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

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After the success of the first two low-budget adaptations which had been largely independently produced by Clark, the stories came under the wing of the BBC's Drama Department, with a new producer, Rosemary Hill, and an increased budget. There are stunning, panoramic shots of a specific area of the British landscape (here, a heavily autumnal Suffolk [ sic]). Even after all these years I still "jump" when an unexpected scene takes places and the British actors performances are the finest in the world bar none. In 'The Treasure of Abbot Thomas' (1974) cynical Reverend Somerton (Michael Bryant) is completely close-minded when it comes to paranormal activity.

It's then that the librarian remembers a chest that was bequeathed to the Cathedral sixty years earlier. There's also the fantastic scene where he thinks he's got away with it by putting the treasure back. In his screenplay for The Signalman Andrew Davies adds scenes of the traveller's nightmare-plagued nights at an inn, and reinforces the ambiguity of the traveller-narrator by restructuring the ending and matching his facial features with those of the spectre. I'm really glad this version has been included and there are still aspects of it that I admire, and if the film as a whole works better for you than it does for me, it only adds further value to an already remarkable collection.All four films in this 3-disc Blu-ray set have been remastered at 2K resolution from the original 16mm camera negatives held by the BBC Archive and are presented in their original aspect ratio of 1. 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.

Abney (Joseph O'Conor)'s estate where he is haunted by two children who previously lived in the house. a b Rigby, Jonathan, "Traces of Uneasiness: Lawrence Gordon Clark and The Stalls of Barchester" in The M. For The Signalman, a replica Great Western Railway signal box was erected in the cutting on the Kidderminster side of Bewdley Tunnel, and Highley signal box was used for the interior shots.In 'A Warning to the Curious' (1972) Mr Paxton (Peter Vaughan) travels to the English seaside town of Seaburg hoping to find the last of three Anglo Saxon crowns belonging to the Agers family whose last descendant has recently died. With nothing to blow into to summon up the spirit, the title is effectively robbed of its meaning and has to be justified instead by having Parkin whisper the words into his wife's ear in the manner a fond poem from their youth.

Wheatley has commented that they heralded a divergence from the stage-inspired horror of the 1940s and 1950s to a more modern Gothic horror based in the present day, losing in the process the "aesthetic of restraint" evident in the original adaptations. In its original context, it was one of eight stories set around the fictional Mugby Junction and its branch lines.The ghost of William Ager does prove to be an inconsistent stalker, alternately watching, walking alongside and aggressively chasing Paxton, a solid apparition one minute and invisible the next. These range from the terrifying rustling of sheets in a supposedly unoccupied bed, to the sharp noise that pulls Parkins out of his nightmare, a trick that was effectively repurposed five years later to equally jarring effect in William Friedkin's standard-setting The Exorcist. In this respect, he makes excellent used of his lead actor and some striking locations to create an unnerving sense of a disrupted normality in which undefined dangers seem to be stalking Parkin even in daylight. The passing of time, of course, has provided some pointers here, and there will surely be few for whom the prospect of an old man inviting wayward young orphans back to his isolated house to stay does not set off a small bell of alarm. He also devotes a final paragraph to the 2010 remake, a more detailed appreciation of which is then supplied by Jon Dear, who admits to being dismissive of the film when he first saw it but has gained a new appreciation for it since.

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. The only addition that has been rendered a tad familiar by time is a new prologue set 12 years before Paxton’s arrival in which an archaeologist is slaughtered whilst in the process of digging up the protected crown.Top of the list of features on the press release was the news that all four titles had been newly remastered by the BFI, and if the cynical amongst you are wondering how remastering old analogue tape programmes to HD can really improve the image quality that much, know that all of the titles in the first run of this series were shot on 16mm film, and these remasters have been sourced from the original negatives.