Three Films Make A Post: Is that a werewolf in your stomach?

Diva in the Netherworld aka 歌姫魔界をゆく(1980): An idol pop duo – one of whose members happens to be an ex-wrestler as well as a vampire – and their manager – who in turn happens to be a werewolf – strand in the mansion of a cannibal (she might be an oni) and her stop motion pet dragon. Given that description, its miniscule budget and its pleasantly short runtime of 63 minutes, Takafumi Nagamine’s weird little movie should be a very fun time of the old “oh, those crazy Japanese” kind. In actuality, most of the film is terribly, so much so even its pieces of loveable insanity – like the moment in the last act when the wrestling vampire lady does a proper henshin into a silver-faced bat heroine – don’t hit very well.

Also, to whoever wrote the plot synopsis that’s all over the internet – please learn the difference between idols and opera singers.

Stigmatized Properties: Possession (2025): Where his old J-horror cohort Takashi Shimizu – to take an obvious example – has kept a core of a personal style, Hideo Nakata from about the 2010s on has turned into something of a faceless journey man director who is making technically proficient films that typically lack any kind of personality. This highly episodic horror comedy about a rookie actor trying to enhance his profile by sleeping in haunted properties is a case in point – it’s not a terrible movie, but there’s such a lack of invention and interest in the material in Nakata’s approach, I dislike it more than I’d do a simple failure. Failures, after all, imply someone is trying.

The Incredible Robert Baldick: Never Come Night (1972): I didn’t know the BBC did the whole “testing the waters for a TV show via TV movies” thing like her US siblings, but this is indeed such a film that never made it to series. Written by Terry Nation – as you know, Jim, a rather important writer in the early years of Doctor Who – this was apparently thought of as a potential Doctor Who replacement, which fortunately didn’t happen.

Unfortunately, this does feel like the start of something rather special. As a standalone filmlet, this is a lovely piece of telefantasy, operating very much in the idea realm of 70s Who and Nigel Kneale, full of fun ideas for its central character and his world that would have been nice to see explored in a series. Apart from a fun and fast supernatural – or is it? – plot, there are some excellent bits and pieces here about class – the madeira scene is brilliant –, the value of knowledge, and the nature of belief.

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.

The Breakthrough (1975)

His superiors in the scientific government bureaucracy send young scientist Saunders (Simon Ward) to a somewhat isolated research facility to check out what lead scientist Maclean (Brewster Nichols)is actually doing with the project’s time and the government’s money. Instead of closing anyone’s purse strings, Saunders quickly finds himself drawn into the project. That’s little wonder, for the researchers appear to be surprisingly close to an answer to the question what truly happens to their consciousness at the moment of a person’s death. Sure, they are using a mentally ill child as a kind of medium and a dying man as their core research subject, but that’s just science, right?

This seventy minute TV movie was part of the BBC’s “Playhouse” strand of teleplays, based on a tale by Daphne Du Maurier. Despite her huge commercial footprint at the time, Du Maurier today looks like a bizarrely underrated writer of often very interesting and thought-rich supernatural tales and weird fiction, as well as her core modernized gothic interests.

It was adapted by Clive Exton (who’d end up as one of the credited scriptwriters for the Brigitte Nielsen Red Sonja movie, of all things, and did write the incredible, for a long time underrated, original Ghost Story for Christmas “Stigma”, in between, among other things) and directed by Graham Evans. There’s a lovely mix of the “serious, scientific” approach to the supernatural so beloved of the 70s (see Nigel Kneale, Legend of Hell House, parapsychological research in the real world, and many other examples), as well as suggestions of the truly unmeasurable in the film’s ideas, and some wonderfully atmospheric landscape shots, as typical of this strand of British TV.

The movie does suffer somewhat from – also typical of British TV of the time – fact that only its exteriors are shot on film, and there’s only a very limited degree of mood to be squeezed out of shot on tape interior sequences. So there’s a lot of talk – most of it interesting –, a bit of mood and only a limited amount of the kind of actual action (in the sense of “things happening”) that would cost money. And much of what happens can be a bit overshadowed by the – also very typical of this time and filmmaking place – tendency of actors to perform emotion exclusively via DRAMATIC SHOUTING. But then, mid-70s TV sound and picture probably needed that approach to reach an audience watching on TVs very different from what we use today.

In any case, there’s quite a bit to recommend The Breakthrough: the already mentioned moody, calm exterior shots, the mixture of science and the supernatural, as well as the film’s willingness to present ideas and ambiguities and – despite the shouting – let the audience sort out what to think about the whole thing for themselves.

Jonathan Creek, Series One (1997)

Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies) uses his considerable powers of logic and imagination to invent tricks and illusions for the sleazy stage magician Adam Klaus (Anthony Head, in a hilariously slimy one episode performance). Sometimes, that’s bad news for potentially levitating elephants. Over the course of the first series’ five episodes, Jonathan finds himself roped into solving various locked room mysteries and impossible crimes by Maddy Magellan (Caroline Quentin), an investigative reporter specializing in using means foul or fair to uncover miscarriages of justice. The two also develop the will they/won’t they dynamic apparently beloved of all TV and romance writers.

This long-running – in the weird, sporadic way of BBC TV shows – mystery series is particularly beloved among mystery and crime fans who prefer the strange mental contortions of the locked room mystery style to grittier or more realistic fare. Even though I’ll probably never stop loving my hardboiled detectives, I’ve grown much fonder of this sort approach to crime over the years, particularly since the purer strains of this approach often show a deep love for the outré, the bizarre and the grotesque that fits very nicely indeed into my tastes. One must just give up on ideas on murder methods being probable and often on the niceties of characterization as well.

The latter isn’t a problem for Jonathan Creek, however. Writer, creator and what the Americans would call show runner David Renwick uses his comedy background to populate the world of bizarre crimes Jonathan Creek takes place in with characters who are usually ever so slightly off. This solves a couple of problems impossible crime can run into rather nicely for the show. The improbability of murder methods and their constructions is easily waved away now: these weird numpties populating the series would never murder anyone in a sensible and direct way, so the building of fake rooms and overcomplicated alibis seem perfectly logical in context. Furthermore, the humour helps the series avoid turning into a sequence of scenes of a guy explaining and theorizing about a crime at the audience. There’s still quite a bit of that, but it is organically integrated into proceedings where the next gag is seldom far away, and where the interplay between Jonathan and Maddy keeps the explain-y scenes light without needing to make them stupid.

