Retro Review by Joshua Allen
There is something in the television.
Specifically, there is something about British TV that seems to breed uncanniness and terror. There’s a specific feeling of malice that I rarely experience in film or music or literature, but it is spread across my country’s televisual landscape like a parachute that never opened. It hovers on the edges of the screen in Charley Says and The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, grotesque public safety ads from the 1970s. It is what gives shows like Ghost Story For Christmas and Dead of Night a strange, phantomic edge and makes them so hard to shake when you’re alone in the dark. It is a sensation shared by British children’s programming, adverts, local news shows and classic Doctor Who alike. And it is the same feeling I get when I read the 13 women whose lives were taken by the “Yorkshire Ripper” (Sutcliffe’s crimes occurred very close to where I live) or the hundreds of victims of infamous TV presenter Jimmy Saville’s sexual abuses. It is pervasive creeping illness, black tar seeping from underneath the image and corroding the edges of the TV screen, the supposed lines between what you see and what can reach out and touch you in your own home.
The piece of British TV that captures all these things better than any other, in my mind, is 1992’s Ghostwatch.
On its surface, Ghostwatch is pretty simple. Over the course of 90 minutes, it follows a live BBC investigation into a Greater London home (dubbed the most haunted house in Britain) owned by single mother Pamela Early (Brid Brennan) and her young daughters, Kim and Suzanne (Michelle and Cherise Wesson). Led by presenter Sarah Greene (playing herself) and a small camera crew, the investigation seeks to prove once and for all the truth behind the terrifying events at the Early house. Meanwhile, the crew at the BBC studios observes, passes commentary on and receives public phone-ins about the night’s events, led by British broadcasting legend Micheal Parkinson (also portraying himself) and concerned parapsychologist Dr. Lin Pascoe (Gillian Bevan). As the programme progresses, both the Early investigation and the studio descend into chaos, climaxing with the realization that the show’s broadcast has inadvertently created a nation-wide seance. It aired on Halloween night in 1992 and was sold as a real investigation gone terribly wrong. The program’s broadcast resulted in an estimated 30,000 calls to the BBC switchboard in a single hour, and has been blamed for the suicide of eighteen year-old Martin Denham, who took his own life five days after its airing and left a note claiming “If there are ghosts, I will be with you forever as a ghost.” It has never been re-aired on British TV.
So why does Ghostwatch provoke such extreme reactions from its audiences? Why does it seem to have such a direct power to upset and terrify? In their ruling on the show’s impact, the Broadcasting Standards Commission concluded that, “in Ghostwatch, there was a deliberate attempt to cultivate a sense of menace.” But what writhes underneath that menace?
As far as I see it, Ghostwatch affects so deeply because it uses its ghosts to reckon with abuse and violence, and the ways that British society has allowed these abuses to continue. By inviting the audience to believe in its paranormal occurrences, Ghostwatch confronts how audiences are controlled, how belief is distributed and how victims are silenced to maintain intersecting structures of victimization. Director Lesley Manning and writer Stephen Volk pit form and content against each other and place an unwitting audience slap-dash in the middle.
The first thing we see in Ghostwatch is Micheal Parkinson, amidst the bright, (supposedly) safe studio and told that there are “no creaking gates, no gothic towers, no shuttered windows” in this horror story. And so the lede is buried. If we cannot contextualize what we are about to see in the history of its genre, then we cannot truly understand what it is trying to tell us. Some may derive their terror out of that loss of understanding, but I think Ghostwatch is asking us to look more closely at Parkinson’s words and prompting us to distrust him as our guiding voice in this story. Throughout, Parkinson’s attitude is one of dismissal in service of entertainment. Parkinson's character is quickly defined by his attempts to move on, or make palatable the events happening here, but the film refuses to buckle to his presentorial evasion. In the first moments of his interview with Dr. Lin Pascoe, he asks, “what can be done for people like Mrs. Early?” and instantly retreats at her response.
