SCARE TACTICS
‘Ghost Stories’ will terrify you for a long time
The scariest film I've seen in long time, more frightening even than the overrated “A Quiet Place,” “Ghost Stories” is both a throwback to the classic supernatural horror tales of M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft and to British portmanteau horror films of the 1970s. The film also is a timely reminder that horror movies can be low budget without being low on intelligence or style.
Constructed by writerdirectors Andy Nyman, who also plays the protagonist, and Jeremy Dyson as a minianthology and based on their successful stage play, the film begins when Professor Phillip Goodman (Nyman), host of a show called “Psychic Cheats,” reveals a psychic stage performer to be a fraud in mid-act.
Phillip, the nebbishy product of an Anglo-Jewish family with a stern patriarch, is then summoned to coastal England where he meets crotchety Charles Cameron (Leonard Byrne) in a shabby trailer on a beach. Charles was a paranormal investigator in the 1970s and gives Phillip a folder with three cases that he could not debunk and challenges Phillip to try.
The first is about a terrifying ghostly visitation experienced by a disturbed and obnoxious nightwatchman (Paul Whitehouse) in a former women's mad- house. The second is a tale of paranoid young Simon Rifkind (Alex Lawther), who gets lost in the woods in his father's car and runs into something horrible.
In the third episode, a super-rich stockbroker (Bilbo Baggins himself Martin Freeman) and his wife give birth to something very nasty. The plot will further involve the framing device of Phillip's boyhood, during which he was bullied by classmates, a fellow bullied classmate with a learning disability and a traumatic boyhood incident that would receive a rousing Stephen King stamp of approval. These scenes feature a demonic version of Kenny from “South Park.”
Yes, like “A Quiet Place,” “Ghost Stories” has its share of the usual jump-in-yourface scares. But conceptually and in terms of spooky atmospherics and visuals, it is so much more terrifying it is no contest. Nyman and Dyson have a fondness for spooky-looking dolls of all kinds, and they know how to exploit the horror of vast, dark spaces.
One of the film's most diabolical moments is an invocation of the 1781 painting “The Nightmare” by Henry Fuseli. The cast is terrific, especially Whitehouse and Lawther, who are new to me. “They're coming to get you, Barbara.”