Paperhouse

Based on the novel 'Marianne Dreams' by Catherine Storr, which had previously been adapted into the fabulous 'Escape Into Night', 'Paperhouse' is the story of 'Anna' (Charlotte Burke) who, while suffering from glandular fever discovers herself slipping into the dreamworld  of her own drawings where she meets Marc (Elliott Spears), another of her Doctor's patients, who's unable to walk due to his muscular dystrophy.  Very much subjected to the whims of the bad tempered Anna, who veers wildly between kindness and petulance, the pair find themselves trapped in the lonely house held seige by a warped and angry caricature of her absent father (Ben Cross).

The kid actors are kid actors and the dubbing of American actress Glennne Headly is massively distracting but director Bernard Rose's interpretation of the story is an intriguing one with some bold visuals but it pales in comparison to it's predecessor.  His idea to replace the terror of the watching stones with the hammer wielding father is the most 1980s of ideas which, with mention of his drinking, gives the whole thing a whiff of psychodrama that robs the story of some of it's supernatural menace but it isn't without it's charms.

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Escape Into Night

Based on the novel 'Marianne Dreams' by Catherine Storr originally published in 1958 this 1972 drama from ATV tells the story of a petulant little shit called 'Marianne' (Vikki Chambers) who, whilst bedridden recovering from the broken leg she gets falling from her pony, begins to dream of the spooky house she's drawn in her sketchbook.  In the house she meets a young boy named Mark (Steven Jones) who is unable to walk. In a fit of pique, following an argument, Marianne foolishly surrounds the house with drawings of standing stones complete with eyes to watch and trap Mark inside after which it becomes a race against time to escape from the encroaching 'Watchers'.

'Escape Into Night' was adapted for TV by the great Ruth Boswell who had previously developed the fabulous 'Timeslip' and who would later go on to develop 'The Tomorrow People'.  Just like 'Timeslip' 'Escape Into Night' was originally filmed and shown in colour but those tapes have been lost / wiped and only the telerecordings exist but personally I think that not entirely a bad thing as the dark, grainy and almost washed out nature of the telerecordings gives Marianne's dreamworld a particularly sinister ambience that I can't really imagine in colour.

The acting of the two leads is very much of the middle class drama school variety typical of the era but beyond that everything about 'Escape Into Night' seemed designed to terrify it's young audience from the watching stones to the unrelenting build of tension over the 6 episodes, the Ralph Vaughan Williams theme music (the third movement of Symphony No.6 in E minor) to the massively creepy hummed end credits over the morphing childlike drawings of the cast and, 48 years on, its lost little of its creepiness.

Buy it here - UK /  US - or watch it below.



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