Did Something Haunt Apple TV+’s ‘The Enfield Poltergeist’ Docuseries? (VIDEO)
Just in time for the scariest day of the year (unless you’re Justin Timberlake…that day came earlier this week with Brit‘s book), Apple TV+ is set to unleash the The Enfield Poltergeist, a genre-defying four-part series that exhumes the historic 1977-79 haunting of the UK’s Hodgson family. You may know the story as it was adapted in 2016’s The Conjuring 2, but you’ve never seen it told in such deep detail.
Thanks to a curious British press at the time and the efforts of paranormal investigator Maurice Grosse, the Enfield case is one of the most-documented accounts of paranormal activity. The tale of a supernatural entity attacking young Janet Hodgson gripped the nation and sold millions of papers. That provided director Jerry Rothwell with a trove of photos and recordings from investigative interviews.
“We were interested that this extensive archival record existed of a situation in which people’s experience is [still] disputed,” says Rothwell, whose team spent months meticulously reconstructing the Hodgson’s public-housing abode to further explore “geography” of the audio recordings. “Who is in which room, what is upstairs, what room adjoins which, and where the furniture is.” Additionally, he’s cast actors to lip-sync the actual interviews, which lend an eerie vibe thanks to the “hissy 1970s tape,” he notes. “You know the performance is a construct, but what you are hearing is real.”
Apple TV+
So did anything go bump in the night during production? “There were a whole series of weird synchronicities of dates and numbers,” Rothwell admits. “On the first day of the edit, we realized it was the anniversary of the poltergeist’s appearance.” Oddly, he adds that one of the “strangest incidents” involved a prop. “We had spent a long time trying to find a specific and rare late 1960s IBM typewriter of the type used by Maurice. [Our production designer] and her crew scoured auction sites, and bought two, neither of which worked and which couldn’t be repaired. Then she found a third, working one. When it arrived, the art department gathered around it to test it, switched it on and typed in capitals ‘THE HAPPENINGS’ — which was the working title of the series during production. As the keys hit the ’S’ there was a bang, smoke and then the typewriter caught fire. That freaked them out a bit. It never worked again.”
“I think weird things happen when you are orientated towards them, when what might or might not be coincidence comes to feel remarkable and meaningful,” Rothwell says. “In some ways, this is what the series is about.”
Watch our exclusive video above.
The Enfield Poltergeist, Series Premiere, Friday, October 27, Apple TV+