Renwick’s jokes hit more often than not, and even when they tend to rather broad satire – particularly of showbiz and popular culture - and the easy gag, they are typically nicely timed and simply work.

Apart from its mysteries and the fun character interplay, the show also puts rather a lot of effort into bits and pieces of weird worldbuilding – Klaus’s stage show and some of the background of fictional 70s rock act Edwin Drood are particular highlights in this first season, though the titular House of Monkeys of the last episode is nothing to sneeze at either. This actually increases the impression the show takes place in a rather fun parallel world that’s exactly like ours (well, the one of 1997), just with a much better quality of murders.

At the same time, the mysteries and their solutions are often as fun and clever as they are improbable; even this early on, the show also seems to find proper delight in playing with certain genre expectations while keeping very strictly to those you can’t play with without breaking the locked room/improbable crime genre.

Three Films Make A Post: They're all alone in this together.

The Holdovers (2023): It’s not generally a great sign to someone of my tastes when basically every single review about a film describes it as “heart-warming”, but then not too many movies manage to be heart-warming without becoming kitsch, so this isn’t completely my failing. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers the kitsch by an insistence on all that’s crappy in life existing for its characters as well; its uplifting quality lies in saying “all this is true, but still…” and finding the positive in the small yet life-changing things. All the while, the humour runs a perfect line of sarcasm of the kind that’s quotable and will still be funny after you’ve quoted it a hundred times. The performances of the core trio of actors – Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa – are point perfect, and Payne directs like someone putting himself completely in the service of the story he is trying to tell (which is a difficult thing if you’re also going to tell it well).

Lot No. 249 (2023): For 2023’s Ghost Story for Christmas, Mark Gatiss went to the Arthur Conan Doyle well. This is probably one of the Gatiss era’s lesser offerings, but I say that rather regularly about these things and then find myself returning to them with great joy later on, so ask me again about its greatness or lesserness in a couple of years.

What’s definitely fine here is a surprising performance by Kit Harington, a cameo by not-Sherlock Holmes quite a few people not me apparently found annoying, and subtext about gayness, (self-)repression and the arrogance of Empire that has lost all of the sub.

The Childe aka Sad Tropics aka 귀공자 (2022): This South Korean action film by Park Hoon-jung concerns the misadventures of a young man looking for his father who learns that some fathers are better not found. A violent three-way-tugging match about with him as the rope ensues. The film features some fun, sometimes – the climax! - brilliant, action set pieces and a handful of performances so cartoonish, one will either find them very fun or very annoying, and very little else worth talking about. Enjoyable, the film certainly is, and I’m not against cartoons in any way, shape or form.

Detectorists (2014-2017;2022)

Friends Andy (Mackenzie Crook) and Lance (Toby Jones) are living in a small town in Essex. These gents have a proper Hobby (the capital letter is very much as it is treated in the series and their lives): they are detectorists, wandering fields with their metal detectors looking to unearth bits of the past that hopefully go beyond buttons and matchbox cars. Whenever they aren’t doing that, they are bumbling through their private lives. At the start of the series, Andy’s doing temp work to finance his archaeology degree and going through growing pains in the relationship with his long-term girlfriend Becky (Rachael Stirling). Those problems are mostly caused by him being a bit of a coward and the kind of dreamer who seldom does something about his dreams. At the same time Lance continues to pine after his horrible ex-wife (Lucy Benjamin). These things will change during the course of the series in a quiet tale of not just a male friendship but also late-blooming growing-up of the kind that doesn’t end up with anyone becoming something horrible like a banker, nor with giving up on childish things like being a detectorist. Also involved are the misadventures of the metal detecting club the two friends are members of, and the breath of buried history – even the Grail (the show’s just that British).

Mackenzie Crook, who not only acts but also writes and directs this wonderful BBC show whose until now final breath has been a pretty fantastic Christmas special in 2022, is apparently a detectorist in real life, which provides the show with a feeling of authenticity even when it goes through what sometimes can be rather standard comedy plots. There’s an idea of how to many people’s eyes rather silly hobbies – like being a detectorist, like going on endlessly about movies and TV on a blog – have the value of quiet, quotidian joy for the people involved in them, bringing with them moments of companionship and calm, as well as things to get unnecessarily but genuinely excited about. Crook generally portrays this and his characters’ foibles and weaknesses with a smile and sympathy, instead of the fist of judgement that’s so au fait these days. It’s not that he doesn’t understand or treat Andy’s and Lance’s failures and weaknesses as such, or seeks to excuse them, it just understands them as a part of how these people are, and not all that any given person is, and thus treats nearly everyone kindly. Generally, the series always seems to root for anyone to do better next time; they often do.

Tonally, Detectorists treats plots and beats that could absolutely make the basis for a minor soap opera with the unhurried patience of Andy and Lance walking a field before it is pub time. It never pretends the things that loom large and dramatically over anyone’s lives aren’t terrible, or painful, or wonderful, and being a comedy it is also never going to ignore them as an excuse for a joke, but it isn’t wont to dramatic gestures. Again, quietness and kindness are often at the centre of the show’s philosophy.

Below all this sits a meditation on a complicated idea of Englishness, informed not by bizarre things like bloodlines or skin colour but by the simple act of living and being in a certain place and relating to it, as well as a fascination with the small buried pieces of the past the protagonists look so patiently, sometimes bored, for. Repeatedly, the series includes bits and bobs of English folklore and culture, relates them to history as well as the present of the characters, never pressing too heavily for dramatic parallels (this simply isn’t that kind of show), but treating these things as the buried treasure and hidden connections they are for these characters. There’s a romantic longing here, not for reliving the past but for a way to be with the past, living one’s life with an acknowledgement of what’s come before. And, with the way Andy and Lance find the treasures of the past they do find, also a clear idea of the ironies of life.

That the series is also nearly always very funny indeed nearly feels like a bonus there.

In short: Casting the Runes (1979)

Apparently, the great Lawrence Gordon Clark, the main driving force behind the initial run of BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas, couldn’t quite let go of ghost stories, or the works of M.R. James, even after the BBC did, so we got this James modernisation made for ITV – curiously enough broadcast in April, but then, TV programmers do tend not to understand how these things generally work.

