Ghosts of Christmas – Past and Present.

The BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas series originally extended from 1971 to 1978. Highly esteemed by supernatural fiction enthusiasts, it is mainly remembered for its adaptations of classic tales by M.R. James, although 1976’s atmospheric version of Dickens’ The Signalman is often considered to be the finest. In recent years, attempts have been made to revive the series, with new productions of James’s A View from a Hill and Number 13 appearing in 2005 and 2006. Whilst these are enjoyable exercises in television nostalgia, there is an air of pastiche about them which means that they fall short of the original series’ level of excellence.

This year it was revealed that the Ghost Story for Christmas was to be a remake of Whistle and I’ll Come to You. Although Jonathan Miller’s 1968 Omnibus production of this pre-dated the series proper, it has joined it in popular memory as the first and most impressive of the BBC’s M.R. James adaptations. It is an extraordinary work that succeeds on many levels, and is a hard act to follow. I was thus mystified as to why the BBC should have chosen Whistle and I’ll Come to You rather than one of the many other tales by M.R. James and his Victorian and Edwardian contemporaries that have not yet been filmed.

Memories of pointless remakes such as The Haunting and The Wicker Man started to rise unbidden, provoking fears that were hardly laid to rest by an announcement that the remake was to be “a contemporary update, influenced by Japanese horror films and The Shining”, penned by Neil Cross. Oh dear. One bit of good news was that the star was to be John Hurt, surely an actor with sufficient gravitas to pull the pull the project through.

The issue of faithfulness to the original story is a complex one. Television and the written word and two separate media, and what works on the page is not necessarily going to be what’s best for the small screen. Jonathan Miller certainly didn’t take the path of slavish adaptation. However, although he was not afraid to make changes to the original, particularly in the area of characterization, he certainly took no liberties. His re-imagining of the story’s protagonist, Professor Parkin, as a bumbling old absent-minded don, played to perfection by Michael Hordern, was a stroke of genius.

Horden’s portrayal is a pleasure to watch in every frame. Here is a man fully at home with his own company and absorbed in his own mental processes to the extent that he has become somewhat disengaged with the rest of the world. As we observe his break at a desolate East Coast seaside resort, we become fully acquainted with the man and his habits. An amusing exchange with another hotel resident in which he applies linguistic logic to dismiss the notion of ghosts shows up Professor Parkin’s one big flaw; he is pleased to the point of smugness with his own arguments and formulations. In particular, he is delighted by his inversion of a famous quote from Hamlet: “There are more things in philosophy than are dreamt of in Heaven or Earth”.

Parkin’s faith in his academic superiority is threatened by the unaccountable events that take place after he discovers and blows and old whistle he discovers in an ancient cliff-top graveyard. Miller remains true to the story’s suggestion that the “ghost”, when it eventually appears, would not have had the power to physically harm its victim. The fear is not of violence or gore, but something far more powerful; the ease with which a logically constructed world-view established over decades of study and argument can be brought crashing down by a single anomalous experience. Jonathan Miller (no believer in the supernatural himself) has turned James’ comic-horrific tale of a conceited young don into a full-blown parable on intellectual hubris.

With this illustrious predecessor in mind, it was with some trepidation that I switched on the TV to view Neil Cross’s “contemporary retelling”. First impressions were not good; we are thrown head first into a scene not bearing the remotest resemblance to anything in the original story. The elderly Parkin (John Hurt) has been saddled by the screenwriter with a senile wife (Gemma Jones) and is shown depositing her into what can only be described as the care home from hell. Parkin (who we learn is a retired astronomer) appears to be a wealthy man, so why he has chosen to place his beloved spouse in this grim establishment, in which the inmates are sat in rows in high-backed chairs wearing identical white gowns, is not explained. To a critical viewer, however, the answer is obvious. This is not one of the quaintly observed social locales we might expect as a background to the chilling goings-on in a Ghost Story for Christmas; this is Generic Horror-Land. And thereby hangs the weakness of this production. James’ finely crafted tale has been hollowed out and used as the vehicle for another, different story entirely; a markedly inferior one. You wonder how this came about; presumably the piece needed the cachet of the original to reach production and attract a talent of John Hurt’s calibre. Surely, however, it can only suffer from comparison with the original?

