Photograph found in old book.

‘The Witches’ by Peter Curtis

The Witches (1966) is one of Hammer’s lesser-known productions.  Lacking the Gothic trappings most commonly associated with the studio’s horror output, it was designed as a star vehicle for Joan Fontaine (an Oscar-winner for her performance in Hitchcock's Rebecca over a quarter of a century earlier), who had acquired the rights to film a novel called The Devil’s Own by Peter Curtis, a pseudonym employed by bestselling historical novelist Norah Lofts.  

The movie, scripted by Nigel Kneale and based around the survival of a Satanic witch-cult in a contemporary English village, is chiefly of interest as a precursor of (and apparent influence on) The Wicker Man.  In its best moments it conveys an air of creepy menace and growing paranoia although it fails to maintain the terrifying tone of classics such as the The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan’s Claw.  Joan Fontaine, as its middle-aged head-mistress heroine Miss Mayfield, bears an unfortunate resemblance to one Margaret Hilda Thatcher and is arguably upstaged by an outrageously camp performance from supporting actress Kay Walsh as high priestess of the coven.  The final, stylised Black Mass / orgy scene rapidly descends into unintentional hilarity, like some piece of experimental art-theatre improvised by over-zealous GCSE drama students. 

The Devil’s Own has been reissued in paperback as The Witches by the renascent Hammer, as part of a series of movie tie-ins and novelisations (it has also previously appeared as The Little Wax Doll under Norah Lofts’ own name).  Unfortunately, Hammer has chosen to saddle the book with an embarrassing generic cover which bears no relationship to its contents and is evidently designed to mislead fans of Twilight and similar 'young adult' sagas.  Anyone seeking ‘supernatural romance’ in The Witches is in for a cruel disappointment; a more sexless tale could not be imagined; the novel, first published in 1960 and set in 1959, is a relic of an era in which an unmarried woman in her forties had to accept that she was a hopeless ‘spinster’ and destined for a solitary life.  The compensation was that she was allowed to pursue a career; hence Miss Mayfield’s willingness to take on the role of headmistress at the remote East Anglian village of Walwyck.

Miss Mayfield is a quietly idealistic character who has not long returned from a twenty year stint teaching at a mission school in Africa.  She wishes to escape from the drudgery and squalor of working at her most recent appointment in an inner-city school and living in ‘digs’ with another woman teacher.  As the story progresses, we learn that she has survived an unspecified mental breakdown in Africa which led to her return to England.   Apart from a chilling reference to ‘the Mau Mau oath’ (colonial ethnopsychiatry held Kenya’s Mau Mau rebels to be ‘an irrational force of evil, dominated by bestial impulses and influenced by world communism’, which aided the killing of more than 20,000 of them and the torturing of suspects by the British) much less is made in the novel of African voodoo than in the film.  In his newly commissioned introduction, Cyril Franke, the film’s director, proudly refers to his ‘production of Man of Africa and first-hand experience of witchcraft among the natives’.  It therefore seems likely that Franke was responsible for emphasising this element, which is crudely-presented and adds nothing to the film apart from an unpleasant and unnecessary injection of racism.

Another difference to is that Canon Thorby (Bax in the film), who runs the private school to which Miss Mayfield is appointed, is a genuine cleric, rather than an eccentric imposter.  Unlike the ruin depicted in the film - so reminiscent of The Wicker Man - the village church is intact and still functioning as a site of Christian worship (alongside the occasional Black Mass).  Thorby’s sister Isabel is eventually revealed to be the coven leader; could it be that Hammer shied away from depicting a churchman so closely implicated in Satanism, for fear of censorship from the BBFC?  The Canon and his sister are much more boring characters in the novel, with the latter hardly seen until the climax.

Much of the novel runs the same as the film, with the addition of extra characters and a number of pointless plot digressions.  After Miss Mayfield becomes suspicious that a death in the village has been caused by witchcraft and vows to reveal all at the inquest, she bangs her head on a desk in a mysterious ‘accident’ and conveniently (and unconvincingly) loses her memory.  This leads to her being parcelled off for a rest cure at a Fawltyesque boarding house in Hove, inhabited by bridge-playing old ladies and a retired General with their attendant nurses (there's not much fun to be had for the Twilight crowd here!)  Eventually she escapes back to Walwyck and regains her memory just in time to rescue Ethel, a teenage girl who, Rowan Morrison-style, has been secreted away prior to being the focus of Walwyck’s ‘All Hallowse’en’ sabbat which is to take place in the church itself.

