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You see, the ghost-laying didn't take
All recordings are ghostwork to begin with, but Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape (1972) goes the extra meta-mile. It's hard to describe without employing its own hauntological vocabulary; its plot is so dense with ironies of reaction and repetition that we may well question whether its human actors have any more agency than the endlessly looping instants they study; it pulls the viewer as well as the characters into its spectral apparatus. I can't remember not knowing its conceit of ghosts as imprints of history, but it was only about fifteen years ago that I discovered the existence of the teleplay itself. The BBC commissioned and aired it for Christmas and I thought it might suit this particularly bleak midwinter. Taproot texts can be tricky to encounter after the fact of their descendants; fortunately, ghosts are all about transcending time.
What books and artifacts are to the unfortunate antiquarians of M.R. James, the paraphernalia of audiovisual engineering are to the characters of The Stone Tape: the tools for unearthing something that for everyone's sake should have stayed centuries down, even when they were looking for the future instead. No one arriving at Taskerlands in the late fall of 1972 is a paranormal investigator or even in a frame of mind for ghosts. They're the R&D team of Ryan Electric Products, billeted for secrecy in a chaotically retrofitted Victorian country house and charged with discovering a new recording medium revolutionary enough to "put the boots in old Nippon," as the national anxiety over the up-and-comers of the electronics industry demands. Instead of the compact disc, however, they find a bare stone room containing some dry-rotted paneling, a rusted pile of tins of WWII-issue Spam, a Christmastime letter in a child's scrawl, and a ghost. At least, most people would term it a ghost, although Peter Brock (Michael Bryant), Ryan's abrasively assured director of research, prefers to think of it as "a mass of data waiting for a correct interpretation." Footprints scurry frantically through the empty room, echoing differently for every listener. A woman in a white pinafore runs up the half-flight of worn stone steps to nowhere and screams, screams to stop her audience's heart. It's the same set of screams every time, exact as a voiceprint. Roy Collinson (Iain Cuthbertson), the reserved and overtaxed site manager, articulates the horror: "A living person in that pain, you can try and help them. Here, you can't." Nonetheless, Peter pushes on with his electroacoustical investigations which feel increasingly as irrational and obsessive as séances until the analyses produced by Jill Greeley (Jane Asher), the team's programmer and the most finely tuned observer of the apparition itself, convince him that the quite common ragstone of the abandoned storeroom is their AV grail, a mineral format more responsive, immersive, and direct than any strip of silver halide or ferric oxide, which after all can play back only to the ears or the eyes, not straight to the human brain. "Costume jewelry, the thirteen-channel earring!" he laughs, tweaking his team's ears and noses and nipples with tech-bro giddiness. "Coronation Street, Double Your Money, Come Dancing, War and Peace—" Of course it all goes wrong. At least Betamax didn't strand its users in the Neolithic.
In this fable of scientific breakthrough and overreach, it is all but expected that Jill as the sole woman on the team should be positioned as its most psychically sensitive member, but the cliché is mitigated for me by several factors, beginning with her intelligence. She's not a passive ghost-meter from whose emotional responses men draw rational conclusions; she's the person who turns data into information, charting the peaks and valleys of spectral activity over the years, collating the differing sensitivities of her colleagues in order to establish a threshold for manifestation and the mechanism of heat exchange that powers it. Buffeted by the effects of the room and nagged by the fear of a suffering revenant instead of a mere "dead mechanism," she asks better questions than the man who runs with her answers and