The best ghost stories are fascinating, whether or not you believe in ghosts. The Amityville Horror can be seen as a terrifying tale of bleeding walls and malevolent spectres or an equally scary cautionary story of a middle-class family’s destruction by capitalism – and the casual abuse of children. Is The Shining’s Overlook hotel haunted by evil spirits or the evils of addiction? Is The Turn of the Screw about a dastardly valet ghost or a turn-of-the-century rejection of modernity? The best straddle the paranormal and the societal – with ghouls and socio-political allegories dancing a spooky waltz through haunted houses, while the audience pick and choose whether class warfare or Satan is to blame.
That second layer isn’t quite there in this Apple TV+ offering. And if you don’t accept the poltergeist’s literal existence, there is not much else to get your teeth into. The four-part docudrama looks back at the infamous haunting of an unassuming north London family home in 1977. Only a few years after the global success of The Exorcist, the house became the centre of a media storm, with tabloids and investigators reporting on how single mother Peggy and her daughters, Margaret and Janet, were being terrorised by a poltergeist. The furniture-flinging ghost’s attempt to possess Janet has uncanny parallels with William Friedkin’s film, but in lieu of a priest, there was paranormal investigator Maurice Grosse, a kind and meticulous researcher who seemed to have breezed into the line of work. He died in 2006, but we hear him recall: “I called up the Society for Psychical Research and said: ‘If you get a good poltergeist case, let me have it.’ Then, one day, they phoned me up, but I had no idea when I walked into that house how long I’d be involved.”
