The Signal-Man by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens wrote a number of ghost stories, often as part of the English tradition of ghost stories for Christmas. The best known is A Christmas Carol, one of his more sentimental stories, but others were more in the vein of scary stories. The Signal-Man was written in 1966, and was inspired in part by a train crash Dickens was involved in and partly by other train crashes he had read about.

This is another example of the ghost that leaves a warning. The story involves a signalman who repeatedly hears his bell ring when it does not actually ring, then sees and hears a ghost, each time as a premonition of a train accident.

You can read the story here. It's only about five thousand words.

This is a very traditional sort of ghost story, with the narrator happening upon the signalman while out for a stroll, and the signalman telling the narrator his story. I am fond of stories within which people tell stories.

Because I'm wayyyyy too visually-oriented, here's a link to the well-done BBC adaptation from their old annual series A Ghost Story for Christmas, starring the late great Denholm Elliott in the title role.

This version was released on dvd by the BFI a few years back, but like a lot of BFI discs (e.g. Ghostwatch) it's now frustratingly out of print and sells for exorbitant prices online. Aro Street Video has a copy if you live in Wellington; it also contains a good reading of the original story.

Below (2002)

In 1943, an American submarine receives an order to pick up adrift survivors. There turns out to be three of them, a British nurse and two sailors, fugitives from a . The men complain about the "bad luck" of a woman aboard. Soon, while they are being tracked by a German warship, strange things start happening, such as a Benny Goodman record turning on by itself while they are maintaining silence. Is it sabotage, or is it a ghost?

(It's a ghost.)

Below started life as a script co-written by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream), who planned to direct. The reins were eventually handed to David Twohy (Pitch Black), who re-wrote Aronofsky's script. I would have rather seen the earlier version, but this is still a fun movie. It doesn't do quite enough with its claustrophobic setting (and the depth charge scenes are obviously not a patch on similar scenes in Das Boot, which just about gave me a heart attack) but it's an effective ghost story.

As far as I'm aware, this is the only haunted submarine movie to date. H. P. Lovecraft's short story The Temple was set on a U-boat in 1920, but it's so long since I read it that I don't even remember whether it was any good or not (and I'm pretty sure that there were no ghosts in it anyway). It's such a great idea that it now seems strange to me that nobody had thought of it before; surely there must be other stories with this theme, if not other films.

What we're dealing with here is a vengeful ghost. I won't say who the ghost is or why it is vengeful, but you'll probably figure it out pretty quickly if you watch the movie. The ghost itself is handled quite well; it's always ducking around a corner, or just a flash of a reflection in a porthole. There were maybe a couple too many loud noise "Boo!" moments, but I can deal with that when the rest of the movie is surprisingly low-key and subtle. I haven't seen any of Twohy's other movies, but I gather that they are action-oriented; this is not. In fact, it's probably the only movie I have ever seen where an explosion that kills multiple characters happens completely off-screen: we only see the build-up to it and the (incredibly creepy) aftermath.

It also contains one of the best "mirror moments" I've seen. You know those scenes? They happen a lot in supernatural movies: someone looks in a mirror and what they see isn't quite right.

There are some definite down-sides. I know next to nothing about the military & navy (hate war, hate most war movies) but even I spotted some of the no doubt rampant anachronisms, which I won't bother listing. The submarine is not mined enough for claustrophobia. There are too many cheap jump scares - the subtle creep-out moments are far more effective. The story is too predictable. Too many of the crew are interchangeable grunts. It should have been scarier - it's creepy throughout but never terrifying.

The best performance by far was Olivia Williams as the nurse, brilliant as always. Zach Galifianakis is endearing as the beardy guy who reads pulp horror stories to the crew. The rest are, ehh, ok. I'm sure I'd seen some of them in other movies, but none were memorable enough to register.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Below was a wasted opportunity, because I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I hope that it inspires other filmmakers to say "I've got a much better idea for a haunted submarine movie!"

The Hitch-Hiker by Lucille Fletcher

Here we have one of the most enduring ghosts of the 20th century: the vanishing hitch-hiker. This particular ghost has turned up in a good number of stories and urban legends. Usually it involves a hitch-hiker being picked up and then mysteriously disappearing from the moving vehicle.

This variation is a hitch-hiker who is never picked up, but who recurs outside of the car. The story was written by Lucille Fletcher as a radio play; it was performed at least three times in three different series, each time with Orson Welles in the lead.

The play features a ghost that is either warning or threatening the narrator, which is a standard trope for ghost stories. It also features another common trope - but you should listen to the play to hear what this is, rather than having me spoil the end for you.

Here is the second version, from the classic series Suspense. It's not quite as good as the Mercury Summer Theatre version from 1946, which was also directed by Welles. I could not find that version online, but I have it somewhere.

Welles and Fletcher were both absolute masters of the radio medium in their day. Welles was infamous for his 1938 War of the Worlds adaptation, which convinced some people that an alien invasion was actually in progress. Fletcher's best known work, Sorry Wrong Number, was one of the best radio suspense plays ever written. The Hitch-Hiker is an old-fashioned radio play, but it's still good fun.

