GHOST STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS VOL. 2 (3 x Blu-ray)

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BBC's 2022 Christmas line up across TV Channels and BBC iPlayer announced". BBC Media Centre. 29 November 2022. Description: Broadcast in the dying hours of Christmas Eve, the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas series was a fixture of the seasonal schedules throughout the 1970s and spawned a long tradition of chilling tales, which terrified yuletide viewers for decades to come. For many fans, they are still a traditional Christmas-time watch. Volume 2 contains the remaining original instalments – The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, The Ash Tree, The Signalman, Stigma and The Ice House – all newly remastered from original film materials and presented on Blu-ray for the first time. Later adaptations of A View From a Hill and Number 13 are also included, plus new and archive extras and a booklet. Kerekes, David (2003). Creeping Flesh: The Horror Fantasy Film Book. London: Headpress. ISBN 978-1-900486-36-1.

The Stalls of Barchester". British Film Institute Database. Archived from the original on 1 June 2009 . Retrieved 22 August 2010. The adaptations, although remaining true to the spirit of M.R. James, make alterations to suit the small screen - for example, A Warning to the Curious avoids the convoluted plot structure of M. R. James's original, opting for a more linear construction and reducing the number of narrators. In addition, the central character, Paxton, is changed from a young, fair-haired innocent who stumbles across the treasure to a middle-aged character driven by poverty to seek the treasure and acting in full awareness of what he is doing. [9] After the first two adaptations, both by Clark, the tales were adapted by a number of playwrights and screenwriters. For The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, Clark recalls John Bowen's script "took some liberties with the story—which made it for the better I think...It's really quite a funny story until it gets nasty, although the threat is always there. James has a mordant sense of humour, and it's good to translate that into cinematic terms when you can. I'd always wanted to do a medium scene, and John came up with a beauty." [17] An electronics company looking for a new recording medium discover that ghosts in their research building could inspire the new format they were after. [52] Spectres, Spirits and Haunted Treasure: Adapting MR James (2023, 17 mins): a newly commissioned video essay by Nic Wassell exploring some of the classic BBC adaptations of the work of MR James.The Turn of the Screw (1898), a novella by Henry James (no relation to M. R. James), was adapted as a feature-length drama by Sandy Welch and broadcast on BBC One on 30 December 2009. [56] Title Wigley, Samuel (3 April 2014). "Ghost Stories at Christmases past". BFI features . Retrieved 31 October 2014. The school term has ended, and academic Professor Parkin arrives at a seaside inn on the East Anglian coast for a holiday of rambling and reading. While on one of his walks, he discovers a cemetery perched on the edge of a cliff that is in the process being reclaimed by the sea. Here he unearths an old whistle bearing a Latin inscription, which he translates and responds to, scorning its potentially supernatural overtones, but is soon given cause to question his long-held scepticism. Spectres, Spirits & Haunted Treasure: Adapting M R James (2023, 17 mins): newly commissioned video essay by Nic Wassell exploring some of the classic BBC adaptations

This second Blu-ray volume of the BBC’s much-loved Ghost Stories for Christmas films effectively completes the set, containing as it does the final five entries in the original run of this once-a-yuletide series. The first three are once again based on short stories by that master of the supernatural, M.R. James, while the final two are original screenplays, the first by Clive Exton, the second by John Bowen, both of whom are writers of considerable repute. All except the final tale were directed by series maestro, Lawrence Gordon Clark. Records the default button state of the corresponding category & the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie. Lost Hearts also makes use of Ralph Vaughan Williams's English Folk Song Suite and the hurdy-gurdy music of the ghostly Italian boy, who plays the tune L'amour De Moi. [32] The Treasure of Abbot Thomas was the only entry in the series to have its own original score. [20] Geoffrey Burgon's score consists of an organ, two countertenors and various unconventional percussion instruments; according to Clark, a "mixture of evensong and bicycle chains". [32] Films [ edit ] Original run (1971–1978) [ edit ]The BFI released the complete set of Ghost Story for Christmas films plus related works such as both versions of Whistle and I'll Come to You on Region 2 DVD in 2012, in five volumes as well as a box set, in celebration of the 150th anniversary of M. R. James's birth. [60] Whistle and I’ll come to You (2010, 52 mins): John Hurt Stars in this Recent Reinterpretation of MR James’ Chilling tale A View From a Hill is one of M.R. James’s less widely known works (it’s certainly not in the first collection that I bought), but it bears a fair few of the author’s hallmarks, and there are strong similarities here to key early entries in the Ghost Stories for Christmas series. The basic premise of an academic who journeys to a rural location far from his home, and who inadvertently awakens supernatural forces through the acquisition of an old and possibly cursed artefact, is one you’ll also find at the core of more celebrated works like Whistle and I’ll Come to You and A Warning to the Curious.

In two programmes from the BBC's four-episode series from 2000, Christopher Lee plays M.R. James in his role of provost of King's College Cambridge at the dawn of the last century and relates two of his ghost stories to a small gathering of masters and students as they sit sipping sherry around a coal fire on Christmas Eve. Gold-tinted visuals of Lee and his attentive, over-privileged audience are intermittently peppered with stylised imagery from the tales themselves, none of which is a problem when you have a storyteller as compelling as Christopher Lee. A constant joy to listen to, he is also worth watching for his sometimes visually expressive delivery. Even the sinister notes of music do not detract from these very fine readings.is the standard speed for theatrical projection on both sides of the Atlantic, but 25fps is the standard speed for European television (a legacy of the 50Hz AC mains frequency), and if a production was only ever intended to be shown on European television, there'd have been no point shooting it at any other framerate. Number 13 (2006, 40 mins): infuriated by the ghoulish noises made nightly by his neighbour, Professor Anderson is soon driven to investigate the diabolical secrets of the old hotel and mysteriously vanishing room 13

The Mezzotint, a ghost story for Christmas from M. R. James and Mark Gatiss, is announced". BBC Media Centre. 22 February 2021. The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974): directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, original story by MR James, starring Sheila Dunn, Anne Blake, Frank Millsa b Rigby, Jonathan, "Traces of Uneasiness: Lawrence Gordon Clark and The Stalls of Barchester" in The M. R. James Collection, BFI 2012 (BFIVD965) Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 and remains to this day one of Britain's finest writers of supernatural tales. His stories frequently have an autobiographical quality to them, often including an academic angle (James spent a good part of his adult life at King's College, Cambridge, eventually becoming Dean and later Vice-Chancellor of the University) and featuring characters who are prompted through experience to re-evaluate their previous cynicism about the supernatural, a reflection, perhaps, of James’s own detailed studies of the early history of the Bible. James was primarily a scholar, an historian and a prolific writer, and regarded his ghost stories almost as a hobby. But his use of language, his vivid descriptions and the manner in which the narratives unfold made them essential reading, and their influence on other genre writers and even film-makers has proved to be substantial. Several of his stories have been adapted for television, including by the BBC as part of the Ghost Stories for Christmas series. Big screen adaptations are rarer, the best by far being the 1957 Night of the Demon, an adaptation of James’s 1911 Casting the Runes and one of the cinema's best ever tales of the supernatural (the story was also adapted for television in 1968 as part of the series Mystery and Imagination and again in 1979 as an episode of ITV Playhouse). 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. 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. [10] The film also makes use of visual and aural devices. For example, the appearance of the spectre is stressed by the vibrations of a bell in the signalbox and a recurring red motif connects the signalman's memories of a train crash with the danger light attended by a ghostly figure. [10] A young squire, John Martin, is on trial for murder in a court presided over by hanging judge George Jeffreys, but the girl he is accused of murdering has been seen after her death. [42]