John Hurt has, it must be said, a most impressive face. Deeply creased and furrowed, it ages him beyond his seventy years. He is made to star in a Samuel Beckett biopic and somebody should really get to work on this immediately. In Whistle and I’ll Come to You, however, the poor man is coasting. He has one direction, which is to look miserable, and he does this exceedingly well. Yet everything about this work is lifeless and depressing, with fifty-two minutes of it stretching out interminably.

Having left the catatonic wife at the Stephen King care home, in the hands of the patronising nurse who is on single-handed duty there, Parkin (in a rare piece of faithfulness-to-the-plot) makes his way to a seaside hotel. This establishment is equally short-staffed and, apart from one family, which packs up and leaves during his stay, Parkin is the sole resident. Jonathan Miller showed us exactly how Professor Parkin spends his solitary days by the seaside, conveying a fine sense of life of the hotel and the nature of his solitary rambling. By contrast, the 2010 version seems fractured and drawn out. The setting has been transferred for some reason from East Anglia to Thanet in Kent, so we are presented with chalk cliffs in place of flat sands and, most importantly, no groynes to act as hurdles in the ghostly pursuit along the beach. Continuity is poor, however, and we never get a clear idea of the landscape and how it stands in relation to the hotel. Cliffs appear first in one direction and then in another. We are never sure how far Parkin has walked or what time of day it is.

The two big scares are stolen from elsewhere. First of all, there is a fearsome, unexplained banging on the bedroom door while Parkin is trying to sleep. This scene is reminiscent of Robert Wise’s The Haunting, but that is rather a classy reference for this production. The pre-screening publicity suggests that this scene was intended to evoke memories of axe-wielding Jack Nicholson from The Shining. Unfortunately as Parkin cowers beneath the postcodes, the response is more likely to be “Why doesn’t he just open the bloody door?”

Scare no.2 (which sinks any pretence at subtlety the production may have had until now) is lifted direct from 1998 Japanese horror smash Ringu. Just like Sadako’s stylised ghost crawling from a TV screen, the wraith of Parkins’ senile wife crawls beneath the three-inch gap conveniently left for her beneath his bedroom door. Crawling up the bed, she screams manically “I’m here, I’m here!” into his startled face – a disruption which causes the poor old codger to expire on the spot. Given the idyllic loving relationship that we have been led to believe existed between the two, this occurrence is somewhat surprising. Is it supposed to be a manifestation of the mood changes medically associated with Alzheimer’s disease? Parkin has earlier expressed to the hotel manager his horror at witnessing his wife’s living body minus her personality. Presumably the idea is that, by appearing in the guise of a Japanese ghost, Mrs. Parkin is merely attempting to alert her husband to her continued existence. But wouldn’t a gentler, more loving reminder have sufficed? There is no law stating that ghost stories have to be about crude horror. This story could have concluded in a heartwarming manner, offering consolation to individuals and families afflicted by dementia.

The final scene contributes more confusion, leading many viewers on online forums to question what happened. The nurse at the rest home (yes, that nurse) glimpses Mrs. Parkin among the white-gowned upright-chair-sitters before glancing back to see she has disappeared, a fact she acknowledges with a wry grin. Obviously she has died and become a ghost, but why she appears in such a peaceful form to the nurse (who seems quite unfazed) after scaring her poor husband literally to death is a mystery, only explained by the reflection that this is just a clichéd conclusion to a generic plot.

The plot of M.R. James’s masterpiece has been mutilated to a ridiculous extent. Most bizarrely, some bright spark has decided not to have a whistle, rendering the title entirely meaningless. The only reference to one when Parkin sings the Burns song into his wife’s ear near the beginning, but the relevance of this is not explained and most viewers will probably have missed this anyway. Removing this key plot element has the sole effect of making the thing even more tedious and uneventful – the director clearly thinking that picture postcard views of the seaside are sufficient to retain our attention.

One of M.R. James’ strengths is the inexplicable nature of his apparitions. All that is known about the ghost (if that’s what it is) in Oh, whistle and I’ll come to you is that it is comes from far away and is connected to the Knights Templars, a mediaeval religious order associated with diabolism and forbidden practices. An air of antiquity and the arcane pervades his tales, infecting the cosy world of his protagonists with the miasma of ancient wrongs. By contrast, the 2010 BBC production adheres to modern Hollywood conventions. In a quote from 1999’s CGI-ridden version of The Haunting (the direst remake of all), “It’s all about family!” In other words, the Supernatural must play second fiddle to a tedious soap opera plot that attempts to put a “psychological” spin on everything that happens to make it “relevant to a modern audience”.