It was later adapted as an episode of The Twilight Zone, but I have not seen that episode.

A Chinese Ghost Story (1987)

I don't know much about the Chinese ghost story tradition, but I do know that there are not a lot of straight-up Chinese horror movies. Ghost movies from China & Hong Kong tend to blend elements of fantasy, kung-fu, romance and comedy.

Of these movies, my favourite is A Chinese Ghost Story, produced by Tsui Hark and directed by Ching Siu-tung. It tells the story of a hapless tax collector (Leslie Cheung) who takes shelter in a deserted temple, where he falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a ghost.

The movie involves an evil Tree Demon, a vengeful Taoist priest, Sam Raimi-style camerawork from the point of view of an extremely long tongue, the most comically unthreatening zombies of all time, a song & dance interlude about the power of the Tao, plenty of slapstick comedy, and a surprisingly moving ending. Small children might find parts of it frightening, but the emphasis is on slapstick comedy and romance.

This tradition of combining kung-fu with horror movies seems to date specifically to the 1974 movie Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, which attempts to marry the British Hammer Dracula movies with the Hong Kong Shaw Brothers kung-fu movies; it was co-directed by Hammer veteran Roy Ward Baker and Shaw veteran Chang Cheh, and co-starred Peter Cushing with many kung-fu stars. This movie featured both vampires from the Western tradition and hopping vampires from Chinese folklore. But the cycle properly begins with director/star Sammo Hung's 1980 movie Encounters of the Spooky Kind, which places a far greater emphasis on action and comedy.

A Chinese Ghost Story strikes me as being superior to these earlier movies simply because it integrates the disparate elements with more confidence. The movie slips from being potentially spooky to laugh-out-loud funny with apparent ease, and even manages to get serious in its final act without a jarring shift in tone. The performances of Leslie Cheung as the tax inspector, Joey Wang as the ghost and the great Wu Ma as the priest certaily help here.

I really need to learn more about Chinese mythology before I can speak about movies like this with any authority. All I can say for the moment is that this is a tremendously fun movie that I've watched many times.

Ghostly music

I'm a big fan of songs that tell stories, so obviously I've been trying to find songs which tell ghost stories.

Here are two.

First up, (Ghost) Riders In the Sky. I always loved this is a kid - I think it was the Vaughan Munroe version. This one is by Johnny Cash & Willie Nelson.



Next up is Warren Zevon's immortal ballad, Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. I've always loved Zevon's dark humour.



Neither of these songs is particularly chilling. I wanted to use something by Alice Cooper, but I couldn't actually think of any ghost stories he's told.

Can anyone recommend a really good ghost song?

What is a ghost story anyway? - part 2

When I posted about The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, Sonia asked on Facebook:

So what was the rationale for including this (and by extension Lovecraft, right? Maybe?) in a ghost discussion? It seems like this kind of story works in such a different way, on such different sources of fear, from "ghost as spirit of specific dead person" stories. Although The Shining walks a funny line between these two modes.

That's a damned good question.

Part of the point of this series is an attempt to find the boundaries of what is and what is not a ghost story. I'm interested in the divisions of genre, especially when they are blurred. The ghost story seems to me to be a good place to explore this.

I think that most people would regard a ghost as being the spirit of a dead person (or sometimes other animal) that is still able to interact with the living. Even here it's possible to blur the boundaries. For example how do you seperate a ghost from other undead such as zombie or a vampire? Post-Night of the Living Dead we usually think of zombies as being kind of the opposite of a ghost: a body that still moves around without a spirit. However, there are plenty of examples of zombies that retain their original memories and seek vengeance and/or to be put to rest, in much the same manner as a ghost.

So is it their physical nature that separates them? But what about those cases where a ghost still has a physical form, such as in the Ju-on movies, where ghosts can stab people or break their necks?

I think that a ghost has to be seperate from the physical body, though it can still have a physical form of sorts. If it is a reanimated corpse, rather than a ghost it is something else.

Except, of course, that ghosts in fiction have been known to possess the bodies of the living and/or of the dead. So if a ghost were to possess its own physical body and keep walking around, would it still be a ghost or would it now be a zombie or a ghoul?

What about the concept of a "residual haunting" - the idea that a ghost, rather than being a sentient being, is in some way a recording of past events? This idea was exploited in Nigel Kneale's teleplay The Stone Tape (to be discussed here in mroe detail soon), where a team of experimenters happen across just such a recording and want to know if they can wipe it and record something new. Could a ghost just be a paranormal video recording?

In the case of The Willows, we never actually discover what the mysterious force surrounding the willows actually is. The characters hypothosise that it could be a different form of life that has evolved completely seperately from the life that we know about, which only intersects with our reality at certain points. Could this be an explanation for a ghost? It seems to be the spirit of a living person, but in fact it is something else. (In this case, the story comes from a book called Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood and the author describes his mysterious entities as "ghosts" even though they are seldom actually spirits of the dead.)

