a sense of the decay. This uneasiness stems from how the witch “unsettle[s] boundaries between the rational and irrational, symbolic and imaginary” (Creed 1993, 76). John follows this caped figure, breathing heavily. The score becomes threatening as its notes continue to uneasily repeat. “Hello? Hello?” John asks. The high-pitched strings add to the unease. “You’ve been watching me. Who are you?” John asks. Through this interaction, Romaine pretends to be Christine Moffat. The fellow performer whom she has replaced. She concocts a story that Romaine threw acid into her face, permanently scarring her. As Christine, Romaine demands money from John. “Show yourself,” John insists. “I can’t deal with someone whose face I can’t see.” With that, Romaine ventures into the light, showing her scarred, burnt face, a witch-like degradation, seared onto her face. “She done this to me,” she sneers. “Boiling sugar and water.” The use of shadows here is emblematic of the series’ use of noir aesthetics. This abjection of the witch, Creed argues, is a patriarchal construct that “draws attention to the frailty of the symbolic order” (1993, 83). Through this performance, Romaine continues to exert power over John. In a notable essay on film noir’s visual motifs, Janey Place and Lowell Peterson argue this “low-key noir style opposes light and dark, hiding faces, rooms, urban landscapes—and, by extension, motivations and true character—in shadow and darkness which carry connotations of the mysterious and the unknown” (1996, 66). Both literally and figuratively here, Romaine’s intentions are hidden. Noir lighting, for Patrick Keating (2013) is always relational when representing some characters as glamorous (i.e., Romaine’s performances) and grotesque (Romaine as Christine). This moment is a performance, after

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all. “Make-up, lighting, the stage was all set, performance! It was all just pretending, John,” Romaine later reveals in the denouement. Here, Romaine imitates Christine’s cockney voice and tells John that Romaine has stolen her man and disfigured her. She gives John some incriminating love letters, which he will use to discredit her in court. She demands that John return with more money, a promise that he will later break; a broken promise that Romaine and Leonard will call John out on. “Swear on what you love,” Romaine stresses. “I swear on my wife.” John pauses and stammers. “I swear on the memory of my son.” “She took my face,” Romaine continues to sneer. “She took my man. Now you take her. Take her!” The menacing score rises to a crescendo as John runs out of the building, his cough getting worse. ABC features similar cinematic ecstasies that establish a threatening mood. Specifically, sound bridges, the opening credits and the use of montage to establish the fracturing of identities. In the opening credits, the score begins at a slow rhythm but quickens in pace. In particular, the discordance of the strings creates an unsettling effect. The images establish the train track as a central motif of the series. They begin to rise into the air, bending and tangling. As the camera pulls away, the image of an adult human in the foetal position is formed. The curled up human body being visually connected to the train tracks is reinforced throughout the series, as along the train lines, the victim’s bodies are found. The horror of the dead bodies is shown in full display. Alice Asher lies in a pool of blood with her throat slit. Betty Barnard is found with a pair of stockings around her throat. Carmichael Clarke’s head is nearly decapitated with a shovel, the shot cutting right before the final blow. The blood and gore associated with the murders continues to be displayed as the killing spree continues. This connection between the railway lines and horror is reinforced further through sound. In several sequences, as narrative cuts to Cust, linking discussions of the killer’s psychotic intentions with Cust’s mental degradation, sounds of a train whirring can be heard non-diegetically. The composition of these transitional scenes is particularly disorienting as the identity of ABC, and whether or not it may or may not be Cust, is left a mystery until the final reveal. In another dream sequence, Poirot walks along a train platform and comes face to face with ABC in a stand-off. The sound of a train is faintly heard as they move towards each other in slow motion. The man lifts his head, showing his bloody face to be that of the soldier killed in Poirot’s flashback. The sound of the train transitions into the sound of Poirot’s church burning. Overall, this “excess” of the soundscape associate descent into madness with the industrialised nature of the London train network. The alienation felt by many on the streets of London is positioned alongside

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the rise of fascism in the ABC. Constant linking between the train network and madness develops this mood further. Ultimately, this excess of style succeeds in portraying both men as weak detectives. William Luhr argues that the men of classical noir films “experience a profound sense of emasculation,” losing the “power that they had once considered their birthright” (2012, 28). The men of these films are doomed to their negative surroundings. By having much of these series presented through John’s and Poirot’s perspectives, this noir “subjectivity is further underscored by expressionistic visuals evoking the narrator’s nightmares, feelings of entrapment, and hallucinations” (Luhr 2012, 5). Both men struggle to suppress the chaotic violence that erupts around them. While Witness concludes with John succumbing to this cruelty, ABC suggests that Poirot continues to struggle against it. The dimly lit, shadowy environments generate suspense as the two men attempt to have an impact on the world around them. In ABC, John is surrounded by a muted colour palette of grey, brown and black, which adds to the desolate and foreboding atmosphere. Poirot is repeatedly shot through either unusual angles or in long shots that emphasise the emptiness of his life. In both series, the revelation scenes, where the killer is unmasked, are understated. In these key moments, both John Mayhew and Hercule Poirot are not represented with any “cinematic ecstasies.” Both men are represented in ways that undermine their status as rational figures.

