Fright Fiction … the ghost story site

A mother and daughter embroiled in a messy custody battle move into a new apartment building where there are unusual goings on in an empty upstairs apartment, and serious problems with the plumbing.

This film should have been better. It has all the right ingredients to be a gripping, psychological ghost story – a woman scarred by childhood abuse and going through a messy custody battle for her daughter, a creepy apartment building and the gradual revelation of a terrible secret. It’s a story about broken families and the absences and fractures at the centre of them.

At the core of the story is an ancient plot device with an extra layer – not only a death waiting to be discovered and laid to rest, but the neglect and loneliness at the centre of both a present and an absent family triangle to be dealt with.

But while the living family in the film are complex and well realised, it ultimately fails to deliver a satisfying ghost. It might well be possible to make bad plumbing scary (anyone who has to call a plumber out in London will know this), but Salles hasn’t quite managed it here. It’s almost there –the permanent leaks from the upstairs flat give the film’s atmosphere a certain damp pervasive threat, but the tension never really heightens beyond nervous curiosity, and the finale is so sudden an escalation that it feels tacked on.

There are some plot parallels with the Japanese film Ringu (The Ring) – a crime against a child uncovered with a discovery of a body – but the descent back into horror at the end of Ringu is far more effectively handled.

The film delivers some mild scares and a couple of jumps for those of a nervous disposition (me, for one), but I was left wishing that I’d been more inclined to check the ceiling for suspicious leaks when I went to bed.

A salvage crew discover a ship that went missing in mysterious circumstances in the 1960s and go on board in hope of making a fortune, getting more than they bargained for.

There are some tense moments in Ghost Ship, before everything kicks off. The film has the promise of all you could want from a ship that’s been floating empty for 40 years (white-faced captains drinking whiskey, spectral singers and little girls in party dresses making brief but sinister appearances in ballrooms.)

But it’s once things kick off that the film gets into trouble. The trouble being that once you involve the devil in a supposed ghost story, it stops being a ghost story and starts being something inevitably more camp and uninteresting. A tense atmosphere and the odd brief glimpse of something nasty too quickly turn into gore and rapid wholesale slaughter of characters that you might have actually cared about if you’d been given more chance to get to know them. Even the ghosts themselves get less interesting the more you see of them. Helpful, talkative ghosts that explain themselves and talk about what it’s like “when you’re like this” are more irritating than frightening.

With some moments that stay on the memory radar but many more which sink without a trace, it’s a film to be watched when there’s nothing better on TV.

The BBC had a ghost story on over Christmas, a mostly forgotten festive tradition that I applaud and want to see more of.

Crooked House was a television series of three interwoven ghost stories all based around the fictional house of Geap Manor. Shown on BBC 4 in December 2008, the series was written by and starred Mark Gatiss. A new arrival to the neighbourhood finds a door knocker in his garden and takes it to the local museum curator, who believes it must come from the now demolished Geap Manor, a house with a ghostly reputation. The curator tells some of the tales associated with the house.

The series reminded me of the VHS machine my dad used to bring home for the holidays from the school he taught at when I was a kid. The machine was the old 1970s kind with the clicky switch-down buttons at the front. We only had two tapes to play on it – a pirate copy of Star Wars,, and a BBC Education drama series called Middle English, which featured a couple of ghost stories with titles such as The Hairy Hand, the plot of which revolved around a scary hairy hand. We watched them over and over again. The ghost stories were clumsily made, but had moments of brilliant terror which are the reason I remember the clicky buttons on the VHS machine so clearly today.

Crooked House was a bit like those stories. There were some dodgy bits, but also moments of genuine, grinning, nervous satisfaction that made it all worthwhile.

Firstly the awful bits. There were a hell of a lot of flashbacks. That’s fair enough, it’s a BBC Drama – par for the course. But … some of them really were rubbish. “OMG he was Keyser Soze all along!” flashback s are all very well, but they take skill to make them convincing. Suddenly bunging a character’s face randomly into the background of a couple of flashbacks does not make a good revelatory moment.

There were other bits of disappointingly lazy plotting which really could have been written around if they’d made the effort. Want to delay a plot revelation for reasons of dramatic tension? How about a picture on the internet doesn’t load at first click, so rather than clicking refresh, you bang the keyboard angrily a couple of times (hitting it harder each time apparently being an accepted technical problem-solving approach) then hare it down to the local library, where they have a convenient edition of Debrett’s Peerage on the shelves with an extensive entry on the minor member of the aristocracy you’re interested in, complete with details of his occult dealings. Meanwhile, back at home, the laptop you’ve left running and fully visible to burglars on your kitchen table suddenly gets over the technical problem of its own accord and loads the picture, which just happens to contain a crucial plot point. Uh huh. Done it many times myself. If you’re going to write a ghost story set in the present day, you should embrace that, rather than fumbling round with unconvincing plot devices to cover up the fact that information technology makes plotting tricky.

If you’re writing a ghost story and you’ve read any M.R. James, you’d be hard-pressed not to be influenced by him. But it’d be nice to see more ghost plots on TV that didn’t find it necessary to shoe-horn in dusty, be-wigged manor houses or wainscoting made of gallows-wood to give us our scares.

But, rants aside, on more than one occasion I checked over my shoulder that my door was closed, which is really all I ask of a ghost story when it comes down to it. I hope the Beeb show more Christmas ghostlies – it’s a festive tradition we should get back into as a nation.