Unlike Clark’s modus operandi in those of the Ghost Stories that were adaptations, this updates the plot of the tale into then contemporary times, so instead of Academic journals, we get a TV documentary raising the ire of Mr Karswell, and our not terribly antiquarian protagonist is actually (gasp!) a woman (Jan Francis in a fine performance with the right mix of disbelief, desperation and courage). Pleasantly, all of Clark’s updates make very good sense for the tale at hand, making it more modern without lessening its core joys and Francis’s Prudence Dunning is a believable heroine for the tale – provided with slightly more character as was James’s style, of course – whereas Iain Cuthbertson really hits the right note of sinister self-centeredness for Karswell.

Working on a TV budget in 1979, this is of course not as great a movie as Tourneur’s Night of the Demon but it is a closer adaptation of the story, despite the changes and some omissions. This being a Gordon Clark joint, there are some surprisingly effective scenes of horror, some very well chosen landscapes for the exterior locations, and a general sense of being in the hands of a filmmaker of pleasant intelligence working for the old pleasing terrors. That the interiors simply don’t look terribly good in the manner of contemporary 70s British TV, and that some of the special effects have aged somewhat badly doesn’t really change anything about that impression.

Three Films Make A Post: Still Partying Like It’s 2022

The Wonder (2022): I’ve read rather a lot of excited praise for Sebastián Lelio’s film, but I can’t say I can agree with much of it. Sure, on a technical level, this is a highly accomplished movie, but to my eyes, it is also one that doesn’t have as much substance as its form suggests. What is has to say about grief and female empowerment is rather on the trite and obvious side, its deliberate surface artfulness trying to distract from a lack of deeper thought at its core, its moments of hapless yet self-important fourth wall breaking notwithstanding.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022): In contrast, this little wonder of puppet animation by del Toro and Mark Gustafson is just as surface artful in its own way, but it also has – despite much more obvious emotionality and plotting – much more depth on any level: emotionally, politically, aesthetically and intellectually. It is also much less po-faced in its approach to the surprising number of things it talks about – from the problems of fathers and sons, over fascism, death, to the troubles of homeownership when you’re a grasshopper. This doesn’t mean it lacks seriousness in its thinking. Rather, the film treats humour and warmth as important parts of the human experience even under circumstances full of suffering and grief, not allowing itself or its viewers to lose sight of the totality of life.

Count Magnus (2022): Mark Gatiss’s newest Ghost Story for Christmas – again based on a tale by M.R. James, obviously – seems to have been the least well-regarded of the irregular series until now. Admittedly, the tale takes a bit too long to get going, with a talky beginning that’s less than ideal in a thirty minute piece. Particularly in its early stages, it looks terribly stagey and nearly aggressively digital, the BBC’s unwillingness to give Gatiss a decent budget showing to ill effect.

I found myself reconciled with the tale once it got going, though. Even though it never reaches the height of the original story – which is one my favourites of Monty’s – there are eventually some nicely creepy moments, despite the script keeping things a bit more removed from the viewer than even the James tale does, perhaps in reaction to the criticism of last year’s episode showing its monster somewhat longer.

Three Films Make A Post: “The Best Werewolf Movie In Years”

A Werewolf in England (2020): As much as I adore many of director/writer/low budget genius Charlie Steeds’s works in general, I can’t say this one’s more me. As always, camera work, editing and lighting are pretty great (particularly when you keep the production budget in mind), always influenced by the tradition Steeds is working in, yet also creative in how that influence is used, and the cast is often much better than you’d expect. Locations and sets are fine, as well. It’s just that the whole tone of the movie is pretty much the opposite of what I like: instead of the more straightforward werewolf fare you’d expect, this is a deeply campy comedy, with joke after joke after joke I found nearly painfully unfunny. Which becomes a bit of a problem in a comedy, even in one where I ended up laughing two or three times.

If viewers who actually like camp will have the same problem with this as I have is anybody’s guess, obviously.

The Corpse Eaters (1974): Teenage (at the time) Lawrence Zazelenchuk’s little – the only existing versions run for apparently incomplete 57 minutes – bit of early (non-voodoo) zombie horror may be Canada’s first gore film. It is certainly a bit of a mess in the state you can see it now, a blown-up, sometimes pixelated greenish print. Much of it doesn’t work and makes little sense, but there are moments when the whole thing does take on the quality of a freakish nightmare, especially in the gore scenes where the (mostly library, I assume) soundtrack drops into synth chirps and drones while we witness improbable but – as far as you can see it in this version – excellently gloopy gore, filmed with wildly wavering camera and edited over-excitedly. As an extra bonus, the film warns us before the gore scenes with its own version of the Horror Horn: shots of a balding guy about to puke set to annoying synth noises. If that doesn’t convince you of a film’s quality, clearly nothing will.

Vampires (1979): Vampires were in the air in 1979, though this entry into the BBC’s venerable (and sometimes absolutely wonderful) “Play for Today” series, as written by Dixie Williams and directed by John Goldschmidt may not feature any actual vampires. Most of it follows a trio of kids in a particularly desolate part of Liverpool finding their imaginations fired by a viewing of Dracula – Prince of Darkness. So much so, they decide a pale man walking the local graveyard is a vampire, as well.

All of this works wonderfully as a compassionate, sometimes funny, exploration of a specific time and place and its people. It finds much joy (and a bit of subtextual anger) in the kids’ resilience in interactions with a grown-up world that mostly – apart from a joke shop owner – seems to go out of its way to nip in the bud anything that might make the dullness of the surroundings more interesting, more adventurous. That it ends on an ambiguous note that might turn this into an actual tale of vampirism is nearly beside the point, but still appreciated.

In short: Omnibus: William Blake: The Soul of Albion (2000) & Tolkien: The Master of Middle-Earth (2001)

One of the definite advantages of state-funded – yet in the tradition I’m speaking of still journalistically independent – television of decades past has always been the room this left for sometimes surprisingly in-depth culture programming. Of course, this has been eroded away in decades past in various ways in most European countries, but when the idea of state-funded television as an educational device based on the assumption that people aren’t stupid and can cope with a wee bit of intellectual stimulation, and that ratings aren’t the only thing all TV has to be about was still kicking, it could produce things like the BBC’s long-running series of arts and culture documentations running under the “Omnibus” banner. As far as I understand most of them were produced directly for the BBC, but there were also some examples bought for the UK, because it simply makes more sense to have Americans look at the history of gospel etc. Formally, these documentaries could even get somewhat experimental.