even after the program of the stone tape has played out once again to its grisly, immemorial end, the shredded printouts of her results vindicate her theories over his conceit. More equalizingly, she's not alone in her perceptions. Evidence of the haunting extends from the scarred childhood of a local barman to stories of "duppies" picked up from a Black American G.I. to the sad little petition of Martin Tasker, who solemnly asked the ghost to "please go away" for Christmas in 1905 and died a childless recluse in a house that even an exorcism couldn't stop from screaming. With the control-group exception of the "ghost-proof, like color-blind" Stewart (Philip Trewinnard), all of the team experience it to some degree. Only Jill seems able to glimpse its terrified girl's face, but the stolid Hargrave (Tom Chadbon) can corroborate its movements and both he and Collinson swear with repeated exposure that they can almost make out words. The footsteps that are barely audible to class clown Maudsley (John Forgeham) are "deafening" to old pro Eddie Holmes (Michael Bates). Even Peter, generally sensitive as pig iron otherwise, hears the screaming for the first time while still outside the room. It unnerves all of them, however they try to cover with schoolboy humor or the dryest of technical jargon, and some of them unravel. At the violent height of Peter's ghost-hunting, not Jill behind the console of her teleprinter but Hargrave in a weeping panic shrieks, "It's in the computer!" Lastly, if Kneale isolates Jill by her gender, he doesn't seem to have done it by Smurfette reflex: her work environment is a toxic swamp of laddishness and the script knows it. On their first day at Taskerlands, while a shaken Jill recovers from an eerie near-collision with a pair of oblivious vans, the rest of the team fill the construction-crowded courtyard with boisterous honks and whistles, cracking dirty jokes, jostling for approval, all but yelping like the simile with which Peter excuses them to the startled security guard, "They've got to do it, like dogs peeing on something." Encouraged by their boss' cocky style, their rowdy camaraderie is a lark if you're on the inside of it and a microaggression a minute if you're not—Jill gets moments of bonding or respect from her teammates one-on-one, but collectively their frat-pack mentality always seems one guffaw from exploding into real violence, like the weird christening rite of "sacrificing the Martian" that saw her gangling assistant chased into the half-finished entrance hall and his rubbery costume ripped off him in pieces like a sparagmos. One of their other tricks is putting on racist impersonations of their Japanese competitors. There again, Peter with his naughty stage-brogue imitation of Ryan's CEO sets the tone. I couldn't help wondering if Bryant had ever played Henry Higgins, "all bounce and go, and no consideration for anyone"; he certainly does his best to motor right over Jill. Despite or because of their sexual history, Peter's no support even at her most obviously fragile, alternately coaxing and negging her with self-centered patronage: "Oh, my Jilly. You're a very female one." It should be reassuring that the plot isn't a contest between her fears and his skepticism, but his eagerness to exploit the commercial possibilities of a historical trauma—followed by his absolute refusal to hear anything more about the haunting after he's colossally fucked it up, driven his team half to nervous exhaustion and let himself in for encroachment by a rival and perhaps even destroyed the precious mechanism of the room itself in his short-sighted ambition and self-owning need for control—may be even more distasteful than if he'd never listened to her at all. It won't turn him a profit, so call the woman who discovered it crazy and move on. It's hard not to notice that he's got his new secretary in bed by the time he's coldly, finally dismissing Jill; that even sympathetic Collinson can't be bothered at a moment that could have made all the difference. Perhaps there's nothing so unusual in the forces stirring in the very deepest layers of the stone, ablated to activation by Peter's reckless blasts of sound and light. Across the centuries, a woman can be the most disposable thing.
