Christmas Ghosts: The Treasure of Abbot Thomas

Friday December 21, 2007

It is a thing of darkness.

This short story by M.R.James was immortalised in 1974 by the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas adaptation directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark. This year the BBC are proudly showing a selection of their James adaptations, although this one is repeated with alarming regularity. But I’m grateful – The Treasure of Abbot Thomas is one of the most satisfying ghost stories I’ve ever seen.

Or read. After watching it again the other evening I was tempted to reread the original short story so I could sit down and conduct a compare and contrast exercise. Interestingly, the two are quite different, and John Bowen – who wrote the television screenplay – has reworked the story quite dramatically. Where the original ends quite comfortably, perhaps something welcome for a 1904 Christmas, the film has a particularly chilling ending to it. More suited for the 1970s, still apt for today’s audience. Very apt for my tastes – I must confess that I prefer the film more.

Michael Bryant in The Treasure of Abbot Thomas

The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974). Are you sure you really want to go ahead with this?

The story follows Mr Somerton, an antiquary who attempts to unpick a code that is scattered in various places by the late Abbot Thomas. Somerton unravels the mystery that leads him to the Abbot’s gold, with supernatural consequences that lead him to return it to its hiding place as soon as he possibly can. It’s a classic James warning to the curious, but with mostly harmless results.

Bowen and Clark’s film casts the excellent Michael Bryant as Somerton. One of their embellishments to the tale is to show him as a firm disbeliever of anything supernatural. All the more to prove him wrong as the story unfolds. Somerton is seen exposing a charlatan at a fake séance. He pursues Thomas’ scattered clues purely as a keen researcher (it’s an interesting puzzle to him, something of a Victorian sudoku), and seems oblivous to the sinister monks who creep around the church where he carries out his studies. But although possibly an intellectual giant, Somerton is weak of the flesh. Climbing to the church roof to pursue his leads he is overcome by vertigo and almost topples to his death. Discovering that the treasure is entombed in an underground crypt, he can only just control his trembling frame as he wades through the flooded tunnels to claim his prize.

And – and this is the heart of all James’ stories – this is where it will always go catastrophically wrong. After he has retrieved the treasure of Abbot Thomas, Somerton is reduced to a jabbering wreck, ranting about the thing of darkness that tries to break into his rooms. A spell has been cast. No choice but to put it back…

Where I think this film succeeds is in its dark ending, one that has continued to haunt me over the years – with or without repeated viewings. As the now recovering Somerton, convalescing in a country garden, is left in his bath chair to greet his doctor as he strolls towards him we notice from Bryant’s horrified face that something is very, very wrong. The figure that approaches is hooded and swift. It’s approaching to claim its victim. The curious has been warned, but there’s still no getting away with their audacity. Somerton is unforgiven. There’s one last terrifying shot of the petrified antiquary meeting his cloaked nemesis before the closing credits. We see one final glimpse of him before he is taken.

In my youth, I remember climbing the stairs to bed but leaving the lights on after I’d watched The Treasure of Abbot Thomas. The other night I did the same.

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Christmas Ghosts

Friday December 7, 2007

It’s that time of year again when I start enthusing about the BBC’s adaptations of M.R.James stories. This year, BBC4 are showing several of its excellent television films over the Christmas period. Highlights include:

Full details on the BBC4 site. It’s disappointing that there doesn’t appear to be a brand new production for 2007, but I’ll be quickly leafing through the Christmas Radio Times when it comes out just to check…

In the meantime, here’s the ending of the truly chilling A Warning to the Curious from Christmas 1972:

Mind the step…

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Things That Go Bump

Friday October 12, 2007

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…

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More Ghostly Goings On

Wednesday October 10, 2007

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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Simply Chilling

Sunday March 25, 2007

This is the first in a new regular series. I enjoy writing about stories that I love reading. With novels, there can be a slow turnaround. So something to keep me posting more regularly…

Continue reading Simply Chilling

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