“The first thing we can all do, for a start, is believe them,” she answers. Here, Parkinson drops the feigned sympathy of his initial question and replies, “Well, it’s not always that easy, is it?” His doubt rings out, but it is not just his doubt. He intends for it to be our doubt too. When Dr. Pascoe voices her anger at the societal skepticism that defines cases like the Early family, Parkinson does not respond. Instead he moves on. And so seemingly, her anger is buried. The Early’s suffering is buried too. But not for long.
Listen to an episode of Cinematary on Ghostwatch below:
At Foxhill Drive, nothing stays buried. There is a “gloryhole” under the stairs (slang to mean a small cupboard or compartment, but the double-meaning is pointed and suggests, as does much of Ghostwatch’s dialogue, other more grounded and disturbing implications). When asked about her most frightening experience in the house, Pam tells of getting trapped in the gloryhole, and feeling like someone else was there with her in the dark. We learn the ghost is nicknamed Pipes, after the clanging of the faulty plumbing in the house that the family cannot afford to have fixed (there’s almost certainly a reading of Ghostwatch to be made that focuses on class and austerity and it’s entirely possible that reading could be incorporated quite nicely into this one). Much of the film’s first act is taken up by slow-paced, atmospheric world-building as Sarah gets to know the family and Dr. Pascoe is interviewed about her investigation into the Early house, all the while Sarah’s husband, and fellow presenter, Mike Smith (playing himself) takes increasingly sinister phone calls from ‘viewers at home.’ But something refuses to sit right. Too many things are wrong: the details of the property’s history seem unusually gruesome and severe to function purely as entertainment (a short monologue about local children discovering the mutilated corpse of a pregnant dog, replete with fetuses hanging out is especially shocking), and the sense that this is just the eye of the storm is impossible to shake.
As the night stretches on, the truth begins to occur to us — deep down, we know what is happening here. Suddenly, the events at Foxhill Drive begin to take on the most frightening form of all: complete sense. Suzanne’s cries for Pipes to “Get off me! Don’t touch me! He’s touching me again!” are some of the very first lines we hear in the film, one viewer’s phone-in brings up the topic of repressed memories, a neighbor is interviewed about local violence against children and a newspaper report evokes a history of British horrors, from the Moors Murders to 25 Cromwell Street. The trauma here is sexual. These girls have been – or are still – being molested.
From this point on, Ghostwatch emerges. As the events of the Foxhill haunting reveal themselves to the presenters and the audience, we see the true face of the girls’ trauma and terror. We hear about the disturbing drawings and scribblings Pam has discovered in Suzanne’s school notebook. We watch as Suzanne dissociates and begins speaking in another voice: that of a lecherous old man. In a moment of terrifying otherworldly lucidity, Kim seems to see through the cameras, the crew and her mother and straight through to Pipes, who is for most of the film only glimpsed in subliminal flashes (still frames of the ghost are inserted in-between camera movements or in reflections in the background) or stray audio moments (the screaming of cats, the knocking of the pipes) that pierce and strike the viewer, a wavelength of terror that the soul senses but is incomprehensible to the mind.
Our instinct is to fear the moments we don’t understand, but in Ghostwatch this terror is amplified because we understand, inherently, that these moments do make sense. We’ve just learnt not to pay attention to them. “I think he’s come to hurt everybody,” Suzanne tells us in this moment of supernatural clarity. “I think he’s come to do bad things.”
