Why You Should Check Out ‘The Enfield Haunting’

A&E’s The Enfield Haunting starts in a quintessentially horror movie way. Two young girls lay in bed together as one girl tells her sister one of the oldest scary stories of all time, ending with the ominous line, “Humans can lick, too.” What follows are not jump scares or contrived intellectual puzzles but a horror series that is as deceptively ordinary as the often-repeated story told in the show’s introduction. This straight faced and non-dramatized approach to the horror genre is what makes The Enfield Haunting’s antiquated storytelling feel so refreshing.

For decades, horror movies have seemed to veer in two different directions: high-brow, intellectually stimulating, and disturbing (The Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, The Babadook) or scream-filled gorefests (The Saw franchise, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Devil’s Rejects). Both of those directions have produced some amazing films, but, in recent years, the horrifying grounds between these two extremes has been a bit lackluster. Sure, the Ed and Lorraine Warren movies (The Conjuring, Insidious, The Amityville Horror) have attempted to fill the mid-range scare void, but more often than not, these films are so dramatized that they cease to be scary. That’s what makes The Enfield Haunting great. The series contains the exact amount of authenticity, jump scares, and odd occurrences to make a believable ghost story without stylistically going overboard.

The three-part series is based on the Enfield Poltergeist, because all good ghost stories need to have real-world source material. Reports of paranormal activity occurred in a house in Enfield, England, from 1977 to 1979, which involved two sisters, aged 11 and 13. The real-world haunting caused a lot of dispute with some believing in genuine paranormal activity and others believing the two girls faked the incidents. It’s this central argument — whether or not the hauntings were real — that the series plays with, and though it’s a concept that seems simple, it’s a sinister one. While confirmed paranormal activity can be a terrifying plot device, unconfirmed hauntings are worlds scarier. At least if a haunting is confirmed in-universe, the characters know the exact root of their problems and can take steps to solve it. Residing in the middle of belief and disbelief is unsettling, both in real life and on screen.

These uncertainties are amplified by the grounded performances of the show’s cast. Timothy Spall plays his role as the skeptic-turned-believer with a believable amount of uncertainty and cautiousness, but the best performances come from the sisters, Eleanor Worthington-Cox and Fern Deacon. It’s amazing what a good child actor can bring to a horror movie. For reference, just look at The Babadook’s screaming brat, turned center of sympathy, Noah Wiseman, or Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. In The Enfield Haunting, the pair act like real children. They pout, cry, joke, attempt to hide their insecurities, and attack in that hostile yet passive aggressive way that defines female puberty. That’s another element The Enfield Haunting portrays well — puberty.

Female puberty and sexuality is in an of itself a horrifying experience. This is a concept that has been played with in Carrie, Jennifer’s Body, and even American Horror Story: Murder House. However, The Enfield Haunting again goes for realism over stylized choices, making its story’s victims even more relatable and they struggle through both real-life developmental horrors and the supernatural. All of these little pieces work to make the scares more terrifying and the tension feel insurmountable.

The Enfield Haunting is far from perfect. It’s pacing can be slow, and when the show does spring for special effects, they aren’t as polished as they can be. The series is not an intellectual mystery, nor is it a violent gorefest. It lives in between, but that balance perhaps makes it more effective. It doesn’t fall into the trap of promising a high intellectual payoff it can never achieve, nor does it substitute quality for fake blood and guts. What you’re left with is a ghost story devoid of the typical horror movie crutches, just like the classic scary story the series begins with.

[Stream The Enfield Haunting on Hulu]

Photos: Hulu