All in all, this was a tragically wasted opportunity. The ingredients for a top-quality production were there in terms of casting and cinematography, but it foundered on the rocks of a dumbed-down screenplay. Considering the rich tradition of British horror, it is difficult to see the relevance of referencing works such as Ringu. Presumably the intention was to be “with it” and fashionable, but the Japanese horror craze was ages ago now, probably when the people who produced this were still at university. This demonstrates the weakness of the whole thing; it was made by people with no sensitivity or feel for their source material, who clearly felt they could improve on the original. Given the story’s warning against hubris, this is ironic to the extreme.

A Portsmouth Ghost Story

Runner-up in "The News" Christmas Ghost Story Competition, December 2010`

Portsmouth in December 1945 was a brave but war-ravaged city. Although Hitler’s bombs had destroyed buildings and blown apart bodies, he had never succeeded in breaking the proud naval port’s spirit. Now its people were getting on with rebuilding their lives.

These thoughts crossed my mind as I left Fratton station. I had not been back to Portsmouth since before the war, but I knew what to expect. Coming down from London, it wasn’t such a shock; we had all learned to live with bombsites. What made me nervous was learning of the human devastation. Portsmouth had suffered heavy casualties and there were bound to be friends I would never see again.

I had two hours to spare before my cousin Reg knocked off from his job at the dockyard. I was grateful to him for inviting me down to spend Christmas with him and his wife. With my parents moved away, he was my sole family connection with the city I had grown up in.

I decided to stop off in the Nell Gwynne for a beer. Halfway through a pint of Brickwood’s, I spotted a familiar face; Vic Voller, an old schoolmate.

Vic and his brother Vince had lived in Orchard Road. They were twins, but not identical and had very different personalities. Vic was down-to-earth, while Vince was a dreamer, full of strange ideas and interests.

One night after the pub he took a bunch of us ghost-hunting in Highland Road Cemetery. The only spirit we found was in the bottle of an old tramp propped up against a grave stone.

After twenty minutes football chat (Vic was never one to talk about himself), I was invited back for a cup of tea. Vic was still living in the same house, which had narrowly been missed early on in the Blitz.

I sat down in the tiny living room while Vic went to put the kettle on. There were no Christmas decorations and everything looked dusty. It seemed like the twins’ old mother had passed away during the war.

“I’ve remembered what I went out for; a bottle of milk!” Vic stuck his head around the door. “I’ll just nip round and get some – won’t be a minute.”

I reflected on how things had changed. Physically, Vic seemed much the same, but there was something different about him. Sadness. Perhaps it was the loss of his mother or something else he had experienced. The war left scars on everyone.

Lost in thought, I was startled to see a figure in the doorframe, standing in the passage. I hadn’t heard the front door open and it came as a jolt to see someone staring. Then I realised it wasn’t Vic, it was his brother Vince.

Vince must have been in the house all along, sleeping upstairs. This would explain why Vic hadn’t disturbed him when we came in. He didn’t look well, quite ashen in fact, but he smiled when he saw that I’d noticed him.

I had always got on well with Vince. He was easy to talk to, always keen to find out what I thought about his latest hare-brained theory.

“Hello Vince”, I said “It’s great to see you! How are things going?” Then, remembering our drunken antics together, I added “How’s the ghost-hunting?”

Despite his poorly appearance, Vince’s eyes lit up. “Oh you wouldn’t believe it, Geoff; I’ve found out incredible things! I was playing around before the war, but I know much more about the subject now.”

This wasn’t the response I had expected, but Vince was obviously keen to expand. “What have you been up to?” I asked.

“I’ve met people in touch with the Other Side”, he said, “Do you know about Helen Duncan?”

I suppressed a grin. Everyone had heard about Helen Duncan. A Spiritualist Medium from Scotland, she had been convicted in 1944 under Britain’s ancient Witchcraft Law.

Many argued that Mrs. Duncan had been unfairly persecuted. It was rumoured that the real reason she had been locked up was wartime security. At a séance in Portsmouth, she had been contacted by the spirit of a dead sailor from HMS Barham. The loss of this Portsmouth-based ship, with nearly 900 lives, had been an official secret at the time.

