In folk horror, the charismatic stranger who turns up just after a family tragedy is never the new piano tuner. Netflix seems to know this. Deadline reports that Paul Bettany and Steven Yeun will lead Pagans, a supernatural drama series from Joshua Zetumer, creator of Say Nothing, who is also showrunner.
Netflix says the series “unearths one’s darkest thoughts about family”. Yeun plays Gus, a man left as sole carer for his two children after his wife dies. His son Nate (Logan Kim) is described as typical. His daughter Alice (Sabine Grace) is “anything but”, and what begins as a strained father-daughter relationship “soon evolves into something far more sinister”. Bettany plays Mag, “a charismatic stranger”. Marin Ireland plays a single mother, Janelle, and Intae Kim plays Gus’s younger brother, Casey.
The executive producers are worth noticing. Yeun is one, alongside Zetumer, Sarah Esberg, Erica Kay and Christina Oh. So is Drew Goddard, who co-wrote and directed The Cabin in the Woods and once wrote the Spielberg version of Robopocalypse that never got made. So is Jonathan van Tulleken, whose directing work on Shōgun showed he can make a period of quiet unbearable. With that line-up, nobody should expect a cosy family drama in which the worst that happens is a burnt Sunday roast.
The casting is a lot of genre in one room. Yeun has spent recent years staring at things in the sky in Nope, dying repeatedly in Mickey 17 and voicing Invincible. Bettany has been an archangel (Legion), a synthezoid (most recently in Disney+’s VisionQuest) and, for years before that, Tony Stark’s polite computer. Cast him as a charming stranger called Mag and viewers will start wondering about his intentions before the end of his first scene.
Netflix hasn’t announced a date or a setting, or said whether anyone ends up in a wicker effigy. Until it does, here is some advice from the long tradition of The Wicker Man and Children of the Stones: if a softly spoken Englishman knocks on your door offering to help with the children, tell him you already have a childminder.
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