At first glance, you’d expect the BBC’s The Pale Horse to be a pretty faithful adaptation of the Agatha Christie mystery on which it’s based. The novel and the two-part film, which is available in the US on Amazon Prime Friday, have the same name. Both take place in early 1960s London and the fictional town of Much Deeping (yep, that’s the name Christie went with). Both center around a guy named Mark Easterbrook and his encounters with a trio of potential witches. But almost everything else about the story is completely unrecognizable.

The television adaptation tells the story of Mark, a well-off Londoner still mourning the tragic death of his first wife and locked in an icy marriage to his second, when his name is discovered on a found in the possession of a dead woman. Almost everyone on the list is already dead—and they’ve all got ties to three creepy ladies in a strangely-named town.

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The original story is different in almost every way possible—and if you haven’t read it or watched the series yet, here’s fair warning that all the twists will be spoiled blow. In the book, Mark Easterbrook is a single man, and he’s not on the list of names. Instead, he’s introduced to the story by police surgeon Jim Corrigan, who’s aiding Detective Inspector Lejeune in solving the murder of a priest who was discovered to be carrying a list of names. As in the series, almost everyone on the list is found to be dead, though all the deaths have been ruled to be of natural causes.

Mark decides to embark on an investigation of his own, and traces the deaths back to a small town called Much Deeping and a historic former inn and pub called the Pale Horse. Its current occupants are a self-reported psychic medium named Sybil Stamfordis, occultist Thyrza Grey, and their housekeeper, reumored local witch Bella Webb. To find out how the murder plot works, Mark decides to go undercover as a Pale Horse client. This leads him to the operation’s lawyer, Mr. Bradley, who reveals how it all works. The person who’d like to order a hit visits Bradley, who then makes a wager with his newfound client. Bradley bets the intended target will die, while the client bets that they’ll live. Then, the client heads to the Pale Horse, where the witches work their juju. Soon enough, the client loses that bet, and with the target dead, it’s time to pay up.

Mark and his friend Ginger decide to see how the murderous scheme works by placing a bet with Bradley on whether or not Ginger will survive the month. After he attends a suitably spooky séance at the Pale Horse, Ginger does fall ill—and it seems like all the witchery may actually be working. That is, until Mark realizes that all the victims suffered hair loss. That’s a symptom of thallium poisoning, and it turns out that all the supernatural intrigue was just a cover for regular-old murder by poison.

In the end, the mastermind is revealed to be local chemist Zachariah Osborne, who committed all the murders and used the “witches” as cover to distance himself from the crimes. It’s not criminal to place a bet on whether someone lives or dies, nor is casting a witchy murder spell illegal, which protects the buyer from prosecution. And the fact that would-be murders interacted solely with Bradley and the ladies at the Pale horse in turn protected Osborne. With the mystery solved, Mark and Ginger put a bow on things by deciding to get married.

Agatha Christie in 1967.

That’s all incredibly different from how things shake out in the BBC adaptation. Ginger is absent altogether, and with his name on the list, the stakes are significantly higher for Mark Easterbrook. While book Mark is a pretty run-of-the-mill and fairly neutral Christie narrator, movie Mark is a terrible person—he asks the Pale Horse to kill his wife and Detective Lejeune, and is revealed to have murdered his first wife, too.

Most of the changes serve to strip the story of much of its Christie primness and inject horror elements: Mark’s an adulterer and a killer, Bradley the lawyer is absent, and there’s a whole creepy occult parade in Much Deeping that happens in the film that never occured in the novel. But these changes aren’t necessarily for the better—the very thing that makes The Pale Horse one of Christie’s greats is its message about the nature of evil. In the book, the witches are purely a distraction. The truly frightening villains are a neat little pharmacist and his clever lawyer. In stripping that away, the adaptation turns it into a story filled with shallow scares.

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