I can't tell if it should be viewed as an in-joke or a touch of psychogeography that Taskerlands is played by Horsley Towers in Surrey, the one-time home of programming pioneer Ada Lovelace, whose colleague Charles Babbage in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) professed one of the earliest versions I can find of the theory of residual haunting, a vision of the globe as a palimpsest of every movement that ever disturbed its atoms, the faintly ceaseless waves of words and actions propagating on through earth, air, and water until the planet itself should wipe the record by ceasing to exist. In A Canterbury Tale (1944), this notion comforts: nothing of the past is ever really lost, no matter what upheavals or merely forgettings may come between. In The Stone Tape, it's the worst. "How far are you trying to go back?" Stewart asks curiously, watching Jill crunch numbers like a woman in the grip of a fever or a possession. She speaks as if she's inside her own answer already: "A long way." The distance from 1972 to 1890 or even 1760 falls away into the gulfs implied beneath the scratched surface of a Victorian under-maid's screams. Taskerlands itself seems caught uneasily between times, its dungeon-like foundations that might be Saxon and its eccentrically Victorian outer flint and brick and its gut conversion into the sleek neutral tones of the streamlined '70's still missing panels, dangling wires, as half-there as an audible, insubstantial ghost. Sapphire and Steel would despair of these indiscriminately mixed triggers, their only unifying content a kind of visual technobabble of oscilloscopes and line printers, parabolic microphones and TV cameras, thermal sensors and reel-to-reels of the same magnetic tape which Peter began his mission statement by deriding as fragile and obsolete, yet it's the gold standard of the uncanny when the rattled Cliff (James Cosmo) protests, "I got them on my headphones!" while the objective witness of his tape unspools only white noise and the sounds of the team's confusion, nothing of the omnidirectional clatter of footsteps or those hopeless, agonized, trapped, unending screams. But that's the language of folk horror, where reaching for the future is an invitation for the present to slip out from underfoot and then there's nothing but to plunge into the past, or meet it where it rises to us, in a terrible space where a woman can fall to her death from a height that hasn't existed for seven thousand years. "Some deep-level record—so old—and shapeless—" What it looked like to previous generations, we never learn; it makes hideous sense that we see it now in the willemite-green of an oscilloscope trace, hear it as the churning throb of a degraded signal, and while it might be consoling to imagine it as a kind of Lovecraftian wild hunt lying in wait for its quarry in the depths of time, I suspect it is no more aware of the victims it pursues into its ancient pattern of sacrifice than the research team are of their own reenactment of tragedies past. The end is the same, one more time round on the turntable of events that never even occurred where they now replay, brought with the stones from their megalithic bed. "Quarried ever since Roman times," Collinson said of the lichen-colored limestone back when it looked like the wave of the future, not the drag of the past. "Most of medieval London's built of this stuff." You feel a haunting so old, so deep, and so dreadful should at least have the decency to be autochthonous. But then you can take a recording anywhere, so long as you have the technology to play it, and we ourselves are the players of the stone tape. It's not in the computer; that would be safer. Like every story, it happens in our heads.
If you would like this story to happen in your head, it appears to be available on Region 2 DVD, although courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashlyme I watched it with a mild case of generation loss on on YouTube. The original production was shot on video with the atmospherically winter-toned results I associate with so much of this decade; the modest budget either permitted or obliged director Peter Sasdy to focus on the performances, which of necessity tend toward the high-keyed but mostly ground themselves in the recognizable dynamics of a bad workplace, and the electro-chthonic sound design by Desmond Briscoe of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which blurs disturbingly between the hums and blips and chatters of the team's equipment and the auditory excavation of the haunting itself. I don't know that I love it as much as similar explorations by Alan Garner or P.J. Hammond, but if I ever had the chance to screen it as part of a festival, I'd run Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" (1986) as the pre-feature short. Watch or close your eyes, the ghosts play either way. This tape brought to you by my timeless backers at Patreon.
What books and artifacts are to the unfortunate antiquarians of M.R. James, the paraphernalia of audiovisual engineering are to the characters of The Stone Tape: the tools for unearthing something that for everyone's sake should have stayed centuries down, even when they were looking for the future instead. No one arriving at Taskerlands in the late fall of 1972 is a paranormal investigator or even in a frame of mind for ghosts. They're the R&D team of Ryan Electric Products, billeted for secrecy in a chaotically retrofitted Victorian country house and charged with discovering a new recording medium revolutionary enough to "put the boots in old Nippon," as the national anxiety over the up-and-comers of the electronics industry demands. Instead of the compact disc, however, they find a bare stone room containing some dry-rotted paneling, a rusted pile of tins of WWII-issue Spam, a Christmastime letter in a child's scrawl, and a ghost. At least, most people would term it a ghost, although Peter Brock (Michael Bryant), Ryan's abrasively assured director of research, prefers to think of it as "a mass of data waiting for a correct interpretation." Footprints scurry frantically through the empty room, echoing differently for every listener. A woman in a white pinafore runs up the half-flight of worn stone steps to nowhere and screams, screams to stop her audience's heart. It's the same set of screams every time, exact as a voiceprint. Roy Collinson (Iain Cuthbertson), the reserved and overtaxed site manager, articulates the horror: "A living person in that pain, you can try and help them. Here, you can't." Nonetheless, Peter pushes on with his electroacoustical investigations which feel increasingly as irrational and obsessive as séances until the analyses produced by Jill Greeley (Jane Asher), the team's programmer and the most finely tuned observer of the apparition itself, convince him that the quite common ragstone of the abandoned storeroom is their AV grail, a mineral format more responsive, immersive, and direct than any strip of silver halide or ferric oxide, which after all can play back only to the ears or the eyes, not straight to the human brain. "Costume jewelry, the thirteen-channel earring!" he laughs, tweaking his team's ears and noses and nipples with tech-bro giddiness. "Coronation Street, Double Your Money, Come Dancing, War and Peace—" Of course it all goes wrong. At least Betamax didn't strand its users in the Neolithic.
