Our first night home after getting back from our Christmas break in Whitby was spent in front of the telly with Blue the old dog, back from his holiday at Mutlins. It's still very festive with the tree lights casting their magic so a few glasses of sherry and some cheese and crackers came out too.
The Missus caught up with an omnibus of Call The Midwife on TV and laptop-earphones at the ready I re-discovered an old Xmas gift, a boxed DVD set of BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas I got a few years ago and a real slice of vintage nostalgia from when I were a mere lad.
I decided to watch two stories I'd not seen before, both appearing at the end of the series at Christmas in the late 1970's. They were also unusual in that a new director was brought in, they were written especially for the BBC and they were not period pieces. You could also say that they were folk horror rather than ghost stories, a sign of the times back then perhaps. Don't read any further if you don't want to know what happens.
The first, Stigma, is about a menhir being moved from a garden adjacent to Avebury Stone Circle. Not something I would do. As soon as the stone is lifted by workmen the woman of the house is afflicted with bleeding from the skin. As the workmen discover an ancient skeleton riven with long daggers beneath the stone the woman's bleeding becomes fatal. Her daughter tells the workmen how witches were once killed and buried this way. The end.
Stigma reminded me of the themes found in more horror-based TV series like Beasts and folk-horror TV plays like Muren and The Photograph. Having camped in Avebury Ring in the late Seventies, when this was first shown on the telly, the film struck a real chord with me and took me right back to my new age days.
The second, the Ice House, is less straightforward I thought. It concerns a guest house run by an odd young brother and sister. A man checks in for a period of saunas, massage and general relaxation. The owners give him all their attention and show him their beloved tropical and intoxicating vine and strange ice house. He sees a face in the ice. The guest becomes obsessed with both the vine and ice and the siblings guide him steadily towards the open door of the ice house, which he willingly enters. The end.
All is not what it seems in the Ice House and I'm not sure exactly what was going on. The brother and sister appear to be extending people's lives by freezing them in the ice, from which they re-emerge somewhat colder. The vine appears to be other-worldly - alien? - and the siblings kiss beneath it. Everyone in the film talks strangely. You could say posh but that doesn't describe it. The pronoun 'one' is used constantly and does create an aura of eeriness and manipulation. I'm really not sure at all what the siblings were: witches? ancient beings? aliens?
Both TV films are available on BBC iPlayer for a while.
Have you seen either of these readers? What did you think?
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