These two particular examples concerning the poetry and visual art of William Blake and the life, writing and influence of J.R.R. Tolkien, respectively, are really more in the late period standard style of these documentaries, mixing a couple of staged shots – mostly used to create mood or illustrate things for which the films have no fitting archive material – with found footage, shots of art (there are some fascinating close-ups of Blake’s work. for example), or in case of the Tolkien doc rather rare interview footage of Tolkien himself, as well as actual experts in aspects of the works of the artists at hand. So yes. expect Peter Ackroyd and Humphrey Carpenter in the Blake and the Tolkien, respectively, though there’s also space to take some by-roads that aren’t as fully expected. There’s also time enough to provide these experts with space to give full thoughts instead of soundbites, which really helps keep these documentaries interesting and informative even a couple of decades later.

There’s a sense of seriousness and genuine interest in the subjects running through these two documentaries, which really are descriptors I would applied to many old Omnibus episodes I’ve encountered.

Three Films Make A Post: An Edge-Of-Your-Seat Thriller!

Murder 101 (1991): This TV mystery by Bill Condon with Pierce Brosnan really wants to be a twisty, cleverly constructed example of its genre, further emphasising this by adding certain meta elements via Brosnan’s hilariously melodramatic creative writing lessons. Unfortunately, the kind of clever-clever mystery this wants to be really needs to actually be cleverly constructed, whereas Murder 101 is more confused than elegantly confusing, and simply not terribly interesting for most of its running time. Brosnan’s character is such an egotistical twit that it’s pretty hard caring about what’s happening to him, as well.

Fire Music (2018): Apart from not really managing to squeeze as much of twenty years of free and avant jazz history into ninety minutes as one would ideally want to see, and then bizarrely pretending forward thinking jazz stopped with the advent of the Crouch/Marsalis bubble, this is as wonderful a music documentary as one would hope for, working as an excellent antidote to the conservatism of something like Ken Burns’s jazz documentary series. It’s chockfull of valuable and incisive archive material, wide-ranging interviews with a good handful of surviving musicians. It also really works as a movie, for director Tom Surgal does not use the interviews as sound bytes but lets them inform the structure and rhythm of his film, using archive material and visual collages very much in the spirit of the kind of music the musicians are talking about.

Synth Britannia (2009): Not quite a great as Fire Music, but still far away from the talking head nostalgia fest this easily could have turned into, this is a serious exploration of the roots and development of what would become British synth pop, not just aiming for the most obvious and successful examples of the form but also finding time for its more avantgarde roots. Some more details about how synth pop lost its more experimental impetus beyond “it’s the money” would have been nice, but there’s still quite a bit of substance to the interviews.

The film is not quite free of the tiresome rockism versus popism nonsense British music writers are so obsessed with, but it’s fortunately not really concentrating on it.

In short: The Mezzotint (2021)

Warning: there will be mild spoilers about the changes the adaptation makes to the tale!

Between the Wars. Academic Williams (Rory Kinnear and his magical facial hair) is sent a mezzotint engraving on approval. On first look, it seems to be not particularly exciting, but whenever Williams or others take a new look at it, it changes in increasingly disturbing and grotesque ways. At the same time, Williams learns some somewhat surprising facts about his family history.

As usual with Mark Gatiss, this half hour adaptation of a Monty James tale as a Ghost Story for Christmas for the BBC has found as much hate as praise (both pretty much from the circles you’d expect them to come from). I’m completely on the praising side this time around, and see this as Gatiss’s best James adaptation yet. It’s an effort that changes exactly the parts of the story that need changing for better dramatic effect, the original tale being one of James’s less exciting stories in need of a bit more punch on the haunting side as well as emotionally for its climax, which Gatiss provides in an efficient and logical manner. Then there are a few bits and bobs added to pull the story a smidgen away from the purely male academic area where James’s stories – as well as their author – dwelt. For this, Gatiss adds some dialogue about women coming to academia, something that actually must have been talked about rather a lot in 1923 in these circles, and puts a bit of organic diversity in by casting Nikesh Patel as Nisbet and adding an important female character (via a wonderful performance by Frances Barber). It’s all very efficiently, effectively and intelligently done, in a way that roots the tale in its contemporary reality, a technique James himself found very important in ghost stories.

Most important, obviously, is how well Gatiss has become at directing this sort thing. There are so many clever and atmospheric uses of Dutch angles, extreme close-ups and sharp editing on display, one thinks Lawrence Gordon-Clarke should have been proud of how creepy a tale mostly about men staring at a picture dramatically can get when filmed right. Of course, the men and women doing the staring here are fantastic too, suggesting great degrees of personality and emotion in a very short time.

And hey, Gatiss also adds a nice example of the Jamesian Wallop (term courtesy of the great M.R. James podcast A Podcast to the Curious) to the climax that’s not afraid to do a bit of showing when the telling’s through.

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968)

Mumbling and muttering academic Professor Parkins (Michael Hordern) checks into a hotel on the Norfolk coast for his vacation, which he mostly seems to have planned – in so far as he does any planning – to spend writing and on surprisingly vigorous coastal walks (unlike in the original story, golfing is out).

On one of said walks, Parkins finds an ancient whistle half-buried in the sand. Taking it home to the hotel, he discovers a Latin inscription on it, carrying the not at all concerning words “Who is this who is coming”. For reasons best known to himself, Parkins blows the whistle and is afterwards plagued by nightmares of some shadowy, deeply disturbing figure on the beach, as well as a feeling of being followed in real life, until things climax in something very disturbing happening in his hotel bedroom.

This short TV movie directed and adapted by Jonathan Miller (and based on one of the greatest ghost stories ever written) is of course the model that would some years later create one of the BBC’s great achievements in horror and supernatural television, the annual Ghost Story for Christmas, often based, as is this one, on the father of the modern ghost story, M.R. James.

For many a viewer, this proto-Ghost Story for Christmas is one of, if not the greatest of them all, and really, it’s not difficult to see why: the calm and slow beginning and the stark and effective black and white photography create a sense of place and a mood of something ineffably dreadful lurking just beyond the borders of the very quotidian; the handful of effects are used so cleverly, they are actually Jamesian in affect and method as well as in an eventual ruthlessness typical of the endings of Monty’s tales that’s not at all sanded down for television; and the sound design does much to add to all this.

For something that was really meant to be shown once and then thrown away (long-suffering friends of vintage British television do of course still have fits of anger about the BBC’s nightmarish decision to just overwrite the tapes of some of their old programs), there’s an astonishing amount of art and thoughtfulness on display. The filmmakers of this – like of a lot of other BBC productions – work on a Hollywood Poverty Row budget with the love, care, and effort of proper artists, and so Miller’s editing rhythm’s and staging decisions provide the film with a nearly hypnotic quality, something ineffable that turns a slow and theoretically straightforward tale into something very special indeed.

