3 - The Pale Horse and Folk Horror

Summary

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 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.