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It was after that that he began to believe he was being followed
In December, I agreed to watch a thing with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants. Admittedly a little fried from our six-hour choral recording session of Yiddish song, I gathered that it was British, from the 1970's, and modernized a turn-of-the-century ghost story in some fashion that included TV journalism; she had picked it out of a giveaway pile of DVDs at WGBH and it sounded like a recipe for excellence or serious injury. It took us a month, but we managed to watch it this weekend. Except in the usual small ways of disquiet, I can definitely say I was not injured by ITV's Casting the Runes (1979).
Although it aired originally on ITV Playhouse (1967–83), a viewer could be forgiven for mistaking this 47-minute television film for a lost installment of A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971–78): it was scripted by Clive Exton, directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, and despite some alterations necessitated or invited by the update in decades and protagonists, it sticks surprisingly close to M.R. James. Instead of turn-of-the-century Warwickshire, it's the Winter of Discontent in Leeds and Prudence Dunning (Jan Francis) has just successfully overseen the production and broadcast of an investigative report on the local occult which ends by dismissing one N.I. Karswell (Iain Cuthbertson), the self-styled, self-published "Abbot of Lufford" whose books espouse the Crowleyesque credo that "vice is the only true virtue, lust is the only true modesty, indecency the only true decorum, and evil the only true good," even more publicly and stingingly than the original Edward Dunning recommended against the acceptance of a paper via anonymous peer review. It does not sit well with the middle-aged man in tinted glasses and a grey jumper who sits for a moment at his desk with its clutter of gilt decadence and half-mounted butterflies and then takes down, with a dipped quill and a dry expression, the name of the woman who quoted his words as "a fitting epitaph on the whole gallimaufry of mumbo-jumbo." From the next moment that Prudence hurries into work the following morning, shaking back a hood of dark hair, joking with her colleagues, an enameled butterfly pinned to the pale green silk of her blouse, nothing will happen to her that does not feel a little, or a lot, off. It might be nothing more than bad timing that her housemate goes suddenly to the hospital with food poisoning, nothing more than eccentricity that the tall, clerically black-clad stranger at the Brotherton Library returns her knocked-over stack of research books with such an avid, meaningful smile that it chills her for a moment, turning to find him watching her from the stairs as if waiting to be seen to make his exit. It is harder to explain a dedication in the credits of her program that wasn't there when it aired and impossible to account rationally for the floppy-legged, toothed thing in her bedclothes that leaves her sitting up all night in the spare room, too shaken to sleep. "I must sound like a complete loony," she apologizes to the older friends whose couch she crashes on, but Derek and Jean Gayton (Bernard Gallagher and Joanna Dunham) are less concerned about her mental state than about her survival—for Jean especially, the mention of Karswell recalls a creepy-crawly story from her days at a London publishing house where one of the first readers wittily slated the original manuscript of Karswell's A History of Witchcraft and not long after, very nastily, died. A visit to the dead man's brother, the wiry welder-sculptor Henry Harrington (Edward Petherbridge), only confirms that the same terrible pattern seems to be forming around Prudence that obsessed John Harrington in the weeks before his death. The slip of paper that riffles from the pages of her library book and almost snatches itself out the window on a strange hot draft is not a shock but a dreadful confirmation. "Is there any way we can find out what it says?" Derek encourages her. Prudence barely hears him, staring into the strip of neat calligraphy that looks most like Greek done upside down and backwards: "It doesn't really matter what it says, does it? We know what it means."