Conclusion This chapter has examined how Phelps’ adaptations of The Witness for the Prosecution and The ABC Murders has been shaped by more than just the source text. As Stam (2000) and many other contemporary adaptation scholars have noted, screen adaptations are shaped by a network of influences beyond the binary of original/adaptation. These series draw on a myriad of detective stories; in particular, they draw upon the modes of the detective genre that include the hard-boiled detective, noir, and the Gothic. In doing so, the emphasis turns to the psychological anguish of the central investigator, i.e., John Mayhew and Hercule Poirot, at the expense of the puzzle. These series do not offer the clue-puzzle whodunit approach of many Christie mysteries; they are not asking the viewer to piece together different clues to uncover who is guilty. Rather, they invite the viewer to witness the anguish felt by the detective. Here, the act of digging up the witnesses’ past causes them to face truths that they had buried. Using the work of Horsley (2001, 2005) and

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Spooner (2010), this chapter has outlined how the Gothic, with its dichotomy of rationality and disorder, is a useful framework to explore these links with crime fiction. The return of the repressed, duality and excess are key elements in these series that are emblematic of this Gothic foundation. Both detectives experience trauma inflicted by World War I that are uncovered through societal shifts in the present. Their psyche is privileged over the puzzle.

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Scorsese, Martin, dir. 1976. Taxi Driver. Columbia Pictures. Serafini, Stefano. 2020a. “The Gothic Side of Golden Age Detective Fiction.” In Gothic Metamorphoses across the Centuries: Contexts, Legacies, Media, edited by Maurizio Ascari, Serena Baiesi and David Palatinus, 117–30. New York: Peter Lang. Serafini, Stefano. 2020b. “Murder, Mayhem, and Madness: John Dickson Carr’s Gothic Detective Stories.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 38, no. 2: 23–32. Shelley, Mary. 1818. Frankenstein. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones. Siegel, Don, dir. 1971. Dirty Harry. Warner Bros. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2012. “Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood.” Screen 53, no. 2: 148–63. Skenazy, Paul. 1995. “Behind the Territory Ahead.” In Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, edited by David Fine, 103–25. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Smajić, Srdjan. 2010. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Iain Robert. 2016. “Bollywood Adaptations of Agatha Christie.” Alluvium 5, no. 4. Spooner, Catherine. 2010. “Crime and the Gothic.” In A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley, 245–57. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Stam, Robert. 2000. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogues of Adaptation.” In Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, 54–76. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Steenberg, Lindsay. 2017. “The Fall and Television Noir.” Television & New Media. 18, no. 1: 58–75. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1886. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Takahashi, Naohito, dir. 2004–5. Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot and Marple. NHK Enterprises. Tashlin, Frank, dir. 1965. The Alphabet Murders. MGM. Unnikrishnan, B., dir. 2012. Grandmaster. Maxlab Cinemas and Entertainments. Vernet, Marc. 1993. “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom.” In Shades of Noir, edited by Joan Copjec, 1–32. London: Verso. Walker, Michael. 1992. “Introduction: Film Noir.” In The Movie Book of Film Noir, edited by Ian Cameron. 8–38. London: Studio Vista. Whale, James, dir. 1939. The Man in the Iron Mask. United Artists. Wheatley, Helen. 2006. Gothic Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wilder, Billy, dir. 1944. Double Indemnity. Paramount Pictures. Wilder, Billy, dir. 1948. A Foreign Affair. Paramount Pictures.

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Wilder, Billy, dir. 1950. Sunset Boulevard. Paramount Pictures. Wilder, Billy, dir. 1957. Witness for the Prosecution. United Artists. Wood, Tom. 1970. The Bright Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily. New York: Doubleday. Woreth, Eric, dir. 2009. “Les Meurtres ABC.” Les Petits meurtres d’Agatha Christie. France 2. Aired January 9. Yoshikawa, Kunio, dir. 2005. Meitantei Akafuji Takashi. NHK Enterprises. Aired December 29.

Conclusion: Agnus Dei Agnus Dei In each of her adaptations of Agatha Christie’s work, Sarah Phelps has hidden an Easter egg for eagle-eyed viewers. Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) by Spanish Baroque artist Francisco de Zurbarán appears in each series in the houses of each of her victims. The oil painting is an allusion to John the Baptist’s description of Jesus as “The Lamb of God.” It’s a simple image, that of a lamb with its feet trussed and ready for slaughter on a sacrificial block. The painting hangs in the lounge in And Then There Were None, the room where the ten guests gather to hear the accusations played over the speakers. In The Witness for the Prosecution, the painting is propped up on an aisle in Ms French’s drawing room, appearing in a scene as she dances right before she is found murdered. The painting appears again in the dining room in Ordeal by Innocence, where the unhappy family members gather to hurl accusations at one another. In The ABC Murders, the painting appears in a shot on the stairwell of the Clarke household as Capstick, the maid, looks up at her dying employer, Hermione. Finally, the painting is seen once again in The Pale Horse, adorning the wall to the left of Mark Easterbrook in his office. For Sarah Phelps, the lamb represents the guilty party awaiting to be judged: It hasn’t got a choice. It’s not making a sacrifice; it is being sacrificed.… You don’t know whether it’s alive or dead. It’s impossible to tell and I just kept thinking that it kind of crystallised, for me, something to do with Christie, which is about you’ve done something and that something has trussed you and so now you are headed in a direction where you don’t actually have any free will. You could have done it a long time ago but now you’re in this story, you’re trussed, you’re basically on the path to perdition and you’ve put yourself there. (Phelps, qtd in Robinson 2020)

