It’s Halloween – and Kristen’s family come under attack…

There’s something darkly appropriate about the episode airing after this show has received a deserved second season pickup that it includes a visual homage to one of the greatest movies in the genre – the 1973 version of The Exorcist. It’s a homage and an upturning: the visual iconography is used to mark the arrival at the house of the exact opposite of a character similar to the priest in the original, but it’s quite clear from the look on Kurt Boggs’ face at the end of the episode, he has seen things that are outside his normal experience.

The show’s spent the first four episodes helping us to get to know more about the central trio – Katja Herbers’ Kristen, Mike Colter’s David, and Aasif Mandvi’s Ben – but Dewayne Darian Jones’ distinctly unsettling script throws more of a spotlight on Christine Lahti’s Sheryl and Kristen’s three children. (We have to assume that their father is still alive and climbing mountains, no matter what Rose 390 said last week.)

As a parent, there’s nothing worse than the thought of your child being in trouble and not being able to do anything about it, and I’m quite sure there are other parents who were concerned about the peril being placed around the children in this episode – not to mention, quite how those scenes were shot so as not to alarm the kids themselves. It’s the second episode on the trot where the children have been the subject of some sort of supernatural activity – hopefully it won’t be something that occurs every week.

Michael Emerson’s Leland makes up for being absent last week with a vengeance – he’s the tempter, the devil sitting on Sheryl’s metaphorical right shoulder, trying to keep her out of the way so that the children can be the focus of attention. For one lovely moment, I thought Sheryl was going to bring him back to the house with her – the look on Kristen’s face would have been interesting, to say the least.

The show also gets into an exorcism properly for the first time, and it exposes fault lines within the team as well as moving the larger plotline along. Ben’s out of it, exposing a TV haunting show’s shenanigans, with Mandvi broadening our understanding of his character.

Verdict: Another unsettling hour from a show that’s allowing its characters to develop at a sensible pace. 8/10

Paul Simpson