It is inevitable but almost certainly unfair to compare a small-screen, low-budget version of James' "Casting the Runes" to its most famous cinematic incarnation, Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957), whose suggestive smoke and shadows are regularly rated among the best of British horror film. The thing is, I'm not sure that Casting the Runes loses out. I suspect much of it can be chalked up to extra-diegetic factors like the differing expectations and allowances of a feature film and a TV anthology slot, but Night of the Demon invents so much more. There's a séance, there's a witch-cult, there's a murder investigation, there's a romance, there are extended passages of cat-and-mousing between a defensive psychologist and a literally devil-may-care magician, there's amateur detecting and hypnosis and storms summoned out of a clear sky. I like all of it immensely except for the full-frontal demon, which I find much less frightening than stealthier tricks like the light in a late-night corridor lying wrong on the floor or a real dead man's voice coming out of the mouth of an embarrassingly phony medium, but it's not the casual, almost anecdotal accumulation of coincidence and insinuation and things that are flatly wrong that animates the original James story. I suppose neither is Casting the Runes, strictly, when we can watch Karswell work his sympathetic magic with a dollhouse and poppets and a spidery little effigy or Prudence unsuccessfully attempt to pass the fatal runes back to their author in the guise of a village-green-preservation-society questionnaire, but it is notable that once they have established the plot in the milieu of regional TV rather than Edwardian academia, Exton and Clark add very little. The Gaytons are fleshed out from the extant characters of the Secretary and his wife; their one-scene friends the Marriotts (Patricia Shakesby and David Calder) stand in for the similarly expository couple who share stories of Karswell and John Harrington. Edward Dunning received the first warning of his fate in the form of an advertisement seemingly embedded within the glass of a tram window—Prudence finds hers apparently inserted into the print of her recently transmitted program. A quotation from Coleridge and a calendar with the pages torn out after a certain date are no less unsettling to receive in the mail of 1968 than 1889. Food poisoning hasn't become any more fun since the nineteen-oughts. An airport is just as suitable a setting as a train station for a sleight of hand with tickets. Much of the dialogue is transferred directly from James or minimally rewritten; some of it is redistributed and on balance I approve, because if you care about the Bechdel–Wallace test, Casting the Runes passes it by having one pair of women discuss curses and another discuss men only in context of a gruesome death. Most importantly, the teleplay leaves intact the pettiness of Karswell, who after all in the original story supernaturally murders one person and tries to murder another for the sake of nothing more existentially threatening than a bad review. As played by Cuthbertson with a mild American accent and a frank delight in the inventive struggles of his prey, he's not without dignity and certainly not without power, but what he uses it for is so thin-skinned and trivial that it's no surprise he practices black magic: any other kind might require him to recognize other people, not just his own pride and desires, as real.
And the magic in this film is good, by which I mean it is well-done rather than benevolent; it runs as much on slant rhymes and correspondences as it does on logical rules and it has a gut-punch trick of revealing itself in hindsight, long after understanding would have helped anything. The first words spoken onscreen are "It's like an oven in here. I don't know why it should be," which is not a ridiculous statement for a cavernous artist's studio in what looks like a converted mill in Yorkshire in November. Much later on, Derek entering Prudence's flat to help her hunt for the written fixative of a curse will remark at once, "God, it's hot in here . . . The heating's not on, even," and we may recall Henry's reference to a mysterious "gust of wind—warm wind" that blew his brother's rune-paper irretrievably into the fire, and we understand all at once that the presence of heat signals the curse in operation and we are never given a single reason why. It's not what matters. A conversation held outdoors on Bonfire Night contributes to the Samhain atmosphere with its sparks and shrieks and spookily masked children romping among the fireworks like outtakes from Derek Jarman, but its content snaps into focus the elliptical cold open where a boyishly bare-headed man in a long red scarf took his brother's dog for a walk and was run to