Beyond being an intertextual clue for audiences to spot, the painting speaks to an internal logic of the quintet. The painting’s repeated appearance speaks to the inevitable nature of death in Christie’s writing. Phelps speaks Richards, S., Agatha Christie and Gothic Horror: Adaptations and Televisuality. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024 doi 10.5117/9789463725781_con

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specifically of the killer as being trussed once they have committed murder and, yet, this status of being trussed could apply to the broader ensembles in the adaptations. Phelps’ characters, be they the killers, victims or suspects suffering from association, are all vulnerable and doomed in their own way. They are trussed by their own pasts. For instance, the central characters of And Then There Were None are coaxed to Soldier Island under false pretences. Once there, they are haunted by the crimes that they had tried to bury. The island becomes a place of reckoning for them, as their victims return to haunt them. For some of the characters in Phelps’ retelling, this is through memory, but for others, such as Emily Brent and Vera Claythorne, it appears as though the ghosts of their victims come back to haunt them. It’s this liminal space, between memory and the supernatural, that creates this setting as a dark, Fantastic space. This sense of macabre has long been associated with None from its earliest adaptation by René Clair in 1945. Phelps, however, embraces the cinematic ecstasies afforded by contemporary modes of television to embellish the darkness of this story. Little Cyril, the boy that Vera was meant to take care of, becomes a poltergeist, where he physically chokes Vera as she washes her face. As Flint-Nicol (2019) argues, this adaptation uses the Gothic framework to highlight the violent, misogynistic and classist nature of British imperialism. The aesthetics of Gothic horror are employed to generate the feeling of impending doom for the trussed guests. In considering the Gothicisation of Christie’s work, the function of death in the whodunit shifts. Themes of the uncanny, with the past bubbling to the surface in the present, are now associated with fear and trauma, whereas in Christie’s writing, the uncanny was more associated with coincidences and odd behaviour. In particular, this trauma for Phelps’ quintet manifests in the impact of war. The application of this Gothic horror framing occurs through the mood-establishing cinematic ecstasies that rely on audience foreknowledge. It is hoped that this book has drawn attention to the moments of horror that occur on the periphery on the genre. The uncanny plays an important role when the whodunit and the Gothic intersect. Freud defines the uncanny as being “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” and what “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (1919, 219). The ensembles of suspects in each of Phelps’ adaptations experience this dread as the investigation into murders uncovers long-held secrets in their past. As Corrêa outlines, the unease brought about by the uncanny is the core of the Gothic horror mode as “most of its fiction deals with the private or intimate sphere of family relations” (2019, 180). These cosy settings become unfamiliar, uncomfortable and, ultimately, frightening. In Christie’s murder mysteries,

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where most of the crimes take place in a cosy “warm and secure middle-class interior,” an “unexpected brutality and violence” erupts (Preis-Smith 2010, 24). While logic and reason often triumph over the macabre and corrupt human nature, in Phelps’ adaptations, this uncanny effect often remains. As outlined in my analysis of Ordeal by Innocence, the investigation into the murder uncovers more than just who is guilty of the crime. Each of the Argyle (now adult) children must all face the troubles of their childhood as a result of living at Sunny Point. This turns the cosy, grand old house of the Agatha Christie closed circle mystery into a dark heterotopian space. The effect of the uncanny extends to the audience member, when dealing with an adapted text that is radically different from the source. When fans revisit an Agatha Christie adaptation that has made changes, be it Ordeal or any of Kenneth Branagh’s efforts, we look to identifying the clues and how the characterisation of the ensemble cast develops. As Hutcheon (2006) outlines in her work on adaptations, the knowing audience member can take pleasure in seeing the adapted work as a form of repetition; adaptations can be a joy of intertextuality. When there is a radical shift, however, this can generate a feeling of the uncanny. In Ordeal’s case, there is an underlying logic to these changes. Kirsten overcomes her exploitation and rids the house of its evils, for her sake and the Argyle children. The deployment of Gothic horror in Phelps’ quintet relies on our foreknowledge of these tropes. The Pale Horse’s subversion of Folk Horror, for instance, occurs through the interplay between style and narrative convention. The series is set up as a conventional detective thriller that is hybridised with Folk Horror. The witches are mysterious, and the village of Much Deeping is an odd experience for our protagonist, Mark Easterbrook. He is a suave gentleman, akin to many detectives that we are familiar with—dashing, drives a fancy car, wears a dapper suit. The witches’ magic is associated with spooky aural cues that have a menacing tone. These moments of “cinematic ecstasies” draw upon our prior knowledge of tropes found in Folk Horror and, yet, the man who we assumed was to be the detective that would solve the crime, is himself revealed to be a murderer. Once again, like the denouement in Ordeal, our expectations are undermined. Adam Scovell’s (2017) Folk Horror chain is beneficial to unpacking this subversion. We presume that the evil resides in the rural landscape, that these witches and their straw dollies are harbingers and, yet, this disruption reveals the modern, urban space as the source of terror. The “skewed belief system” is typified by Easterbrook’s cruel misogyny. The witch in Sarah Phelps’ version of Agatha Christie is proven to be powerful and not to be messed with. They are the ones that vanquish the evil in this tale.

