Helen Baxendale reveals 'properly frightening' choice making The Dark stand out
The Dark star Helen Baxendale found one choice in the ITV thriller "really horrific".
Helen Baxendale thinks her new ITV thriller made a "properly frightening" choice keeping its killer masked.
The 56-year-old actress, who plays a young murder victim's mother Bethany Morgan in new six-part series The Dark, has praised writer Matt Hartley and director Gilles Bannier's decision to leave "more to the imagination" across the board.
She told the Radio Times magazine: "Choosing to put the killer in a mask, I found that really horrific.
"When I read it, it's really properly frightening."
As well as keeping the killer's face hidden, the duo also decided to limit the amount of gore in their adaptation of G R Halliday's novel From the Shadows.
Helen added: "I don't think you need to show loads of blood. I think what goes on in your head is much more interesting and more frightening than what you show."
In the tense thriller, Laura Donnelly plays DI Monica Kennedy, who teams up with DC Connor Crawford (Mark Rowley) in the search for a serial killer.
A rural community in the Scottish countryside is thrown into chaos after a young man's body is found stage in an eerie way.
The synopsis teases: "As fear spreads through the rural community and secrets begin to unravel, Monica finds herself in a dangerous game of cat and mouse with the killer.
"But when the case becomes intertwined with her own past, she must confront whether her personal history could put both the investigation and her family at risk."
Meanwhile, Helen is pleased that the drama bucks the trend of serial killer stories mainly focusing on women as the victim.
She said: "I don't want anybody serial-killed at all, obviously, but it's often women that are depicted as the victims, so it was quite a change that it was men who were the victims, young men.
"That was quite different, they've approached it in quite a novel way."
Helen is arguably best known for playing Ross Geller's English wife Emily Waltham in Friends, as well as roles in the likes of Cold Feet and Noughts + Crosses.