death in a winter field by something that came out of an emptiness of snow and late low sun. I love this scene on its own micro-horror merits: it's our one real look at the embodiment of the curse—I am reluctant to name it as specifically as a demon since the production never does—glimpsed first at a distance through thorny bare branches, then closer through a scrim of frosted thistle-heads, snow-dusted dark as a winged statue with hands clawed out. The clearest we ever see it is a kind of photonegative double exposure, a snarling mask across the sun's smoked gold. Mostly we see doomed John Harrington (Christopher Good) blundering across the thin-snowed ground, thrashing against the invisible something that beats about him and bears him down and will leave him almost unrecognizable to the brother who had to find him: "Almost every bone in his body was broken." The field is beautifully tinted by the sunset firing the horizon of the trees, scratchy and luminous as a watercolor by Samuel Palmer. It's the farthest thing imaginable from terror by night and it sets the tone for a narrative that does not play its black magic against modernity for irony but for matter-of-factness, which is worse. A TV editor assumes the unfamiliar intertitles In memoriam John Harrington 1937–1968, one month was allowed are some kind of cutting-room prank, but when he pulls the film out of the Steenbeck, it takes him one glance to realize "it couldn't have been cut in—there aren't any joins." The same pale winter sun that so pitilessly witnessed the demolition of John Harrington seems to burn in the depths of Karswell's celestial globe where a female figure twists among the hot gold of the constellations, the magician himself roars with laughter as the heavens wheel crazily and Prudence in her fruitless disguise flees. She has to let herself out of the building; the housekeeper has disappeared. On hearing her description of the woman, a passing local will repeat a name as if trying to rid himself of it and finally share the not-joke: "Mrs. Pearce has been dead for three years!" Again and again, we receive no explanations, only the inarguable existence of things that should not be. For this sure a hand with the uncanny, I will accept any number of budget shortfalls and actors compensating for special effects with mime. I like, too, how its ambiguity makes room for humor, mostly in the helpless mode of normality run aground on the bizarre. "A spider?" Derek tactfully double-checks Prudence's story of the horror in her bed. "Yes," she sighs impatiently, "with teeth," and then as if belatedly registering what she's just said, qualifies, "Not an ordinary spider."
It especially impresses me that Casting the Runes contrives an ending even more lingeringly unnerving than James' own. In the short story, the curse turned back on Karswell kills him with supernatural deniability—visiting a church in Abbeville, he's brained by a stone that shouldn't have been able to fall from the scaffolding where no renovation work was going on. Here, the script having substituted a flight to Venezuela for the boat train to Dover, our last sight of the Abbot of Lufford is a jet lifting off into a blood-red sunset. Nothing manifested in the airport or on the runway, as we might have expected from the opening sequence or the fiery, rending finale of Night of the Demon. Prudence and Derek return home to Jean, he confident, she uncertain if their shell game with the tickets even worked. The evening news is playing in the background, stalled negotiations in Brussels, barricades and riots in Tehran; seamlessly the newsreader switches from the international to the up close and breaking:
"News has just reached us of an air disaster at the Bristol Channel involving a Brazilian jumbo bound for Caracas. First reports tell of a violent disturbance in the passenger compartment and a rapid loss of altitude. The pilot was heard to speak of panic and confusion, but did not specify a cause. Seconds later all communication with the plane was lost. Local shipping has been diverted to the area. We'll be giving you more details on this story as they come out."
It's a brilliant step further. It preserves the impersonal reportage of the story, where a mundane freak accident speaks volumes to those in the know, but it magnifies the cost far beyond the qualms of James' Dunning and Harrington. Karswell may have deserved whatever fearful fiend he had coming to him, but not the rest of the innocent passengers and crew; their deaths demonstrate with blunt gravity that it is not possible to handle black magic even defensively without some evil done. The screen fades to red before we can read anything in Prudence's still face as she takes in what she's unwittingly enabled. Persons attempting to find a trolley problem in this narrative will be shot.