 

The fate that has been planned for Ethel – defilement at the hands of a pantomime-clad ravisher - is much less horrific than the Ed Gein / Elizabeth Bathory gruesomenesss threatened in the movie, during the nastiest moment of which we observe the village butcher, who has already been graphically shown skinning a rabbit, whetting his knives in readiness.  This was possibly not expected to be the case in the minds of Ms Lofts’ genteel lady readers; any suggestion of nakedness or sexuality is couched in terms of the utmost horror and repulsion.  As she hides in the church, the mere sight of the villagers’ uncovered bodies at the start of their ritual causes Miss Mayfield so much distress that she is forced to pretend to herself she ‘is back home, in bed’, rather than face up to ‘the fat round haunches… the pendulous breasts like empty paper bags…’ paraded in front of her.  This scene is prefaced by a jaw-dropping reflection about her time in Africa; ‘she had time to think that black skin was, in itself, in some strange way, a kind of raiment; no black-skinned people could look as naked as these Walwykians did.’  

The film suffers from a preposterous conclusion in which Miss Mayfield is finally invited along to the human sacrifice by Thorby's sister for no apparent reason and then manages to sabotage the proceedings via supernatural means. By way of contrast, the novel’s ending is plausible enough but dull.  Besieged in the church tower with the hypnotised girl, Miss Mayfield finally realises that ’she was, in a fashion, the victim of her own faith’ and that the witches are without any supernatural capabilities; ‘if they had any power other than their own, they wouldn’t throw themselves against the door.’  Miss Mayfield saves Ethel by human means, Isabel Thorby bangs her head against the font and dies and, in a final ‘twist’, the girl destroys out of modesty the cine film that her rescuer has made of the ritual so that no record remains of Walwyck’s lurid Satanic revels.

The Witches, with its unquestioning depiction of post-war attitudes and morals, is a snapshot out of time. Although its premise is a promising one, the story is poorly paced and offers little of interest by way of characterisation.  It might have been rendered more interesting had the heroine been less strait-laced and old maid-like (the word 'dowdy' is used to describe her appearance throughout).  A frisson of attraction between her and the Canon would have offered an additional pole of interest; instead all we have is her fending off the attentions of a mildly louche, elderly wine-dealer in a purposeless distraction to the main story.  

As we have seen, The Witches doesn’t really count as supernatural fiction, although Ms Lofts was not averse to including spooky passages in her 'modern gothic' novels such as Gad's Hall (1977) and even published an entire collection of ghost stories; Hauntings (1974).  Written prior to the mainstreaming of Wicca and modern paganism, the story’s depiction of witchcraft comes straight from the pages of Malleus Maleficarum, although in Miss Mayfield’s sensibly modern, rationalistic brand of Christianity, witchcraft is seen as an atavistic survival rather than an active force of evil and most of its adherents are to be pitied rather than condemned:

‘And she remembered a phrase… “God has no hand but man’s to work with.”  It was equally true of the Devil.  Everything else – black magic, white magic, miracles, answered prayers – they were left-overs, dregs, the vestigial remains of primitive man’s bewildered recognition of things beyond his control.’

So what can have inspired such a tale?  In the mid-1950s, witchcraft and murder had been linked in the public mind with the publication of Detective-Superintendent Robert Fabian’s sensational memoirs Fabian of the Yard (1955).  In these, he offered a grippingly embellished account of an unsolved murder that had taken place in 1945.  In a case which became known as ‘the Lower Quinton Witchcraft Murder’ an elderly Warwickshire farmworker named Charles Walton was found savagely slain in a manner described by Fabian as ‘like the kind of killing the Druids might have done in ghastly ceremony at full moon’.  Alternatively, the manner of Walton’s death, pinned to the ground by a pitchfork through the chest and slashed across the throat with a billhook, closely resembled the 19^th Century execution of a suspected witch by a mentally deranged young man in the same area.  Fabian found his investigations blocked by obstructive villagers and reported an eerie encounter with a ‘Big Black Dog’ that related to local legendry involving Walton.  He secretly concluded that the murder was committed by a farmer with a financial motive (he could not record this while the suspect still lived due to libel laws) but the idea of a present-day hideous crime linked to the survival of ancient beliefs in a backward rural community is a powerful one that may well have provided an impetus for The Witches.

