Ghostwatch
Released in 1992, directed by Lesley Manning
A descendent of Welles’ War of the Worlds, an extremely rare specimen, the film-as-real-time-news-report – and thus initially broadcast on the BBC. The only other examples I was able to find of this species are Special Bulletin (terrorists with an a-bomb on a tugboat), Without Warning (meteorites), and Alternative 3 (scientists secretly colonize Mars, music by Brian Eno). Of these Ghostwatch appears to have been the least ersatz – it is populated by reporters playing themselves, and an effort is made to keep events within a reasonable time frame.
The plotting is brilliantly true to the spirit of a mid-rent paranormal “investigation”. We begin in the safety of the studio, with an avuncular host (Michael Parkinson) on-hand to steer us through the night’s events; then at intervals we are thrown out to a reporter (Sarah Greene) embedded with a family whose house may be haunted. All of the action is in the haunted house, but the host, a cynic and a clock-puncher, is often content to conduct interviews with various peripheral figures, to take calls from the audience, and generally to dick around. Thus much of the film is spent waiting for various bits of business to conclude so that we can get back to the house – we are often authentically bored, or perhaps entertained by the verisimilitude of the boredom on offer. In the house itself things gradually go bad, as they must; then things go bad more generally, a fun, Lovecraftian choice, positing that a single puncture in our reason can quickly collapse the whole world. The villainous spirit goes by the name of Mr. Pipes; he is only glimpsed, and you have to work to catch him (viewers of a certain age may be reminded of Loo-Kee’s appearances in episodes of She-Ra: Princess of Power).
A brief theory of the horror story. There are two components to it, the horror and the release (note that the release can come before or after the horror; even if before it’s still a release – a premonitory release). One can vary the length of the horror, the length of the release; but what really gives a story its feel and texture is the compression between the two. To stay British, the stories of MR James are generally uncompressed. The moments of release are quite safe, quite nice: logs on the fire, books on the shelf, a glass of port. The moments of horror though are quite nasty, and our protagonist will often come to a grim end. As with music, there is something soothing about this wide variation in magnitude; the loud parts might tense us up, but we are always given our rest in between. The other extreme is Ramsay Campbell, who maintains the intensity of the horror, but erodes the safety of the safety. In a Ramsey Campbell story, just because you aren’t at immediate risk of violent death doesn’t mean that more insidious and everyday forces aren’t eating away at you. The tension is continuous and can be exhausting.
Ghostwatch gives us an interesting synthesis of these two extremes. When we are in the studio with our plummy host the tone is decidedly Jamesian (even down the terrible horrors: the film’s most disturbing scene is in the studio, a brief darkening of the lights). But when we go out the haunted house we are in Campbell’s territory. The house is cramped, the family within fractious and we sense economically strained. There is one location which we return to several times – we are always getting the same shots of the same locations, because one of the film’s conceits is that we are reliant on stationary cameras placed around the house – one particular location that seems to sum up the spiritual grime of the environs: a cramped sharp-angled staircase, covered in dirty carpeting. Were it spiraling hardwood the entire tenor of the film would be different.
NOTES
When a horror story is compressed but the in other direction, that is towards the release, then the result might be horror-comedy, or it might something in the vein of the clubbable ghost stories that populate Victorian and just post-Victorian fiction. I’d nominate Francis Marion Crawford’s The Screaming Skull as an example; as a counterpoint here is an article arguing that it’s terrifying.