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Finally, the impact of Phelps’ Gothicisation of the detective was explored in chapter 4. As is evident with her quintet, the psychological deterioration felt by her protagonists, particularly in Witness for the Prosecution and The ABC Murders, shifts the focus from these narratives being “clue-puzzle” driven to being about the detective’s mindset. Both John Mayhew and Hercule Poirot are undermined as detectives throughout the investigation. Poirot, even though he does demonstrate his rational prowess by unmasking the killer, is still shaken in the final confrontation. Franklin Clarke’s reading of Poirot as being restored through this investigation is the emotional crescendo of the denouement rather than the conventional presentation from the detective in front of the ensemble of suspects. This focus on the detective’s psyche is achieved through the deployment of narrative tropes and the aesthetics of detective subgenres, namely the hard-boiled detective, noir, and the Gothic. Spooner’s (2010) work on this intersection of the Gothic and crime fiction is a useful framework to question how the dichotomy of order and disorder are used to undermine the detective. It’s not just the suspects’ guilty secrets that are exposed here, but also the repressed trauma of our protagonists. This vulnerability of the detective extends to other recent adaptations of Christie. In Hugh Laurie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (2022), the protagonist, Bobby Jones, is poisoned and has nightmarish hallucinations as a result. In Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile (2022), a backstory is devised for Poirot, where he decides to grow a beard to hide a facial mutilation from the war. After his fiancée dies in a mortar explosion, he repudiates romance, which informs his bitterness as he investigates the case. Much like John Malkovich’s Poirot in The ABC Murders, Branagh’s Poirot is a sad and tortured man. This focus on the detective’s vulnerable psyche shifts attention away from the clue-puzzle structure to the adaptation’s narrative. These connect to a broader trend in entertainment of iconic male heroes, such as Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) and Daniel Craig’s James Bond, particularly in No Time to Die (2021), being vulnerable. These men are haunted figures all struggling to cope with the trauma of loss in their lives.

A Haunting in Venice and Uncertainty This research has demonstrated how the murder mystery has thematic parallels to the horror genre. Agatha Christie regularly drew upon horror iconography to generate a feeling of Fantastic uncertainty. We, the audience and the ensemble of characters are given limited information regarding a

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murder. This uncertainty, ultimately, concerns the fear of death. Is something more sinister, dangerous and supernatural at play? Witches, séances and hauntings regularly appeared as devices to generate these macabre tones. The logic of the clue-puzzle narrative, however, dictated that these potentially supernatural elements were explained away as the workings of an individual trying to cover their crimes. Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice (2023) is a more recent Christie mystery that embraces the Gothic horror mode. The film is a loose adaptation of Hallowe’en Party (1969), and the promotional images draw particular attention to horror iconography, where several guests attend a Halloween party and partake in a séance by candlelight. These paratextual promotions function as entryway texts that guide the viewer to seeing the film as a Gothic horror text. Repeated shots feature a zoetrope with an image of a dancing skeleton juggling its own skull. As Poirot is revealed at the conclusion of the trailer, several shots play out that are remarkably similar to Vera Claythorne’s attack in Sarah Phelps’ None, where both Vera and Poirot bend down to wash their face in a basin only to have a ghost appear behind them, lit up by lightning and candlelight. “Tonight, we are all afraid,” Branagh’s voice-over says. “We cannot hide from our ghosts, whether they are real or not.” These promotional materials demonstrate the usefulness of horror aesthetics to establish a macabre mood in a film that is fundamentally about death. This fear associated with murder is further evident in Christie’s influence in the slasher film which, in many incarnations, is a hybrid of horror and the whodunit. Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (2022), The Blackening (2023) and Identity (2003) are just some of the many films that take narrative cues from And Then There Were None. The bare bone plots of most of Christie’s works are repeatable across many different contexts, such as the many international adaptations of her work, from Bollywood musicals to Japanese anime featuring a cute, talking duck. Horror film and television series that are influenced by Christie’s stories are just another example of how her work is adaptable into so many different media environments. Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice builds on Christie’s long association with the horror genre. As the source’s name suggests, Hallowe’en Party (1969) and its adaptations have long been affiliated with the supernatural. In the source novel, Mrs Goodbody attends the party as a witch. In a culminating scene, the local landscaper, Michael Garfield, attempts to poison the young Miranda in a paganistic ritual. Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of the book for the series Agatha Christie’s Poirot playfully infuses the story within even more horror iconography. While Poirot disproves any supernatural occurrences, the episode is still creepy, with the murder taking place on a “dark and stormy

