The Pale Horse (2020) is a television mini-series adaptation, written by Sarah Phelps and co-produced by the BBC and Amazon, of billion selling author Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name that was originally published in 1961 and which has been described as the most supernatural of her 66 detective novels.
Due to its inclusion of a number of folk horror-like scenes, themes etc the adaptation could be considered an example of what I call “Albion in the overgrowth”, which is a phrase I’ve tended to use to describe mainstream television dramas etc which to various degrees explore, utilise and express an “otherly pastoralism” or rural wyrd and at times variously contain elements of, or are fully intertwined with, folk horror.
Both the novel and the 2020 adaptation centre around a man called Mark Easterbrook and his encounters with a trio of women who are possibly witches and both are also set in early 1960s London and a fictional rural town called Much Deeping but a considerable number of the other details etc of Christie’s novel have been changed in the adaptation.
In the 2020 adaptation Mark Easterbrook is a suave urbane city dwelling antiques dealer whose name is found on a list of people in the shoe of a dead woman. A number of people on the list subsequently die or are discovered to have died and the series tells of Easterbrook’s attempts to discover the truth of why they have died and if he is next. As the series progresses it shows him struggling with his belief that there is a rational explanation for events which conflicts with evidence that often appears to point towards the deaths being the result of the actions of the above-mentioned trio of women who are fortune tellers but as said above may also possibly be witches and who live at The Pale Horse, a former inn in Much Deeping.
It is far from the cosy family viewing experience that can be found in some popular murder mystery television dramas, where the death/s are often merely a puzzle to be solved and, other than to the actual victims, seems to cause little truly disastrous direct nor collateral damage. In contrast with such dramas, The Pale Horse is an at times near hallucinogenic and often unsettling tale but which smuggles its dark atmosphere and events under a distracting guise of urban style and glamour. At the same time, it does not rely on gore and sensationalist visual shock to unsettle and create its darkly hued atmosphere but rather the sinister aspects of the story and events are more subtly and even ambiguously shown and implied which marks it out as somewhat unusual in today’s cultural landscape.
The just mentioned cosy murder mystery aspect of some television drama is something which has come to be associated with Agatha Christie’s work possibly in part because of the success of the various television adaptations of her Miss Marple novels, which centre around an elderly spinster who lives in a quiet village and who stumbles upon murders before going on to help the police to solve them and which often have a twee rural character. In contrast with these, Phelps’ adaptations have been said to “[reveal] the clenched fist of terror at the heart of Agatha Christie’s novels… [and] deconstruct the cosy image that has grown around the Mother of the Whodunnit, like lichen around a headstone” and to acknowledge the dark character of her source material of which she has said when she returned to it that she was:
“Profoundly shocked by [it]… That’s what I really hope comes across [in my adaptations, that Christie’s books are] brutal… [she] plants these little clues in her books and I pick them up and run with them… I’m honouring the secret, subversive Agatha… There’s something dangerous about her – and there’s a lot of academic work to be done on the tension in the novels between the book she knew the public wanted to read and the one she wanted to write.” (Sarah Phelps quoted in “ABC Murders writer Sarah Phelps to adapt another Agatha Christie novel”, David Brown, radiotimes.com, 6th February 2019.)
Accompanying which the darker character of Phelps’ adap- tations may also in part be a reflection of the contemporary popular culture landscape which allows for and often contains more overtly dark themes, atmospheres and so on than was the case when Christie originally wrote The Pale Horse.
In a number of ways Phelps’ adaptation of The Pale Horse is very much an urban wyrd tale, as it connects with this loosely interconnected mode or form of culture which, as I also in part refer to in the Preface, has been described as having:
“A sense of otherness within the narrative, experience or feeling concerning a densely human-constructed area or the in-between spaces bordering the bucolic and the built-up or surrounding modern technology with regard to another energy at play or in control; be it supernatural spiritual, historical, nostalgic or psychological. Possibly sinister but always somehow unnerving or unnatural… [and] that taps into the undercurrent of the city. In a similar way to psychogeography, it can find new narratives hidden below the top-layer; of dark skulduggery and strangeness beyond the reasonable confines of what we consider part of city life.” (Quoted from “Urban Wyrd: An Introduction”, Adam Scovell, Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd – 1. Spirits of Time, 2019.)
However, rather than being purely “urban” wyrd, which might well imply that the supernatural forces emanate from and are contained within the series’ urban set scenes and locations, The Pale Horse often plays with a sense of the city and ordered sophisticated urban life being invaded and overpowered by a form of long-distance supernatural power that is controlled by rural dwellers.
