The book’s subtitle puts it better: Ghost Movies. But even that’s deceptive.
In this 260-page anthology, editor Peter Haining (whose many other spooky collections were familiar to me as a teenager) traces the history of the ghost story onscreen through the works of fiction that inspired such classic films as Night of the Demon, Don’t Look Now, and Dead of Night. The contents page is what hooked me: here, seemingly, were also the origin tales for Halloween, Beetlejuice and The Stone Tape.
Except not quite. Haining writes an introduction to each author and story, and it immediately becomes clear that there’s been some sleight-of-hand. Not every story in the volume is one that inspired the film to which it is “attached”. A note below the contents holds the disclaimer “this is a list of film titles. The original works on which these films were based may have had different titles from those listed above.”
However, this editorial choice does make sense with the first story. James Herbert, in 1995, was still Britain’s best-known horror author (even if the horror “boom” had ended, and his own books tended now towards the more ghostly, or fantastic). That year saw the release of one of the few adaptations – and certainly one of the few good adaptations – of his work, Lewis Gilbert’s Haunted. There was little sense in publishing an extract – the book would be well-known to readers – and right at the start of the collection Haining proudly displays his trump card: an exclusive short story from an author who wrote (or at least published) almost no short fiction. That ‘Hallowe’en’s Child’ is a short, sharp shocker is no surprise, but although the climax delivers a nasty twist it doesn’t bear much scrutiny, and on reflection the tale is a misogynistic little story, full of anxiety over female physicality.
In J.B. Priestly’s ‘Night Sequence’, bickering husband and wife Luke and Betty abandon their stranded car and, in the dark and pouring rain, seek shelter at an isolated stately home. The premise sounds familiar but alas, their host isn’t Tim Curry’s Frank-N-Furter but instead amiable old Sir Edward and his niece Julia. Betty is as entranced by Sir Edward as Luke is enchanted by Julia, and in the morning, when they discover themselves in an empty, run-down mansion, realise that it’s the ghosts who have done the exorcising, by bringing out the couple’s better selves and reconciling them.
‘Sir Tristram Goes West’ by Eric Keown and ‘A Smoky Lady in Knickers’ by Thorne Smith are, as the titles suggest, light comedies with amiable ghosts. Dorothy Macardle’s ‘Samhain’ is a modern framing of an old Irish folk-tale, while the inspiration for the ventriloquist dummy sequence in Dead of Night – ‘The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy’ by Gerald Kersh – is a very short but genuinely creepy little story, whose power is not diluted by the title giving away the premise. It’s one of the collection’s highlights, and it’s here that the book really shifts up a gear as we move into adaptations from the second half of last century. M.R. James’s ‘Casting The Runes’ is familiar and welcome, and one of the master ghost story writer’s most modern-feeling works.
Shirley Jackson is represented, not by an extract from The Haunting of Hill House (all the pieces herein are complete tales), but by the short story ‘The Bus’, which I had read before. My vague remembering of it fed nicely in to the spiralling nightmare of the action as Miss Harper finds herself ejected from the last bus home at night and made welcome in a roadhouse that seems somehow familiar but other at the same time.
I had been excited at the thought that Nigel Kneale had written The Stone Tape as a prose work, but sadly not. Instead, we have ‘The Trespassers’, which I’ve also read somewhere before. Like The Stone Tape, it takes as its premise the idea that ghosts can be embedded in a building (in this case, a modern bungalow), and there are similarities to Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist. It contains (for me) one of the creepiest moments in the whole anthology: “”The sea,” he said, barely whispering. “But you can’t hear the sea in the kitchen!””
I wrote about Daphne du Maurier in the early days of this blog, and haven’t read her since. She’s still (and probably always will be) best-known for Jamaica Inn and the superb Rebecca, but her dark, modern-gothic short stories deserve the widest possible audience. ‘Don’t Look Now’ is one of those rare instances of story and film being equally brilliant. If you only know Nicolas Roeg’s film, read the story. It’s a heartbreaking tale of grief and hope in Venice as a couple try to recover from their daughter’s death from meningitis (drowning, in the film). But death continues to hang over them.
One of the disappointments of the volume is the brief, slight ‘Harlequin’, written by an 18-year-old John Carpenter, and while the tale of moonlit transformation is atmospheric and enigmatic, it isn’t what the director of Halloween, The Thing and The Fog will be remembered for.
Haining, though, ends the anthology with a flourish. One of the undoubted highlights is ‘Halley’s Passing’ by Beetlejuice screenwriter Michael McDowell, and it’s one of the best short stories I’ve read all year. We follow Mr Farley as he undertakes a night’s work with meticulous care, noting with an accountant’s precision all his outgoing expenses as he performs his very particular role. To say more would be to spoil it, but although ‘Don’t Look Now’ and ‘Casting the Runes’ are easily available elsewhere, and a rare short from James Herbert notwithstanding, the collection is worth tracking down for this gory little tale alone.
1995 was not a vintage year for horror fiction (Stephen King’s Rose Madder; Intensity by Dean R. Koontz) or films (Haunted aside): Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh? Children of the Corn 3? Those aren’t scream you hear, it’s just the bottom of the barrel being scraped.
Into the Gyre 