In this fable of scientific breakthrough and overreach, it is all but expected that Jill as the sole woman on the team should be positioned as its most psychically sensitive member, but the cliché is mitigated for me by several factors, beginning with her intelligence. She's not a passive ghost-meter from whose emotional responses men draw rational conclusions; she's the person who turns data into information, charting the peaks and valleys of spectral activity over the years, collating the differing sensitivities of her colleagues in order to establish a threshold for manifestation and the mechanism of heat exchange that powers it. Buffeted by the effects of the room and nagged by the fear of a suffering revenant instead of a mere "dead mechanism," she asks better questions than the man who runs with her answers and even after the program of the stone tape has played out once again to its grisly, immemorial end, the shredded printouts of her results vindicate her theories over his conceit. More equalizingly, she's not alone in her perceptions. Evidence of the haunting extends from the scarred childhood of a local barman to stories of "duppies" picked up from a Black American G.I. to the sad little petition of Martin Tasker, who solemnly asked the ghost to "please go away" for Christmas in 1905 and died a childless recluse in a house that even an exorcism couldn't stop from screaming. With the control-group exception of the "ghost-proof, like color-blind" Stewart (Philip Trewinnard), all of the team experience it to some degree. Only Jill seems able to glimpse its terrified girl's face, but the stolid Hargrave (Tom Chadbon) can corroborate its movements and both he and Collinson swear with repeated exposure that they can almost make out words. The footsteps that are barely audible to class clown Maudsley (John Forgeham) are "deafening" to old pro Eddie Holmes (Michael Bates). Even Peter, generally sensitive as pig iron otherwise, hears the screaming for the first time while still outside the room. It unnerves all of them, however they try to cover with schoolboy humor or the dryest of technical jargon, and some of them unravel. At the violent height of Peter's ghost-hunting, not Jill behind the console of her teleprinter but Hargrave in a weeping panic shrieks, "It's in the computer!" Lastly, if Kneale isolates Jill by her gender, he doesn't seem to have done it by Smurfette reflex: her work environment is a toxic swamp of laddishness and the script knows it. On their first day at Taskerlands, while a shaken Jill recovers from an eerie near-collision with a pair of oblivious vans, the rest of the team fill the construction-crowded courtyard with boisterous honks and whistles, cracking dirty jokes, jostling for approval, all but yelping like the simile with which Peter excuses them to the startled security guard, "They've got to do it, like dogs peeing on something." Encouraged by their boss' cocky style, their rowdy camaraderie is a lark if you're on the inside of it and a microaggression a minute if you're not—Jill gets moments of bonding or respect from her teammates one-on-one, but collectively their frat-pack mentality always seems one guffaw from exploding into real violence, like the weird christening rite of "sacrificing the Martian" that saw her gangling assistant chased into the half-finished entrance hall and his rubbery costume ripped off him in pieces like a sparagmos. One of their other tricks is putting on racist impersonations of their Japanese competitors. There again, Peter with his naughty stage-brogue imitation of Ryan's CEO sets the tone. I couldn't help wondering if Bryant had ever played Henry Higgins, "all bounce and go, and no consideration for anyone"; he certainly does his best to motor right over Jill. Despite or because of their sexual history, Peter's no support even at her most obviously fragile, alternately coaxing and negging her with self-centered patronage: "Oh, my Jilly. You're a very female one." It should be reassuring that the plot isn't a contest between her fears and his skepticism, but his eagerness to exploit the commercial possibilities of a historical trauma—followed by his absolute refusal to hear anything more about the haunting after he's colossally fucked it up, driven his team half to nervous exhaustion and let himself in for encroachment by a rival and perhaps even destroyed the precious mechanism of the room itself in his short-sighted ambition and self-owning need for control—may be even more distasteful than if he'd never listened to her at all. It won't turn him a profit, so call the woman who discovered it crazy and move on. It's hard not to notice that he's got his new secretary in bed by the time he's coldly, finally dismissing Jill; that even sympathetic Collinson can't be bothered at a moment that could have made all the difference. Perhaps there's nothing so unusual in the forces stirring in the very deepest layers of the stone, ablated to activation by Peter's reckless blasts of sound and light. Across the centuries, a woman can be the most disposable thing.
