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For anyone who has seen True Detective, the opening scene of ITV’s new crime thriller Dark will seem hauntingly familiar: a naked body is found in a terrifying set-up in a remote desert.
Except this victim is a young man on the cusp of adulthood in the Scottish Highlands. The lack of a female victim has made the adaptation of H.R. Halliday’s novel Out of the Shadows “inevitable” for show writer Matt Hartley.
Ahead of this weekend’s release, he says: Metro: “It was not young women who were killed in the forest. It felt like there was a different lens through which to explore sacrifice.”
As the six episodes unfold, the body count mounts and the cops on the case quickly realize they are dealing with a serial killer.
The “frustrations” of a young man living in the middle of nowhere were something Hartley could relate to from his teenage years, adding: “I don’t think we often see these young people at that age where independence exists, and that’s the underlying theme of the motivation for someone to do it.”
“It was a great chance to find out what it’s like when we think young men aren’t as vulnerable as their female counterparts and just start to disappear. How is the community reacting differently to this?”
ITV’s Dark follows the hunt for a serial killer who kills men in their teens and twenties (Photo: ITV)
Laura Donnelly plays detective on the Monica Kennedy case (Photo: ITV)
True Detective was indeed a big draw as inspiration for the series, with its “breathtaking use of landscape, atmosphere and tone”. Hartley talks about Dark as turning it into a distinctly British drama, set outside the police station and into the distant future.
Another reference was the BBC series The Fall, with its cat-and-mouse chase between detective and killer.
The detective is Monica Kennedy, played by Laura Donnelly, and the mouse is an incredibly creepy masked figure who Hartley described in the script as someone you might see when driving past and first think, “That’s a normal face,” before doing a double-take.
“It’s like a ghost,” he says. “We’ve talked a lot about at what point we’ll really see this person haunt both the show and our detectives.”
When it comes, it strikes.
I don’t want to strike fear into the hearts of people, but perhaps it is…
Quote Quote
Hartley promises that Agatha Christie’s students getting involved may be able to pinpoint who is to blame before the big reveal happens.
But he’s not interested in hanging out on message boards, even if the prospect of fan theories is “fantastic.”
“It means that in some sense we are doing a good job,” he says. “But I think it would scare me.” I’d say, “Oh, they saw that,” or, “That could have been a great idea,” or, “Why didn’t I implement that more?”
“I’m afraid I’ll lose so much of my life if I do this and then join them. That wouldn’t be very good.”
‘It’s like a ghost’s presence’ (Photo: ITV)
The author of Dark describes it as a wildlife crime thriller (Photo: ITV).
Before Hartley struck fear into hearts on ITV primetime, he made melodramas on the soapy shores of Hollyoaks and EastEnders.
I imagine this should be the perfect training ground for perfecting scripts.
“To be honest, I wasn’t very good at it,” he says with surprising candor. “There are so many people who are fantastic at it because they have the muscle and they know the show and the characters so well.
“I didn’t know the characters as well as I know the characters in the world I’m going to create. As with this series, yes, it was based on Gareth’s brilliant books, but I created a lot of these characters and they lived and breathed because of the heartbeat I put into them.”
This novel is the first in a trilogy. There’s a “very, very clear crime” in series two, says Hartley, but there’s no word yet on whether Dark will become a longer series. Color me curious after this description.
As for the series finale, he quotes former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross’s infamous line: “Don’t have nightmares” and adds: “But I think if it happens, it will be part of the job done.”
Darkness can be watched tonight on ITV1 at 9pm and the entire series on ITVX.
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