The mood continues and so do the BBC Ghost Stories For Christmas shorts. Today I did the 1975 adaption of MR James’s ‘The Ash Tree,’ the 1977 original ‘Stigma’, And the 1976 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘The Signal Man.’ I also planned this around read ‘The Ash-Tree’, mostly because I noticed it was one of the shorts and I wanted to compare the two.
Figured I’ll go in order of which short I watched first because that’s the order in which the thoughts formed! And also because I did mean this to center around ‘The-Ash Tree.’ It just ended up the one I have the least to say about. I loved the story, found it a truly creepy attempt to Reckon With The Ambiguities Of History and light parody historical monograph writing. I loved the short as a portrait of a man slowly loosing his mind to his ancestor’s memories and personality superseding his. And some very creepy puppets. But as an adaptation? I didn’t love it. I didn’t like that Mothersole’s ambiguous last words ‘There shall be guests at the hall” was turned into a pretty obvious curse: “Mine shall inherit.” I think that takes away a lot of the moral ambiguity that the story thrives on. Love the spider babies tho.
‘Stigma’ was my favorite of the three. I really do think it’s one of the best short films I’ve seen in a while. It explains nothing. There are conclusions you can draw, but you must draw them yourself. The plot is this: after a stone circle is disturbed, a housewife’s skin starts oozing blood. And yet so much is packed into that 31 minutes. Fear of women’s sexuality. Fear of puberty. The past in conflict with the present in conflict with the future. The inherent conflict of the mother-daughter relationship. The horror of having one’s body overtaken by unknowable forces. The juxtaposition of class dynamics between the family and the men hired to move the stone. You could poke at it for hours, and should, actually. It’s 31 minutes long and easily findable with a google search. If nothing else, it’s a brilliant little piece of body horror, and if you’re an enthusiast of such it’s worth checking out.
Lastly we have ‘The Signalman’, a story I read….30 seconds ago to prepare for this review. I’m going to be honest. I’ve never been overly fond of Charles Dickens. I generally find his stuff to be overwrought and sentimental, even compared to his contemporaries. So I’m biased against the source material as is. Which the short faithfully adapts! And goes a couple steps farther. It gives the signalman a chilling monologue about tunnel accidents. It adds a certain ghostly element to The Traveler, who is our narrator in the story, but has a sense of unreality that clings to him in the short. I watched half the thing waiting for him to be revealed to be a ghost or a devil of some kind. But really it’s what the actors are bringing to the characterization, the Tenseness of the atmosphere, two men shut up in close quarters not Really trusting each other, culminating in the Horrible Realization at the end, the future snapping into the past like a rubber band. It adds layers of ambiguity absent in the original story that I really dig.
Again: these are good. Even my least favorite was fun and watchable. You should absolutely seek these out. Again, they are not hard to track down even without a Shudder account. They really scratch that Classic Ghost Story itch that’s sometimes hard to find outside, well, short stories. ‘Stigma’ stands out as something worth watching for it’s own right, especially, and I hope you do. These are a lot of fun and seem to have broken me out of my bad tv rut, so I hope somebody else finds Something in them, too.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 