Is Marianne Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot

Retiring a witch by announcement

Emma Larsimon is a best-selling horror author who tells her readers she has finished with the genre and has killed off her main character, the witch Marianne. Caroline, a friend from her school days, visits and says her mother now believes she is Marianne. She shows Emma a charm her mother made from human skin. Emma tells her assistant Camille that Marianne gave her nightmares as a child. Her boyfriend Pierre leaves because he is tired of her drinking. Caroline then hangs herself in public and warns that Emma's parents are the next ones her mother will go after. Emma and Camille stop at the home of Caroline's mother, Madame Daugeron, who acts very strangely. At Emma's parents' house, Emma's possessed father attacks Camille, and her parents head into the woods without clothes, bloody symbols drawn all over them. The retirement has lasted about one episode.

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A school reunion that includes a locked room

Inspector Ronan comes to investigate the disappearance of Emma's parents and finds the skin charm on the Larsimon front door. Emma and Camille let themselves into Daugeron's house, where Emma finds one of her books with writing in a strange language added to it. There is a room they cannot open, and when Daugeron comes home she cuts her own arm and tells Emma that she must write. Ronan's friend Pat warns him that whoever holds the charm is cursed. Emma meets up with her old school gang, the Shipwreck punks: Aurore, Seby, Tonio and Arnaud, who goes by No-No. Aurore doesn't trust Emma, because of something that happened at the lighthouse fifteen years before. No-No sends Camille an article Emma wrote about her mother at fifteen. Furious, Emma starts writing a new chapter, and her mother is seen wandering through town naked and confused.

The new chapter turns out to be non-fiction

Tonio and No-No find five drowned cows in the sea, matching what Emma just wrote. Her mother returns home. Emma and Camille are introduced to Sophie, who is pregnant and married to Seby, and to their son Hugo, and then Hugo disappears. Emma remembers that her new chapter has five children hanging in the lighthouse, so she sends everyone there. This is the scene people dread most, and it happens in episode 3: they find Hugo and four other children hanging inside, and they get all five of them down alive. Emma works out that whatever she writes happens, and her exorcism attempt on Daugeron does nothing. Ronan finds Emma's father in a coma in a hospital. Emma finds her mother stabbed to death, with Daugeron laughing and holding the knife, and she strangles Daugeron. Daugeron warns that Marianne will simply possess someone close to Emma. Camille tries CPR and sees Marianne, falls down the stairs, and a mist leaves Daugeron's mouth.

Marianne has a surname and a husband-shaped grudge

Camille is in a coma at the hospital. Daugeron is arrested and is herself again, but Marianne took her eyes, because Marianne always takes something with her. Daugeron tells Emma that Marianne existed before Emma, that the two are connected, and that Emma has to keep writing. In the locked room, Ronan finds Daugeron's husband, plus a book written in the cursed language. Pat explains that knowing a witch's name is the only way to have power over her, and that the symbol in the book belongs to Beleth, a demon king. Sophie has a baby boy. Ronan reads the Molitor Report, which records the witch trials and the life of Marianne Basselin, who killed her husband, called herself the wife of Beleth and swore to return for the town's children. Marianne goes after Emma, Tonio and Aurore that same night, and she takes Seby's newborn. Episode 5 flashes back to the lighthouse when they were fifteen, where a séance goes badly, Marianne possesses Emma, and she tells each friend what will happen to them. Their friends think Emma is faking, and a day later Lucy, Aurore's little sister, is trapped in a freezer and dies. Father Xavier tells Emma to leave town to protect everyone, which is why she wrote the cruel article.

Plan B involves a dog

Ronan tells Emma that events from her novels have happened as real tragedies over the years. Emma tries to write Marianne's death and fails, so Ronan brings the others to the lighthouse, along with Father Xavier's dog, hoping to lock Marianne's spirit inside it. At first nothing seems to happen. At the hospital Marianne possesses Camille, and Emma's father, now awake, sees it. When Ronan summons her, Marianne leaves Camille and possesses Ronan, who kills himself in front of the group. In episode 7, a flashback shows a young priest failing to burn Marianne's body. In the present Marianne possesses the dog, and the group scatters. Lucy appears to Aurore and tells her Emma was there when she died. No-No volunteers to go in Aurore's place and Marianne takes him. Emma goes home and writes again, and Seby's son is returned to him. Seby and Emma spend the night together, and in the morning Father Xavier turns up at her house, attacks her and starts an exorcism.