Ghost Stories for Christmas - The Definitive Collection (5-DVD set)

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The critical reception of the films has been varied, but several are regarded as classic television ghost stories. With its modern setting, this is not generally included under the heading of A Ghost Story for Christmas [52] and was originally intended as an episode of the anthology Dead of Night. As his carriage approaches the hall, Stephen briefly sees two wan-looking children (Christopher Davis and Michelle Foster) standing in a field, their arms slowly arching in a synchronised wave. The first official Ghost Story for Christmas came when former documentary filmmaker Lawrence Gordon Clark adapted and directed The Stalls of Barchester, a single tale of the supernatural broadcast on Christmas Eve of 1971.

Highlights include Jonathan Miller's Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968), Lawrence Gordon Clark's A Warning to the Curious (1972) and the Andrew Davies adaptation of Charles Dicken's The Signalman (1976). Others will disagree and indeed some have in the special features of this very set, and I'm fine with that. As a Christmas treat in the late 1960s and 70s, the BBC produced adaptations of ghost stories based on the works of MR James, the Cambridge academic and author of some of the most spine-tingling tales in the English language, which were broadcast to terrified viewers in the dead of winter. Having read of the legend, middle-aged former clerk and amateur archaeologist Paxton (Peter Vaughan) arrives in Seaburg with the intention of locating and retrieving the crown, unaware that the spirit of William Ager continues to guard it from beyond the grave.For Christmas 1979 the BBC produced a 70-minute-long adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's gothic tale Schalcken the Painter, directed and adapted by Leslie Megahey. The BFI will make all 12 of the classic BBC films from A Ghost Story for Christmas series available on DVD this year, with the first two volumes – each containing a double bill of chilling tales – released on 20 August. For A Warning to the Curious, "Seaburgh" (a disguised version of Aldeburgh, Suffolk) was filmed on the coast of North Norfolk at Waxham, Holkham Gap, Happisburgh, Wells-next-the-Sea and on the North Norfolk Railway. Here he is a married man in late middle-age, and his isolation is not self-imposed but the result of his wife's steadily deteriorating dementia. For items that are dispatched using our standard service, we ask that you wait 14 days from the date of dispatch before reporting any items as undelivered.

The impressive remastered HD transfers would be worth getting the set for alone, but not only do you get that, but all of the special features from the DVD editions and excellent new commentary tracks for all four films. An overuse of a signature high-pitched electronic crescendo from avant-garde composer Gyorgi Ligerti's Atmospheres does come close to overstating the threat, but in the end never seriously detracts from what, even all these years after it was first screened, remains a gripping and genuinely chilling slice of supernatural storytelling. Clark noted in a 2014 interview that he tried to make the second adaptation, A Warning to the Curious as "essentially, a silent film, with the tension building slowly throughout the visual images". I’m just scratching the surface of the busy and consistently engaging conversation that takes place here.Although he felt the substitute film was "effective", Clark had by this time left the BBC to go freelance, joining Yorkshire Television, where he and Exton made another James adaptation Casting the Runes in 1979. His shocked regression into childhood thumb-sucking and the very way he stares ahead, shakes his head and repeats the words, “Oh no…” feel more like the reaction of a man for whom all logic and the scientific certainty – the very foundations on which his life has been built – have just collapsed before his very eyes. The early ones based on M R James' stories are reasonably true to the originals, later ones are "inspired by" but still well worth seeing. The presumption at the time was that Phoebe was taken by travellers and Giovanni ran away, but as Stephen explores the grounds he repeatedly catches sight of a boy and a girl who may well be the ghosts of the two missing children.

But of the TV adaptations, for many of us the 1968 version of Whistle and I'll Come to You still stands as the finest. The seat-jumping favourite of having a character check behind him and then get a start when he turns back is given an early outing here, and there's a splendidly executed frisson where Haynes has his back to the camera and. Clark's final Ghost Story for Christmas, Stigma, was an original story by Clive Exton filmed around the stone circles at Avebury, Wiltshire. Certainly when they're grinning and waggling their overlong fingernails, there is a sense of children play-acting at being scary and not quite pulling it off, but when their movements fall into the rhythm of the hurdy-gurdy music in a slow dance of death, the effect is considerably more disconcerting. R. James, the film version of A Warning to the Curious makes some significant changes to the original text, particularly in the character and intentions of Paxton.

After this, I suppose, I fell asleep, but was awakened with a start by a feeling as if a hand were laid on my shoulder.