There have never been so many genre TV series. Horror, science fiction, and fantasy - we're up to necks in the stuff. Thanks to the onslaught of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and myriad others, there is a voracious demand for content and a lot of money being thrown at producers in many a country. The result is a deluge of stuff that is, inevitably, variable in content, but often interesting.
Which beings me to the unpromisingly-titled Paranormal, an Egyptian Netflix series based on a series of books by Ahmed Khaled Tawfik. It consists of six hour-long episodes. The story is set in Cairo the late Sixties, with Nasser still running Egypt and the ever-present threat of air attack by an unnamed enemy. The main character is an improbable hero, Refaat Ismail (Ahmed Amin) a professor of haematology at Cairo's university. He is a morose, bespectacled chap with a receding hairline. And yet he becomes - in spite of himself - a champion of light against darkness as he battles a series of supernatural threats.
In the first ep we encounter Refaat on his fortieth birthday, where he is required to attend a family meal. Also in attendance will be his fiancée, Howaida (Aya Samaha). But when an old flame, Maggie (Razane Jamal), returns from her native Scotland, Refaat does the wrong thing and invites her along. This leads to awkwardness, to say the least. It seems Refaat does not want an arranged marriage to Howaida and sets out to sabotage the engagement.
Table talk leads to the reveation that, when they were young, Refaat and his siblings visited a supposedly haunted house. There they encountered a girl called Shiraz (Reem Abd El Kader), who apparently tried to lure Refaat to his death. Things become complicated when Refaat's young nephew disappears in an air raid and Shiraz seems to be responsible.
Why has the ghost reappeared after all these years? Unravelling this mystery provides the story arc for the series, but there is a monster of the week element. Thus the second episode offers a full-on curse of the pharaohs plot, with the undeniable boon that legendary Saqqara itself can be used as a setting. The third episode sees our dour, ever-grumbling hero set off into the Libyan desert in search of a fabled medicinal plant which has a very formidable guardian. Other menaces encountered include a 'Naiad', or undine, in an irrigation canal, and a succubus demon that hunts its victims in dreams.
Paranormal is a relatively low-key horror series with a few sharp shocks and plenty of plotting. Refaat is refreshingly unlike the typical American protagonist of this sort of show, and the various plot strands are well-handled. If would recommend this one to anyone who is (like most of us) wondering which of the plethora of horror shows on Netflix they should try.
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