For a more general overview of the series, Melissa Dickson’s and Alison Moulds’ reviews are both great. Arriving from the nation’s busy, cultivated capital, Shepzoy is a culture shock for New Woman Charlotte and a frightening return to the past for Nathan, whose family has long run the community’s farm.Īs his mother ails, the couple must adjust to the old world of rural Somerset, a setting straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel.
The narrative of the BBC’s recent series The Living and the Dead exists within this creative environment, following the story of Nathan Appleby and his wife, Charlotte, as they move to rural Shepzoy in Somerset in the year 1894.
Haunted landscapes characterise the worlds within the medium of folk horror, creating fictional spaces in which pagan tradition collides with Christian demonology. Charlotte Spencer and Colin Morgan as the Applebys (Robert Viglasky/BBC)