Now, I’ve gone on record somewhere that I don’t actually love this particular James adaptation as much as many others do mostly because of the much-praised performance of Michael Hordern, who portrays the somewhat obtuse but basically sensible Parkins of the story as a mumbling, brabbling absent-minded horror of a man barely able to communicate. I can’t say I’ve grown to love the performance over the years. I still believe Hordern is just too much here, but I’ve grown less irritated by it, and therefore less distracted by it also, and now find myself disagreeing with his acting decisions without finding them ruining the filmmaking for me anymore, finally – after a decade or so – leaving me just as much in love with the filmmaking and mood of Whistle and I’ll Come to You as everyone else who cares about these wonders of British television is.

Doctor Who: The Dæmons (1971)

The planned opening of a barrow in the not at all suspiciously named village of Devil’s End  - on Walpurgis Night to boot! – awakens the interest not just of a TV team but also of the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee), at this point of the show exiled to Earth, without a functioning TARDIS and working with UNIT, while driving around in a canary yellow old timer.

Turns out what’s buried under the barrow is the last survivor of the alien race that is the original model on which all tales of horned devils and demons throughout human history are based, and the thing is really not very nice at all. Further complicating things is the presence of the Master (in his Roger Delgado incarnation, aka the best male one), who really wants to be endowed with the elder thing’s power, even if he has to go undercover as a vicar and dabble in black magic to do that. Well, and sacrifice the Earth and all of humanity.

I don’t think I’m going to get into the habit of writing about classic Doctor Who serials here, though you never know with me, but this five-parter written by producer Barry Letts with Robert Sloman under the pseudonym of Guy Leopold, and directed by Christopher Barry, is too fitting for the season not to.

As people who know their classic Who history will understand, the era of the Third Doctor, as well as about the first half of the stint of my beloved Fourth Doctor Tom Baker, was particularly and pretty consistently close to the horror genre, with many a British version of classic monster movie tropes, and quite a few moments for children to go through the classic hiding behind the couch ritual. The serial at hand, with its ancient evil hidden below rural soil, black magic rituals and a not quite right village, is also clearly part of the folk horror spirit of the time, as well as paying homage to the Nigel Kneale method of mixing horror and science fiction approaches.

Because this is 70s Doctor Who, there are also some well-shot arrows cheerfully aimed at the spirit of fascism (the Master didn’t call himself that without reason), some companionable poking at the officer class with the Brigadier (obviously, Nicholas Courtney), and a bit of an anarchic spirit of just going for tales bigger than the budget should reasonably allow.

Though, when it comes to visual attractions, this serial is actually rather richly realized, with a lot of location shooting (as always then with the BBC, shot on better filmstock) that really provides the tale with the sense of place it needs to work, as well as some great sets. The latter, as is typical of this Who era, may look cheap to modern eyes (and probably were) but were clearly built with love and attention, showing a focus on the telling detail that is usually more than enough to convince me of a cheap set actually being what it’s supposed to. Hell, somehow, the production even manages a handful of properly effective action scenes here. Add to this the often great and highly strange sound design so typical of several decades of BBC TV, and Barry’s genuine ability to create a sense of strangeness and mystery when the script calls for it, and the whole serial looks and feels really rather impressive.

The plotting of these things, with their cliff-hangers every twenty-five minutes and their stop and start structure is certainly an acquired taste, but this serial certainly makes up for this by throwing a fun or clever or endearingly goofy idea a minute at the viewer, seldom suggesting any dragging of feet. So we get - aside from the whole back plot about the truth about the shittiness of humanity caused by ancient aliens - attractions like a living gargoyle as portrayed by someone capering in a rubber suit, a very shouty Devil progenitor (which makes sense, because he is really very tall, and must have gigantic lungs), the Master finding out why you should not call up what you cannot put down again, a Weird Science machine that’ll make the Brigadier’s “technical chap” sweat quite a bit, an invisible heat barrier, evil Morris Dancers, Delgado really getting into the black magic rituals, a perfectly bizarre sequence in which the local white witch saves the Doctor’s life by pretending he is a wizard, and so much more.

The only annoying element for this contemporary viewer is the way the series at this time treats the companion, Jo Grant (Katy Manning), whose main function is to be patronized by writers and Doctor alike, and to get into trouble so she can be rescued. Even here, when she’s actually doing something to save the planet during the climax, she’s still treated like a mascot more than a human being or a hero afterwards.

Despite of that, this is certainly a top tier example of classic Who, bringing ideas intelligent and weird, whatever the British version of pulp values should be called, quite a bit of subtext, craftsmanship, as well as a great sense of excitement to the screen.

A Thrilling Development: Kiss Me and Die (1974)

aka “The Savage Curse”

“Thriller”, season 2, episode 3

For some general remarks about the British TV show “Thriller” and its stylistic setup, please take a look at my first write-up of an episode.

American Robert Stone (George Chakiris) supposedly comes to one of those small English villages for a bit of rest and relaxation and a bit of photographing. He’s rather good at becoming friendly with the people living in the village too, quickly and effectively becoming a part of the local pub culture. But then, in truth he isn’t a tourist, but is working in the investigative business, so he is supposed to be good at these things. At the moment, Robert is on a rather personal mission, looking for his brother who was last seen in this charming little hamlet before he mysteriously vanished.

Robert is quickly drawn to the mysteries of the local manor house (always a good place to look for the creepy stuff when you’re in the UK). As his brother before him, he is very quickly smitten with Dominie Lanceford (Jenny Agutter), who is rich, utterly charming in a gothic romance heroine way, and seems just a little bit eccentric. Her uncle Jonathan (Anton Diffring), on the other hand, while perfectly polite, even friendly, is clearly crazy as the bird of your choice, apparently spending most of his day exhorting the virtues of Edgar Allan Poe to whoever wanders near him. Given the Poe connection, I’m sure there’s nothing problematic at all going to happen at a masked ball, and taking up the offer of some amontillado is certainly not dangerous at all.

But then, one of the charms of this particular episode of thriller is that Robert is completely clueless about Poe’s work – he clearly hasn’t even seen the Corman movies – and rightfully seen as a barbarian not knowing some of the best parts of his own culture by Jonathan. Therefore he is a perfectly valid target for Poe-style shenanigans, as well as the sort of main character whose denseness really makes a Poe reader groan. Detective or not, Robert’s a bit of an idiot, not just for repeating – doppelganger-like, as Poe would approve of – his brother’s doomed love affair but also for not taking a look at Poe’s work even though he quickly starts to think that something is very wrong with the Lancefords.

