Bill Nighy has joined Caitríona Balfe in Ascension, the cult horror series Alfonso Cuarón is making for Apple TV. Deadline broke the casting on Monday, and it has since spread across Dread Central, Bleeding Cool, Fangoria and the rest of the horror press. Nobody is saying who Nighy plays, which, given what the show is about, is probably wise. A secretive cult is precisely where you’d expect to find a tall, softly spoken Englishman with impeccable tailoring and a smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes.
Balfe, fresh from eight seasons of Outlander, plays Rose, “a relentless documentary filmmaker and recently divorced mother” who investigates the Church of Ascension, a 20th-century cult, and finds herself drawn to its teachings before discovering something considerably nastier underneath. Apple ordered the one-hour psychological horror series in August. Natalie Erika James, who directed the excellent Australian dementia-horror Relic, is co-showrunner with her Relic co-writer Christian White, and James is lead director. Alfonso and Carlos Cuarón write alongside them, and all four executive produce, with Anonymous Content producing. There are no dates yet for filming or a premiere.
Here is the bit most of the coverage skims past. Ascension is “inspired by” Last Days, the 2012 novel by the British horror writer Adam Nevill. In the book, a guerrilla documentary-maker called Kyle Freeman is hired to film the Temple of the Last Days, a cult notorious for a massacre in 1975 and for its paranoid leader, Sister Katherine, who lived in luxury while her followers lived in squalor. The closer Kyle gets to the cult’s old haunts and surviving members, the stranger, and less survivable, the job becomes. Last Days won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel, and Cuarón first tried to make it back in 2017, with Casey Affleck attached. So it is an English book with an award on the mantelpiece, about to become a prestige American TV show with a different hero, and on the evidence of the trade reports it is barely getting a mention.
Nevill is no stranger to the screen. His 2011 novel The Ritual, about four old university friends who take a short cut through a Swedish forest and very much regret it, became the 2017 film that Netflix took to most of the world. We reviewed The Ritual when it came out, along with House of Small Shadows and Lost Girl, and he has long been one of the most reliably unsettling horror novelists Britain has produced. The reports don’t say whether he is involved in the series. Turning his male documentary-maker into a woman piecing her life back together after a divorce is a reasonable change, and it gives Balfe plenty to play.
Cult horror has had a busy decade, from The Sacrament to Midsommar, but a filmmaker of Cuarón’s quality working from a novel this good is a rarer thing. If you’d like a head start on the Church of Ascension, track down a copy of Last Days. As with all such communities, it is better to read about them than to join.
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