It is on record that Nigel Kneale’s original screenplay included elements of humour that the producers rejected.  It is easy to see why he would wish to satirise this material and the completed film retains camp elements that are absent from the novel.  It is impossible not to snigger, for example, at the prurience with which Ms Lofts alludes to a bodily act which she is primly unwilling to describe yet nonetheless invites us to guess at and imagine:

‘Then she lifted the cup, and saying, “Here is his blood,” offered it to Granny Rigby, who did with it something so degrading that Miss Mayfield shut her eyes and released her finger’s pressure on the camera, hoping that she had been in time.  Not even for purposes of evidence did she want a picture of that!’

So - who is going to enjoy this book?  Well, no one who is attracted by the cover, that seems certain.  Its appeal will mainly be limited to diehard Norah Lofts fans (who will probably have read it already) and Hammer completists. Wicker Man scholars and may also wish to check out both the book and the film.  For myself, I am always intrigued to read the book that inspired a film I have enjoyed and The Witches was a thought-provoking, if somewhat dull, read

Emanations: Second Sight

Volume II of Emanations, International Authors’ engaging anthology series is now available.  Edited by the ever-intrepid Carter Kaplan, it follows the tripartite plan of its predecessor, showcasing English language fiction, poetry and prose from around the world. 

Resolutely battling the fads and fashions of academia, Emanations: Second Sight plots a perilous path through the morasses of postmodernism, as it seeks to discover what might constitute the avant-garde in this rapidly-changing age.  Readers fazed by Dr Kaplan’s somewhat inconclusive introductory manifesto (the fruit of an impromptu online symposium) will gain much from persevering, as the collection features some solid and original contributions, supporting the good doctor’s  assertion that “the avant-garde announces that there is before us something actually original.”

Fictional highlights include “Sequences”, a haunting short story by Michael Butterworth and “The Bottomless Bottle of Beer” a Bulgakovian satire carried out with aplomb by Horace Jeffery Hodges.  Verse occupies over a third of the volume and includes substantial work such as Dario Rivarossa’s self-illustrated Milton-influenced piece "PL575".  The non-fiction section is shorter, but traverses a diverse range of themes from the decline of American technological supremacy observed through the prism of an artistic “Space Program: Mars” installation, through to an interesting appreciation of Gaston Leroux’s “Phantom of the Opera”.

Emanations: Second Sight is available from US and UK Amazon and the call is already out for submissions to Volume III!

Fat controller runs out of steam - "Hell Train" by Christopher Fowler

Hammer horror, the romance of travelling by steam train; what can possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a lot, it seems. Despite the framing device, in which an American screenwriter pitches it to Michael Carreras, Hell Train's main story just doesn't bear much resemblance to a Hammer film (although it does borrow elements from Horror Express, which many people seem to think is a Hammer film). Considering the ending, it could be argued that this is part of the joke, but all it does in reality is render the Hammer link gratuitous. A cynical person (not me, of course...) might even view it as a blatant attempt to cash in on the reborn studio's resurgent popularity.

The story, taken by itself, is an acceptable piece of pulp, but it's easy to see why Fowler should want to "distance" himself from it - another reason for the framing sections.  He clearly, for instance, hasn't bothered to find out anything about trains; how is it for instance, that passengers manage to get from the train on to the footplate of the locomotive (annoyingly called the "engine room") when it's moving?   The Americanisms are irritating; I know the story-within-a-story's supposed to have been written by an American, but the author doesn't even know the meaning of at least one of the words. On p.229, one of the characters, "in the engine room", watches the "stoker" whilst "trapped against the caboose" (i.e. the brake van - famously found right at the back of an American freight train)!

The characters are stock ones and don't interact in a particularly interesting way. They are all given their own separate little story, leading some reviewers to compare the plot to a that of a portmanteau horror film such as Doctor Terror's House of Horrors , but those were made by Amicus; nothing to do with Hammer. The idea of each person being "tested"by the train itself for some moral flaw in their character is rather boring. It would have been much more interesting to see their characters develop as they responded to a mutual threat together. So far as the monsters are concerned, there are way too many zombies (oh, how bored I am with zombies!), once again decidedly un-Hammerlike as the studio only ever made one zombie movie in its huge output.