Despite of its typically low budget, the episode/film, as directed by John Sichel does make quite a bit of the Poe connection, putting effort if not money into the most excellent masked ball as well as the expected premature burial. This is also one of the Thriller entries that spends quite a bit of time in outside locations in its first acts, and so can work in some rather good suspense sequences on actual film stock.

This one’s really rather lovely, with fine early work by Agutter, a cracking gothic villain turn by Diffring, and a plot that clearly enjoys playing with Poe and gothic tropes.

A Thrilling Development: Nurse Will Make It Better (1975)

“Thriller”, season 4, episode 2

Charley (Linda Liles), the daughter of Edgar Harrow (Cec Linder), an American diplomat in England living in quite the country manor, is a bit of a firecracker. She’s breaking hearts left and right – particularly those hearts her more seriously minded sister Ruth (Andrea Marcovicci) seems invested in – and goes through life with the clear conviction everything in it belongs to the rich and hot like her by rights.

So it’s not much of a surprise that she can’t cope at all when a riding accident she’s at least half responsible for herself leaves her paraplegic. In fact, her behaviour is so extreme, it’s not terribly easy to feel much compassion for her. It is also driving away one nurse after the other.

Until, that is, Bessy Morne (Diana Dors) arrives. Bessy easily – and with a bit of magic – manages to build a rapport with Charley, and, like an evil Mary Poppins, soon starts to exert a rather negative influence on the rest of the household, too, particularly the youngest sister Susy (Tiffany Kinney). And look, if Charley is a good girl, reads the nice big book of witchcraft dear old Bessy is going to provide and agrees to a certain pact, she might even manage to walk again.

Only Ruth and Harrow’s chief of security Carson (Ed Bishop) seem to understand that something very bad is going on, but they won’t really start to do something about it once the body count starts. On the plus side, there’s also an alcoholic priest (Patrick Troughton) in play who might eventually come in useful.

In the coming weeks or months (I’ve never been too great at planning, I have to admit), I am going to dip into episodes of the British 70s TV show Thriller (not to be confused with the US 60s show, of course). Produced and to a large degree written by the great Brian Clemens (of the Steed and colleagues Avengers and so much more fame), this was an anthology show with episodes of about seventy minutes length each, usually with some American actors involved to make it easier to sell the show there, and generally with thriller (what a surprise) and – more irregularly – supernatural horror plots. There’s an obvious debt to Hitchcock style thrillers on display, of course, but I wouldn’t at all be surprised by an influence of the – often great - non-supernatural thrillers made by Hammer which were of course themselves inspired by Hitchcock.

This being a British TV production of its time, the show does tend to some of the visual weaknesses TV production in the country was already starting to lose when this was made, namely the often slightly confusing contrast between 16mm exterior shots and interiors shot on video, which does tend to make even the best set look a bit more flimsy than it should.

However, thanks to usually fun acting and clever and unapologetically pulpy scripts, that sort of thing is rather easily overlooked in the better half or so of the episodes I’ve seen by now.

Nurse Will Make It Better really is a case in point there. This is one of the absolutely supernatural entries in the series, with no improbable last act reveal to make things “realistic”. Instead, this one ends in a scenery chewing duel between Patrick Troughton (in what feels like a bit of dry run to his character in The Omen) and Diana Dors absolutely made-up as evil Mary Poppins (though she is in truth the devil herself, which is pretty awesome). A duel that Dors absolutely wins with a performance that manages to be so camp and silly that it actually becomes creepy again.

Which really is the way the script handles most of its business. Clemens is not at all afraid of using every simple and cheap (that is, affordable on his budget) trick in the books to make his tale of a sexless seduction of the not so innocent interesting and fun, first building the family up in short and deft strokes, and then letting it implode via the obvious fault lines once Bessy gets her claws in.

There are some genuinely creepy scenes here, in particular most everything concerning Bessy’s influence on Susy, a couple of cleverly staged murders, and some neat business where characters see something horrible Bessy hides in a little chest, but the audience can only go by their reactions on what it actually is, making a virtue of the fact the show couldn’t effort many special effects. The acting is very on point, too. Marcovicci makes a very likeable heroine who wins out in the end because she loves a family that gives her a lot of reasons to hate them, and channels this love into practical action, and Liles and Kinney really seem to have fun witching it up.

While the direction – by Shaun O’Riordan, a British TV stalwart – certainly can’t go all giallo or 70s cinematic horror on us thanks to the problems of mostly shooting on video under very constrained budgetary circumstances (the lighting in the show as a whole tends to be rather bland, too), there’s quite a bit of clever blocking and framing to produce tension or demonstrate the lines of influence here.

It’s a fun little film – given its running time and structure, that does seem the proper word rather than episode – giving dear old Bessy her due very nicely.

In short: Rogue Male (1976)

1939. Driven by reasons that’ll become clear during the course of the movie, British aristocrat and sportsman Sir Robert Hunter (Peter O’Toole) nearly manages to assassinate Hitler. Instead, he falls into the hands of the Gestapo, who proceed to torture him, including pulling out his nails. They can’t just kill Hunter, though, for his uncle (Alastair Sim in full-on “demonstration why the aristocracy is a very bad idea” mode once we meet him) has a rather high position in the British government and the Nazis are still trying to draw the British on their side. So it’s best to arrange an accident to befall him.

However, Hunter manages to escape when he’s left for dead and slowly, with luck and talent, reaches British shores. That, one would assume, would be that. However, Nazi agents are still after him; worse, as his uncle explains, his own government (at this point Nazi appeaser Chamberlain still being in office) is very much willing to give him to the Nazis. So Hunter goes underground, fleeing to the countryside. But even living in an actual hole in the ground isn’t quite enough to escape his enemies, specifically another British aristocrat and sportsman, one Major Quive-Smith (John Standing), Nazi hireling.