I can't tell if it should be viewed as an in-joke or a touch of psychogeography that Taskerlands is played by Horsley Towers in Surrey, the one-time home of programming pioneer Ada Lovelace, whose colleague Charles Babbage in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) professed one of the earliest versions I can find of the theory of residual haunting, a vision of the globe as a palimpsest of every movement that ever disturbed its atoms, the faintly ceaseless waves of words and actions propagating on through earth, air, and water until the planet itself should wipe the record by ceasing to exist. In A Canterbury Tale (1944), this notion comforts: nothing of the past is ever really lost, no matter what upheavals or merely forgettings may come between. In The Stone Tape, it's the worst. "How far are you trying to go back?" Stewart asks curiously, watching Jill crunch numbers like a woman in the grip of a fever or a possession. She speaks as if she's inside her own answer already: "A long way." The distance from 1972 to 1890 or even 1760 falls away into the gulfs implied beneath the scratched surface of a Victorian under-maid's screams. Taskerlands itself seems caught uneasily between times, its dungeon-like foundations that might be Saxon and its eccentrically Victorian outer flint and brick and its gut conversion into the sleek neutral tones of the streamlined '70's still missing panels, dangling wires, as half-there as an audible, insubstantial ghost. Sapphire and Steel would despair of these indiscriminately mixed triggers, their only unifying content a kind of visual technobabble of oscilloscopes and line printers, parabolic microphones and TV cameras, thermal sensors and reel-to-reels of the same magnetic tape which Peter began his mission statement by deriding as fragile and obsolete, yet it's the gold standard of the uncanny when the rattled Cliff (James Cosmo) protests, "I got them on my headphones!" while the objective witness of his tape unspools only white noise and the sounds of the team's confusion, nothing of the omnidirectional clatter of footsteps or those hopeless, agonized, trapped, unending screams. But that's the language of folk horror, where reaching for the future is an invitation for the present to slip out from underfoot and then there's nothing but to plunge into the past, or meet it where it rises to us, in a terrible space where a woman can fall to her death from a height that hasn't existed for seven thousand years. "Some deep-level record—so old—and shapeless—" What it looked like to previous generations, we never learn; it makes hideous sense that we see it now in the willemite-green of an oscilloscope trace, hear it as the churning throb of a degraded signal, and while it might be consoling to imagine it as a kind of Lovecraftian wild hunt lying in wait for its quarry in the depths of time, I suspect it is no more aware of the victims it pursues into its ancient pattern of sacrifice than the research team are of their own reenactment of tragedies past. The end is the same, one more time round on the turntable of events that never even occurred where they now replay, brought with the stones from their megalithic bed. "Quarried ever since Roman times," Collinson said of the lichen-colored limestone back when it looked like the wave of the future, not the drag of the past. "Most of medieval London's built of this stuff." You feel a haunting so old, so deep, and so dreadful should at least have the decency to be autochthonous. But then you can take a recording anywhere, so long as you have the technology to play it, and we ourselves are the players of the stone tape. It's not in the computer; that would be safer. Like every story, it happens in our heads.