The authorities, it was claimed, were worried that a German spy might attend one of Mrs. Duncan’s séances and obtain classified information from the Spirit World.

From what I had heard, however, the true story was not so exciting.

“Oh yes”, I answered, “I know about Helen Duncan. One of my journalist friends covered her trial at the Old Bailey. But, you know, he was not impressed. He says she was arrested simply because the police were fed up with her taking money from the bereaved.

“You know, she had already been convicted of fraud in Scotland and exposed as a fake.”

I regretted those words instantly; I could see from his face that Vince was angry. “Well”, he hissed, “You can tell your friend he is wrong. Nell Duncan is a good woman. I was at the séance in Copnor and, trust me, I know she is genuine. Nell Duncan is no witch and she is certainly not a fraud!”

With this he turned around and left the doorway. I felt rotten for upsetting him. It seemed his belief in the after-life was something he was hanging on to. This is what suffering and loss did to people. How could I be so insensitive?

Just then the front door opened and Vic appeared, clutching a bottle of milk. I followed him through to the kitchen.

“I’m really sorry Vic”, I said, “I think I’ve upset your brother.”

A dark look entered Vic’s eyes, and his gaze went down to the kettle.

“Look, Geoff. I haven’t told you about Vince.”

“He’s not well, is he?” I asked gently.

Vic turned and lifted his eyes to meet mine.

“He’s dead, Geoff. He went down on the Barham in 1941”.

"The Witch of Prague and Other Stories"

In his introduction to “The Witch of Prague and other Stories” (a volume in the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series) David Stuart Davies presents us with a mystery:

“During his lifetime Francis Marion Crawford (1854 - 1909) … [was] one of the most popular and commercially successful authors of his day. Yet strangely, quite soon after his death … [he] became a forgotten writer and there seems to be no logical reason for the evaporation of interest in this skilled author.”

Well, after working my way through the 300 page novel that forms the centrepiece of this collection, I feel I am on my way to solving this mystery.

Despite the originality of its conception, some interesting characterisation and an atmospheric, if sketchily realised, setting, the “classic of occult fiction” (as Dennis Wheatley, who presented a previous paperback edition in 1974, dubbed it) has several fatal flaws. Tedious purple passages full of rambling conjecture slow the action to the pace of a charnel worm and Crawford’s over-reliance on conventional plot contrivances such as unlikely coincidences and “love at first sight” undermine “the suspension of disbelief”, bogging the novel down in clichés. Overall, the modern reader is likely to feel crushed by the dead weight of Victorian Romanticism.

This is a pity, because at root, “The Witch of Prague” is an intriguing attempt at speculative fiction, largely inspired by the new science of hypnotism. In his exploration of this topic, Crawford rejects the “animal magnetism” theories of Mesmer and adopts an explanation based on “moral” influence. His central character, the beautiful but capricious Unorna, possesses hypnotic powers that she (and others) can’t help attributing to “superstitious” causes, hence her reputation as “the witch”.

Materialistic and reductionist science is caricatured in the bizarre figure of Keyork Arabian, an aged dwarf whose obsession with extending his own life leads to grotesque experiments with both living and dead subjects. The description of his Frankenstein-like chamber of horrors, full of dismembered remains and semi-revivified specimens, provides one of the most straightforwardly Gothic and enjoyable sections of the novel:

“Here a group of South Americans, found dried in the hollow of an ancient tree, had been restored almost to the likeness of life, and were apparently engaged in a lively dispute over the remains of a meal – as cold as themselves and as human. There, towered the standing body of an African, leaning upon a knotted club, fierce, grinning, lacking only sight in the sunken eyes to be terrible. There again, surmounting a lay figure wrapped in rich stuffs, smiled the calm and gentle face of a Malayan lady, decapitated for her sins, so marvellously preserved that the soft dark eyes still looked out from beneath the heavy, half-drooping lids, and the full lips, still richly coloured, parted a little to show the ivory teeth. Other sights there were, more ghastly still…”

Arabian’s self-centred quest for physical immortality throws him into an alliance of convenience with Unorna, whose skills are essential for his most sinister project; maintaining a centenarian in a state of hypnotic suspended animation pending rejuvenation via non-consensual blood transfusions from her young Jewish suitor, Israel Kafka (also kept hypnotised throughout the week-long procedure).

