Marshes intersected by dykes to the south, recalling the early chapters of Great Expectations; flat fields to the north, merging into heath; heath, fir woods, and, above all, gorse, inland …. old firs, wind-beaten, thick at the top, with the slope that old seaside trees have; seen on the skyline from the train they would tell you in an instant, if you did not know it, that you were approaching a windy coast.
On Christmas Eve 1972 the BBC televised M.R. James’ classic ghost story A Warning to the Curious as part of their Ghost Story for Christmas series. The film has since become a classic in its own right; chillingly atmospheric and a perfect evocation of the wind-beaten and bleak seaside town of Seaburgh as described by James above. Although the viewer must allow for the production values of 1970s television, the mud flats and the hazy landscape are still brilliantly captured by director Lawrence Gordon Clark. And a small budget works in its favour, making the studio bound interior scenes extremely tight and claustrophobic. The eerie music, too, works wonders for the story.
The film begins with with a man digging a deep hole. James enthusiasts will tell instantly that he is going to meet a sticky end. The man is watched by a shadowy figure who warns him “no digging”. When he persists, the dark figure attacks and kills him. Twelve years later a man called Paxton arrives in Seaburgh, carrying suitcase and spade. Paxton is an amateur archaeologist searching for a fabled Anglo-Saxon crown, buried somewhere in the local area…
After checking in at his lodging house Paxton passes through a cemetery, where he learns that the site of the buried crown was once guarded by one William Ager, a man who has since died and who we presume to be our murderer from the first scene. The vicar indicates where Ager’s grave is but declines to show Paxton to it, as he has become suddenly “very cold”. As he looks at Ager’s gravestone Paxton notices, or thinks he notices, a dark clad figure watching him from the distance. This black robed spectre remains ever present just outside Paxton’s immediate field of vision. As James explains:
Sometimes, you know, you see him, and sometimes you don’t, just as he pleases, I think; he’s there, but he has some power over your eyes.
Paxton continues his research into the whereabouts of the crown, visiting Ager’s former home and a creepy curiosity shop. Gathering just enough information, he sets out to dig up the crown, announcing that he will be away overnight and catching a train. Returning to Seaburgh with his prize, he climbs into his train carriage and then turns to hear the guard holding the door open and calling “room for one more! Oh, sorry … I thought someone else was there” before shutting the door on the lone Paxton.
Following a troubled night Paxton reveals to Dr Black, a fellow lodger at the boarding house, that “someone” is now with him, the shadowy figure watching him has accompanied him from the burial site. He vows to return the crown and asks Black to go with him. Together they return the crown, Clive Swift as Black never being one to shirk his responsibilities when it comes to spooky tales. In the morning the two arrange to go walking together, but Paxton is enticed onto the beach by the shadowy figure, thinking it is Black. Dr Black later finds Paxton lying dead beside the burial mound.
The film ends with Black boarding a train to leave Seaburgh. He holds what looks like Paxton’s case. Climbing into the carriage, he turns to hear the guard holding the door open and calling “room for one more! Oh, sorry … I thought someone else was there” before shutting the door on the lone Black…
A Warning to the Curious stars Peter Vaughan as Paxton and Ghost Story for Christmas regular Clive Swift as Dr Black. Mr Paxton, a now redundant office clerk, attempts to rise above his lowly status by making this rare archeological find. As an embellishment to James’ original story, the film creates a solid class structure – from those above Paxton (Black, a local vicar) to those below him (the boots of his boarding house, the young girl he meets in Ager’s cottage). Where James warns antiquarians and learned men not to become too curious in their findings (The Treasure of Abbott Thomas, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you, My Lad) the film goes further in warning the likes of Paxton not too think too high above their social standing. And Black, by lowering himself to Paxton’s level, is seen to suffer too.
