Hello, everyone, it’s good to be back, and I’ve got an interesting film here for the Halloween season: Ghostwatch. Now, the thing about this film is that it’s more along the lines of a mock TV broadcast than a traditional film, in that it tries to give off the sense of being a real show or special when it isn’t. However, when it was released, it resulted in a similar situation to what happened during Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio play: a lot of people took it seriously and/or were just generally freaked out. This response, which ended up being more tragic than just a few frights (we’ll get into that later), resulted in it never being broadcast again, nor released on any home media. I thought it would be intriguing to look back on this film, see how it holds up in hindsight, and talk about the situation surrounding it, since sometimes the story surrounding a production can be more interesting than the production itself. As is tradition on this blog, I’ll give you a brief idea of what happens in the film, and then we’ll get into the meat of it all.
The main idea of this film is that it’s a special broadcast concerning a supposedly haunted house wherein a malicious spirit has been terrorizing a mother and her two daughters. The BBC crew is sending in some people to record the house and stay with the family overnight, to see if there are any true signs of paranormal activity. The attention of the film is split between four main hosts: Michael Parkinson, the main host who stays at the studio headquarters and discusses the events at the house with various people (including a parapsychologist and various callers/video correspondents); Sarah, who stays with the family in the house and experiences the main brunt of the supernatural element; Craig Charles, who stays outside of the house and interviews various neighbors; and Sarah’s husband Mike, who mans the telethon-esque phone-line section of the studio where people can call in to talk about the situation (or just ghost stuff in general). As we jump between the different locations, we get various bits of backstory, such as the mother’s recent divorce as well as testimonies of those that claim to have seen the ghost, who’s called “Pipes” by the daughters since he often makes noises in the pipework, and it seems as though there might actually be something to all this, since those same noises have started up again live on air. However, this ultimately turns out to be a dead lead (though I won’t spoil why), and many who were on board are considering calling off the show. However, as they get a bigger picture of who this ghost actually is, from callers who’ve looked into the history of the house, things start to get weird again at the house, with the elder daughter developing inexplicable scratch marks all over her body, her speaking in a low and gravely voice, and the footage broadcast into the studio actually being repeats of earlier and more placid events from that night rather than what’s actually happening at the moment. I don’t want to give too much more away, since that’s where the last act of the film really kicks off, but I’ll just say that it definitely pushes the realm of believability, if you’re trying to look at this as an attempted legitimate broadcast. Alright, time to talk about what I thought about this film.
So, I just want to say right off the bat, I did not believe this was a real broadcast for one second. Yes, I was aware that it was fake going in, but I’m talking in terms of how believably it was executed. The whole thing felt way too scripted, with lines that clearly didn’t sound like natural speech. There was one bit where the elder daughter is crying and saying things like “We were nothing but noises to you, we thought you would leave us” (in reference to their distraught over the divorce and their worries that their mother would also abandon them). This did not sound like an actual kid talking, this sounded like something written, and whenever this sort of thing happened (which was quite a bit), it always took me out of the experience. Add to that the fact that the film plays out a little too conveniently, in the sense that it follows standard storytelling conventions of progression and escalation (e.g., doubting characters in the beginning, leading into a reveal of what was happening before to be a hoax, leading to a moment of intentionally disappointed relief with that little bit of uncertainty still in the air, leading to an elucidation on the actual backstory of the real ghost, leading into the real hauntings in the climax, and so on), and the program just doesn’t feel like it could pass for an actual event. However, the thing is that much like with the Orson Welles incident, the program was never technically advertised as being real. In fact, the number that they have in the show for the call-ins was an actual number which, when people called, would give a message informing them of the show’s fictional nature. Plus, the show was aired with other “drama” shows as opposed to “real-life” shows, so it wasn’t improperly placed in the schedule. However, it seems like there still wasn’t enough context around it to let people know of its artifice, and I’m sure that many tuned in to see it without knowing of it beforehand, so that probably threw them off from the get-go. What’s even worse is that the number mentioned previously ended up being so swamped with calls from concerned viewers that the line was stuck on “busy” throughout the broadcast, which only added to the worries of the audience. All this fracas sadly ended up in the near traumatization of several kids, and, even more tragically, a real suicide. Apparently, the suicide victim in question had some form of intellectual disability and associated events that were going on in his house (banging on pipes and the like) with the ghost in the film, which drove him to such a point of despair that he sadly took his own life. All of this fallout lead to the BBC never re-airing the special, though they did put it out on home media many years later, so some of the backlash must have died down by then. So, when I criticize this movie, I don’t mean to do so in a way that devalues the horrible experiences that the audience went through at the time. If anything, I can sort of understand why these things happened the way they did. Ghost hunting shows were not a big thing back then like they are today, and arguably didn’t really exist at all, so all of this would have been very new to the populace (and it was several years before movies like The Blair Witch Project put “found-footage” films on the map). Plus, most of the people that were affected so deeply were much younger in age, or had developmental delays and an unfortunate parallel situation, in the case of that one victim, so it makes more sense why they would be more susceptible to believing in what they were seeing. Honestly, in historical terms, Ghostwatch is pretty fascinating, like looking into a time-frame when all of this was able to affect people on a major level. I just wish that I could say that I enjoyed it on its own merits, which I generally didn’t. The presentation just never really grabbed me, and I didn’t find it very engaging for most of the runtime. I’ll definitely give credit for the attempt, but I just think that looking back on this film in the current day, it’s more interesting to view it as a historical document rather than as a film on its own. I will say, though, that it was fun to see Craig Charles, what with me being an old Red Dwarf fan and all. Anyway, that’s about all I have to say on this film, so we’ll move on to the conclusion.
In all, Ghostwatch is an intriguing little piece of TV history, if only for it being an early example of its kind and for the situation it caused. I think if you have more of an interest in these sorts of haunted house stakeout shows and can accept the general artifice of it, you might have a good time with Ghostwatch, but if you don’t and can’t, then maybe give it a miss this Halloween. Still, though, even several decades later, and fake or not, it is another reminder of how much we don’t know about life after death. Just in case, this Halloween, leave a couple extra treats out for our old friend Pipes. I think he might appreciate it.