If you would like this story to happen in your head, it appears to be available on Region 2 DVD, although courtesy of
ashlyme I watched it with a mild case of generation loss on on YouTube. The original production was shot on video with the atmospherically winter-toned results I associate with so much of this decade; the modest budget either permitted or obliged director Peter Sasdy to focus on the performances, which of necessity tend toward the high-keyed but mostly ground themselves in the recognizable dynamics of a bad workplace, and the electro-chthonic sound design by Desmond Briscoe of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which blurs disturbingly between the hums and blips and chatters of the team's equipment and the auditory excavation of the haunting itself. I don't know that I love it as much as similar explorations by Alan Garner or P.J. Hammond, but if I ever had the chance to screen it as part of a festival, I'd run Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" (1986) as the pre-feature short. Watch or close your eyes, the ghosts play either way. This tape brought to you by my timeless backers at Patreon.
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I did not intend it, but would be honored if it functioned as such!
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One of the books I bought at the weekend chimes in with this post; David Toop's Sinister Resonance. It's a history of listening that treats sound as ghost, listener as medium. I've not read it yet, but looked in the index: no mention of The Stone Tape.
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Thank you for making it finally possible for me to see it! I think it holds up: it does everything it sets out to do, does it chillingly, and now I feel like the existence of Ghost Box makes eighty-five percent more sense to me.
Between the toxic mansoup (I like Collinson alone out of them, but he's no use to Jill in the end)
That's a good way of describing it. Collinson frustrates me the most, because for so much of the story he is so supportive of her (and so unimpressed with Peter, which is the correct response; I'm glad to have seen Michael Bryant first in a role where I could appreciate him as opposed to just wanting to punch him into the sun) and then he drops the ball at the worst possible moment. I get that he's under as much strain or more as the research team with the washer-dryer man and his entourage moving in and hasn't stopped being sincerely concerned for Jill (which Peter of course interprets as sexual white-knighting, because he wouldn't do anything else himself), but all he has to do is listen to her that afternoon she comes to his hut and he shuts her off instead. "Remember I'm on your side," he has to say, because for the first time it isn't true. Afterward, I think he understands at once what they did to her, including his own part. I just wish he'd done something different.
and the ragstone record, it still disturbs me, and the question perhaps that unsettles me the most; is the "willemite-green" ghost only a recording, or somehow conscious? I hope you're right, and it's the former.
It's less awful to me if it's conscious, because at least that implies some kind of meaning to the interaction, however rudimentary or malevolent—some intent, some purpose to the pattern. A dead mechanism senselessly collecting further deaths is just horrible. It doesn't know it's still hunting, or when its victim slot is filled. It just revolves under everything, insensibly lethal, the fringes of its influence felt sometimes in the stone-grey rumble of moving vans. It would be like trying to exorcise radiation. How could you ever make it stop?
One of the books I bought at the weekend chimes in with this post; David Toop's Sinister Resonance. It's a history of listening that treats sound as ghost, listener as medium. I've not read it yet, but looked in the index: no mention of The Stone Tape.
I will be very interested to hear how the book pans out, but that sounds like a serious omission! I understood why the teleplay was adapted for radio. I'll have to go back and look again at your review.
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I know two like that, one on this side of the Atlantic and one on the other. The only thing you can do is fuck the fucking fuck off with a fucking quickness. I mean, a film is a film, I'm just saying, there are those. I remain entirely baffled and blind astonished you managed to be within three hundred yards of one for however many years you withstood grad school.
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Well, I can't watch this, so thank you!
Have some salt.
(I know the point of a film review is to make me watch the film! But you're so amazingly good at my then not NEEDING to do so. Grammar.)
Edit: oh, it means stone tape like Castle Leap or Borley Rectory. Gentlethem, bye.
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You're welcome! I am happy to perform this service. Especially when it comes with free salt.
(I know the point of a film review is to make me watch the film! But you're so amazingly good at my then not NEEDING to do so. Grammar.)
I do take it as a compliment.
