The Best Agatha Christie Miniseries Leans Into Horror

The Big Picture

• Agatha Christie’s 1939 classic
  And Then There Were None
  is her best-selling work and often considered literature’s first slasher story.
• The best adaptation of
  And Then There Were None
  , a BBC miniseries from 2015, captures the grim and horrifying elements that set the book apart from the rest of Christie’s work.
• The adaptation effectively uses horror movie traditions to create an oppressive and tension-filled atmosphere.

A group of strangers is invited to a secluded getaway. Instead of a glamorous party, they find themselves picked off one by one like lambs to the slaughter. Also, the call is coming from inside the house. Sound familiar? That’s because Agatha Christie invented it. The Queen of Crime earned her superlatives as a mistress of mystery. Few authors before or after proved as capable of crafting intellectually satisfying, meticulously plotted, and thoroughly entertaining yet morally interrogative works of crime fiction. Within her oeuvre, some stories qualify as frightening; Christie always made murder gnarly, but expert saviors like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple infused the grisly with safety. The best example of Christie going full-throttle horror is her 1939 masterpiece And Then There Were None. Not only did Christie fans vote the standalone as their favorite book of hers, it’s the world’s best-selling crime novel. Also, just to make And Then There Were None a triple threat, many consider it literature’s first slasher story. James Prichard, Christie’s great-grandson and the CEO of her estate, told Entertainment Weekly in 2020 that “whether subliminally or deliberately, [And Then There Were None is] the template to all sorts of movies be it Seven or even Alien.” Because, of course, Dame Agatha Did That.

And Then There Were None‘s best and most faithful adaptation, a BBC miniseries from 2015, understands these horror elements set the book apart from Christie’s other work and remain essential to its lasting acclaim. A psychological thriller set in 1939, with Britain on the cusp of World War II and still reeling from the Great War’s aftershocks, ten individuals gather on an island after receiving invitations from a mysterious U. N. Owen. The invites contain a myriad of motivations to guarantee attendance: wealth, intrigue, debauchery, etc. But their host never shows. Instead, these ten souls, each beset with secrets and sins, collide in an act of psychological warfare. They discover someone has selected them for death as carefully as a housekeeper sets a dining table. (Eat the rich, indeed.) And with their terrible pasts, such murder-as-justice might be warranted. From director Craig Viveiros and screenwriter Sarah Phelps (who seconded Prichard’s claims that And Then There Were None “spawns a whole style of entertainment – this house in the woods where people start dying”), the miniseries’ cinematography, pacing, production design, and the performances of its eye-popping ensemble cast, approach Christie’s best whodunit like the paranoid, claustrophobic, and socially eviscerating proto-slasher it is.

What Inspired Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’?

According to Agatha Christie’s estate (who would know best), And Then There Were None “is arguably Christie’s most parodied work.” The estate cites a Superman comic arc and a Family Guy episode called, “And Then There Were Fewer,” and neither the comparisons nor the adaptations end there. Multiple countries have made direct movie and television adaptations since at least 1945, including the BBC. Other productions draw conscious or unconscious inspiration or can be considered loose remakes: CBS’s 2009 mystery-thriller series Harper’s Island, the 2022 A24 indie horror Bodies Bodies Bodies, the Japanese video game Umineko When They Cry, and even the American cult classic Clue, which employs a humorous take. Just the concept of a slasher story depends on a group of people falling victim one by one to an anonymous killer.

That idea, and its difficulty, is what inspired Christie. She wrote And Then There Were None because the plot was “so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me.” Her novels often involved a large cast of characters, but And Then There Were None demanded a higher level of cleverness: creating 10 individuals of varying moral ambiguity, trapping them on an island, and having a perpetrator (or perpetrators) murder them through different means, is a recipe for plot holes galore. The conceit does require a suspension of disbelief, but Christie’s customarily tight plotting keeps readers on their toes. Likewise, And Then There Were None demanded that Christie establish an unsettling atmosphere that builds over time. Something has to feel odd, but it’s not until several dead bodies have accumulated that the remaining survivors realize foul play is afoot, not coincidental accidents.

