Looking back, those halcyon days of Living TV’s Most Haunted were a tepid treat. That show, very much a product of its time, had spooky sleepovers; celebrities screaming when brushing past walls/cobwebs/anything; showbizzy mediums claiming to be conversing with the spirits of dead people via their own deceased spirit guides; witches, light orbs and malevolent spirits, all under the eerie green glow of night vision cameras. These days, like everything else, ghost-busting is a much more serious and solemn business, and in the hands of American paranormal investigators and social experiments, it is as supersized as you might expect.
You could say that 28 Days Haunted (Netflix) is the hold-my-beer of spirit-hunting TV shows. It sends three teams of researchers to separate, and I use this term loosely, “haunted” locations, in Colorado, North Carolina, and Connecticut, in order to “prove” the theory – I am going to run out of quotation marks here – that it takes 28 days to fully pierce the veil between the living and the dead. It is the kind of series that is made to be shown in small chunks on Gogglebox, where viewers will either hide behind sofa cushions or roll their eyes so hard that they’re in danger of spinning.