Edit: oh, it means stone tape like Castle Leap or Borley Rectory. Gentlethem, bye.
Don't forget your salt!
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Excellent! Enjoy!
(That should be the first link in the post—I have been trying to point more consistently toward streaming services even if I don't use them myself. It seems polite; it's not like anyone can visit a library easily this year.)
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You feel a haunting so old, so deep, and so dreadful should at least have the decency to be autochthonous. But then you can take a recording anywhere, so long as you have the technology to play it, and we ourselves are the players of the stone tape. --Nice
Like every story, it happens in our heads. --Yes indeed.
and how great that it's on YouTube! Might give it a look.
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Yes! I've seen a variant used comedically in The Ghost Goes West (1935)—a Scottish castle is boxed up and shipped to America and the ghost bound to its stones must perforce travel with it—but not this kind of dislocating weirdness and I wasn't expecting it, thinking of folk horror as so place-based. I mean, it still is. It's just that pieces of places sometimes move.
[edit] It took me until last night lying in bed to remember that I wrote a similar kind of dislocation into "Tea with the Earl of Twilight," the ghost of Hilary who never lived in Boston, never died there: I even talked about it in the author spotlight. No wonder I responded so well to its cousin in The Stone Tape.
--Yes indeed.
I loved that awareness. I don't even want to call it a twist. It's just an essential part of being human, even without being haunted, and I wasn't expecting it in this story, either.
and how great that it's on YouTube! Might give it a look.
I hope you enjoy it if you do! I wouldn't have been able to see it otherwise.
re: edit
(I saw the opening few minutes of the movie but will probably wait to see the whole thing for some time when I can see it with Wakanomori)
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I have definitely written about other film and TV in its shared lineage of folk horror and hauntology: Penda's Fen (1973), Robin Redbreast (1970), Casting the Runes (1979), The Legend of Hell House (1973), and of course Sapphire & Steel (1979–82), which I should really finish writing about one of these days. I use a lot of similar language in my own work, because I think similarly about the imprints of time. And I have definitely mentioned The Stone Tape because I have known about it for years. It just took me until two nights ago to see it because for those same years it was completely inaccessible to me! I'm still not sure there's ever been a Region 1 DVD.
(I haven't read the rest, because I would like to watch it some time and I prefer to know very little in these cases!!)
Fair enough! I hope you like it when you do.
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Fair enough! I hope you like it when you do.
It's one of those things on my list!
Although he wrote a much earlier play about time and ghosts and places that is long-lost, which I would very much like to see - it starred James Maxwell! I think they did at least try a radio performance of the script: https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/nigel-kneales-lost-visions-and-a-library-of-voyages-into-the-unknown-ether-signposts-2352a/
https://bleedingcool.com/tv/the-road-the-legacy-of-nigel-kneales-legendary-lost-tv-play-lives-on/
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It is thematically appropriate!
(If it was someone else's actual review though, though, please let me know so I can also read it.)
Although he wrote a much earlier play about time and ghosts and places that is long-lost, which I would very much like to see - it starred James Maxwell!
I didn't know James Maxwell was in that! I have a copy of the script! (Ironically, it came off the BFI DVD of The Stone Tape which I do not have.) If you have not read it already, would you like it?
[edit] James Maxwell is in fact credited in the script I have, the name just didn't mean anything to me in 2013 when I picked it up.
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He is apparently called Sir Timothy and his wife his mean to him, which sends about par for the course for early 1960s JM, bless him. XD
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Good for
He is apparently called Sir Timothy and his wife his mean to him, which sends about par for the course for early 1960s JM, bless him.
It would have been a marvelous part for his face.
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It would have been a marvelous part for his face.
We would have had to have the rest of him as well, though. :)
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It might be me, as I did watch and review it here in early 2018. I seem to have reached a lot of the same conclusions as
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Your reaction to The Stone Tape reminds me of my reaction to The Big Heat (1953). Representation may not equal endorsement, but that still doesn't mean you want to watch the thing.
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I suspect it's because you found the production as unsettling - as scary as did the unsuspecting BBC audience, which may be why it was never aired again.