The performances are as solid as the script. Gallagher and Dunham make for sturdy support without coming across as either too quickly credulous or stubbornly skeptical, but Good draws a great deal of haggard, mercurial sympathy from his three minutes onscreen and commits to his assault by invisible assailant like a pro. Petherbridge is essentially playing an infodump, but his restless chain-smoking and his skeletal art suggest a haunting not so different in aftermath from his brother's; the diffident precision of his voice actually sharpens the horror of the events he narrates and it feels like the lightest of in-jokes on the film's part that one of his smaller pieces resembles the bat-winged demon of its predecessor. Biased as I am toward any scene that contains Petherbridge, however, I have to grant that the success of any version of "Casting the Runes" rests with its Dunning and Karswell and Francis and Cuthbertson are so good that even knowing the close adaptation doesn't really allow for it, I wish they'd shared more scenes. She's smart, tenacious, occasionally dismissive or brusque in the way of real people as opposed to flawless heroes; her brief third-act meltdown is entirely deserved, as she sees her death coming up on the calendar and nothing up anyone's sleeve to get her out of it, but she applies herself to researching her own curse as thoroughly as she would a documentary and it feels both admirable and characteristic. What else is she going to do? These days she'd probably record everything on her phone, just in case she didn't live to edit the final cut. He smiles like a man with a private joke and performs his small, sinister rituals with the familiarity and care of daily practice; he can turn on a great teasing charm and we know he can't take criticism, never mind that his masterwork was apparently a crankish disaster even by the standards of the "flower-power psychedelic pseudo-mystic manuscripts" flooding the market in the Age of Aquarius. His Americanness interests me because I can't tell if it is intended to suggest crass entitlement, not one of us, or Jack Parsons. His shadow on the library wall looks like The Third Man (1949). The photography by a different Peter Jackson is quite nice, by the way, in the bleak-lit, washed-out style that is associated with both the dead of fall and the 1970's. It switches between 16 mm and video depending on whether the camera is indoors or out, but I didn't care about that. The score contains some electronic skitters and some moody, eerie flutes.
I don't know what to tell you about availability. The Region 1 DVD from Acorn and the Region 2 from Network both appear to be out of print [edit: the latter is still Amazon-available; also there is YouTube]; I would suggest checking your local library, except in the universe of M.R. James that is often a terrible idea. Probably the ideal way to see one of these films is too late at night on TV, if that happens anymore. An evening with friends did not ruin the experience for me. I should really watch more of the actual Ghost Story for Christmas than The Ash Tree (1976) and The Signalman (1976) sometime. This gallimaufry brought to you by my investigating backers at Patreon.
skygiants. Admittedly a little fried from our six-hour choral recording session of Yiddish song, I gathered that it was British, from the 1970's, and modernized a turn-of-the-century ghost story in some fashion that included TV journalism; she had picked it out of a giveaway pile of DVDs at WGBH and it sounded like a recipe for excellence or serious injury. It took us a month, but we managed to watch it this weekend. Except in the usual small ways of disquiet, I can definitely say I was not injured by ITV's Casting the Runes (1979). Although it aired originally on ITV Playhouse (1967–83), a viewer could be forgiven for mistaking this 47-minute television film for a lost installment of A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971–78): it was scripted by Clive Exton, directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, and despite some alterations necessitated or invited by the update in decades and protagonists, it sticks surprisingly close to M.R. James. Instead of turn-of-the-century Warwickshire, it's the Winter of Discontent in Leeds and Prudence Dunning (Jan Francis) has just successfully overseen the production and broadcast of an investigative report on the local occult which ends by dismissing one N.I. Karswell (Iain Cuthbertson), the self-styled, self-published "Abbot of Lufford" whose books espouse the Crowleyesque credo that "vice is the only true virtue, lust is the only true modesty, indecency the only true decorum, and evil the only true good," even more publicly and stingingly than the original Edward Dunning recommended against the acceptance of a paper via anonymous peer review. It does not sit well with the middle-aged man in tinted glasses and a grey jumper who sits for a moment at his desk with its clutter of gilt decadence and half-mounted butterflies and then takes down, with a dipped quill and a dry expression, the name of the woman who quoted his words as "a fitting epitaph on the whole gallimaufry of mumbo-jumbo." From the next moment that Prudence hurries into work the following morning, shaking back a hood of dark hair, joking with her colleagues, an enameled butterfly pinned to the pale green silk of her blouse, nothing will happen to her that does not feel a little, or a lot, off. It might be nothing more than bad timing that her housemate goes suddenly to the hospital with food poisoning, nothing more than eccentricity that the tall, clerically black-clad stranger at the Brotherton Library returns her knocked-over stack of research books with such an avid, meaningful smile that it chills her for a moment, turning to find him watching her from the stairs as if waiting to be seen to make his exit. It is harder to explain a dedication in the credits of her program that wasn't there when it aired and impossible to account rationally for the floppy-legged, toothed thing in her bedclothes that leaves her sitting up all night in the spare room, too shaken to sleep. "I must sound like a complete loony," she apologizes to the older friends whose couch she crashes on, but Derek and Jean Gayton (Bernard Gallagher and Joanna Dunham) are less concerned about her mental state than about her survival—for Jean especially, the mention of Karswell recalls a creepy-crawly story from her days at a London publishing house where one of the first readers wittily slated the original manuscript of Karswell's A History of Witchcraft and not long after, very nastily, died. A visit to the dead man's brother, the wiry welder-sculptor Henry Harrington (Edward Petherbridge), only confirms that the same terrible pattern seems to be forming around Prudence that obsessed John Harrington in the weeks before his death. The slip of paper that riffles from the pages of her library book and almost snatches itself out the window on a strange hot draft is not a shock but a dreadful confirmation. "Is there any way we can find out what it says?" Derek encourages her. Prudence barely hears him, staring into the strip of neat calligraphy that looks most like Greek done upside down and backwards: "It doesn't really matter what it says, does it? We know what it means."