The 2015 miniseries succeeds because it doesn’t change any of Christie’s fundamentals. By making some of the crimes more heinous, screenwriter Sarah Phelps highlights the book’s subtextual bigotry and addresses some of Christie’s own flawed beliefs. Added circumstances, like a sexual relationship between two characters, draw upon the time frame’s evolving social mores. Some murder tableaus are simplified to make them easier to film but remain effectively dramatic. Christie’s great-grandson praised Phelps’s insight into the Queen of Crime’s work: “Sarah Phelps actually taught me about my great-grandmother’s work. I read them very differently now as a result of speaking to her and reading her scripts and watching her show,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “There are two particular things that she pointed out to me. One of which is actually they are serious books. She was very adamant that these were not fluffy little parlor game mysteries. She took the crime seriously; there were consequences and all that.”

What Makes Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’ a Slasher Mystery?

Being the most faithful version of And Then There Were None means being unrelentingly grim. When Christie herself adapted it for the stage, she switched out the novel’s “far too bleak” conclusion; World War II audiences deserved a more hopeful ending than what she had inflicted upon her readers. Most adaptations have followed Christie’s lead and injected some hard-won optimism, which negates And Then There Were None‘s intent. It took almost 50 years for someone to follow Christie’s footsteps up to the bitter end: Desyat Negrityat, a Russian film made in 1987.

The 2015 version follows suit. Sarah Phelps said of the book:

“There was no redemption. Within the Marple and Poirot stories somebody is there to unravel the mystery, and that gives you a sense of safety and security, of predicting what is going to happen next. Somebody is going to be brought into the light as being a perpetrator of a crime; someone is going to be brought to justice. In this book that doesn’t happen –
no one is going to come to save you, absolutely nobody is coming to help or rescue or interpret
. There is someone in charge, and that person is malign. […] I found it shocking at how cold it was – the brutal nature of justice. Justice is coming, and justice will be served and it was painful.”

So who, exactly, is in charge? That’s a reveal too excellent to spoil. What can be said is there are no heroes. Everyone is a moral failure, professionally or personally (and the two inevitably overlap). Vera Claythorne (Maeve Dermody), an out-of-work governess and the closest Christie gets to a Final Girl, saw her ward tragically drown under dubious circumstances. Surgeon Edward Armstrong (Toby Stephens) became an alcoholic after a patient died on his operating table. Judge Lawrence Wargrave (Charles Dance) presents himself as an English gentleman but has a merciless reputation behind the bench. The same goes for William Blore (Burn Gorman), a police officer, and Emily Brent (Miranda Richardson), a self-aggrandizing Christian; both should be pious and charitable, but those instincts are in short supply. John MacArthur (Sam Neill) earned medals during World War I and jumps at ghosts. Callous rumors haunt butler Thomas Rogers (Noah Taylor) and his wife Ethel (Anna Maxwell Martin). Only Philip Lombard (Aidan Turner), a mercenary, admits the blood on his hands. Rich playboy Anthony Marston (Douglas Booth), meanwhile, is just here for the free drugs.

‘And Then There Were None’ Uses Horror Tropes Perfectly

Some of the above are naturally depraved. Others are so wracked by guilt over their misdeeds that they can barely function under the slightest pressure. Just like the novel, which introduces an oppressive feeling and builds upon it with each grisly twist, and by unraveling each character’s psychological flaws, And Then There Were None is a pressure cooker. The BBC adaptation has a bleak atmosphere from the jump and escalates tension through tried and true horror movie traditions. If Christie created the slasher, then this miniseries goes back to the basics. Stuart Earl‘s score deploys ominous strings and Inception-esque stingers as soon as the group sets sail like an organ in a classic horror movie means that hapless victims are approaching a vampire’s castle. Cinematographer John Pardue favors close-ups of knives eviscerating lobster shells, bloody animal organs piled atop a plate, and axes shoved into wood like the most obvious Chekhov’s Gun. In fact, the Rogers setting the table for their guests is a literal table setting for what’s to come. The audience recognizes these stylized portents of doom and is still drawn in by them; the more And Then There Were None leans into horror cues, the more effective they are.

By the time the first body drops, gagging up blood, all bets are off. Well, except for the guarantee about what kind of story this is. There’s no way out and no one coming to save them — no conveniently positioned Poirot and his little gray cells from which we draw comfort and turn horrific violence into a cozy mystery. A patient predator is on the hunt, complete with complicated murder set pieces, and everyone is an intended victim. Helpless and trapped, the characters and the audience are unsettled, jumping at every noise. The sound design heightens ambient noises like an echoing cave or drops the sound out entirely. People wander dark hallways by candlelight; a threat could be hidden in every shadow. The camera makes people small by framing them in a corner of a wide open room, slowly tracking closer as viewers instinctively wait for something to appear in the open space.

