How to Tell a Meta-Ghost Story

By Alison Lanier | TV | October 31, 2023 |

By Alison Lanier | TV | October 31, 2023 |

Meticulously crafted 1970s scenes of British suburban life, complete with the minutiae of posters, wallpapers, and the correct kind of tea kettle, set the stage for a precise re-enactment of one of the most well-documented ghost hunts ever: the Enfield poltergeist. But there’s a twist with this four-part series: the actors don’t speak. All the audio used in these recreations of the case are the actual recordings of the investigation, the conversations around the investigation, and the public debates and reporting around it. Apple TV’s The Enfield Poltergeist takes the found-footage, re-enactment mode most recently used by Netflix’s The Devil on Trial and pushes it a step further.

It’s a case you might know of from a little film called The Conjuring 2. In the late 1970s, a lower-middle-class English household was plagued by an absurdly well-publicized haunting. From knockings on the walls to heavy fixtures being thrown into the air to manifesting voices, the haunting was thoroughly investigated and reported with a level of care and seriousness that puts what you might be imagining as “ghost hunting” to shame.

Amateur investigator and professional inventor Maurice Grosse, played by Christopher Ettridge, spent a full year meticulously recording and observing the poltergeist activity, living among the family and conducting himself as a serious scientific mind, as a member of Britain’s Society for Psychical Research. SPR originated as a bunch of well-heeled white English gentlemen in the nineteenth century trying to legitimize and systematize the ghost hunting craze of the time. In the time our story takes place, it’s a collection of enthusiasts, academics, and the psychically inclined, all coming together to understand those forces beyond mundane comprehension. To quote the Lore podcast, which gave an end-of-episode shoutout to the case on its last episode: It isn’t sexy, but it sure is British.

Directed by Jerry Rothwell (who also directed the ever-intriguing Sour Grapes about elitist wine fraud), The Enfield Poltergeist is a fascinating meta-ghost story that toys with the method through which stories are told. Alongside the lip-synced by somehow very uncorny reenactments, there are the typical talking-head interviews of those people actually involved. Tabloid photographers, psychic investigators, the family at the heart of the story…It’s hard to overstate how well this haunting was documented.

The interviewees don’t remain as talking heads, however. The filmmakers bring them onto the uncannily accurate set, let them walk around and recount their memories of the haunting and their varied experience of it. Alongside their own voices recorded decades before, frightened and urgent in the recordings, these moments come across as sincere and unsettling. Re-enactments in these kinds of programs, which I tend to find hokey, are elevated to a level that I found myself admiring, especially with the precision to which the actors embody their dis-embodied lines.

There are many, many things that make this case fascinating to revisit and rediscover. For one, the variety of people that came through this very ordinary English household, from psychic mediums to Cambridge physicists, is staggering. There’s also the strong-willed eleven-year-old girl, Janet (Olivia Booth-Ford), at the center of the poltergeist’s apparent attention, who is striking both as a character and as a performance. There are the many witnesses of paranormal activity, the borderline-plausible explanations for how this could all be faked, and the photographs of Janet being flung across her bedroom by an unseen force. And there’s the tantalizing lack of actual answers that hangs over the case to this day.

And there’s the sheer, strange ordinaryness of it all. These are not high-drama subjects: there’s the sense of long, dragging time around the points of high tension, the long hours in front of the TV as nights waste by in the investigation, the quiet clatter of a tea kettle lid that could be a ghost or could just be the metal cooling. Long, lingering shots impose the sense of plain old life rolling along within the frame of these disquieting occurrences and the many prying eyes that eagerly looked on.

The Enfield Poltergeist does itself a favor by not only being about the haunting itself, or the thrills and chills that go along with it, but the human spirit of curiosity and stubbornness that went into the investigation as well as the serious aftermath for the girl at the center of it. There’s a level of real earnestness that series manages to communicate, even as it refuses to answer the question of how real any of this actually is. It doesn’t take sides: it only gives you the story and the captivating characters that populate it.

If you’re looking for a solid, spooky, and engaging watch this Halloween, this real-life ghost story is a very good choice.

The Enfield Poltergeist is now streaming on Apple TV.