The main story is driven by Unorna’s abuse of her powers in advancing her unrequited passion for the mysterious, unnamed “Wanderer”. He in turn is single-mindedly engaged in tracking down his own long-lost love, Beatrice, in pursuit of whom he has travelled the globe before sighting her in a Prague church. Unorna’s egocentric ways (exacerbated by Arabian’s amoral tuition) eventually lead her to a state of moral crisis which precipitates the novel’s melodramatic conclusion.

A subplot concerns the fate of Israel Kafka, whose one-sided adoration of Unorna ironically mirrors her own predicament. Unfortunately, the novel’s portrayal of Prague’s Jewish community falls back on anti-Semitic stereotypes that still find favour among Far-Right and “Anti-Zionist” conspiracy theorists;

“…Israel sits, as a great spider in the midst of a dark web, dominating the whole capital with his eagle’s glance and weaving the destiny of the Bohemian people to suit his intricate speculations. For throughout the length and breadth of Slavonic and German Austria the Jew rules and rules alone.”

At one remarkably queasy point, Unorna, out of sadistic pique, places Kafka in a hypnotic trance and forces him to relive the life and death of Simon Abeles, a young Jewish apostate who (according to the Jesuit John Eder’s miracle-ridden account) was martyred by his father and an evil rabbi for converting to Christianity.

Crawford’s Prague is a spectrally foggy and frozen place of Gothic churches and deserted graveyards, a far cry from the stag party capital of today. This archetypal Mitteleuropean city seems to be more of a state of mind than a geographical location, and its icy gloom contrasts with the warmth of the tropical conservatory in which Unorna receives her visitors. The fact that the unnamed protagonist is referred to simply as “The Wanderer” adds to the feeling that we are reading some kind of psychological allegory.

David Stuart Davies reports that Crawford was in poor health when he drafted the novel, and its long, rambling passages certainly reveal some dark meditations that have scant relevance to the plot. These digressions try the reader’s patience and ultimately stifle any enjoyment or interest in the story. In contrast to Dennis Wheatley’s praise of the novel’s “fascinating reading” and the author’s “penetrating analysis of the powers of the human mind”, an Amazon reviewer wickedly hits the spot:

“If ruthlessly edited, it might have made a passable short story itself, but the melodramatic gothic tale goes on and on and on, padded out by relentless swathes of descriptive prose, philosophical treatises on life, love, romance, and a million other concepts, and bosom-heaving twaddle.”

If Crawford is remembered today, it is for a much-anthologised pair of short stories that have become classics. “For the Blood is the Life”, described by Basil Copper in his study of The Vampire: In Legend, Fact and Art as “one of the most original and unusual essays in the genre” is the tragic tale of Cristina, a murdered girl who returns to vampirise her lover, “he knew that her lips were red … and that she was dead”. Full of pathos and eroticism, the story is particularly memorable for its sun-drenched Italian setting.

“The Upper Berth”, lauded by H. P. Lovecraft as “one of the most tremendous horror stories in all literature” is the account of a haunted cabin aboard an Atlantic crossing. Its realistic setting, first-person immediacy and the narrator’s initial scepticism make its unexplained supernatural terrors all the more ghastly.

“The Screaming Skull” is inspired by a “real” 17th Century legend concerning a skull reserved at Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset. It is an effectively scary tale, narrated in the cantankerous persona of a retired sea captain. It was filmed in 1958 and the movie was promoted with the gimmick of a free funeral for anyone scared to death during a screening. There is no record of any takers! It also seems likely that the story was an influence on Robert Bloch’s 1945 Weird Tales contribution “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade”. This was far more effectively filmed by Amicus in 1965 as “The Skull”, featuring the immortal combination of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

From the rest of the stories, “The Dead Smile” is the purest Gothic, full of dark family secrets and mouldering crypts; “The Doll’s Ghost is a Dickens-like exercise in sentimentalism; “Man Overboard!” is a seafaring ghost story featuring identical twin, marred by an excess of nautical terminology; “By the Waters of Paradise” is a Gothic romance and “The King’s Messenger” is a tale of premonition.

The Wordsworth Editions Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series is a bargain-priced set of volumes from the publisher which launched the “£1 Classic” back in 1992. Retailing at under £3, the series contains some obscure works that would otherwise only be available in expensive small-press editions, alongside better-known works by Dennis Wheatley, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (including the “The Right Hand of Doom”, the only British edition of Howard’s original Solomon Kane stories).