Sometimes horror can feel dangerous, like a terrifying bedtime story that has lodged itself deep within your imagination. Every shadow, every flicker of the lights or noise from just beyond where you can see feels formidable in a way it hasn’t before. There are horror stories we laugh at, horror stories that edify, and then there are those that rewire our brains, forever altering the things that go bump in the night and how willing we are to see them. Samuel Bodin’s Marianne landed on Netflix four years ago with urgency and frightening efficacy. Though only one season long, it remains the apex of Netflix’s original horror offerings, rivaling the likes of Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House as the scariest thing Netflix has ever done. And it’s not even close.
Metatextually setting the stage in ways that would make Stephen King proud, the series broadly follows Emma Larsimon (Victoire Du Bois), a successful horror author whose works follow the titular witch Marianne. Emma is ready to retire from horror on account of longstanding nightmares that have fueled her work. She’s even killed off the series’ main character, solidifying her commitment to leaving the witchy past behind. But in horror, the past is never left behind. A tragic visit from a young friend incites a quest for the truth as Emma returns home, desperate to determine whether the horrors of her book have manifested in very real, very frightening ways.
Written by Bodin and Quoc Dang Tran, Marianne earnestly earns credit for pacing. Horror is difficult to sustain for long, though in the age of streaming, more and more shows feel like several seasons worth of content warped to fit into one. Episode lengths are bloated, rivaling their cinematic peers in scope and scale. While not innately bad, it often runs contrary to the core conceits of successful horror—the less an audience sees, the better. Nothing will ever be as frightening as our imaginations, though modern streamer demands cultivate visibility and then some. Nothing is left cryptic or unclear—every monster is dragged into the light.
Marianne certainly edifies its haunting as the series unfurls over eight episodes, though it remains nebulous and destabilizing where it counts most. The psychology at play is remarkably rich, suspending the audience in a perennial state of uncertainty as Bodin crafts scare after scare.
Bodin plays with sound and light to instill terror. The mise en scène adroitly keeps Emma on edge, flanking darkness and personalities she can’t hope to penetrate. Everything from family members to suburban houses is rendered dangerous places, opportunities for Marianne to manifest in increasingly terrifying ways. While Emma remains a hardened protagonist, she—like the audience—is assailed throughout, growing more and more vulnerable with every jolt, attack, or gruesome confrontation.
Principally, Marianne plays within the realm of hypnagogic horror. Hypnagogia is the state one’s in immediately before falling asleep. Parallel to the transition from wakefulness to sleep are hypnagogic hallucinations, tactile and sensory hallucinations that occur during this transition. The feeling of literally falling while falling asleep is a common hallucination, one characterized by the sensory experience of being suspended in air when one really isn’t. The titular witch quite literally feeds on nightmares, and resultantly, Bodin disrupts narrative normalcy, effortlessly shifting from the real and unreal, reality and hallucination, generating massive scares along the way.
Marianne could strike at any moment. Conventional suspense and more modern, visceral (and gory) scares punctuate the classic tropes. Marianne is both a specific horror villain and a template, one capable of terrifying the audience within the rules of its universe and beyond them. She is general enough to exist beyond the boundaries of the show, creeping into the audience’s own nightmares, floating right behind them when the lights go down and the world goes quiet.
Director Samuel Bodin released Cobweb in theaters this July. The trailer makes it clear he hasn’t lost his deft touch for merging childhood whimsy with terrifying nightmares. I can confirm it’s as stellar a follow-up as any.
Marianne remains a perfect calling card for a burgeoning voice in horror. It is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen, an antidote to desensitization and horror excess. It’s lean, mean, gruesome, and enduring. It’s nightmare logic rendered reality and an absolute must-watch for horror fans who haven’t seen it yet. If you don’t believe me, trust that Marianne will see to it that you do.