It is inevitable but almost certainly unfair to compare a small-screen, low-budget version of James' "Casting the Runes" to its most famous cinematic incarnation, Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957), whose suggestive smoke and shadows are regularly rated among the best of British horror film. The thing is, I'm not sure that Casting the Runes loses out. I suspect much of it can be chalked up to extra-diegetic factors like the differing expectations and allowances of a feature film and a TV anthology slot, but Night of the Demon invents so much more. There's a séance, there's a witch-cult, there's a murder investigation, there's a romance, there are extended passages of cat-and-mousing between a defensive psychologist and a literally devil-may-care magician, there's amateur detecting and hypnosis and storms summoned out of a clear sky. I like all of it immensely except for the full-frontal demon, which I find much less frightening than stealthier tricks like the light in a late-night corridor lying wrong on the floor or a real dead man's voice coming out of the mouth of an embarrassingly phony medium, but it's not the casual, almost anecdotal accumulation of coincidence and insinuation and things that are flatly wrong that animates the original James story. I suppose neither is Casting the Runes, strictly, when we can watch Karswell work his sympathetic magic with a dollhouse and poppets and a spidery little effigy or Prudence unsuccessfully attempt to pass the fatal runes back to their author in the guise of a village-green-preservation-society questionnaire, but it is notable that once they have established the plot in the milieu of regional TV rather than Edwardian academia, Exton and Clark add very little. The Gaytons are fleshed out from the extant characters of the Secretary and his wife; their one-scene friends the Marriotts (Patricia Shakesby and David Calder) stand in for the similarly expository couple who share stories of Karswell and John Harrington. Edward Dunning received the first warning of his fate in the form of an advertisement seemingly embedded within the glass of a tram window—Prudence finds hers apparently inserted into the print of her recently transmitted program. A quotation from Coleridge and a calendar with the pages torn out after a certain date are no less unsettling to receive in the mail of 1968 than 1889. Food poisoning hasn't become any more fun since the nineteen-oughts. An airport is just as suitable a setting as a train station for a sleight of hand with tickets. Much of the dialogue is transferred directly from James or minimally rewritten; some of it is redistributed and on balance I approve, because if you care about the Bechdel–Wallace test, Casting the Runes passes it by having one pair of women discuss curses and another discuss men only in context of a gruesome death. Most importantly, the teleplay leaves intact the pettiness of Karswell, who after all in the original story supernaturally murders one person and tries to murder another for the sake of nothing more existentially threatening than a bad review. As played by Cuthbertson with a mild American accent and a frank delight in the inventive struggles of his prey, he's not without dignity and certainly not without power, but what he uses it for is so thin-skinned and trivial that it's no surprise he practices black magic: any other kind might require him to recognize other people, not just his own pride and desires, as real.