This BBC production directed by Clive Donner adapts a novel by Geoffrey Household, a great British thriller writer who isn’t terribly known anymore, the destiny of many a writer of popular fiction. It’s a very successful film, apparently shot on something of a higher budget than most BBC productions of the time – why, even the interior scenes are shot on 16mm! – and clearly making good use of every penny, even if Wales has to stand in for Germany. Donner has a good hand for the staging of clear and effective suspense sequences that emphasise clever planning and patience over outright action for the most part and rather purposefully, but also using very simple set-ups to build tension. The scene in the subway, for example, is a prime lecture on how to make much of a simple set-up, eschewing the more involved camera work a theatrical feature would have used for clarity and focus to great effect, thereby turning the film’s nominal weaknesses into virtues.

In general, clarity and focus are some of the film’s main strengths. Its tightness really works wonders for a film in which probably not all that much happens for some contemporary tastes now; the trick is to make the things that do happen important.

O’Toole is obviously perfect casting for the role, playing Hunter as a man of his class and time, with all that entails for good and for bad, but also as a man who has developed empathy through experience unlike others of his class. The films builds a meaningful contrast between him and Quive-Smith here, a man who shares all the same telling signs of Hunter’s class, but none of the insight and empathy the other man has developed through loss and the willingness to try and understand others.


If all that doesn’t sound interesting enough, the film also features a cameo by playwright Harold Pinter as Hunter’s (Jewish) friend Saul Abrahams.

Three Films Make A Post: They faced death......and found life.

The ABC Murders (2018): Or as I like to call it “Poirot: The Grimdark Years”, seeing as this BBC mini-series directed by Alex Gabassi and written by Sarah Phelps goes down the road of all bad grimdark stuff of presenting a worldview and view of people so bleak it becomes more than just faintly ridiculous. In this film’s world, everyone is horrible 24/7, then murdered by a horrid person who in turn is hunted by a past his prime Poirot (John Malkovich doing his best with a crap script) haunted by the shadows of an of course sordid past. Thing is, once your portrayal of humankind becomes as one-note negative as the one presented here, an actual complex and complicated human being watching it does tend to lose the emotional connection to the oh so dark caricatures grimly making their way through one’s field of view. There is, needless to say, quite a bit of scowling involved, as well as the expected scenes of the killer (Eamon Farren) throwing “creepy” poses for the camera.

Need I mention that the main colours in the production are poison green and piss yellow as if this were exactly the low rent copy of a David Fincher production it indeed is?

The Dead Room (2018): As a matter of fact, this half-an-hour ghost story for Christmas written and directed by Mark Gatiss, is just as dark as that Poirot thing. Here, though, it’s a darkness that comes from an actual exploration of character and guilt of the piece’s lead character, radio horror narrator Aubrey Judd (wonderfully performed by Simon Callow). Where The ABC Murders only knows how to strike poses, this one derives its strength and its darkness from an understanding of human complexity rather than from turning humans into caricatures that only know how to be shitty.

Because Gatiss must have been in a hell of a form when he did this, the short film also deftly creates a sense of place and of time having passed, all the while demonstrating – as expected – the writer/director’s love for the classic British ghost story. Quite an achievement for half an hour of television.


Christopher Robin (2018): Despite today’s complaints against a particular style of grimdarkness, I am still a bit too cynical to enjoy the particular style of all ages personal improvement feelgood cinema of most films like Marc Forster’s Christopher Robin. However, in this particular case, I found myself rather spell-bound by the whole affair. In part, it’s certainly an effect of the nostalgia towards Winnie the Pooh et al, but there’s also the fact that the film is quite serious about its portrayal of a very specific post-war malaise that sees Christopher Robin (a fine turn by Ewan McGregor) losing himself in the surrounding greyness of 50s England (despite being married to the most certainly not grey Hayley Atwell). Also bound to win my heart is the portrayal of Christopher’s former friends around Pooh as childlike and gently, yet utterly weird living plush toys. Well, expect for Tigger, who is hilariously deranged and not at all gentle. Really, the only thing that isn’t enjoyable about this one is that it doesn’t solve the problem of alienation in a capitalist society it posits and instead has McGregor inventing paid leave, but I may be asking just a tiny bit much.

The Enfield Haunting (2015)

1977. When the Hodgsons, a family living in a council home in Enfield, is terrorized by all kinds of poltergeist phenomena, Society for Psychical Research member Maurice Grosse (Timothy Spall) is called in to investigate. He quickly realizes that much of the activity seems to be centred around the youngest daughter, Janet (Eleanor Worthington-Cox), who, we will later learn, happens to share the first name of his own dead daughter.

After the publicity blitz about the affair starts, the SPR sends the delightfully named Guy Playfair (Matthew Macfadyen) in to help Maurice. Well, they actually send him to debunk what is going on, for Maurice’s public belief in the things he experiences in the Hodgsom home seems like rather bad publicity to the organization. It doesn’t take terribly long, though, until Playfair also realizes the phenomena are very real indeed. In fact Maurice’s and his duty may very well be not to debunk what is happening but to help the family experiencing it.

All the time, the phenomena are getting worse, going from the usual moving objects and smashed up furniture to what very much seems like possession of Janet, and even to physical harm.

I’m really not sure if calling a story told in three forty-five minute episodes a mini-series instead of a movie hacked in three parts as the British Sky did with The Enfield Haunting as directed by Kristoffer Nyholm and written by Joshua St Johnston is a terribly sensible idea, but then, I’m not working in TV, so what do I know?

As even someone only very superficially interested in the history of psychical phenomena will realize, the series is based on what may very well be the UK’s most famous poltergeist case, specifically, it calls itself an adaptation of a book about it by the real Guy Playfair. How much the book or this film have to do with any actual reality, only the people involved will ever truly know, but then I’m not writing up a documentary but a pretty neat little horror series, so this question is probably neither here nor there.

There is a very typical mistake quite a few – particularly TV – adaptations of true (or “true”, depending on one’s philosophy and mood) tales of the paranormal tend to make. All too many of them, while going hog-wild with the characterisation of their protagonists and taking all kinds of shortcuts, eschew being satisfying narratives by seemingly going out of their way to not have thematic through lines and certainly no satisfying endings. It’s understandable, of course, for non-fictional tales of the supernatural are not really supposed to have a theme – life sure as hell does not – and usually just peter out somehow, somewhere.

