The suggestion that all's not well in the village comes fairly early on in the BBC production, The Living and the Dead, a six-part supernatural period chiller set in a bucolic corner of 1890s Somerset (BBC First, Channel 119 DStv). For a start, in the first episode, 16-year-old Harriet, a creepy but otherwise comely wench played by Tallulah Haddon, speaks in strange voices, cruelly feeds ducklings to pigs, and roams the lavishly-filmed countryside at night in a white nightgown, a garment that now practically shrieks "demonic possession" thanks to its dramatic appearances in countless horror flicks.Soon enough all the other familiar frightening tropes have come to play: ominously creaking floorboards, the menacing caws of crows, the malevolent expressions on the faces of china dolls, pottering about in church graveyards, the sudden appearance of faces in mirrors, the haunting soundtrack, flickering candles. Familiar as it may seem, it's all edge-of-the seat viewing.What you also get is much folksy dread à la The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, Straw Dogs and other "closed community" cult films. In this case, it's a sort of Thomas Hardyish backwater seething with suspicion of outsiders, a place where the locals, when not quaffing cider and ruminating on stalks of straw, rut with one another under the trees by the light of bonfires during solstice celebrations.Into the village come our unwelcome heroes from London, pioneering psychologist Nathan Appleby and his feisty society photographer wife, Charlotte - played by Colin Morgan and Charlotte Spencer. Progressive city types, the Applebys are only out here in the sticks because they've inherited the family farm and are determined to not only get on with their lives in the country but also to bring a bit of that modern rational thought to all the strange goings-on around them.They are a rather handsome couple, and critics have noted that Morgan and Spencer share a rare - for horror, that is - on-screen chemistry; there have been mutterings of DH Lawrence with spooks - or, as the Daily Telegraph put it, "Indeed, all we needed was a six-packed shirtless, scything scene to make this marketable as 'Poldark with poltergeists'."There's a surprising twist in the closing moments of the first episode, which is followed immediately by the second, about a young boy whose visions spur Nathan into unearthing more awful secrets in his new neighbourhood.The first two episodes of "The Living and the Dead" are repeated this evening. New episodes on Wednesdays on DStv Channel 119...