The Secret of Crickley Hall (BBC America, NR)

This may not be the most original of series, but watching it play out is fun.

I’m always up for a good ghost story, or even a middling ghost story, especially if a creepy old house and some haunting across the decades are involved. The Secret of Crickley Hall, a 3-part BBC miniseries based on a novel of the same name by James Herbert, has both. It also delivers some effective scares along the way, so I’m willing to forgive the fact that the plot is basically cobbled together from bits and pieces of standard horror lore.

The Secret of Crickley Hall isn’t really a horror film but more of a psychological mystery and suspense film—there are supernatural elements, to be sure, but the film aims to create a sense of unease based on the fact that things don’t seem quite right, and of dread based on the sense that something bad is about to happen, rather than revulsion at something that has already happened and is spelled out graphically on the screen.

The story begins in 1943, in an orphanage housing children evacuated from London during the Blitz. One of the boys is told that the housemaster, Augustus Cribben (Douglas Henshall), wants to see him, which is clearly not welcome news as the boy runs to hide in a closet. We later learn that this child is Stefan Rosenbaum (Kian Parsiani), a German-Jewish refugee, and a frequent object of Cribben’s rages (caning for the most minor of offenses is standard practice in this orphanage, along with inadequate food and heating), although the other orphans also get their share.

Cutting to present-day London, Eve Caleigh (Suranne Jones) and her son Cam (Elliot Kerley) both wake up from nightmares. It turns out that they have a special psychic connection, symbolized by the fact that both have shortened little fingers (this doesn’t make sense to me either). Otherwise, they’re part of a normal middle-class English family, which also includes an engineer father, Gabe (Tom Ellis), and two daughters, Loren (Maisie Williams) and Cally (Pixie Davies). The placid surface of their lives is shattered, however, when Cam disappears without a trace from a local playground.

Almost a year later, Cam has not turned up, and Eve blames herself for falling asleep when she should have been watching him. Gabe has a job to do in the countryside and suggests the family move temporarily, in order to help Eve forget about the tragedy and move on with her life. Their new location is Crickley Hall, in Hollow Bay near Devil’s Cleave, and if that sounds like it belongs in a Simpsons episode (I’m surprised the address is not 666 Bloody Lane or something like that), well, this series does recycle a lot of tropes. The house has been sitting empty for some time because, wait for it, it’s the site of the orphanage in the 1943 storyline.

Needless to say, there’s still plenty of evil residing in Crickley Hall, including a mysterious figure that attacks people with a cane. This may not be the most original of series, but watching it play out is fun, and writer/adapter Joe Ahearne does a particularly good job of cutting between the two storylines and establishing parallels between them.

Since it’s all about seeing the story unfold, I don’t want to spoil too much here. But I will say that in the 1943 storyline, an idealistic young teacher, Nancy Linnet (Olivia Cooke), arrives at the school and starts to shake things up; that Cribben’s sister Magda (Sarah Smart) helps run the school and is only slightly less brutal than her brother; that one of the orphans, Maurice (Bill Milner), acts as a sort of trustee to keep the other children in line; and that Nancy has a boyfriend, Percy (Iain De Caestecker) who is the only person interested in helping her rescue the children. There’s also a scary old well in the basement, a nearby graveyard, and a ledger in which Cribben records all the children’s offenses and how they were punished for them.

The series consists of three episodes of 59 minutes each, all included on a single disc. There are no extras included, but the picture and sound are both sharp and clear. | Sarah Boslaugh