And the magic in this film is good, by which I mean it is well-done rather than benevolent; it runs as much on slant rhymes and correspondences as it does on logical rules and it has a gut-punch trick of revealing itself in hindsight, long after understanding would have helped anything. The first words spoken onscreen are "It's like an oven in here. I don't know why it should be," which is not a ridiculous statement for a cavernous artist's studio in what looks like a converted mill in Yorkshire in November. Much later on, Derek entering Prudence's flat to help her hunt for the written fixative of a curse will remark at once, "God, it's hot in here . . . The heating's not on, even," and we may recall Henry's reference to a mysterious "gust of wind—warm wind" that blew his brother's rune-paper irretrievably into the fire, and we understand all at once that the presence of heat signals the curse in operation and we are never given a single reason why. It's not what matters. A conversation held outdoors on Bonfire Night contributes to the Samhain atmosphere with its sparks and shrieks and spookily masked children romping among the fireworks like outtakes from Derek Jarman, but its content snaps into focus the elliptical cold open where a boyishly bare-headed man in a long red scarf took his brother's dog for a walk and was run to death in a winter field by something that came out of an emptiness of snow and late low sun. I love this scene on its own micro-horror merits: it's our one real look at the embodiment of the curse—I am reluctant to name it as specifically as a demon since the production never does—glimpsed first at a distance through thorny bare branches, then closer through a scrim of frosted thistle-heads, snow-dusted dark as a winged statue with hands clawed out. The clearest we ever see it is a kind of photonegative double exposure, a snarling mask across the sun's smoked gold. Mostly we see doomed John Harrington (Christopher Good) blundering across the thin-snowed ground, thrashing against the invisible something that beats about him and bears him down and will leave him almost unrecognizable to the brother who had to find him: "Almost every bone in his body was broken." The field is beautifully tinted by the sunset firing the horizon of the trees, scratchy and luminous as a watercolor by Samuel Palmer. It's the farthest thing imaginable from terror by night and it sets the tone for a narrative that does not play its black magic against modernity for irony but for matter-of-factness, which is worse. A TV editor assumes the unfamiliar intertitles In memoriam John Harrington 1937–1968, one month was allowed are some kind of cutting-room prank, but when he pulls the film out of the Steenbeck, it takes him one glance to realize "it couldn't have been cut in—there aren't any joins." The same pale winter sun that so pitilessly witnessed the demolition of John Harrington seems to burn in the depths of Karswell's celestial globe where a female figure twists among the hot gold of the constellations, the magician himself roars with laughter as the heavens wheel crazily and Prudence in her fruitless disguise flees. She has to let herself out of the building; the housekeeper has disappeared. On hearing her description of the woman, a passing local will repeat a name as if trying to rid himself of it and finally share the not-joke: "Mrs. Pearce has been dead for three years!" Again and again, we receive no explanations, only the inarguable existence of things that should not be. For this sure a hand with the uncanny, I will accept any number of budget shortfalls and actors compensating for special effects with mime. I like, too, how its ambiguity makes room for humor, mostly in the helpless mode of normality run aground on the bizarre. "A spider?" Derek tactfully double-checks Prudence's story of the horror in her bed. "Yes," she sighs impatiently, "with teeth," and then as if belatedly registering what she's just said, qualifies, "Not an ordinary spider."
It especially impresses me that Casting the Runes contrives an ending even more lingeringly unnerving than James' own. In the short story, the curse turned back on Karswell kills him with supernatural deniability—visiting a church in Abbeville, he's brained by a stone that shouldn't have been able to fall from the scaffolding where no renovation work was going on. Here, the script having substituted a flight to Venezuela for the boat train to Dover, our last sight of the Abbot of Lufford is a jet lifting off into a blood-red sunset. Nothing manifested in the airport or on the runway, as we might have expected from the opening sequence or the fiery, rending finale of Night of the Demon. Prudence and Derek return home to Jean, he confident, she uncertain if their shell game with the tickets even worked. The evening news is playing in the background, stalled negotiations in Brussels, barricades and riots in Tehran; seamlessly the newsreader switches from the international to the up close and breaking:
"News has just reached us of an air disaster at the Bristol Channel involving a Brazilian jumbo bound for Caracas. First reports tell of a violent disturbance in the passenger compartment and a rapid loss of altitude. The pilot was heard to speak of panic and confusion, but did not specify a cause. Seconds later all communication with the plane was lost. Local shipping has been diverted to the area. We'll be giving you more details on this story as they come out."
