Produced and Directed by STEPHEN WEEKS / Written by ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF, PHILIP NORMAN, and STEPHEN WEEKS / Music by RON GEESIN / Photographed by PETER HURST

"Like a vintage P.G. Wodehouse story as it might have been ghosted by Edgar Allen Poe." -- Cinema TV Today

Stephen Week's GHOST STORY (1974) is a chilling but thoroughly underrated little film. This low-key chiller needs neither the baroque plot of Peter Straub's excellent like-titled novel or the accomplished Dick Smith make-up effects of its muddled film adaptation to tingle the spines of patient and receptive viewers (the kind that find BBC's ongoing series GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS or the better episodes of the short-lived SHADES OF DARKNESS). Mild-mannered Talbot (Larry Dann) joins some old school friends, snobby, effeminate dandy McFadyen (Murray Melvin) and the contempuous bore Duller (Vivian Mackerall), for a week in the country at the vacant baronial hall belonging to some friends of his father. They find the large house covered in dust with sheets over most of the furniture; however, they are prepared to rough it out. The talkative Talbot is an object of silent derision by the other two men due to his middle-class origins. Talbot - whose sexual repression is highlighted in a scene in which the other two men discover photos of nude women inside a book Talbot was reading - seems to be the only one sensitive to the voices in the night and the appearances in strange places of one of those creepy Victorian porcelein dolls. Gradually he starts to experience visual hallucinations of the house's past where he learns that Robert (Leigh Lawson) had his incestuously attracted sister Sophie (Marianne Faithful) committed to an asylum run by Dr. Borden (Anthony Bate). When Sophie's governess Miss Rennie (Penelope Keith) travels to the asylum to beg for them to let her take Sophie away on the night financially-strapped Dr. Borden plans to poison the patients and set fire to the asylum and collect the insurance money, she inadvertently sets the patients free and sets the scene for the past tragedy. The creepy doll becomes Talbot's link to the past (even coming alive at one point to drag him out to the sight of another past event). Even in daylight, Talbot sees chracters from his visions interacting in present day settings (for instance, he sees the long dead Dr. Borden having tea in the village). Duller and McFadyen are entirely unaware of the hauntings and are too busy making fun of his social awkwardness to really notice his strange behavior. Duller, an amateur ghost hunter, is eventually frustrated when his various tools for capturing paranormal phenomena do not produce any results and leaves. Left alone with Talbot, McFadyen inadvertently fills in the blanks about the tragedy involving the mansion and the nearby asylum now in ruins at which point the ghostly forces make themselves apparent even to him.

You may wonder what a Victorian British ghost story set in a giant baronial hall is doing being tagged as a low budget horror film. Well, while Hammer and Tigon with their less anemic budgets were renting out the great halls of the British gentry fallen on hard times, writer/producer/director Stephen Weeks took the production to Tamil Nadu in the south of India which apparently could pass for rural England in the 1860s for the flashbacks and the 1930s for the present setting. Weeks had previously directed I, MONSTER, a Freudian variation on Robert Louis Stevenson's THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE which was bogged down by producer interference (according to Rebecca and Sam Umland's article in VIDEO WATCHDOG 59, the film started out as a 3D production but they dropped it when too many technical problems cropped up so there are several scenes of awkward camera placement throughout the film). When Weeks made GHOST STORY, he produced and directed it under his own company "The Stephen Weeks Company" so that he would have full artistic control. Two of his three leads (Dann and Melvin) are accomplished yet unfamiliar actors (at least to US viewers). The third (the late Mackerall) was the real-life counterpart to the Withnail character (played by Richard E. Grant) in Bruce G. Robinson's cultish semi-autobiogrpahical WITHNAIL & I (1987). They, of course, are credited beneath the more recognizable Faithfull and Lawson (whose catalyst flashback roles are more appropriately showy). Shelley (her last film role), Bate, and an a pre-GOOD NEIGHBORS Keith (TO THE MANOR BORN) are dependable talents who make the most of their supporting roles without stealing the show. Ron Geesin's score similarly creeps throughout the film without overwhelming it or trying to manipulate viewer reactions. Peter Hurst's cinematography is probably attractive but the print source likely does not do it justice.

GHOST STORY did not receive an American theatrical release. When it arrived on VHS in the states via Comet Video and Continental Video, the title was changed to MADHOUSE MANSION to avoid confusion with the aforementioned like-titled Universal Picture release (the film's working title ASYLUM but Amicus had used that for one of their Robert Bloch-scripted anthologies). The videotape (whose cover featured a photograph of Marianne Faithful and highlighted hers and Leigh Lawson's roles without mention of their co-staring protagonists) was of course cropped from 1.85:1 but not ruinously so with decent sound. In the late nineties, director Stephen Weeks himself offered an authorized tape release but I have never come across a copy. Although Weeks' other films have recieved DVD releases (although MGM's disc of SWORD OF THE VALIANT is cropped to fullscreen from its JDC-Scope anamorphic aspect ratio) GHOST STORY has yet to see a DVD release and the tape releases are getting harder to come by.