The Enfield Haunting

The Enfield Haunting

TYPESupernatural drama miniseries

NETWORKSky Living

PRESENTERTimothy Spall, Matthew Macfadyen

FIRST AIRED3 May 2015

STATUSEnded

The Enfield Haunting is a 2015 British three-part drama miniseries broadcast on Sky Living, dramatising the real-world Enfield Poltergeist case of 1977–1979. Directed by Kristoffer Nyholm, it stars Timothy Spall as Maurice Grosse and Matthew Macfadyen as Guy Lyon Playfair, the two Society for Psychical Research investigators who led the original case.

Format

Loosely based on Playfair's 1980 book This House Is Haunted: The True Story of a Poltergeist, the series follows Grosse and Playfair's investigation of the Hodgson family's council house in Enfield, North London, while weaving in Grosse's own recent bereavement — the death of his daughter, also named Janet, in a motorcycle accident the previous year — as emotional backdrop to his dedication to the case. The series takes the dramatisation further into horror territory than a strictly documentary account, drawing comparisons to The Exorcist in its later episodes.

Reception

The Enfield Haunting drew a generally positive response for its performances, particularly Spall's portrayal of Grosse's grief-driven investment in the case, alongside criticism for its heightened, increasingly horror-inflected treatment of events compared to more restrained documentary accounts such as Channel 4's Interview with a Poltergeist.

Legacy

The series is one of several screen dramatisations of the Enfield case, alongside the 2016 film The Conjuring 2 and the 2007 documentary Interview with a Poltergeist. Unlike The Conjuring 2, which frames the case through American investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, The Enfield Haunting centres the real British investigators who led the original case.

See also

• Enfield Poltergeist
• Maurice Grosse
• The Conjuring 2
• Interview with a Poltergeist