Sometimes, something does appear. Here, a jump scare means something: MacArthur and Brent see reflections and hear breathing over their shoulders. Vera hallucinates a hand shooting out of the sink to strangle her like this is The Ring. In every case, it’s their guilt manifesting as the mangled, bloodied corpses of the human beings they maybe, possibly, killed. And Then There Were None uses every visual and auditory trope employed by over 100 years of multimedia in the story that birthed those very same genre stylings.

As the adaptor, Sarah Phelps shares a similar meticulousness with Christie. And Then There Were None feels extraordinarily grounded in its island location, period timeframe, and the ways Phelps reveals the characters’ fundamental traits through choice sketches. Speaking about her writing approach to any original or adapted script, let alone the best-selling and arguably most influential crime thriller of all time, she shared:

“I have to be able to see the world they’re in and to absolutely know what it looks like and what’s on the walls and what the colours of the walls are and where the light falls… That’s as important as dialogue – the house and the island are characters and the space that any drama takes place in is a character in itself. Otherwise it’s just a blank featureless landscape through which people move, and then their actions within it are meaningless because you haven’t given any time as to what they can see, what the weather’s doing, what the terrain is like, where the light source comes from – that is all really important to me.”

‘And Then There Were None’ Is Pure Psychological Horror

Slasher villains are usually motivated by twisted revenge, with some exceptions. Freddy Krueger‘s mad about getting burned alive. Jason Voorhees is mad about getting drowned. Michael Myers doesn’t like sex. And Then There Were None‘s villain is Jigsaw before Jigsaw: a coldly impersonal dispenser of justice and a brilliant schemer. It took so much thought, effort, and time to assemble ten criminals, let alone execute them like some Old Testament God on the warpath. It’s almost impossible not to draw comparisons between And Then There Were None‘s villain and the knock-offs they spawned. They even get their explanatory monologue.

Unlike Jigsaw, however, here the torturer is psychological. Each individual deserves punishment in this person’s eyes. Before death, why not let them emotionally twist like a worm on a hook? Then, the killer can look upon their works with satisfaction. It’s this competency of writing on Sarah Phelps’ part, paired with exquisite production, that keeps And Then There Were None enthralling. Every recognizable horror element emphasizes Christie’s already perfect bones, without a hint of winking irony.

Admittedly, the interpersonal conflicts springing from And Then There Were None‘s hostile paranoia are delicious. As accusations fly like bullets and the stakes heighten with each increasingly terrible development, Agatha Christie is the woman behind the curtain revealing society’s flaws. And Then There Were None is commentative horror ala Alfred Hitchcock, the thriller as social autopsy. When peoples’ selfishness is revealed, and their lives threatened, manners and affectations crumble so easily — if they existed to begin with. Those with power believe they can shirk the consequences, while those acting out of “love” spend their lives hiding.

Objectively, these people are terrible. Their actions deserve punitive justice. Yet And Then There Were None raises the age-old question: is achieving that end result via murder ever worth it? Even if the deplorable victims have their own victims, or their subsequent guilt is all-consuming? Most slashers at least allow the Final Girl a measure of catharsis. Without giving too much away, And Then There Were None honors Christie’s hopeless tale with its own gallingly brazen despair. It’s violent, but not purposeless. The only answer is that violence isn’t the answer.

Agatha Christie Created the Blueprint for the Slasher Genre

Matthew Prichard, Christie’s grandson, described her highest-selling novel as “probably the book my grandmother was proudest of.” Referring to the BBC’s And Then There Were None, Prichard praised Sarah Phelps’ scripts with a definitive, “[Agatha] would have liked this.” From the Queen of Crime, there’s hardly a higher compliment.

The definitive interpretation of Christie’s most sobering work, And Then There Were None follows her structure like a map and transfers it to the screen through proven cinematic techniques. Novel and miniseries do exactly what slasher horror should: challenge, disrupt, and terrify.

And Then There Were None is available to stream on AcornTV.

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