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night,” to quote the opening radio programme that Poirot is listening to in the opening scene. The local “witch,” Mrs Goodbody, is still perceptive and aware of many village occurrences rather than being mocked like other witch-like characters. Richmond still attempts his paganistic ritual in the final confrontation. Several meetings between characters occur at night, with the fog clouding the moon. The children’s chanting during the game of snapdragon at the titular party is used as a creepy musical motif throughout the episode. There are even references to Witchfinder General, with the local landscape bearing the history of the brutal death sentences carried out. By choosing a lesser-known Christie novel, Branagh isn’t as burdened by the expectations that come with the adaptation of a much-loved classic. His adaptations of Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile don’t just have to contend with the source novels but also popular adaptations, such as the 1974 and the 1978 films, respectively. The lesser-known quality of A Hallowe’en Party means that the dramatic Gothicisation of the novel doesn’t clash with the weighty expectations of Christie fans. Branagh relocates this mystery to Venice, where Ariadne Oliver asks the retired Poirot to attend a séance at a grand old palazzo. Rather than being asked to investigate a murder, Oliver asks Poirot to investigate whether the celebrated medium Joyce Reynolds is legitimate. This premise establishes the long held binary of the supernatural and a rational understanding of the world. The action surrounding the central mystery is contained within the palazzo, making this a closed circle mystery. On the evening of the séance, there is a terrible storm and Poirot traps everyone in the palazzo until he solves the crime. The palazzo is steeped in a miserable history, further grounding this narrative in the Gothic. Owned by a former opera singer, Rowena Drake, the palazzo was once home to children who died during the plague. A party is held for orphaned children and concludes with a séance so that Rowena can contact her recently deceased daughter, Alicia. So too are all the guests haunted by their pasts, with the film being relocated from 1960s England to 1947 Venice, with many characters shaken by the horrors of World War II. Like many closed circle mysteries, the palazzo’s various rooms function as highly stylised interrogation rooms, where one by one, the suspects are questioned by Poirot and Oliver. In several moments, long shots capture the characters dwarfed by the spectacular Venetian architecture. As Poirot and Oliver progress from one interview to the next, Poirot increasingly sees and hears potentially supernatural incidences, weakening his mastery of the situation. Much like ABC and Witness, the Gothic is a lens through which to explore the deterioration of the detective’s rationality. Tight framing,

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Dutch angles, severe high and low angles all disorient the viewer, further hampering Poirot’s control of the investigation. Branagh infuses the film with Gothic horror aesthetics. Shadows loom by candlelight and ghostly figures appear when lightning briefly brightens a room. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is effective in further evoking these macabre themes. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Guðnadóttir speaks of Branagh’s direction for an abstract tonality, saying that we wanted the score to “enter the realm of the supernatural, and he really wanted the orchestration to be much narrower and closer” (qtd in David 2023). For Guðnadóttir, these horror associations with the score are tied directly to Poirot’s war-induced trauma. The haunting turmoil evoked in the score directly correlates to the turmoil felt by Poirot (Guðnadóttir, qtd in Linton 2023). Guðnadóttir explains: My main point of focus with the score was finding the parallels between the questions that Poirot was asking himself and the questions that composers of that time were asking themselves. It has so much to do with how the world basically was falling apart during the war and the sense of rebuilding, post-war. And for Poirot, the big questions were: “Who was he before the war? What happened to him during the war? And who does he want to be after the war? How does he want to rebuild his world?” And I think you can hear that really clearly in the way that composers at that time approached melody and harmony. (Guðnadóttir, qtd in David 2023)

The central puzzle is also radically changed from the source novel. It’s revealed that the séance was set up by Ariadne Oliver so that she could base her next book on Poirot being outsmarted by a medium. Poirot deduces that Oliver had conspired with both Joyce Reynolds and Poirot’s bodyguard, Vitale Portfoglio, the former policeman who had worked on Alicia’s case, to trick Poirot. Oliver had also invited Maxime Gerard, Alicia’s former fiancé, to the séance for dramatic effect. Poirot further deduces that Alicia was poisoned via tainted honey by her mother, Rowena Drake, so that she would remain bed bound and in need of her motherly care. The maid, Olga Seminoff, unknowingly gives Alicia an overdose. Upon discovering Alicia’s lifeless body, Rowena scars Alicia’s body in accordance with the ghost stories told about the palazzo and throws the body over the balcony into the water. This rational explanation is in accordance with many of Christie’s mysteries that flirt with the supernatural only for the revelation to reveal that the guilty character has concocted much of the mystery to cover their crimes. Throughout the stormy evening, Poirot has visions of water running down walls and a young girl is heard