When it comes to this decision of either making a “realistic” story or a satisfying tale of the supernatural, The Enfield Haunting goes straight for the latter, providing not only a dramatic, emotional ending but also building its story rather nicely on Maurice’s emotional involvement with the Hodgson family who clearly could use a non-horrible male in their lives. As they occur, the supernatural events invite him to treat them as a mirror for some of his own ghosts, suggesting a connection between the two girls named Janet that may or may not only exist because he cares for them both. It’s an important, and rather well written, part of the story that also involves the marital troubles between Maurice and his wife Betty (Juliet Stevenson) caused by the death of their daughter. It would be very easy to use this element of the narrative only to jerk out a few tears from the audience – and the series certainly doesn’t shy away from a bit of tear-jerking – but it is also part of the series’ complex idea of human motivation and connection. The inner lives of people, the series understands, are not single-lane streets, so it accepts complexity and ambiguity in them. So where you’d expect it to have Maurice and Playfair go through the usual believer/sceptic rigmarole, it actually portrays both men as believers and sceptics, depending on the situation, something that practically never happens in this sort of story, and which made me really rather happy.

It also uses this approach in its treatment of the supernatural as something that can be threatening and horrifying, and certainly very cruel, but also quiet and kind. Accepting ambiguities seems to be the modus operandi here, and I’m certainly all for it.

Mind you, there’s no ambiguity to the existence of the actual supernatural in the series’ world, but then, there are really only a handful of cases where keeping the supernatural absolutely ambiguous in a tale of horror is anything but frustrating and even a bit cowardly, and I’m pretty sure it would be pointless for The Enfield Haunting. At the very least, the film’s acceptance of the supernatural as a given does provide us with some very good set-pieces. Some of the scenes of Janet – and others – speaking with the voices of the dead are really rather chilling, and the sequence with the medium in the second part manages to start out as a bit of a joke yet becomes increasingly uncomfortable and tense, even more so because it starts as anything but. Series director Nyholm generally manages to keep even the more typical bits of poltergeist business interesting, often concentrating on giving them a physical impact that makes them feel real. These scenes are not, as such, original if your know your horror, but they are so well staged and scripted originality doesn’t come into it.


Nyholm and the script are very ably assisted by a fine cast. I was particularly enamoured with Timothy Spall’s performance that at first seems to be all facial hair and a very late 70s embodiment of growing old badly but that reveals a complex and humane soul. And when have you last seen a movie or TV show this interested in a guy who looks like Spall here that uses him as its actual hero? Eleanor Worthington-Cox is also particularly good, selling all elements of the role - the intelligent teenager, the literally haunted kid, the various characters that will speak through her, and the near brokenness of the final part – without ever laying it on too thick.

Requiem (2018)

Warning: I won’t spell things out completely, but there are certainly some spoilers towards the nature of the series and its ending in here!

Things are going swell for cellist Matilda (Lydia Wilson) and her musical partner – who is more of a further appearing kind of guy in their promo materials – Hal (Joel Fry). They seem to be hitting the big time as much as a chamber music duo can today, with a big London show coming up and important American tour dates in their future.

However, directly before the start of said big show, Lydia witnesses her mother Janice (Joanna Scanlan) committing suicide by cutting her own throat right in front of her. There weren’t any warning signs at all, and Matilda is very distraught. Sadness and pain mixes with confusion when she finds a shoebox on her mother’s bed. It is full of photos – apparently shot stalker-style – of people Matilda doesn’t know, newspaper clips and a videotape with TV news features about the disappearance of a small girl named Carys in a Welsh village twenty years ago. Thinking about what these things mean is like an itch she can’t stop scratching for Matilda, so she and Hal make their way to Wales, where their questions open up old wounds and suggest increasingly more occult explanations for what has happened to the girl and what all of this has to do with Matilda.

This six part BBC/Netflix series is a mix of mystery and supernatural tale, written in most part by its creator Kris Mrksa and directed by Mahalia Belo, both with TV experience – Mrksa a lot of it - but with not much else coming up on IMDB. It’s a genuinely excellent mixture, using the parallels between modern mystery and crime tales about cold cases and what at first seems to be a ghost story, but ending up in a somewhat different direction than you’d at first expect, the ghost story rather elegantly escalating into an occult conspiracy story.

The writing is not above using clichés, but this is more the case of the piece using well-worn tropes because they fit its needs, not because it can’t come up with something better. Even the crime standard of the lost child isn’t the easy emotional in for the audience it sometimes tends to be but an intrinsic part of this tale, for the story is indeed about it instead of using it as an easy way to grab the viewer. The mystery is well enough constructed that even once I had figured out the shape of the story relatively early on (subjective thousand years of genre cinema and literature consumption will do that to you), it was a pleasure to follow the series into the details, the obvious ones and the less so. The characters are interesting throughout, usually starting from a point a viewer will have a handle of as a cliché, but eventually showing more complexity and facets that turn them into people. Very often, the characters feel more like they are the people on whom the clichés were based, rather than clichés.

I did find myself somewhat exasperated by Matilda’s approach to, well, anything, (while still rooting for her) in part because of the socially anxious person’s discomfort at someone being quite this direct and immune to what strangers might think of her, but also because Requiem makes very believable how someone genuinely hurt by her past and recent events might end up bursting through human niceties, proprieties and other people’s lives in a way that can only lead to something very bad for everyone involved. In fact, I wouldn’t see things ending much better for our protagonist if there were nothing supernatural involved here at all. At the same time, the way Wilson portrays her, she never becomes a caricature, but a pained and sometimes frustrating human being that really deserves better.

Speaking of the supernatural, one of the most pleasant surprises for me was the actual nature of the beings involved, the clever way the show portrays and uses them, basing them on a certain historical magician and his beliefs and practices, without either getting too much into the minutiae of occult practices nor ending up with people in robes muttering about Satan. Obviously, used and portrayed as present but mysterious and not truly understandable but us humans, these beings are rather disturbing not just because they are involved in spookiness, but because of the ideas about the cosmos they represent.

Belo’s direction is generally of the slick, contemporary TV style that may not have as much money to work with as a blockbuster, but that never feels cheap and suggests not the classic picture of some work-for-hire hack quickly shooting away at a script she doesn’t care about. The direction is as composed and thought through as you’d wish from every director worth your time as a viewer.

Some of the horror sequences will not be exactly new to the discerning viewer of this sort of thing, but Belo’s handling of Matilda’s shifting states of consciousness, and the intersection between the more visible horror effects and those that are just in her mind or might just be in other characters’ minds is flawless, and often wonderfully creepy without ever only wanting to creep you out. However, this is not the kind of tale that cops out on the supernatural in the end. As a matter of fact, the ending, while elegantly not showing a lot things, is consequent and rather brutal in this regard, while also keeping with what the series has set up about its supernatural world before.


So, Requiem is a rather lovely piece of work.