It's a brilliant step further. It preserves the impersonal reportage of the story, where a mundane freak accident speaks volumes to those in the know, but it magnifies the cost far beyond the qualms of James' Dunning and Harrington. Karswell may have deserved whatever fearful fiend he had coming to him, but not the rest of the innocent passengers and crew; their deaths demonstrate with blunt gravity that it is not possible to handle black magic even defensively without some evil done. The screen fades to red before we can read anything in Prudence's still face as she takes in what she's unwittingly enabled. Persons attempting to find a trolley problem in this narrative will be shot.
The performances are as solid as the script. Gallagher and Dunham make for sturdy support without coming across as either too quickly credulous or stubbornly skeptical, but Good draws a great deal of haggard, mercurial sympathy from his three minutes onscreen and commits to his assault by invisible assailant like a pro. Petherbridge is essentially playing an infodump, but his restless chain-smoking and his skeletal art suggest a haunting not so different in aftermath from his brother's; the diffident precision of his voice actually sharpens the horror of the events he narrates and it feels like the lightest of in-jokes on the film's part that one of his smaller pieces resembles the bat-winged demon of its predecessor. Biased as I am toward any scene that contains Petherbridge, however, I have to grant that the success of any version of "Casting the Runes" rests with its Dunning and Karswell and Francis and Cuthbertson are so good that even knowing the close adaptation doesn't really allow for it, I wish they'd shared more scenes. She's smart, tenacious, occasionally dismissive or brusque in the way of real people as opposed to flawless heroes; her brief third-act meltdown is entirely deserved, as she sees her death coming up on the calendar and nothing up anyone's sleeve to get her out of it, but she applies herself to researching her own curse as thoroughly as she would a documentary and it feels both admirable and characteristic. What else is she going to do? These days she'd probably record everything on her phone, just in case she didn't live to edit the final cut. He smiles like a man with a private joke and performs his small, sinister rituals with the familiarity and care of daily practice; he can turn on a great teasing charm and we know he can't take criticism, never mind that his masterwork was apparently a crankish disaster even by the standards of the "flower-power psychedelic pseudo-mystic manuscripts" flooding the market in the Age of Aquarius. His Americanness interests me because I can't tell if it is intended to suggest crass entitlement, not one of us, or Jack Parsons. His shadow on the library wall looks like The Third Man (1949). The photography by a different Peter Jackson is quite nice, by the way, in the bleak-lit, washed-out style that is associated with both the dead of fall and the 1970's. It switches between 16 mm and video depending on whether the camera is indoors or out, but I didn't care about that. The score contains some electronic skitters and some moody, eerie flutes.
I don't know what to tell you about availability. The Region 1 DVD from Acorn and the Region 2 from Network both appear to be out of print [edit: the latter is still Amazon-available; also there is YouTube]; I would suggest checking your local library, except in the universe of M.R. James that is often a terrible idea. Probably the ideal way to see one of these films is too late at night on TV, if that happens anymore. An evening with friends did not ruin the experience for me. I should really watch more of the actual Ghost Story for Christmas than The Ash Tree (1976) and The Signalman (1976) sometime. This gallimaufry brought to you by my investigating backers at Patreon.
no subject
I don't think there's any serious problem with its availability in Region 2, by the way. I got it by putting it on my Amazon wish list, and there are still copies available here. I highly recommend the other BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas, too. There's a BFI box set of them with lots of extras and interviews, which is an extremely worthwhile investment.
no subject
Nice! I will check that out; I am sorry to have missed it at the time. My post-Christmas was full of hell-cold and waiting for plumbers.
a) because I want to screencap it so I can go and take matching shots of some of the Leeds locations
You should! I'd love to see them. I hope the local TV studios were in fact just the local TV studios.
but more specifically because they don't show it. And probably for the best, as that certainly leaves plenty for the viewer to think about.
