MR James’s story Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad is one of the author’s more powerful ghost stories – the tale of a strait-laced and rather pompous college professor who takes a holiday by the sea and encounters supernatural forces, it remains a potent scare story today. It’s also important – in terms of this DVD at least – as being the story that began the BBC’s long tradition of filming James’ stories, most frequently in the Ghost Stories for Christmas slot. Fittingly, a new version of the story marks the most recent BBC excursion into this territory, and this new release – effectively an upgrade from the previous (and long deleted) BFI DVD – helpfully brings both versions together.

Jonathan Miller’s 1968 version of the story, shot in grainy, moody black and white, was part of the Omnibus arts programme strand, and gets off to a bad start with a Miller voice-over needlessly setting the scene with talk about James, his work and the meaning of the story we are about to see. That aside, this is a magnificently unsettling work. Michael Hordern plays the lead, far from the prim young professor of the original story - his character is almost pathologically eccentric, mumbling and muttering to himself and others, smugly self-satisfied and amused at his own ideas and yet hiding secret fears that come to the fore when he unearths an old wooden whistle near a gravestone (“finders keepers” he proclaims) that has a Latin inscription that translates as ‘who is this who comes?’. He dutifully whistles, but then spends nights lay in bed worrying about who – or what – will come. Plagued with nightmares about being pursued by an unseen spectre and waking to find the unused bed next to his is disarray, his fears increase until one night he awakens to be encountered by the ghost. Whether this is a literal supernatural figure or the manifestation of his own fears – well, that’s for the viewer to decide.

The film sets the template for later James adaptations – quiet, slow and with a continual sense of unease that builds to a moment of terror. Hordern’s professor, arrogantly dismissive of the supernatural but secretly terrified by it, is eventually reduced to a broken shell of a man – unharmed physically by the apparition in the room, his sense of reality and self-belief (or disbelief) have been so shattered that you know there is no going back. It’s an extraordinary performance.

I’m not one to subscribe to the idea that the best horrors are those unseen – critics of that other famed MR James adaptation, Night of the Demon, are wrong to complain about the presence of the demon at the end of the film because nothing we’d imagine could possibly compare to the creature shown on screen for example – but Miller here gives a master class in creating terror from very little – that his ghostly manifestations are essentially moving bed sheets and yet still utterly terrifying is a remarkable achievement, but much of the horror comes from the close shots of Hordern’s face, lying in bed in twitchy, terrified denial, and from the soundtrack, which is one of the most disturbing you’ll ever hear. The combination of all these things makes this one of the most genuinely scary ghost stories you’ll ever see on film.

Of course, this puts the 2010 in a bit of an awkward position. I would suggest that, if you haven’t seen either before, you watch the more recent first, because it simply can’t follow Miller’s film in any sense.

This new version (dorected by Andy de Emmony; written by Neil Cross) takes its abbreviated title from Miller and the basic setting from James, but little else from either, instead taking the basic theme of James' story and working a new tale, with decidedly modern concerns, around it. In this version, the unnamed professor becomes academic James Parkin (John Hurt), who places his senile wife Alice (Gemma Jones) into a nursing home and then heads for a break at their favourite old haunt, a seaside hotel that has seen better days. Finding a wedding ring on the beach – which again contains the haunting inscription. But there, really, the connection ends.

By having its lead character a married man in mourning for his lost wife, this new version dramatically alters the nature of the character’s isolation, and the extensive back story that comes to play a major part in the proceedings (you won’t be surprised to discover who the ghostly figure in this version is, given that the clues are sledgehammered home) feels like a distraction. Everything about this version feels like a depressing statement on modern television – the idea that the original story and TV adaptation are somehow too subtle for modern audiences to grasp and so need to be spelled out crudely. The haunting of Hurt is louder and more blatant than Hordern’s ‘corner of the eye’ ghosts, and far less effective, and his character – modest rather than smug, emotional instead of detached – might be more in keeping for our touchy-feely age, but is oddly less involving. This isn’t to knock Hurt’s performance, which is by far the best thing about this version – but his character’s descent into terror is less convincing than Hordern’s simply because he is already gripped with guilt and self-doubt when we first meet him.

Having the new version take place in a contemporary setting also feels off, somehow. Perhaps we are too used to seeing James’ work in a Victorian world of repressed emotions, but the modern take simply doesn’t seem convincing. And then there is the switch from the whistle to a wedding ring – necessary for this new story perhaps, but it immediately renders the title meaningless. Hordern summons the demons of his psyche by blowing the whistle found near a gravestone– Hurt simply finds a ring in the sand.
Still, having both versions to compare is interesting, and I’d rather the 2010 version be here than not. It will, however, be the essential 1968 production that lingers in your memory for weeks afterwards.

Rounding this collection up are readings of both James’ original story and Ramsey Campbell’s Jamesian tale The Guide, read by the author (who also provides a 16 minute introduction to the 1968 film), as well as frustratingly brief interview extracts with Miller and Christopher Frayling.

DAVID FLINT

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