But the BBC adaptation doesn’t stray too far from the original classic, and the only serious change they make is creating Dr Black, who serves to replace James as the narrator figure and his friend Henry Long. All of the best ingredients are James’ inventions; the churchyard, the curiosity shop and the half glimpsed ghost of William Ager. Changes to James are always forgiven as the leads in the Ghost Stories for Christmas series always turned in fine performances, and here Vaughan and Swift are magnificent. Vaughan is perfectly nervy as Paxton, driven although quite terrified before the haunting properly begins, Swift is also perfect as Black, delivering his usual take of urbane reason.
If there’s still time, I urge you to read A Warning to the Curious by M.R. James this Christmas Eve…
Christmas Ghosts: The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
I must be firm.
The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral by M.R. James is possibly my favourite ghost story. It was televised by the BBC in 1971 and starred Robert Hardy and the James regular Clive Swift. Unlike other BBC adaptations for television and radio over the decades, this version changed very little from the original, which takes an ostensibly dull premise – a man looking through a collection of documents to piece together the death of an archdeacon – and turns it into something rather chilling.
The best James stories share an array of interchangeable themes. One is theft and subsequent haunting. In both A Warning to the Curious and The Treasure of Abbott Thomas, greed or curiosity compels somebody to take something of either monetery or intellectual value. Fear of supernatural punishment leads them to attempt to return it. With usually disastrous results, especially in the BBC adaptations. The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral follows a similar thread, with a guilty victim increasingly troubled; although in this case he has orchestrated the death of another to further his own career. The supernatural has a hand in his own inevitible end.
My fertile imagination has left both the original James text and the BBC adaptation (truncated to The Stalls of Barchester) also interchangeable. They are complementary in providing the correct dose of ghostly satisfaction; the dark staircase, the black cat, the whispering voice:
The whispering in my house was more persistent tonight. I seemed not to be rid of it in my room. I have not noticed this before. A nervous man, which I am not, and hope I am not becoming, would have been much annoyed, if not alarmed, by it. The cat was on the stairs tonight. I think it sits there always. There is no kitchen cat.
The ghost stories of M.R.James are like a generous glass of mulled wine. Warming, but with an additional ingredient of spice to jolt you slightly. It’s important to remember that many of these stories were read aloud to students, and the subject matter of often over zealous antiquarians could be read as a warning not to take one’s studies too seriously. At least not at Christmas.
The Stalls of Barchester was first shown on Christmas Eve 1971. And so on the same day in 2008 I wish you all a very Merry Christmas…
I hated the picture from the moment I first saw it. Partly, of course, that was because it came from someone unknown, the same someone who had sent me the letter and who wished us harm. But it was more than that. I did not know much about art but I had grown up among delightful pictures which had come down through my family on my mother’s side, charming English pastoral scenes and paintings of families with horses and dogs, still-life oils of flowers and fruit, innocent, happy things which pleased me. This was a dark, sinister painting in my eyes. If I had known the words ‘corrupt’ and ‘decadent’ then I would have used them to describe it. As I looked at the faces of those people, at the eyes behind the masks and the strange smiles, the suggestions of figures in windows, figures in shadows, I shuddered. I felt uneasy, I felt afraid.
Susan Hill’s The Man in the Picture is a brilliant ghost story. The language is deceptively simple; although it reads as a straightforward and traditional spooky tale, full of recognisable motifs from the ghost stories of old, it has already left me wanting to revisit its unsettling pages.
I want to tell you all about The Man in the Picture and yet I don’t. To revel in it may be to spoil it. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but I’m itching to talk about it as much as I can. For anyone familiar with The Woman in Black it is similar territory. In this story a horror cascades through time and generations, a horror inherited that will revisit again and again to wield its terrible power. The Man in the Picture reminded me of the chilling power of the stage adaptation of The Woman in Black. The theatre brought out the use of narrative in the story, how one man’s telling of a haunting tale to another is a fantastic device to evoke the raised hairs on the necks of those who listen. Susan Hill’s latest does something similar. Told as a sequence of stories by alternating narrators, the reader is slowly drawn into this disturbing tale.
