The Burning Girls’ Potential Is Snuffed Out by Its Half-Baked Folk Horror

We need to have a talk about underbaked folk horror. As we celebrate The Wicker Man’s 50th anniversary, we’re starting to see a lot more rural, British, spooky tales that float ideas of religious fanaticism, un-Christian rituals, and vague sermons on hallowed ground and the earth-inheriting sinful secrets or whatever. Compared to The Wicker Man and other lo-fi but unsettling, subversive treatises on humanity’s dark communes, these prestige-polished takes feel limp. 

For every Penda’s Fen, A Field in England, and Enys Men, we get Men, The Third Day, In the Earth, and now Paramount+’s adaptation of twisty village thriller The Burning Girls. Let’s set the record straight: if it doesn’t come with genuinely imaginative and visual explorations of pagan terror and how we’re spiritually bonded with sick earth, don’t bother; that’s not folk horror you’re drinking, it’s just sparkling small-town mystery.

The Burning Girls is no folk horror, at least not for the three episodes made available to reviewers. It’s unclear if The Burning Girls would describe itself as folk horror, but it certainly contains enough window dressing for critics to describe it as such—haunted twins, sacrificial children, deep psychological rifts that propel ugly secrets to the surface. Oh, and foggy moors.

Based on C.J. Tudor’s novel, The Burning Girls centers on Jack Brooks (Samantha Morton), a burned-out vicar and widow who, along with her feisty teenage daughter Flo (Ruby Stokes), takes up vicarage in Chapel Croft, a tiny, overcast English village where seemingly everybody has a dead parent or child, and their claim to fame is burning two innocent girls in the 1500s for not giving up the Protestant faith. Based on that, you can guess how friendly it is.

Jack is trying to distance herself from a scandal in her old parish over a dozen years prior where, as we learn in distorted, fragmented flashbacks, several deaths happened under her watch. Flo is keen to leave the trauma in the past, but it’s so far unclear how much the past has been bothering them for the past 13 or 14 years—a key example of the writers keeping important details at arm’s length for mystery-plotting reasons.

That’s not the only repressed scandal going on; 30 years before the show takes place, two rebellious teenage girls, Merry (Mollie Holder) and Joy (Safia Oakley-Green), ran away never to be heard from again. What’s more, Jack is only Chapel Croft’s new vicar because the previous one committed suicide. While there’s no shortage of dramatic happenings bubbling beneath the surface (including a different missing vicar, dead and/or haunted children, and lots of people losing their sanity), by the third episode, you find yourself lost in tangled knots of backstory and clue-laying. There is simply too much plot going on in this village.

It’s tough to gauge how successful a thriller is by only watching the bits where it foreshadows big spooky twists without actually delivering them, but there is something reliably entertaining about seeing human darkness and its sick aftereffects seep out from the pleasant, if conservative, facade of the prototypical English village. The performances, especially from Morton and Stokes, are strong, and familiar British faces crop up regularly enough to draw your attention—like Sherlock’s Rupert Graves as nasty farming baron Simon Harper and My Policeman’s David Dawson as the weirdly Renfield-esque church warden Aaron Marsh. But, in these first episodes, they feel less like characters and more like chess pieces in some clumsily moving plot machinery.

It’s good to see a mystery dropping in October that shows keen interest in actual scares, but the visions of burning ghosts and the intrusions of overwrought spooky vibes are done with such an unrefined, tactless touch—at least the jumpscare-y melodramas of Mike Flanagan are primarily about character, not twists, and despite how broad their attempts are, they do succeed in scaring and affecting you. Compare The Burning Girls to Midnight Mass; we see about 300% more actual church services in the latter, despite The Burning Girls having a clergywoman for a protagonist.

Although its plot may be ambitious, The Burning Girls has respectably modest goals: to hook you in, to surprise and stir you, to provide answers that will hopefully come out of nowhere. It’s okay, if a little underwhelming, for a mystery to trade exclusively in twists and twistedness, you just have to make your peace with the fact that there are barely any characters, just props to keep up the storytelling until a new piece of information is revealed when the writers best see fit.

You can tell this British miniseries is produced by an American streaming giant (Paramount+ is not a giant in terms of cultural impact, but rather money sunk into the project): it’s a little more schlocky and less rigid than primetime BBC novel adaptations, and the interest that’s being drummed up doesn’t feel connected to any homegrown British hype about the novel. It feels unfair judging The Burning Girls as a piece of modern streaming horror—anything more than average will land in the uppermost percentiles simply because it’s not terrible. But just like Chapel Croft, there’s something off about this tale of witchery and brutality.

The Burning Girls is now streaming on Paramount+. 

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.

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