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It's more that I was trying not to give the entire game away for people who hadn't seen it and care about spoilers—there was not originally a cut-tag in this review, but I was advised to include one for even an allusive description of the ending. I did find it beautifully done, though, and I'm glad you liked the review!
(Maybe it'll get a fiftieth anniversary re-run. Even if just going by influence, it deserves it.)
Poor Jane.
“You’re good, Spaniard, but not that good.” - Proximo, Gladiator
Having watched as much of it as I care to - thank you very for the Youtube link! - I found myself thinking, “Poor Jane.” It is never pleasant to realize that you’re not big enough to be a star in your own right, but only a planet, shining only by reflected light - and that only by remaining in orbit. Break away, as she did in her quest to be a “serious actress,” and you slide off into darkness - disappear. She wasn’t that good - the only role she’s remembered for is 'Francesca' in Masque of the Red Death, and that was an ingenue role, only requiring a pretty face & figure. On her own merits - she vanished.
- Two other planets in the McCartney system made the same discovery: 'Peter & Gordon' were Peter Asher and company, and at the request of his sister, Paul belched, scratched and dashed off “A World Without Love,” which became their one blockbuster hit - name anything else they did! - tossed off as an act of casual charity, which so shamed them that they quit not long after. Peter Asher became a record producer for the likes of Linda Ronstadt, while Gordon Whatsisname just fell down - acted out the lyrics to D Fogelberg’s “Leader of the Band,” becoming a poor attempt to imitate, just a living legacy, &c. - spent the rest of his performing career doing Beatles covers. Sad.
Re: Poor Jane.
You're welcome for the link! I agree that I've barely seen Asher in anything beyond The Stone Tape—she was one of the child actors in Mandy (1952) and the mother of Alice Liddell in Dreamchild (1985)—but I actually think she's quite good here. I don't think I would believe as much of Jill as I do without her performance; I certainly don't find myself mentally substituting one of her contemporaries in the role and feeling wistful. Whatever she brought to the script, it works. I'm just sorry it didn't work as well elsewhere, if that was what she wanted.
Re: Poor Jane.
If you'd thought of it, your review could have mentioned the striking similarities between N Kneale's 'Jill Greeley' and 'Barbara Judd' of his earlier Quatermass and the Pit - close enough to verge on recycling. Miss Judd is likewise a competent professional paleontologist, she likewise puts the pieces together against the dismissive Quatermass, finding incidents going back to the 12th century (a modern worker screams at an apparition, and tells them, "It was li'tle, hunchback -" and Miss Judd's face changes: "'The creature was small, like a hideous dwarf…" she quotes. "Yeah! … 'Ere, Miss, how'd you know that?")
- and likewise she turns out to be the most receptive to the psychic emanations of the unearthed Martian artifact. Amusingly, the British Rocket Society appears one up on Ryan Electronics - they have a working brain-scanner that videorecords the "mind's eye" of the subject! Their test subject is a dud, however - but Miss Judd says, "Give me the helmet! I'm seeing it!" And thus they get a record of Martian "ethnic cleansing" in action…
The 1967 movie appears now and then on Youtube, before Official Notice makes it vanish again; it's very good.
Re: Poor Jane.
I'm aware of it by reputation—and I know its central conceit—but I haven't seen either version of Quatermass and the Pit, which makes it a little difficult for me to draw parallels. I had a chance at the original 1958–59 TV serial on YouTube once, but it was yanked for copyright before I could make the time for it.
And thus they get a record of Martian "ethnic cleansing" in action…
"Sacrificing the Martian" in The Stone Tape, then, sounds like an in-joke.
Re: Pit
Updated to add:
That British class consciousness shows up earlier - when the working-class yob says, "'Ere, how'd you know that, Miss?" - neither she nor Quatermass deign to answer. In an American version she could say, "Apparently people have been seeing your friend there for a long, long time," and how hard is that? But he’s Other Ranks, not One of Us, and it would be unseemly for such as they to react in the slightest to what such as he says - so neither of them do. Which, in turn, he accepts.