‘I wrote ITV’s chilling new thriller because it wasn’t about women being massacred’

For anyone who has seen True Detective, the opening scene to ITV’s new crime thriller The Dark will feel hauntingly familiar: a naked body is found, eerily staged, in the remote wilderness.

Except this victim is a young man, on the cusp of adulthood in the Scottish Highlands. The distinction of not having a female victim is one that made adapting GR Halliday’s novel From the Shadows ‘unturndownable’ for show writer Matt Hartley.

Ahead of the release this weekend, he tells Metro: ‘It wasn’t young women getting massacred in woods. It did feel like it was a different prism in which victimhood was going to be explored.’

As the six episodes unspool, the body count racks up and the coppers on the case quickly realise they’re dealing with a serial killer.

The ‘frustrations’ of a young man in the middle of nowhere were something Hartley could relate to from his own adolescence, adding: ‘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 of driving somebody to do this.

‘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?’

True Detective did loom large when drawing inspiration for the show, with its ‘haunting use of landscape, atmosphere and tone’. Hartley speaks of The Dark as funnelling that into a distinctly British drama, which steps out of a police precinct and into the great beyond. 

Another reference point was BBC’s The Fall, with its cat-and-mouse chase between detective and killer.

The detective is Monica Kennedy, played by Laura Donnelly, while the mouse is an incredibly creepy masked figure, whom Hartley described in the script as someone you could glimpse driving past and first think ‘that’s a normal face’, before doing a double take. 

‘It’s like a ghostly presence,’ he says. ‘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.’

When it does come, it packs a punch.

I don’t want to be instilling fear in the hearts of people, but maybe I do…

Hartley promises that the Agatha Christie disciples tuning in might be able to piece together exactly who the culprit is before the big reveal.

But he isn’t keen on traversing the message boards, even if the prospect of fan theories is ‘fantastic’.

‘It means we’re doing a good job in some ways,’ he says. ‘But I think it would terrify me. I would be going, “Oh, they saw it”, or “That could have been a great idea”, or “Why didn’t I pursue that even more?” 

‘I’m wary that I would lose so much of my life to doing that and then joining in. That would not be well advised.’

Before Hartley was instilling fear into hearts on primetime ITV, he was pumping out melodrama on the soapy shores of Hollyoaks and EastEnders.

I imagine this must be an ideal training ground for grinding out scripts.

‘In all honesty, I wasn’t very good at it,’ he says, with surprising candour. ‘There are so many people that are fantastic at it, because they have that 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 that I’m going to create. Like with this show, yes, it was based on Gareth’s brilliant books, but I was creating a lot of these characters, and they were living and breathing because of a heartbeat that I put into them.’

This novel is the first in the trilogy. The second has a ‘very, very distinct crime’, says Hartley, but there is no word yet on whether The Dark will become a longer-running show. Colour me curious, after that description. 

As for the ending of this series, he quotes former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross’s infamous sign-off, ‘Don’t have nightmares’, and adds: ‘But I think if that happens, then that was part of the job done.’

The Dark is available to watch on ITV1 tonight at 9pm, with the whole series on ITVX.