HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 65
4th of 4 haunted house films

I have been a huge fan of ghost stories since as long as I was reading books...

Instant sidebar: I remember our school library used to have this fascistic system where a whole raft of books had a sticky RED DOT on the spine which meant you had to be in at least the 5th grade to read them. Anyway, some do-gooder had decided that almost everything supernatural was unfit for younger kids so I was constantly sneaking in there and reading ghosty stuff on the sly, hoping the librarian wouldn't walk past and look at the spine and stop me reading it. Borrowing them was out of the question. I mean, what kind of fucked up educational system makes kids feel like deviants for wanting to read a book, for fuck's sake? I was genuinely guilty about it and thought I was being bad. Fuck those guys, I've never actually thought about it since then, but now I look back on it with adult eyes it makes me kind of furious! End rant.

... and although I've never actually read Susan Hill's novel, I am very familiar with The Woman in Black having seen the West End stage production twice (it's still running there as it has continuously since the late 80's and if there are any horror fans who ever visit London and want to see a play, I can't recommend it enough - it's AMAZING) and obviously the excellent (IMO) Daniel Radcliffe-starring remake and it's fairly crappy sequel (which I still quite enjoyed). And this material, my friends, is as good as ghost stories get, as far as I'm concerned.

I only recently learned that there was a British television adaptation of this, but obviously I immediately put it high on my watchlist. In an uncanny co-incidence, the main character of Arthur Kidd, the credulous solicitor sent to the foreboding Eel Marsh House to put the recently deceased Mrs Drablow's paperwork in order, is played by Adrian Rawlins, who more recently played opposite Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter's father (or his disembodied ghost and reflection - a far more benevolent spectre than the one in this story!)

Like many British TV movies, the cast tends to be full of unfamiliar names who, for me, turn out to be highly familiar faces. The other key character (apart from The Woman in Black herself) is local landowner Sam Toovey, played here by Bernard Hepton, who I remember most strongly from his role as Tobe Esterhase, one of the clique of secretive, possibly sinister spooks of another kind altogether in the legendary BBC version of Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. Consisting as it is of a group of super talented and professional British stage and TV veterans, this cast is uniformly superb, and just watching these guys do their thing, delivering Susan Hill's wonderfully authentic dialogue, and existing within the beautiful period detail (including liberal use of precious turn-of-the-century artefacts, especially the cars), would be worth the price of admission alone.

This version takes a far more subtle route than the recent remake, with much less in the way of James Wan-esque jump scares and eye-catching set pieces. No doubt many will assume that makes it far superior, but I think there's an argument for either approach - I do think the jump scares in the James Watkins films are pretty beautifully done. In fact, this film is far more understated even than the stage production, which had a lot more terrifying moments, from memory. But when this film does decide to ramp up the creepiness, it succeeds in pretty breathtaking fashion. If this was a film the average British family threw on at Christmastime in 1989 (as per time honoured British tradition - Christmas and ghost stories going together like peaches and cream, a fact known to all since Charles Dickens threw them together) I can only imagine the broken night of night terrors those parents had to deal with that Christmas Eve. This is some scary shit, folks.

This story plays to my deep seated loves of storytelling on such a fundamental level, its appeal to me is actually hard to articulate. Gloomy mansions, shrouded figures, villages where folks hunch over their beers in warm pubs while the mists roll in outside, forbidding desolate marshlands, strange women appearing in graveyards... God, it's so fucking good and I will be pulling this one out as frequently as possible. This'll probably end up being five stars for me - I'm just readjusting my ability to incorporate this different take on the material.

This makes me want to look for a list of British TV period ghost stories. I want to believe there's a whole raft of them, but that might be wishful thinking. I do have the MR James Christmas Ghost Stories set on my radar, but there's bound to be many more things like this. I need to also pull out my DVD set of the old Shadows TV series - the opening credits for that show (which used to air about 5.30pm) were themselves enough to give me the heebie jeebies when I was a kid.

At what point did we decide letting kids see scary stories was a bad thing? Because it might not be inaccurate to say that scary stories were invented as something to tell children in the first place. They were literally intended to scare kids into submission! I'm not saying we should do that, but man, we are all going so fucking milquetoast.