‘They raise demons and people die’: Gothic, Cosy Crime and National Identity in <i>The Pale Horse</i> (2020)

Upon its broadcast in 2020, many reviewers were dismissive of the BBC’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse (1961), citing the production’s inclusion of supernatural and occult elements as incongruous with the author’s work. Screenwriter Sarah Phelps has adapted five Christie novels for television, with all the productions dividing audiences and critics due to their deviations from the source materials. While The Pale Horse (1961) contains elements of folk horror and gothic, these elements are accentuated in the television mini-series and gradually dominate the novel’s rational crime narrative. This article argues that rather than being an inappropriate aesthetic choice, the two-part adaptation adroitly incorporates folk horror and gothic traditions to explore contemporary debates about British national identity, by examining how the ghosts of the past haunt the present, in response to a socio-political climate that seeks to shape cultural attitudes by evoking mythic notions of history. The first half of the article discusses the overlapping characteristics of gothic and crime narratives and examines how they are used to challenge the cultural expectations of Christie’s work and adaptations thereof. The second section discusses the adaptation’s use of folk horror to examine a contemporary cultural milieu of decolonisation, Brexit, and culture wars in which folk horror becomes a battleground for national identity.