I  quite enjoyed the framing sections which convey the "feel" of Hammer reasonably well, although there are a couple of sloppy mistakes. Nigel Hawthorne was never in a Hammer film and Ingrid Pitt didn't join the roster until 1971. Also - I can't imagine a writer who had previously worked for the notoriously miserly Roger Corman making the mistake of turning out a script that would go over budget for Hammer.  Overall, there is so much more could have been done with the setting of the studio and the wonderful people who worked there.  Fowler employs one of his characters to make observations about the company's declining fortunes and how these related to changes in society; but these do not go beyond the journalistic insights reflected in a work such as Sinclair McKay's A Thing of Unspeakable Horror.

By the time I had got near the end and was introduced to the "bloated" Controller, complete with his stovepipe hat, I started to feel that I really had been taken for a ride and had alighted on the Island of Sodor. At least the Rev. Awdry did his homework properly and was scrupulously correct about railway operations!  I can only assume that this is a deliberate joke, but it is irrelevant and only serves to undermine "suspension of disbelief" at a crucial moment.

Fun, but nothing special, Hell Train is on a level with the type of writing that used to be churned out in industrial quantities by paperback houses such as NEL in the '70s and '80s. As I rarely read much modern horror, could it be that the high praise dished out to this book is a measure of how far the genre has deteriorated since that era?

Full praise however has to be given to Graham Humphreys' gorgeous cover painting. In these days of photoshopped blandness, it is a sheer delight to see work of this standard adorning a paperback. Let's hope it starts a revival of high quality pulp art.

Shadows of Darkness (1975)

I wonder if there was ever a No. 2?

"Highgate vampire" hysteria was obviously still raging, five years on (or somebody hoped it was). And people were expected to pick up on references to "The Communist Party Manifesto" in a trashy comic...

From Pan's People to Pony Play:"Ringstones"

Sarban's Nightmares - Part One(Warning - spoilers ahead)


John William Wall (1910-1989), who wrote under the name of "Sarban", has had something of a renaissance of late. This is largely due to the stalwart efforts of the Tartarus Press in publishing high-quality hardback and e-book editions of his long-out-of-print and unpublished works, plus a biography by Mark Valentine. Unfortunately, however, I have had to rely on a typo-riddled P.O.D. edition of The Sarban Omnibus. Two of the the three novels contained therein (Ringstones, The Sound of his Horn and The Doll Maker) are also available in free online editions.

Ringstones (1951) is centred on the first-person narrative of Daphne Hazel, a trainee gym teacher who accepts a holiday job at Ringstones Hall from an eccentric academic named Dr Ravelin. At this isolated moorland residence she is tasked with tutoring three mysterious "foreign" children of undisclosed nationality. In response to her questioning, Dr Ravelin is decidedly unforthcoming about the origin of his mysterious charges.

Idyllic to start with, the tale gradually becomes sinister as Miss Hazel discovers more about her mysterious charges and their surroundings. It becomes apparent that she is entrapped by the power of Nuaman, the fifteen year old boy (or is he?) who also dominates his younger female peers, Marvan and Ianthe, and Katia the Polish maid. Eventually, she is vouchsafed a disturbing revelation of where this domination is leading.

These events are punctuated by conversations with the reclusive Dr. Ravelin, who stays cloistered in his study for most of the daytime. An amateur archaeologist, he speculates that the ancient house occupies the site of a Roman arena set out for chariot races and other games. The moorland stone circle from which the Hall takes its name feeds wilder ruminations on history and mythology. Reflecting on the reuse of sacred sites by successive religions, Ravelin concludes "Perhaps these ancient stones hold down something far more ancient, something far stranger than the men who placed them understood. Some queer feet have danced here, I feel."
Ringstones is suffused by the spirit of Pan and "his representatives on (the) moors", who may or may not be the indigenous inhabitants of the land, driven out to desolate places but still recalled by folklore and superstition. The myth is of "the gift of the fairies" which, as Dr Ravelin observes "always has some disastrous condition attached to it. Their gold, in the morning, is a stone, or their invitation to a night's revels holds the unfortunate mortal in a century's slavery."

It will be clear from the above that we are in Arthur Machen territory. As with many of the Welsh master's accounts of the" Little People" Sarban's tale exudes an air of unwholesome sensuality. It starts off with in "Health and Efficiency" style with the well-toned Miss Hazel donning her "skimpy gym trunks" for a day's "romping and tumbling" with her shirtless young charge, whilst wondering at "the perfection of his physical development". Likewise, the clothing of the two little girls is of a type unlikely to be approved by the Mother's Union; "Like Nuaman's, their dress seemed more than is usual with English children to set off their figures rather than to cover them".

