ITV’s new crime thriller The Dark opens with a naked body found in the Scottish Highlands—a young man, not a woman. Writer Matt Hartley says this distinction made adapting GR Halliday’s novel From the Shadows “unturndownable.”
Why male victims?
“It wasn’t young women getting massacred in woods,” Hartley told Metro. “It did feel like it was a different prism in which victimhood was going to be explored.” The six-episode series follows detectives as they realize they’re hunting a serial killer.
Hartley drew on his own adolescence to explore the “frustrations” of young men in remote areas. “I don’t think we often see those young men, at that age where independence is there, and that’s a core theme of the motive,” he said. “It was a great chance to explore what it’s like when we think that young men are not as vulnerable as their female counterparts, and just start to disappear. How does the community react differently to that?”
Inspirations: True Detective and The Fall
Hartley cited True Detective for its “haunting use of landscape, atmosphere and tone,” and BBC’s The Fall for its cat-and-mouse chase. Detective Monica Kennedy, played by Laura Donnelly, pursues a masked figure Hartley described as “a ghostly presence.” He added, “We talked a lot about at what point we really truly see this person that’s going to be haunting both the show and our detectives.”
Hartley promises Agatha Christie fans may solve the mystery before the reveal but avoids message boards. “It means we’re doing a good job in some ways,” he said. “But I think it would terrify me. I would be going, ‘Oh, they saw it’, or ‘That could have been a great idea’.”
From soap operas to primetime
Before The Dark, Hartley wrote for Hollyoaks and EastEnders, though he admits, “I wasn’t very good at it. There are so many people that are fantastic at it… I didn’t know the characters as well as I know the characters in the world that I’m going to create.”
The novel is the first in a trilogy, with the second featuring a “very, very distinct crime,” but no word yet on a series renewal. Hartley quoted former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross’s sign-off: “Don’t have nightmares. But I think if that happens, then that was part of the job done.”
The Dark airs on ITV1 tonight at 9pm and is available in full on ITVX.
