“Some people ask why people would go into a dark room to be scared. I say they are already scared, and they need to have that fear manipulated and massaged. I think of horror movies as the disturbed dreams of a society.”
Wes Craven
The Ghosts of the Lanterna Magica
The writing style of E.F. Benson’s tales is far more cinematic than say that of M.R. James. For one thing Benson’s dialogue reads like a screenplay, conversational and relaxed, but the perhaps the main influence of the moving pictures are those scenes in Benson’s stories that turn on the exchange of looks and glances that a movie director would call ‘reaction shots’. In fact ghost stories written today tend to owe a debt more to the cinematic form than the wordy and sometimes overheated style of Sheridan Le Fanu. I’m thinking here of Jeanette Wintertons’s 2023 collection Night Side of the River and Jordan Peele’s anthology of new writing from black authors in Out There Screaming.
It’s certainly true that reading a creepy book by yourself can be scary, but fear is contagious and so the horror tale certainly suits the cinema. Yet literalness can be the enemy of horror in that the cinematic ‘gross-out’, to borrow Stephen King’s phrase, can become laughable. And ghosts don’t like being laughed at. But it’s also true that, with honourable exceptions, the ghost tale now lives more in the cinema and television than in print. And recent years the ghost story has been reinvented by screenwriters by adding aspects of another genre, for example, time travel in the movies Last Night in Soho and Lost Christmas, the sporting back story in Field of Dreams, riotous slapstick in Ghostbusters, the romantic drama in Truly, Madly Deeply and the zany vauderville comedy of Beetlejuice.
Ghosts have featured in classic television series such as Twilight Zone (Night Call, The Hitch-Hiker, The Grave), Boris Karloff Presents (What Beckoning Ghost) and Thriller (One Deadly Owner). The Avengers also played with the haunted house concept in The House That Jack Built. Ghosts, or what are thought of as ghosts, have been over the years a regular feature of Doctor Who. In the classic Doctor Who era, Day of the Daleks begins with an investigation of what is believed to be a ghost, though it turns out to be time travel, and Ghost Light has the setting of a Victorian haunted house. In the Doctor Who modern era, The Unquiet Dead is a Christmas ghost tale featuring Charles Dickens, where the supposed ghost is revealed to be an alien. There’s also the television series The Living and the Dead.
A word here about the BBC supernatural anthology series A Ghost Story for Christmas, which aired from 1971-1978 and featured five stories by M.R. James, including Lost Hearts which so freaked me out as a child and still does. The majority of the episodes were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark who had been inspired by Jonathan Miller’s ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ which had been made as part on the Omnibus series. Interestingly Miller’s adaptation was filmed in black and white and owed much to Expressionistic techniques. In recent years, the mantel of Lawrence Gordon Clark and Jonathan Miller has been taken up by Mark Gatiss whose adaptations of classic ghost stories are always a highlight in the BBC Christmas schedule.
