Three Ghostly UK TV Movies Make A Post

Traditionally, the British were better with tales of the weird and the supernatural on TV than the most other nations. At least it looks so from over here in Germany, and going by the surprising number of TV plays, TV movies and random anthology episodes you can often only find in blurry VHS rips on YouTube. In these cases, the blurriness does enhance the mood.

Three cases in point (all of which I’ve encountered thanks to the efforts of writer Ray Newman to make all of us watch more obscure British TV on YouTube:

“Haunted”: The Ferryman (1974): This fifty minute shortish TV movie based on Kingsley Amis finds Jeremy Brett as a freshly baked bestselling writer on vacation with his wife (Natasha Parry) at a country inn. The place shows increasingly disturbing parallels to the supernatural thriller he wrote, until he’s basically stepping into the role of his own doomed hero.

This, a Granada production as directed by John Irvin, is a particularly nice discovery: Brett projects a believable mix of arrogance and self-doubt, Parry is excellent as the woman who has to cope with it, and the plot escalates from playfully weird meta to the truly creepy, helped by the kind of calm shooting style so typical of this strand of British filmmaking, where creepy shots are insisted upon until they cause quite a bit of lingering dread.

“Dramarama”: Snap (1987): This twenty-five minute piece directed by Michael Kerrigan concerns a boy who may be on his way to a mild form of juvenile delinquency getting dropped off in some marshland by his father for an ill-defined school photography project (British schooling in the 80s must have been rather peculiar). There, he encounters a supernatural power very interested in his dark side.

I wouldn’t have expected a piece of children’s television to be quite as visually inspired as this is by the proto-Ghost Story for Christmas Whistle and I’ll Come to You, but this borrows a couple of central shots, as well as the mood of a desolate landscape where even human habitations seem to be infused with a degree of wrongness and runs with it to a really pleasantly dark ending. The central child actor isn’t great, but the film quotes well from the right sources and carries its sense of genuine creepiness right through to the end.

“Ghosts”: Three Miles Up (1998): Last but not least, this BBC production directed by Lesley “Ghostwatch” Manning adapts Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “Three Miles Up”, from the phase when she wrote weird fiction influenced by but highly distinctive from the works of her then boyfriend Robert Aickman.

In visual mood, this does with the British canal system what Snap did with marshland, so expect slowly lingering shots of a landscape that feels simply not like a place meant for humans when looked at long enough. I’m not too fond of some of the acting here – TV attempts at psychodrama are generally not my bag – but there’s a sense of strangeness in some of the human interaction here besides the loud attempts at TV Bergman that fits nicely into the strangeness of landscape.

In short: Ghost Story (1981)

Every couple of years, I’ve forgotten enough about John Irvin’s all too free adaptation of Peter Straub’s fantastic eponymous novel to try and change my mind about the film.

Alas, once I start watching, I remember again why I’ll never be able to call this one worth rediscovering, a hidden gem, or anything else positive. The problem really isn’t me here, it is that the film’s just a mess. In part, that’s the fault of a lot of heavy-handed studio intervention that tried to pull the film away from subtlety to more obvious shock effects, as if all that a film needs to be visceral are some often very awkwardly added in shots of a bad looking corpse make-up job. Director John Irvin has quite a bit to answer for, too. The glacial pace in which the film develops through pointless scene and pointless scene of little specific happening is all on him and scriptwriter Lawrence D. Cohen, as are the bizarre tonal shifts between the film’s main timeline and the long, long, way too long flashbacks.

That the film needs to cut back considerable parts of Straub’s novel to fit into anything but a modern mini series runtime (this one could really make a great contemporary streaming series) is obvious. It just seems to wilfully cut out the most important parts of the book, while keeping elements in that do not make sense anymore without what’s been lost. The completely rewritten elements of the film – particular the nature of its big bad - go out of their way to weaken one of the book’s main themes - the destructive force of male fear of women. That the originals many-coloured play with the traditions of the written (or really, told) supernatural tale have gone the way of the dodo is no surprise, but it makes it hard to see the point of the old men telling each other ghost stories at all.

But then, this is a film that makes a big thing out of featuring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and John Houseman in the leads and does sod all with them, focussing on their flashback selves (played by nobody you need to remember), and on Craig Wasson, who, I’m sad to point out, could not act his way out of a wet paper bag, and is actively, wilfully bad here. Alice Krige as our villainess is great, mixing cold anger and strange sensuality perfectly, but again, the film never seems to understand the performance Krige gives (or even what the point of her character is) and simply wastes it on nothing of consequence.

All of this is little improved by Irvin’s failings as a horror director: slow burn horror, shock horror, American Gothic mood, mild (and therefore heavily toned down from the novel) surrealist horror – there’s no mode of the genre you’ll see any ability for here.