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| Add a little darkness to your Christmas with the return of the BBC's GHOST STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS, now on DVD. |
Continuing our mini-horror/Halloween celebrations, this week sees the BFI DVD releases of the collected classic UK BBC ghost stories of seventies Xmas past. And classics they really are: well-cast with big-star names, atmospherically adapted, mostly from the original chilling pen and dark imagination of M.R. James, directed with flair, on atmospheric film, over the years by expert stalwart Lawrence Gordon Clark. These truly were a formative part of my growing up and I remember every Christmas the anticipation and dread excitement of seeing what new subtle horrors would be unleashed over the festive season to send shivers down viewers spine before bedtime. This completist edition contains
The Stalls of Barchester (Robert Hardy, having committed a murder as an ambitious cleric, comes a cropper from a mysterious figure),
A Warning to the Curious (Peter Vaughan plays an amateur archaeologist who stirs up dark forces whilst on a treasure-hunting holiday),
Lost Hearts (children's souls are captured by an old man wanting immortality),
The Treasure of Abbott Thomas (Michael Bryant really should really know better as a theologian looking for hidden treasure in an abbey library), and
The Ash Tree (witchcraft plagues a family estate). Another James story included, not from Gordon Clark but classic nonetheless, is Jonathan Miller's superb 1968 B/W play
Whistle and I'll Come to You (Michael Hordern is wonderful as an eccentric beach comber professor plagued by a pursuant apparition after discovering an old whistle). There's also Charles Dicken's equally morbid
The Signalman (based on a real life tragedy involving the author, starring Denholm Elliott as a lone signalmen who sees the omens of a possible future railway disaster). Rounding out the releases, I don't recall seeing Gordon Clark's
Stigma (a supernatural force terrorises a young couple) or the Derek Lister directed
The Ice House (a strange flower growing in an old ice house causes grave misfortunes to residents at a health spa), written by Clive Exton and John Bowen respectively, so I look forward to catching up with their frightening imaginings at some point.
The collection also has several more recent attempts to recapture the glories of that period, as BBC 4 made two further adaptations of M.R. James ghost stories in 2004 and 2005, once more for Xmas and keeping the same kind of film-making style: A View from a Hill (an historian is plagued by terrible visions through a pair of borrowed binoculars) and Number 13 (about a mysterious appearing and disappearing room, filled with visions and strange noises from the past, or the future?), both of which proved surprisingly enjoyable and reasonably successful.
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