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singing off in another room. Poirot even has a conversation with her, only for Oliver to ask to whom he is speaking. Poirot, naturally, deduces that his tea was poisoned with a hallucinogenic drug. This reveals the function of a lot of the disorienting camera work. For much of the denouement, most of the Fantastic elements are provided with a rational explanation. While the palazzo indeed has a tragic history of many children being abandoned to die during a cholera outbreak, there is no evidence of the supernatural. Rather, the fear stems from ghost stories. And yet, the final confrontation between Poirot and Rowena on Alicia’s balcony against the backdrop of the violent storm reignites this uncertainty. As lightning crashes, a ghostly vision of Alicia briefly appears, grabbing Rowena, pulling her backwards over the railing to her death. Poirot’s reaction to this ghostly appearance indicates that there is further uncertainty as to whether this is a genuine appearance or the remaining effects of Rowena’s honey. No clear answer is provided. In the following morning, as the survivors leave the palazzo, Oliver confronts Poirot: “You saw something last night.” In reply, Poirot states that “we cannot hide from our ghosts, whether they are real or not,” a key line used in the film’s trailer. By not providing a definitive answer, the film concludes by returning to the Fantastic space. This is an interesting framing for a whodunit, which is fundamentally about rational explanations. For Poirot, and the audience, there is this hesitation. Is the palazzo actually haunted? Can a rational mind make room for the supernatural? This hesitation is effective when the film is focalised from Poirot’s perspective. There are several shaky POV shots. The ghostly visions are reminiscent of key scenes from The Innocents. Director of photography Haris Zambarloukos even notes that this film was an influence for its “visual eloquence” in telling a ghost story (Formo 2023). This unsettling feeling is not necessarily about cheap jump scares but more about this persistent atmosphere of uncertainty.

Final Thoughts Phelps’ quintet speaks to the pervasive uncertainty of the Gothic mode, where the rational and irrational dichotomy is unclear. Since the distinction between crime and Gothic fiction was devised primarily for commercial concerns. (Ascari 2007), the dominance of the clue-puzzle narrative during the height of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction saw this focus on rationalism. The push for the generic purity of this subgenre arises through fear of the logic of the crime-puzzle narrative being contaminated by “supernatural,

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occult, or irrational” elements (Smajić 2010, 2). As Serafini (2020b, 24) notes, many interwar novels embraced generic hybridisation, which saw notable shifts in the associated themes and aesthetics of the genre. Throughout the twentieth century, however, crime film and television become even more hybridised. In the Gothicised murder mystery, a rational understanding of the world is threatened. Often, the detective in the original restores a sense of order to the chaos that has ensued. Even in Christie’s And Then There Were None, Justice Wargrave’s discovered note explains how he committed the perfect crime and punished those that had previously gotten away with murder. Even though Wargrave dies by suicide before being caught, there is still closure to the mystery. We know how the clues “fit” into the puzzle. In Phelps’ quintet, however, this closure is undermined. There is little attention paid to the clues of the puzzle in None. In Witness, the wrong person is hanged for the murder of Miss French, Leo and Romaine escape justice, and John dies by suicide after he is proven to have been a fool. In a telling moment, Romaine threatens Leo that he must remain useful to her in order to continue their life together. “What would happen if you became tired of me?” Leo asks. “Then don’t be tiresome,” she replies, as they both exit the hotel in the series’ conclusion. As she exits the frame towards their car, the shot lingers on Leo’s uneasy expression, suggesting that the couple might not have a happy conclusion after all. In Ordeal, Kirsten locks Leonard Argyle in the bomb shelter in a seeming conclusion. The effects on the Argyle children as the result of the cruelty they all faced, however, is not resolved. The Pale Horse has the most open ending of the quintet as the actual investigation is discarded by Mark Easterbrook and the witches allude that they are responsible for this punishment. The ABC Murders, the most conventional crime drama of the quintet, has the neatest conclusion, with the central mystery being easily solved. And yet, Poirot’s brokenness still remains at the conclusion of the series. Has he really been restored by ABC’s cat-and-mouse game? While the innocent suspects are mostly “saved” with each conclusion, they still face uncertain futures as each series draws to a close. The cohesiveness of Phelps’ approach to each series speaks to her position as a “showrunner-as-auteur.” Leora Hadas (2020) identifies the transition from the unseen writer-producer to the noteworthy showrunner as being a result of two factors. First, the rise of the showrunner is a mark of distinction amongst a crowded screen landscape. Second, new digital mediascapes offer “new spaces and expectations for visibility and authorship performance” (Hadas 2020, 66). The showrunner bridges the culture/economy binary that allows for the production of series that offer heightened, signature content

