A fun grab-bag of horror
Ghost Stories
15 cert, 98 min Dir Jeremy Dyson, Andy Nyman Starring Andy Nyman, Martin Freeman, Paul Whitehouse, Alex Lawther, Nicholas Burns
Aclever, rattling scare machine on stage, the West End hit Ghost Stories feels at home on the big screen. This is largely because the play’s antecedents were cinematic, especially the portmanteau horror films released by Amicus Productions in the Sixties and Seventies. The original’s creators Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson have poured a lot of imagination into making this adaptation work, as well as a lifetime’s connoisseurship of English horror in all its uncanny flavours. Nyman stars as the Peter Cushing equivalent from those Amicus films, as we follow his paranormal debunker, Professor Phillip Goodman, in and out of a trio of creepy cases in flashback.
The middle story is a prime slice of woodland Gothic, with Alex Lawther’s edgy driver stranded and menaced by
some kind of MR James-style goat demon on a country road. Lawther, ever more valuable as a young film actor, and brilliant in the Black Mirror episode Shut Up and Dance, gives us an edge-of-hysteria turn that’s great, campy value. Meanwhile Paul Whitehouse, equally well-cast as a depressive nightwatchman whose life has fallen apart, lends his part a kind of leery gravitas that really suits the Amicus tradition.
Cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland lights the godforsaken backwaters in which the film is set to extract every ounce of gloom, and also knows how to get his camera crawling along Whitehouse’s forearm, in a transitional close-up that’s particularly weird and unnerving.
It doesn’t all pan out equally well: Martin Freeman’s sketch of a shotguntoting toff, terrorised by a nursery poltergeist, comes off as strangely thin and throwaway. And it’s hard to avoid the sense you’ve watched a grab-bag of horror conceits. But it’s fun and semi-scary, with a bevy of extra twists bolted on, and plenty of ambitious ideas about the trickery of the mind. Gimmicky, nicely crafted entertainment.
TR