A French take on the X-Files twenty-odd years before the X-Files, I first saw La Brigade des maléfices in the late ’70s, on some low-rent local TV station. There were only six 55-minutes episodes of the series, and as a kid of ten or twelve I found it weird, baffling, and French. But I was thinking about it this last weekend, and I decided to do a little research on my own.

The basic premise of La Brigade des maléfices (more or less The Sorcery Brigade): there is a secret department in the French police system, that takes care of occult and supernatural events. Underfunded and derided by the colleagues, Inspecteur Guillaume Martin Paumier is an eccentric that occupies an attic in the Paris police headquarters. He can rely only on one assistant, Albert.

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