Fiona and I are in this picture… somewhere.
The Edinburgh Secret Society is… wait, no, I can’t tell you about that.
However, at their most recent monthly gathering, the ESS showed Nigel Kneale’s TV play/ghost story THE STONE TAPE, directed by Peter Sasdy, and Fiona and I attended. The Society meets at different, specially selected venues each time, and for this filmshow Edinburgh Filmhouse was chosen — a cinema which happens to be haunted (just ask Diane Ladd!).
At terrible personal risk, I can exclusively reveal that this was no ordinary screening, but a highly scientific investigation into the nature of fear itself. This deeply psychological and technically unexplainable inquiry was — but I’ve said too much.
What I can talk about is the film itself. I’d seen it before (for all host Professor Richard Wiseman’s protestations as to the film’s obscurity and rarity — it was judged so terrifying in 1972 that it was never shown again — it was released on DVD and is on YouTube), and had found it a little slow and not very scary. What always impressed was the idea — Kneale postulated an explanation for hauntings that has been taken up by the parapsychologists and used as a genuine theory. Briefly, Kneale suggested that buildings can, in certain undefined circumstances, act as recording devices, preserving a record of moments of high emotional trauma. Something like this theory informs Scatman Crothers’ explanation of the Overlook Hotel’s phantom populace in THE SHINING… an explanation which proves, at the very least, incomplete.
The other impressive thing in the show is Michael Bryant, as a pig-headed, macho businessman who latches on to a haunting in his new lab as the possible key to a new recording medium — “Tape is dead!” — “Something to beat Nippon!” The dated racism and casual sexism of the character provoked a certain amount of embarrassed laughter from the sophisticates in the audience, but it struck me as an astute and probably accurate skewering of the awfulness of the unreformed 1970s British male. The true theme of the story emerges through heroine Jane Asher, who’s more “sensitive” to ghosts than those around her, and so sensitive to the obnoxiousness of Bryant and the other swinging dicks of big business as to eventually find life almost unsupportable.
Jane Asher appeared in the first QUATERMASS film as little girl, so it’s especially nice to find her here.