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, no explicitly carnal sentiments are expressed in the novel; things remain chaste even when Nuaman "caressingly" strokes Miss Hazel's arm in a "soothing, persuasive way". Sarban's eroticism runs underground and is focussed on male control and dominance. The measures that Nuaman (jokingly nicknamed "the Slave Driver" by his tutor) takes to impose his will on females very slowly become apparent, until the point at which Miss Hazel realises she has misheard the Polish maid Katia's broken English as "he weep" and that what she really meant was "he whips".

Miss Hazel also starts to realise that it is physically impossible for her to leave Ringstones. An attempt to reach a nearby village by crossing the moors results in her becoming lost and going around in circles until she returns to the Hall ("I want to keep you here for ever" observes Nuaman in a later conversation). She also receives a creepy indication that the two girls may be representatives of a larger group on the moors, as she spots some of them playing with Nuaman by the stream. Meanwhile, the Polish maid expresses her fear of lies-schi, which Dr Ravelin explains to the means "demons of the forest".

The conclusion of Miss Hazel's retelling of her adventures finds her arising on a moonlit night and finding herself mysteriously cast back in time to the Roman era, when the Games are being held on the site of Ringstones Hall. Preparations for track events are taking place in the arena and she encounters the Armenian servant Sarkissian with a special chariot. She had previously dreamt of him constructing this device with Nuaman in the stables.

It appears that Miss Hazel is about to be forced into an unconsenting act of what is termed "pony play" by modern devotees of the Aristotelian Perversion. Already leashed, she is to be stripped and manacled to the pole of this vehicle alongside the already-harnessed Katia in order to take part in a race. Then she sees the charioteer; "Nuaman gazed at me, and before I dropped my eyes I saw his expression begin to change… I dared not look at his face, but I saw the lash…" On this climactic note, her memoir comes to an end.

Daphne Hazel's story is framed by the sceptical account of an unnamed male narrator accompanying his friend Piers, who has received her manuscript and is keen to discover more about the extraordinary events described in it. When they arrive at Ringstones Hall, they discover it to be an uninhabited ruin. Tracking down Miss Hazel (placed as a tutor to two Egyptian girls in more normal accommodation), she explains her story to them as "a sort of dream, or a lot of dreams" which came to her after she injured herself at the ruin and was left there alone for several hours whilst medical assistance was sought for her.

One is reminded of the gift of the fairies, but the young woman seems, superficially at least, undamaged by her experiences, imagined or otherwise. Just before the narrator and his friend part company with her, they observe her making a movement which shows this is not the case;
"She held out both her hands … with a curious gesture of surrender as if offering the hands and wrists to someone. I saw a newly-healed long cut on the inside of her left wrist plain against the sun-browned skin. She seemed to offer her wrists a moment and then, yielding to an unknown compulsion, reluctantly turned down her palms, curling her fingers round something invisible to us."
Our narrator concludes "I was shocked to see how far behind Piers I had been in understanding the depth of her distress … I think we were all looking with a slowly rising fear at those two drooping hands, so helplessly waiting there." They respond in a reassuring way, but it seems clear that both believe that Pan's representatives have found a victim.

It could be argued that the extent to which Sarban's fantasy edges over into pornography is a measure of how it fails as literature. It could be that Sarban got away with so much kinkiness because he was writing in a more innocent time. Reaching the end of Ringstones, modern readers may feel that they have stumbled into one of John Norman's notorious Gor novels.

What saves Ringstones from being mere BDSM fare are its mysticism and atmosphere. Whilst it falls short of the bar set by Machen, there is a strangeness about the tale that captures the imagination in a similar way to The Hill of Dreams. It is very slow-moving and replete with detailed descriptions of the countryside and meditations on arcane subjects. The prurient person that James Branch Cabell dubbed "the pornoscopic reader" will have a laborious time finding the juicy bits.

Seen as a trilogy, the component novels of The Sarban Omnibus share the theme of male dominance. Ringstones introduces it as an archetypal principle arising from the mythic depths of the collective unconscious to ensnare a modern, independent young woman. The message is that, despite her superficial recovery, Daphne Hazel will remain permanently marked, physically and mentally, by her mysterious experiences. "Everything has end. Except a circle" she pleads to "Sir No Man" at one point. "Ringstones is a circle", he responds "You can never come to the end of Ringstones"…
(Next: The Sound Of His Horn)

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.