The series is visually striking and intertwines a stylish 1960s, almost populuxe-esque aesthetic with the tropes of folk horror; its main character Easterbrook dresses in sharply tailored suits and has a high living affluent way of life and an, on the surface at least, picture-perfect wife and flat. However, there is a sense of a rottenness at his core, of something that is eating away at him, coupled with a controlling, self-serving nature and amorality of which Mark Sewell who plays the character has said:
“There’s something about the exteriors of [such] people, that in order to support that level of luxury there’s an underbelly of brutality to maintain it… That seemed to be really reflected in [Easterbrook’s] character’s story.” (Quoted from “TV: Agatha Christie adaptation stirs up a witch’s brew of woe”, author unknown, theherald.com, 8th February 2020.)
However, that “brutality” and the sense of control Easterbrook has in his urban life proves to be far from invulnerable and in a sequence where he and his wife visit a traditional rural fair at the town of Much Deeping where the trio of witches who may be involved in the deaths live, when he crosses fields to spy on them, they seem to preternaturally sense that he is there and there is a palpable sense that he is out of his depth and faced with powers he does not understand and cannot control.
It is during the fair that the drama becomes its most overtly and even orthodoxly folk horror-like: during it there is a folk ritual procession which features locals in surreal animal heads and masks, ghostly looking shrouded children in white dresses and people dressed in sack cloth costumes bestrewn with wheat eaves and wearing cloth head masks with ghastly simplistic features possibly burnt into the fabric.
When the procession stops the gathered crowd shouts “Cut the king” and one of the townsfolk is selected to chop the head off a towering figure with a shock of hair made from crops that had been carried during the procession. When the head is cut off, in a manner that seems somewhat grotesque and bizarre, members of the crowd swoop in to pluck parts of the head and eat them. However, the king’s head is made of bread and this “cutting” is part of a harmless traditional harvest ritual but that is not revealed in the series nor is it known by the urban outsiders Easterbrook and his wife and they find it unsettling, particularly his wife who sarcastically thanks him for a fun day out, before declaring she is going to find a stiff drink and leaving him alone amongst the locals.
Unlike much of horror however this takes place in bright daylight and amongst bucolic beauty, which gives it the air of a waking daytime nightmare, where something very untoward is happening but the outsider watcher does not know quite what it is:
“[There is] great sunshine, beautiful greenness and the corn is growing and everything else. And there’s this shiver that runs through the blood because even in bright sunshine, there’s something scratching at the back of your neck. And you might see it if you turn your head quickly, or it might’ve disappeared by that point… [it] happens, just out of the corner of your eye.” (Sarah Phelps quoted in “The Pale Horse writer interview: ‘I’ve changed elements of the end’”, Rosie Fletcher, denofgeek.com, 18th February 2020.)
Adding to the folk horror-esque character of the series for viewers who have seen Nicolas Roeg’s 2007 supernatural folk horror-esque drama film Puffball is that Rita Tushingham plays one of the witches and whose character’s piercing stare, straggling hair and possible use of supernatural powers in The Pale Horse seem to almost be a revisiting of her part in Roeg’s film in which she plays an elderly matriarch with a not dissimilar appearance and witch-like character who lives rurally and uses dark folkloric magic to achieve her aims.
The Pale Horse is the fifth adaptation of Agatha Christie’s work by Sarah Phelps and each have had recurring images or hidden “easter eggs” which include a painting of a trussed lamb by Agnes Dei and a stuffed polar bear. In the above interview with Den of Geek, Phelps talks about how in the painting you do not know if the lamb is alive or dead and that it has no free will:
“The way I think about the Agatha Christie universe is you have a hero or the antihero, the main character, and there was a point at which they put their foot on a position and that point comes way back… they have no choice. They had a choice a long time ago and they didn’t take it.”
Stuffed animals often have an inherent creepiness to them and the stuffed polar bear in The Pale Horse is no exception and this is coupled with the bears’ fiercely threatening apex predator appearance and position in the natural world.
Easterbrook unboxes the bear in his antique shop in the first scene of The Pale Horse and there is something surreal and unsettling about it which seems to be an indicator that, as Phelps says in the above interview, causes the viewer to think “Something terrible is going to happen to this man”. It also subtly calls into question Easterbrook’s morality and personal moral compass as he is shown to be fully prepared to reduce this wild creature to being merely another decorative bauble.
These recurring easter eggs in Phelps’ Christie adaptations are also accompanied by her repeated use of real-world historical dates, events, newspaper stories and so on, with for example a murder taking place on a prominent date connected with the rise of political extremism in pre-Second World War Germany and Easterbrook reading a newspaper which reports on the trial of a related captured extremist.