She’s warning us. She already knows what’s going to happen. This, as much as Suzanne’s cries or her potential self-mutilation, is the film screaming at us to stop listening to Parkinson and the artifice of the broadcast, and start listening to the women of Foxhill Drive. Dr. Pascoe describes the activity at the house as “a warzone” and she’s right. Ghostwatch has become a war. Suzanne, Kim, Pamela and even Sarah Greene, who’s quiet arc throughout the film sees her aligning far more with the traumatised women than with the framing device she’s asked to maintain, are on one side and they’re pleading with us to wake up and realize what’s happening before it’s too late. On the other side, Parkinson, sub-presenter Craig Charles (playing himself as a camera-obsessed fool) and the program’s entire form strive to keep us passive, to keep treating these events as entertainment — as Halloween fun. Yet the longer the studio and the audience continues to doubt, the more suffering Pipes inflicts. The more people fall victim to his control.
But once its final act begins, the film suddenly seems at risk of failing the Early family. The girls are put to bed, and eventually the knocking begins again. Greene runs towards the noise, but is told by Parkinson to stay in her place. This time, he tells us, Suzanne is responsible. The cameras adjust, and we see that she is crouched in the corner, manufacturing Pipes’s most recent appearance by banging the walls herself. The last thing we hear is Suzanne’s insistence that it “wasn’t her,” and then the camera goes off. What follows is the quietest moment in the entire film: a shot of Dr. Pascoe, opposite Parkinson, completely bereft and silent. Parkinson boasts and declares the haunting “a hoax,” set up by the Early family for attention. For a moment it seems Pascoe has been defeated – and so have the girls. Her earlier protestations to believe the victims rendered hollow. But here, Ghostwatch takes one of its most compelling and powerful turns. Lin refuses to buckle to Parksinson’s “simplistic” analysis. She gets angry, and she continues to insist that something is wrong. “Maybe there’s a ritualistic reason… the invoking process that proceeds the genuine appearance.” Gillian Bevan’s performance really sells this moment, her frustration and confusion crystallizing in her voice until suddenly, she too finds clarity. “I can’t help but feel like whatever it is in there, it’s deliberately muddying the waters”. Again, Dr. Pascoe follows her instincts, and she is completely right to.
It’s also here that I notice the film keeps drawing attention to Foxhill’s voices of fear and pain versus Parkinson’s dispassionate narration. He asks Suzanne if she faked the drawings in the notepad, pushing against her emotional answers that she did it “to show them! All we were was noises to you! We gave you what you wanted!”
He accuses her of creating lesions on her face, ignoring Pamela’s protests that Suzanne has no fingernails to mutilate herself with. He tells Sarah to “stay where she is” and observe instead of entering the girls’ rooms to help them. He remains “rational” and “impartial” in the face of increasingly irrational events during which his impartiality is inappropriate.
His responses are harmful. His unwavering rationality is harmful. And the film refuses to accept it. Thus, ultimately, he is possessed. The film’s final moments are sensationally distressing, but never for the wrong reasons. Parkinson has maintained his “professionalism” throughout the programme, even after Sarah Greene has disappeared (lured into the gloryhole by a voice from the darkness) and Dr. Pascoe has realized the programme is transmitting Pipes into every home in the country, visiting down the Early’s suffering onto each and every household and viewer. Finally, we are left alone with Parkinson. Into an overturned camera in a now abandoned studio, he performs still. He presents and rationalizes in darkness. As he relays the events of the night, his voice changes for the first time in the programme. His professional dispassion is replaced by Pipes’s deep, menacing tones, and he begins to recite the nursery rhyme that Suzanne, in a dissociative state, sang earlier. The implications all amass in these climactic moments. Throughout the show, Parkinson has maintained Pipes’s power. Where the girls look to expose it by replicating it for the cameras, where Sarah looks to counteract it with compassion and where Dr. Lin Pascoe looks to solve it in her unwavering belief, he has stood by and watched and doubted. So he becomes Pipes. His role in this outcome is inseparable from that of the abuser. And we now, who have straddled the lines in this war and been privy to both doubt and belief, are left overturned, onlookers in the final moments when the truth becomes obvious: we watch as the abuser subsumes the impartial. If only we had listened to Kim’s warning: “I think he’s come to hurt everyone. I think he wants to do bad things.”