Sorry I’ve been gone so long, I’ve been on a brief sabbatical. (I have been watching bad reality television and reading short stories with a discord server I’m in.) I have stopped doing short story reviews because I’m doing at least one a day and that situation simply isn’t tenable.
But! I am reading Damnable Tales, a lovely little folk horror anthology, and it got me in a mood. So I turned to Shudder and went ‘Shudder give me some folk horror’ and Shudder was like ‘do you want some old BBC adaptations of MR James stories?’ and I was like ‘yes very please’, so I watched the 1968 adaptation of ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad‘ and the 1972 adaptation of ‘A Warning to the Curious’. Both were Very Good.
I had read ‘Whistle’ before, but had never read ‘Warning’ until after I watched the short. I think I come down on this: They were both good adaptations, but ‘Whistle’, being much more Internal of a story, is much harder to adapt. They did it exactly how it Should be done, but there’s only so much the visual can convey what is in a text.
‘Warning’ is, in my opinion, a lesser story than ‘Whistle’ but a better short. But that is my opinion because: we never get an explanation of anything in ‘Whistle’, what the ghost is, what it wants, why it’s tied to the whistle, what the whistle’s general deal is. We know all that stuff in ‘Warning’, what the crown is, why it’s there, who the ghost is, what it wants. And there’s nothing wrong with that really! I just like a little more ambiguity in my ghost stories. But that ambiguity doesn’t always translate well on screen.
All in all if you like MR James, old movies, or ghost stories these are worth tracking down, which is fairly easy even if you don’t have a Shudder account, though you didn’t hear that from me. They’re worth watching, and if my current Mood continues I’m going to steadily work my way through the Rest. Highly recced.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 