The flat Easterbrook shares with his wife is full of mod cons and every inch is perfectly styled but it is very much, to quote the title of the Roxy Music song, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”.
His beautiful and stylish wife suffers from mental health problems, which are exacerbated by his womanising, related deception, mind games, and cold-hearted treatment of her.
At points the isolation and emptiness of his wife’s life is shown in a subtly brutal manner, as she sits alone and motionless in their stylish flat which could well have tumbled from the pages of a glossy aspirational lifestyle magazine. At other times she is shown as being little more than a harassed skivvy at social gatherings in their flat, with her supposed friends denigrating and being dismissive of her relationship with Mark.
It becomes apparent that Easterbrook’s former wife died in the bath at the flat, possibly due to some kind of electricity related accident, and he wakes repeatedly at night after reliving the time around her death. These dream sections, which take place in the flat’s corridors, are reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic horror film The Shining (1980) in which scenes that take place in a hotel’s empty corridors have an almost unbearable and unsettling tension and in both The Shining and The Pale Horse these relatively ordinary and prosaic settings are transformed into nightmarish places.
The Pale Horse is also in part reminiscent of Basil Dearden’s film The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970) as in both a comfortably affluent urbane city dweller finds his grasp on and understanding of reality fracturing, possibly due to some preternatural and unknown force or events. As The Pale Horse progresses Easterbrook’s self-possession, control and sanity seem to increasingly crumble; he always maintains his stylish exterior but it increasingly becomes merely a well-presented, finely tailored and manicured shell, while his inner life in turn becomes a hellish and hallucinatory one as he repeatedly tries and fails to discover whether he is the victim of a supernatural curse placed on him by the trio of witches.
The crumbling of his psyche is often subtly implied rather than overtly visually expressed but it is more overtly depicted in one of the most conventional horror-like sequences in the series during one of his nightmares about his first wife’s death during which he is shown walking down the eerily blue lit corridor of his flat at night. When he opens the door, he falls back terrified and his silhouette is shown cowering in front of the folkloric “king” from the town fair and at this point it seems as though the “otherly” rural and its powers have fully invaded and conquered his well- ordered and affluent urban life and home.
Interconnected with which his flat is stylishly contemporarily decorated but there are three out of place seeming antique ornamental faces displayed in the main fireplace which have an unsettling air to them. One appears to be horned or be of a man wearing a creature’s horns, while the other two appear to be bellowing or in pain and they could be seen as accidental totemic links to the folkloric rituals at Much Deeping or perhaps to even be a conduit for the possibly supernatural powers of the trio of rural witches.
Alongside which when Easterbrook and his wife drive to the fair at Much Deeping, they pass the town’s contemporarily produced metal name sign on the road that is surrounded by and draped with folkloric red ribboned doll-like figures as part of the fair’s celebrations. As with some of the costumes and rituals at the fair, although the dolls are nominally harmless, in the context of the story and its events they assume the air of a warning and seem to indicate that those who pass them are leaving behind the norms and safety of urban life. There is also an interplay between modernity and the old ways in this scene, with modernity seeming to be literally subsumed by the folkloric figures and therefore the “old ways”, and this interplay or conflict is one of the constant undercurrents in The Pale Horse, as it also is in much of folk horror orientated work.
Throughout the drama Much Deeping’s rural area and country dwelling inhabitants are depicted as the threatening “other” and to have an unknowable alienness to city folk, in a manner which is often found in folk horror related work, such as the insular, pagan and at times wanton ways and rituals of the locals in the iconic folk horror film The Wicker Man (1973).
However, eventually it is revealed that the trio of witches may well not be the source of the deaths but rather they have merely been pawns used in nefarious plans by somebody in the city, who has been using information given to the witches when they tell urban visitor’s fortunes to discover those who have a wish for certain people in their lives to be killed in order to inherit, prevent scandal and so on. He does this for financial reward and has merely been playing mind games with Easterbrook by leaving corn dollies on his car and filling his head full of supernatural and near deranged Biblical portents.
Ultimately though the drama ends on an ambiguous note; Easterbrook appears to be trapped in some form of purgatory where he will have to endlessly relive the death of his first wife, who it has been revealed that he killed in a moment of jealous rage, and it is unclear whether the trio of witches have used supernatural powers to place him in this state of damnation or even if they do actually have such powers. The story finishes not so much with a sense of a conflicting duality between urban dwellers and a threatening, supernatural rural other but rather that evil, corruption and rottenness springs from Easterbrook himself.