In another story I've looked at, Ghostwatch, what at first seems to be the spirit of a living person turns out to be merely the latest layer of "skin" covering some kind of demonic presence that has haunted the area since at least the stone age. Could a ghost be something that merely assumes human form for its own purposes, stealing the identity of someone who is dead?

In the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, there is no mention of the ghosts being any specific people. It is the house itself that is the problem.

Perhaps the meaning of "ghost story" has changed over the years. It might have used to mean any kind of spooky supernatural story, with this term being supplanted by "horror story" in recent times.

I don't have any answers, just a lot of questions. If anyone else has any theories, I'd love to hear them.

The Whip and the Body (1963)

Here's an example of two kinds of ghost story that I like a lot: the returning lover, and the "ambiguous ghost". It's also an Italian movie, and I'm all about Italian horror movies. It's co-written and directed by Mario Bava, probably the greatest of all Italian horror movie directors, and it features top horror star Christopher Lee. To top it all off, it was a very controversial movie in its day and was cut to shreds in most countries when it was first released, to the point where it was apparently incomprehensible.

If released now, it would probably be rated PG.

The Whip and The Body is Gothic horror in all senses. It's a period movie (though as with many of these things, the period it is set in is ambiguous) and it features a crumbling old castle, secret passages, doomed love, unsympathetic characters, delirium, suicide, murder, and unmotivated coloured lighting.

The story involves the return of Kurt (Christopher Lee) to the family home and the disruption this causes. Kurt's former lover Nevenka (played by stunning Israeli actress Daliah Lavi) is now married to his brother, who is in love with another woman, Katia. The housekeeper, Giorgia (Bava regular Harriet White Medin), is still grieving the loss of her daughter, who had committed suicide after being seduced then abandoned by Kurt. Of course, Kurt's return awakens old passions in Nevenka, and the thoroughly hissable Kurt revels in the chaos he is causing.

So far, so whatever. But what made this movie so controversial (and still makes is quite unusual) is that Kurt and Nevenka's relationship is openly sadomasochistic. A good four years before Luis Buñuel's brilliant Belle de Jour, The Whip and the Body features a woman with vivid masochistic fantasies as its protagonist and puts the viewer within her viewpoint.

As a movie of its time, it is not terribly sympathetic to its sadomasochistic couple even as it mines them for prurient interest. Kurt is portrayed as a vile and utterly self-absorbed villain, and Nevenka is shown to be mentally ill. Tony Kendall as Nevenka's husband and Ida Galli as his unrequited love interest are probably supposed to be the audience identification figures, but Dahlia Lavi and Christopher Lee dominate the movie, with performances far more memorable than any of the supporting cast, so that despite their obvious defects we are far more interested in them.

But then again Heathcliffe and Cathy were not terribly sympathetic either, and people just love Wuthering Heights (which was definitely an influence on this movie), so audience sympathy is obviously a tricky thing.

Before long, Kurt is murdered and the movie becomes a combination of whodunnit (far too easily guessed) and romantic ghost story, as the shade of Kurt seems to visit Nevenka in the night, filling her with a combination of terror and desire. Is that the sound of his horse-whip, or is it just the trees lashing against the castle walls?

Incidentally, Lee apparently has a clause written into his contracts that he will not be required to perform scenes of a sexual nature or even to kiss on the lips. (Which hasn't stopped directors like Jess Franco from some creative editing to put him into outrageous scenes.) Either this clause was not present in his Whip and the Body contract or he chose to ignore it, as his scenes with Lavi are about as steamy as you could get at the time.

As usual, Bava's mastery of the camera turns the movie into a visual feast. As well as co-writing (with Ernesto Gastaldi, master of kinky Italian horror) and directing he is the uncredited cinematographer and the camera operator, and he also executed the matte paintings and other special effects.

This almost makes up for the slightly cheesy score by Carlo Rustichelli, which sounds like something out of a soap opera. Others (such as Bava's biographer Tim Lucas) praise Rustichelli to the skies, but compared to other Italian genre composers like Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai and Riz Ortolani, he doesn't sound interesting to me.

There are several notable plot holes in the movie, and I didn't find the ending terrinly satisfying. The biggest problem, however, is that Christopher Lee did not dub his own voice on the English-language track. (Everyone except for Lee voiced their own role on the Italian-langue track.) Lee has a particularly commanding voice, so this is a real pity.

It's also not really the best introduction to Italian horror or to the films of Mario Bava. There are actually two other Bava ghost stories that I like more (the mind-bending, if dreadfully titled, Kill Baby Kill! and the utterly terrfying "Drop of Water" segment of the anthology film Black Sabbath), both of which I intend to get to later in this series, but when Kate visited me recently, she saw the dvd cover of this movie and wondered what the hell I had been watching (and it does indeed look lurid, as demonstated below) so I thought I would do this now.