So I’m only offering teasing glimpses of The Man in the Picture. An atmospheric setting shared between Cambridge and Venice, a mysterious Miss Haversham type, a haunting oil painting and perhaps one of the most effective final lines in a novel. The Man in the Picture allows the reader to guess what is happening next, but only just, only as it is about to happen. By then it is too late to withdraw from the horror. Susan Hill has a real skill in that you can only really say you’ve guessed the outcome with seconds to spare. Read this short novel in one sitting if you can. And prepare to be afraid.
Following on from my last post I underwent a spot of detective work to investigate if there were any more ghost stories from the pen of H.G.Wells. And I found a classic. Written in 1894, The Red Room is a superb little tale.
“It’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm once more.
I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the passage outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He supported himself by a single crutch, his eyes were covered by a shade, and his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow teeth. He made straight for an arm-chair on the opposite side of the table, sat down clumsily, and began to cough. The man with the withered arm gave this new-comer a short glance of positive dislike; the old woman took no notice of his arrival, but remained with her eyes fixed steadily on the fire.
“I said – it’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm, when the coughing had ceased for a while.
“It’s my own choosing,” I answered.
The Red Room has a fantastic build up, where the old people who warn the narrator against his wishes to visit a haunted room are as creepy as any ghosts he may or may not encounter. It’s the repetition that makes it work, the endless questioning about whether he really wants to go through with this, by his own choosing. I’m putting it in my top ten of ghost stories.
Another gem I found this week was The Coat by AED Smith. Dating, I think, from the early 1930s, this short story concerns a self confessed loner who embarks on a cycling holiday abroad. Escaping a sudden downpour, he takes refuge in an abandoned house. There, he sees small unsettling details. The orange fungus growing across a carpet, strange patterns in the dust and an old military coat:
I discovered that just below the left shoulder there was a round hole as big as a penny, surrounded by an area of scorched and stained cloth, as though a heavy pistol had been fired into it at point-blank range. If a pistol bullet had indeed made that hole, then obviously, the old coat at one period of its existance had clothed a dead man.
Superb stuff, and Cook has the knack of putting the reader right in the scared man’s shoes…
More Ghostly Goings On
Wednesday October 10, 2007 in ghost stories |
Some more ghost stories for your consideration as I continue with my October thrills.
H.G.Wells wrote The Inexperienced Ghost for The Strand magazine in 1902. The opening of the story is very similar to his classic The Time Machine, with a group of gentleman sitting round a fireside to settle into hearing an intriguing story. The fireside technique is always a good start to a story, the cigars and general good humour settling the reader in before the thrills start, and one I’m sure has been used many times before and since. The Inexperienced Ghost is essentially a comic ghost story, and the tale doesn’t really get serious enough to scare. However, it’s as well written as you would expect and so still required reading for Wells completists.
Eerily, I found the style of The Inexperienced Ghost quite similar to a story by W.W.Jacobs called The Toll House, which I recently found online at Online Literature (some interesting stuff here if you can put up with the awful ads) and which was also written in 1902. It features another group of excitable gentlemen, who this time get exactly what they were bargaining for in an empty, abandoned house. Why do people in ghost stories always elect to spend the night in haunted houses? I suspect for exactly the same reasons that we enjoy reading ghost stories…
And now I’ve settled you in, I’ll just finish with Bram Stoker’s The Squaw. More humour here, although this time not wholly intentional. A man and his wife decide to take a companion along with them, already bored on the second week of their honeymoon. They also decide to do another romantic thing and visit a notorious tourist attraction called The Torture Tower. Black cats feature prominently and some well worn instruments of torture enjoy a new lease of life…
The Squaw has an inevitably gruesome ending, although still satisfying for a horror story and it stands up quite well for one written in 1893. It reminded me of the Amicus films of the 1970s, the portmanteau collections of scary tales that were always worth sitting up for.
Judge for yourself, this one’s also online as a PDF at Horrormasters...
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