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(Blakey 2017). Most significantly, however, the auteur has an authority in terms of authorship discourses that surround the text (Newman and Levine 2012). While Agatha Christie’s unquestionable authorship is branded across these BBC series, Sarah Phelps is also identified as the writer-producer who has adapted her work. The Gothicised take on Agatha Christie is a result of Phelps’ translation of the source texts for the screen. The grim aesthetics are coherent across the quintet. By identifying Phelps as the auteur behind each series, it allows audiences to “identify signature styles and meanings” (Newman and Levine 2012, 50). The showrunner as auteur sees the “unification of vision across works … includ[ing] consistency of themes, motifs, verbal and visual styles, settings, and genres” (Newman and Levine 2012, 50). By branding these series as being a product of Phelps’ vision, this elevates the series above other productions, not just of other Christie adaptations but of other British whodunits more broadly. This clear effort to label Phelps as an auteur positions her alongside other adapters for television, such as Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, who co-wrote and co-produced Sherlock (2010–17) and Dracula (2020). Gatiss has also adapted a handful of works for ITV’s Poirot series, such as episodes of the aforementioned Hallowe’en Party, Cat among the Pigeons (2010) and The Big Four (2013), as well adaptations of M. R. James’ work, such as Martin Close, Tractate Middoth, The Mezzotinit and Count Magnus. Both Phelps and Gatiss are British contemporary screenwriters and producers who are known to adapt literature for television that draw upon Gothic aesthetics and to embellish the darker moods in the original texts. For many of these series in Phelps’ quintet, disorder remains, which speaks to the impact the Gothic has had on crime fiction throughout the twentieth century. Chaos arises from the uneasy mood that is established during moments of excess. To return to the opening argument of this book, this excess manifests in both grim and gross ways. Grim in terms of the influence a Gothic mood has on these adaptations, and gross in terms of the inclusion of gore. Many of these characters are haunted, both literally and figuratively in many cases, by their traumatic pasts. As Jarlath Killeen (2009) has argued, the anxieties that arise from this uncertainty allows for ideological readings to arise. In Phelps’ quintet, the unease and horror give insight into the effects of trauma, as a result of war, racism, fascism and misogyny. In this book, I have argued that many adaptations of Agatha Christie’s work have drawn out the Gothic themes in her work. In Phelps’ BBC quintet, horror tropes, such as ghosts, witchcraft and haunted houses, are deployed to further stoke this unease. More broadly speaking, these series are contemporary examples of horror television that speak to the

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increasing importance of televisuality in contemporary screen scholarship. Both the genre of Gothic horror and the process of adaptation allows for the exploration of how the social politics of gender, class, race and so on are employed in the whodunit. In reworking these stories, the whodunit continues to be an important narrative device in the contemporary media landscape. The conventional Agatha Christie adaptation treats the murder mystery as a cosy parlour game. The ensembles in Phelps’ quintet are in much darker territory; they are the trussed lamb depicted in Francisco de Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei.

References Ascari, Maurizio. 2007. A Counter-history of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Blakey, Elizabeth. 2017. “Showrunner as Auteur: Bridging the Culture/Economy Binary in Digital Hollywood.” Open Cultural Studies 1: 321–32. Branagh, Kenneth, dir. 2023. A Haunting in Venice. 20th Century Fox. Corrêa, Graça P. 2019. “The Gothic Uncanny: Selected Mind-Images in Literature and Film.” Kairos: Journal of Philosophy & Science 22: 179–204. David, Brian. 2023. “Hildur Guðnadóttir Talks A Haunting in Venice Score, the Inf luence of Sicario and Joker 2.” Hollywood Reporter, September  12, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/ haunting-in-venice-hildur-gudnadottir-joker-1235588031. Flint-Nicol, Katerina. 2019. “‘There’s a Secret behind the Door. And That Secret Is Me’: The Gothic Reimagining of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.” In Gothic Heroines on Screen: Representation, Interpretation, and Feminist Enquiry, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald and Frances A. Kamm, 141–53. New York: Routledge. Formo, Brian. 2023. “View to Kill: Four Macabre Films That Influenced the Look for A Haunting in Venice.” Cinemascope, September 13, https://letterboxd.com/ journal/a-haunting-in-venice-haris-zambarloukos-cinematography-inspirations. Freud, Sigmund. 1919. “The Uncanny.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217–56. London: Hogarth. Gatiss, Mark, dir. 2013. The Tractate Middoth. BBC One. Gatiss, Mark, dir. 2019. Martin’s Close. BBC One. Gatiss, Mark, dir. 2021. The Mezzotint. BBC One. Gatiss, Mark, dir. 2022. Count Magnus. BBC One. Gatiss, Mark, and Steven Moffat, creators. 2010–17. Sherlock. BBC One.

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Index 4.50 From Paddington 155 A Murder is Announced 28 A Pocket Full of Rye 91 ABC Murders, The 12–14, 18, 31, 37–39, 56, 93, 94, 95, 143, 144, 150, 155–172, 179, 182, 184, 187 Agatha Christie’s Marple series 13, 19, 24, 39, 56, 95, 126 Agatha Christie’s Poirot series 13, 155, 183, 184, 188 Allen, Grant 118 And Then There Were None 12, 14, 15, 21, 23, 24, 31, 33, 39, 49–79, 89, 91, 97, 101, 144, 179, 180, 183, 187, At Bertram’s Hotel 94 Bazin, Andre 20 Blackwood, Algernon 118 Blood on Satan’s Claw, The 35, 117, 118, 130, 132 Bodies Bodies Bodies 59, 60, 75, 183 Bordwell, David 18, 25, 55, 124 Botting, Fred 14, 38, 73, 85, 165 Branagh, Kenneth 13, 181–186 Carroll, Noël 25, 32, 49, 53–55, 88 Chandler, Raymond 147–149 Creed, Barbara 116, 128, 169 Crooked House 13 Curtain 56 De Palma, Brian 95 Death on the Nile 93, 182, 184 Detective fiction 14, 37–39, 52, 81–86, 88–91, 143–150 Doyle, Arthur Conan 37, 89, 145, 146 Dumb Witness 125 Eggers, Robert 35, 131 Elephants Can Remember 145 Endless Night 29, 124 Evil Under the Sun 93, 125 Fantastic 31–33, 49–56, 63, 66–71, 85, 144, 180, 181, 186 Folk Horror 31, 35, 36, 115–138, 181 Foucault, Michel 34, 81, 90, 91, 101, 108 Freud, Sigmund 32, 85, 180 Gatiss, Mark 35, 118, 183, 188 Genette, Gérard 20 Genre theory 12–14, 23–31, 53, 54 Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery 81 Guðnadóttir, Hildur 185

