My friends recommended to me a new-ish French series called Marianne and I watched the whole thing over the last week or two - one series, eight episodes and it ends sort of setting up a potential direction for a second series while at the same time pretty much concluding the arc of the main story, which turned out to be a good thing cos it was not renewed.
Anyway, I don't know if this is old news or what but for simplicity's sake I'll describe it with the assumption that none of you have heard of it; straight off it seems quite unusual if not unique in that it's a horror. I'm not aware of any recent series that like this would be classified as straight up old-fashioned horror, maybe there are some with creepy elements or whatever that could be a mixture of horror and something else (though I can't even name one of those off the top of my head - maybe Lovecraft Country) - and this is something I've thought about before and wondered if there is a reason for it. Specifically I wondered if that was because it was difficult to maintain the necessary level of tension to generate fear repeatedly over the course of a series. Or perhaps it's a more fundamental and simply stated problem than that, how long can you keep scaring people with the same thing?
Well, I'll come back to that. Without giving away anything that you won't find out in the first half hour - and guess in the first ten minutes - the story concerns a girl called Emma who is a horror writer - in fact it makes it clear that she writes horror for young adults, which is a wise move as the idea that this person could write proper books for grown ups would strain credulity far beyond any of the supernatural events that ensue later - whose highly successful series of books deal with an ongoing battle between her heroine Lizzie Larck and a horrifically evil demon called.. dun dun daaahh Marianne!
At the start Emma is at a book signing for the final book in the series. The problem is, it turns out that the idea for Marianne came to her after she was tormented for years by terrifying nightmares about that very entity, dreams which only finally disappeared when she started to write about her/it... and now she's stopped writing they are back again. In fact, Marianne is not just in her dreams, she's every-fucking-where and she's leaving bags of human teeth all over the shop, killing people left right and centre and generally being a right cunt.
So the set-up isn't going to win any prizes for originality and the protagonist is a bit too annoying but... but, in the first episode there were a number of genuinely creepy scenes that intrigued me enough to hook me into the second episode and there were some good moments in the second too. You quickly understand that Marianne isn't fucking around, there's none of that 'is it all in her head' business, she's definitely possessed the creepy old woman and she kills people who get in her way. And that's it really, it all takes place in the spooky seaside town where Emma grew up and she joins with a bunch of childhood friends and enemies to try and battle the monster while working through some histirical traumatic events that ruined their teenage years.
The problem for me is - as I speculated before - it does get less scary. Horrible stuff still happens but it doesn't land quite so hard. But perhaps that is unavoidable, and the story is satisfying enough.
But I'd be interested to know - are there any other horror series? Do they made manage to stay scary all the way through? And - and this is the main question - is that even possible?