The Cutprice Guignol

I didn’t think the strangest show I saw this year was going to be a mostly-forgotten six-part BBC horror drama from 2008, but here we are, I suppose.

When I sat down to watch Apparitions, I really did so on the strength of the back catalogue of its creator, Joe Ahearne – by which I mean, of course, that he directed five episodes of my beloved Christopher Eccleston-era Doctor Who, including Dalek, which is still pretty much in the top three episodes the show’s ever produced. When I stumbled across Apparitions, which broadcast on the BBC in late 2008, it seemed like the perfect place to start with his solo work – and, hey, it’s spooky season and all that, so it’s about time to start mainlining horror into every orifice for the next three to four business weeks, isn’t it?

Apparitions follows Jacob Myers (Martin Shaw), a Catholic priest who faces off against the forces of evil as the devilish hordes while he clashes with fellow members of the church about the place of exorcism, miracles, and possession in the modern doctrine. And, while I am not a religious person myself, there’s no arguing that religious horror has a prominent place in the genre both historically and contemporaneously, and the noble believer taking a stand against all that’s satanic in the world has been a tried-and-true formula for decades; from The Exorcist to The Conjuring, it’s a pretty reliable set of story beats to hit.

And those were the beats I expected Apparitions to trundle through over the course of its half-dozen episodes – which, to an extent, it sort of does. Though short, it squeezes in a handful of case-of-the-week episodes where Jacob deals with some inexplicable spiritual event and must free the afflicted from their possession. But Ahearne seems to have gone out of his way to choose the most deliberately contentious issues he can to centre these stories on – from the Holocaust to abortion to the spiritual value placed on virginity – and the show does not hold back in Going There with the profane and shocking. We’re talking flayed corpses, child abuse, nun gassings, sexual perversion, suicide, self-harm, most of it on screen, most of it pretty graphic – for the Beeb in 2008, I was pretty surprised just by the sheer full-throatedness with which the show treats its horror. Shaw is a great centrepiece for these stories, the kind of warm, watchable, witty character who could easily have shouldered a longer run of case-of-the-week episodes in this vein, particularly when he shares the screen with the brilliant Siobhan Finneran as Sister Ruth, who serves as his fractiously affectionate foil.

But then there’s the overarching plot, which dives into some rather dense and quite inventive interpretations of theology that take this from “slightly full-on religious horror” to “batshit weird”. The central conflict revolves around the forces of evil attempting not to destroy Jacob, but to convert him – to convince him that their suffering is such that he should be inclined to help them, and attempting to prove that via various theological debates. It’s a really interesting approach to the genre that leans in to the truly profane in a way that so few stories of this nature do; Ahearne isn’t afraid to take things to some twisted places in pursuit of placing Jacob in some spiritual quandaries, and Jacob feels like he is navigating a genuine religious struggle rather than just your standard-issue CGI demon with a spooky voice. This is, no doubt, helped along by the excellent performance and brilliant writing for Rick Warden as Michael, an amnesiac who serves as the primary vessel for the forces of evil to connect with Jacob – the way Ahearne slowly unfurls his character and challenges Jacob’s belief about the nature of redemption is probably my favourite part of the show, and Warden imbues him with vulnerability and violence with equal conviction.

Apparitions might look like a pretty standard-issue religious horror, but it’s secretly a bizarre procedural that goes to some seriously profane places – and is all the better for it. I feel like this is a show that’s been almost entirely lost to time by now, but I would love to hear about your memories of it if you watched it when it came out, or if you’ve stumbled across it since. Let me know in the comments below!

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(header image via BBC)