Requiem, episode one review: there are genuine chills in this fine Friday night horror

The word “hokum” is of uncertain origin. Probably an Americanism, first recorded in the early 20th century, it is a portmanteau of “hocus-pocus” and “bunkum”, and it’s not necessarily pejorative. Requiem (BBC One), for instance, a new supernatural drama for Friday nights, is definitely hokum, and I was gripped with a delicious fear throughout.

Nostalgia had a lot to do with my enjoyment. As a child I would sneak downstairs after everyone had gone to bed (sorry, Mum!) and load our VHS recorder with Hammer House of Horrors that had been recorded off the telly. These were nasty, crude, captivating little tales, about suburban poltergeists (the most malevolent kind), quaint villages possessed by the undead, and nice middle-class families torn asunder by telekinesis. In one memorable episode, former Fifties “blonde bombshell” Diana Dors played the Hungarian matriarch of a family of werewolves. I don’t think this was meant to be funny.

Requiem felt like an upmarket Hammer Horror. It starred Lydia Wilson, an actress usefully blessed with an austere sort of beauty, as Matilda, a concert cellist. Her depressive mother (played by Joanna Scanlan) was followed everywhere by phantasmagorical voices; then, in a shocking and very well-crafted scene, she slit her throat in an underground car park, as Matilda looked on.

We discovered that this might well have been linked to the mother’s obsession with the disappearance of a young Welsh girl, Carys Howell, two decades earlier. So, in search of answers and in the best horror tradition, Matilda and her millennial best friend Hal (Joel Fry) decamped to Carys’s home town so that they could become “outsiders” and thus be particularly susceptible to any supernatural happenings.

The Welsh tourist board can’t have been happy at Requiem’s portrait of a land of surly barmaids, nasty flock wallpaper and half-day closing. “The whole country’s a bit mildewy,” commented Nick, an Australian who had turned up to claim his country pile following his uncle’s suicide. Were the suicides linked? Had the wide-eyed Matilda been here before? Was she really Matilda?

Of course, the most frightening things happened after dark and, as is customary in these situations, neither Matilda nor Hal were content to pull their duvets over their heads when things started to go bump in the night. Instead, they stood numb with terror as the French windows burst open and net curtains billowed furiously like something out of a prog-rock video from the Eighties. I have no idea what is going to happen next, but I reckon you would be mad to miss the next episode. That said, I can’t guarantee it will leave you sane, either.