Yahoo News ‘The Enfield Poltergeist’ Recreates a Haunting — and Some Terrifyingly Specific ’70s Design Choices
Natalie O’Connor was looking for a very specific type of car for production on Apple TV+’s “The Enfield Poltergeist.” A painstaking recreation of the most documented paranormal activity ever (and the inspiration for “The Conjuring 2”), the show needed a stand-in for the red E-Type Jaguar driven by lead investigator Maurice Grosse.
“We couldn’t find one anywhere, but we eventually got sent an option,” O’Connor told IndieWire. “And then we actually figured out that it was his real car.”
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On a different show, that story would be charming in its serendipity. But for “The Enfield Poltergeist,” the kismet has a creepy sense of inevitability in keeping with the events that plagued the Hodgson family from 1977 to 1979, resulting in hundreds of hours of recordings capturing things that went bump in the night and disembodied voices.
Those recordings are at the heart of the Apple TV+ four-part limited series, which has actors meticulously lip-syncing to them on exactingly recreated sets and costumes. The results are a chilling cross between documentary and horror series, even as the series makes room for the doubters who cast side-eye at Grosse’s insistence that what he recorded was true and not the pranks of teen girls.
No less dogged were O’Connor and costume designer Rachael Clarke (along with makeup and hair designer Frances Hounsom, who contributed everything from false teeth to sideburns), who somehow had to bring to life not just the weirdness of the late ’70s but also the idiosyncracies of a typical family — even if that family was being tossed from their beds by unseen forces.
“Peggy [the mother] had like a mack that she wore on top of her nightie most evenings and that was real,” Clarke told IndieWire. “That’s what she actually did do. So there was this sort of combination of day clothes, outerwear mixed with their nighties and their pajamas and things. It was funny recreating that without looking at my work being like, ‘My work is really weird!'”
Clarke had a bit more leeway in terms of deviation than O’Connor, although she made sure to recreate the red nightgown in which young Janet (the focus of much of the activity) was so often photographed. “Jerry [Rothwell, the director] wanted us to capture the essence of these characters, but we didn’t have to completely recreate them identically,” Clarke said. But because the Hodgsons’ flat was so well-documented — and featured such character-revealing specificity — O’Connor often found herself scouring eBay at 3 a.m.
The furniture was an assortment of builds and items sourced from junkyards and flea markets (because of the length of production, renting was too exorbitant to be a viable option). “Carpets was the hardest, honestly,” O’Connor said. “Trying to find that quantity of vintage carpets was really, really hard. I really wanted to design and print some of the carpets because they were amazing, the real ones. Like, you’ve never seen anything like it. But cost-wise it wasn’t really gonna happen. But I did have some of the wallpapers designed and printed because I felt like that was the thing that you were really, really gonna notice.”
And on top of that wallpaper throughout the Hodgson sisters’ bedroom was an array of photos and magazine covers that O’Connor calls “the bane of my existence.”
“The detective work that went into those posters is kind of insane,” O’Connor said. “And it sometimes gives me flashbacks of horror.” O’Connor managed to find almost every poster shown in photos of the bedroom in back issues of magazines like Jackie, Time Out, and Diana, but clearance issues became an even more tangled web. “We had to come up with our own graphics that kind of looked similar but weren’t quite the same. Like, my brother is one of the characters, which is quite mad. But yeah, annoyingly, I did actually have almost every single poster for real but not all of them ended up in the show because we couldn’t get clearance.”
All four episodes of “The Enfield Poltergeist” are now streaming on Apple TV+.
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