I have just listened to the Stone Tape online on Radio 4 playback. It is a modern radio remake of the Seventies TV play. The version I listened to was described as being recorded in binaural sound as opposed to stereo, but with my basic headphones I couldn't really tell the difference.
That said, I enjoyed the radio remake especially the final half hour when it all goes to hell. the director, who made the Berberian Sound Studio, is like me, a fan of horror soundtracks and this remake is another of his homages to them. For techies among you the play contains many references to weird and wonderful recording gear. Its nested format, the fact that it was a radio recording about recording a recording on an ancient wall, in a Victorian house called Taskerlands, was not lost on me [available for playback online, Radio 4, for another 2 weeks].
Recording the supernatural is a common theme in horror and the original Stone Tape, which aired Christmas 1972, written by Quatermass author Nigel Kneale, contained perhaps the scariest moment ever on British television - involving a prolonged and singularly blood-freezing female scream [altogether more chilling than normal stock TV screams like the Wilhelm and the Howie].
Before the onset of the World Wide Web I wrote to TV Heaven in Bradford and asked if I could watch it there. I could but I never did and now you can watch it whenever you want due to the power of recordings on the World Wide Web!
Although the theory of the Stone Tape had been around since the early Sixties, it was particularly amplified in popular consciousness during 1972-73, firstly with the Stone Tape on television and then with the film The Legend of Hell House in 1973.
Written by the prolific American Richard Matheson in 1971, his book, "Hell House" concerned investigations into supernatural sound and activity at the haunted Belasco House in Maine. The film had a memorable turn from Roddy McDowell as a medium, who along with Pamela Franklin, picked up the creepy aura better than any microphone. In fact the machine set up in the house was meant to destroy the evil forces through electromagnetism.
The concept of a past physically recorded on everyday objects - archeoacoustics - continued in books like Time Shards [1979] about pottery and Koji Suzuki's Ringu [1991] about video tape. This was eventually filmed and probably contained the single most frightening screen image since the Stone Tape, that of Sadako climbing out of a TV.
Other films include Prince of Darkness, The Woman in Black and Poltergeist. A strand which dealt specifically with the power of the sarsen stones at Stonehenge included the films The Night of the Demon and Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
The recording media used have changed over time as well, just as technology has changed and in some films it is the toxicity of these media - books, phonograph, tape, video, internet - which is explored e.g. Evil Dead, Brainstorm, Videodrome, Ring, V/H/S, REC and Unfriended to name just a few.
In the real world the establishment's own long-standing fear of the effects these new media may have [and had] on the masses i.e. lawlessness, is also reflected in part in these films and something I'll return to at a later date.
