So Long, Marianne

"Marianne born on a Tuesday

Happy on a Wednesday

Married on a Thursday

Witch on a Friday

Caught on a Saturday

Judged on a Sunday

Executed on Monday

And buried on a Tuesday"

There's a shortlist of horror films that have given me the creeps. Ones that got under my skin and even given me nightmares. Marianne was the recent addition to this list. But it isn't a movie. It's a TV show. It's right beside Mike Flanagan's The Haunting of Hill House as far as scary television shows go. 

The look of the show is what pulled me in immediately. There's no gloomy or desaturated look that other horror shows have. The pallette is vivid with warm lighting. Director Samuel Bodin brings us back to a style of horror bereft of jump scares and instead focuses on drawn out sequences of dread. His focus on the human face and the many contortions it can contain is one of the things that separates this from your average horror show. 

The story is about Emma Seligman, a horror author who just put the finishing touches on her last book in the Lizzie Larcken series concerning a witch named Marianne. She is confronted by a childhood friend at a book signing that forces her to confront her past. Her friend, Caroline, tells her that her mother has been possessed by Marianne. She pleads to her to come back to her childhood home to defeat the curse. The actress who portrays Caroline's mother, Mirielle Herbstmeyer, is a face you will never forget after this series. 

One of the main themes of the show is childhood trauma. How the decisions we make as children cause us to self-sabotage as adults. Marianne, a combination of Pennywise's playfulness and Annie Wilkes' obsessive demand for a writer to write what she wants, brings about this trauma in her wake. Having the power to jump from body to body. It's a show that sustains it's terror right up until the climax. Leaving an ending that sticks the landing in its relentlessness.