Hallowe’en Party 29, 145, 183, 184, 188 Hammet, Dashiell 147–149 Hercule Poirot’s Christmas 93 Hitchcock, Alfred 148, 151, 155 Horsley, Lee 37, 38, 144, 147, 149, 161, 172 Hound of Death and Other Short Stories, The 24, 55 Hutcheon, Linda 21, 105, 151, 181 International Adaptations Brazil 58 France 50, 58, 60–62, 127, 128, 155 Greece 58 India 50, 58, 60, 155 Japan 58, 156 Lebanon 58 Soviet Union 50, 59 Spain 58 West Germany 50 Ils Étaient Dix 60–62 Johnson, Rian 13 Kives Out 13, 81 Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie 127, 128, 155, 156 Lynch, David 30, 91 Middlebrow 22, 81–85, 108 Mood 18, 23, 26, 31, 35, 52, 54, 62, 63, 86, 88, 103, 121, 123, 124, 144, 166, 169, 170, 188 Moving Finger, The 84 Murder at the Vicarage, The 84, 94 Murder in Mesopotamia 15 Murder is Easy 124 Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The 15, 93 Murder on the Orient Express 13, 15, 16, 93, 184 Murders in the Rue Morgue, The 37, 89 Mysterious Affair at Styles, The 89, 91, 94 Mysterious Mr. Quin, The 55 Nemesis 125, 144 Noir 32, 56, 57, 95, 148–162, 165–169, 171, 182 Ordeal by Innocence 12, 14–16, 19, 23, 24, 31, 39, 81–109, 144, 160, 161, 179, 181 Pale Horse, The 12–14, 17, 21, 23, 31, 35 – 37, 83, 115–138, 144, 156, 179, 181, 187 Peril at End House 38, 91, 93, 94 Poe, Edgar Allan 35, 37, 57, 89, 146

214  Poirot Investigates 55 Pollock, George 50, 57 Scream 25, 81 Sinnerbrink, Robert 26, 54, 62, 63, 103, 121, 123, 166 Sittaford Mystery, The 23, 24, 29, 38, 55, 125 Sleeping Murder 15, 23, 29, 33, 38, 49, 55, 56, 144 Spider’s Web 125 Stam, Robert 20, 21, 123, 150, 171 Televisuality 30, 54, 123, 124, 137, 165, 189 They Do It with Mirrors 144 Thirteen Problems, The 125

Agatha Christie and Gothic Horror

Todorov, Tzevetan 31, 32, 49–56, 63, 66, 70, 85, 88 Twin Peaks 30, 91 Uncanny 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 40, 50 – 56, 63, 70, 80 – 82, 85 – 88, 91 – 94, 103 – 108, 130, 148, 154, 161, 180, 181 Wheatley, Ben 121 Wheatley, Helen 29, 30, 54, 86, 87, 96, 123 Wicker Man, The 35, 117, 120, 132 Wilder, Billy 151–153 Witchcraft 17, 35, 36, 83, 116–138, 144, 169, 181, 183, 184, 187 Witchfinder General, The 35, 117, 184 Witness for the Prosecution, The 12, 14, 16, 21, 31, 37, 38, 143–145, 151–154, 157–172, 179, 182, 184, 187

H O R R O R A N D G O T H I C M E D I A C U LT U R E S

Agatha Christie’s work has been adapted extensively resulting in transformations that are both textual and cultural. While some adaptations are best known for being quaint murder mysteries, there are many that draw on horror aesthetics. This book will look at how the growth of Agatha Christie adaptations have grown increasingly dark. Of key relevance to this study is the work of Sarah Phelps, whose Witness for the Prosecution, And Then There Were None, Ordeal by Innocence, The ABC Murders and The Pale Horse all are darker than their precedents. Born out of their contemporary screen contexts, they use entrenched literary and filmic codes of Gothic horror as central reference points for audiences. Drawing on adaptation scholarship, where adapters are interpreters as well as creators, this study will look at how the works of Agatha Christie are much closer to Gothic horror than we realise. Stuart Richards is a Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of South Australia. He is author of The Queer Film Festival: Popcorn and Politics and is an Associate Director of the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre.

ISBN: 978-94-6372-578-1

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