I don't think it was you: it really is the short sharp shock and done. It worked for me. I think of some of James' endings in the same class of sudden stop.
I don't think there's any serious problem with its availability in Region 2, by the way. I got it by putting it on my Amazon wish list, and there are still copies available here.
Good to hear! I will correct the post. I saw the out-of-stock notices and believed them.
I highly recommend the other BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas, too. There's a BFI box set of them with lots of extras and interviews, which is an extremely worthwhile investment.
That is very tempting. How have the revival episodes been? I've only seen The Tractate Middoth (2013).
no subject
Yes, I think they are - and much less changed since 1979 than I would have guessed, judging from those pictures.
How have the revival episodes been?
I've generally enjoyed them, particularly because (with the exception of Whistle and I’ll Come to You 2010) they have tended to do stories which weren't adapted in the 1960s / '70s anyway, so it is all a bonus rather than a frustrating replication of something which had already been done very well. The one they did this Christmas (Martin's Close) was a bit weak, but it isn't on the box set anyway (obviously, being too new).
I think my favourites versions will always be Christopher Lee's Ghost Stories for Christmas, a) because Christopher Lee, b) because they were the first context in which I encountered M.R. James and c) because the format, in which he reads the stories directly to a circle of rapt students with only light dramatisation to aid the imagination, is so beautifully evocative of James' original practice. Frustratingly, only three of the four stories he originally did are on the BFI box set, as there is some kind of copyright problem with the music on the fourth (The Ash Tree) that prevents commercial release. It can generally be found on YouTube, but often with the title written in funny letters to avoid being taken down for copyright infringement. If you're ever desperate for that one, I have a downloaded copy which I could probably share with you via Dropbox or similar.
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I'm delighted. That is some very familiar boxy brick.
I think my favourites versions will always be Christopher Lee's Ghost Stories for Christmas, a) because Christopher Lee, b) because they were the first context in which I encountered M.R. James and c) because the format, in which he reads the stories directly to a circle of rapt students with only light dramatisation to aid the imagination, is so beautifully evocative of James' original practice.
I have never heard any of those! I will try to track them down and may well ask you for The Ash Tree. That sounds like a lovely style of storytelling.
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Oh my, you are in for a treat! The other titles he did are A Warning to the Curious, The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral and Number 13. I only have a download of The Ash Tree, as I've got the others on the box set, but do let me know if you want that one. Good luck finding the rest!
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I guess if you genuinely believe your credo that Evil is Good, then you’re morally obligated to be as petty as possible in your reasons for homicide.
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Well, by those lights, he's knocking it out of the park!
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You're welcome. I am glad to be able to do it.
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Oh, that solves the library problem entirely! You might just get a contagious internet haunting instead.
Which makes me happy, because your write-up makes me want to watch it. I'm a big fan of Night of the Demon (aside from that silly demon), and I'm curious to see another take on the story.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts!
(I like the demon when it can't be seen clearly. It does not work for me head-on.)
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I had no idea. I am delighted to know it! How did you find out?
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HERE IS THE GHOST THIS GHOST STORY ISN'T ABOUT.
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I absolutely love the concept of haunting physical media. And why not? If the supernatural can manifest messages on walls, it can surely add frames to a film.
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Yes. And it's awful, because the physical record of a moment isn't supposed to alter after the fact. It's one thing to see something in a video that isn't there. It's another thing to have it be there—now, as if it always had been—but it wasn't. All ghosts are dislocations of time, but most of them are not retroactive. More hauntings should try it. (More people should not.)
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No, but it sounds like I should.
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their deaths demonstrate with blunt gravity that it is not possible to handle black magic even defensively without some evil done. --That's very good; it adds gravity and consequence.
spookily masked children romping among the fireworks like outtakes from Derek Jarman --Nice
The whole thing sounds good!
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Excellent!
--That's very good; it adds gravity and consequence.
And it did not feel like a betrayal of the original story, which is the danger of adding a stinger to an already shivery ending.
The whole thing sounds good!
I hope you enjoy it! I was really impressed.