Ghostwatch

    This is an odd one to analyze in at least three ways: it’s one of those foundational works whose influence is so widespread now it comes across as utterly familiar even though it was doing a lot of things for the first time. It’s also been well documented as a fictional program whose original notoriety came from people mistaking it for an actual documentary. Finally it’s almost thirty years old so it’s hard to put yourself in the headspace of someone watching it without context in 1992 when you’re watching it in 2020 with the television landscape and communications technology so fundamentally different.

    Let’s do the best we can. ‘Ghostwatch’ was a 90 minute program that aired on October 31^st, 1992 on the flagship channel of the BBC, BBC1. Although it was promoted and listed in the Radio Times as a drama the fact that it was made and presented for its duration as an actual news broadcast fooled quite a number of people. It was hosted by several actual television personalities as themselves, principally Michael Parkinson in the studio and Sarah Greene on location at the supposedly haunted house, with comedian Craig Charles throwing in color commentary. It’s hard to translate those figures into any analogues today for a number of reasons: first the US doesn’t really have an equivalent to the BBC and how central it was to news dissemination at the time nor does trust in individual news personalities run as deeply, for better or worse we’re much more skeptical of our news sources. To translate to similar US figures of the time it’d be a bit like Tom Brokaw presenting a live broadcast as an official NBC newscast with Katie Couric in the field and Ted Danson cracking jokes on the side.

    The biggest changes almost 30 years of technological progress has had on the impact of the show isn’t so much on the production side of the show itself, although the studio segments are stodgy, the cameramen in the field are trailing cables behind them quite a lot of the time, and the entire thing is shot on tape to give it that early-90’s live look, it’s in what information was available to the audience watching at home. Unless you physically had a copy of the Radio Times (the UK equivalent of a TV Guide) you had to rely on what the show was presenting itself as to know what you were watching. There was also no internet to look up information while you were watching to do instant fact-checking. And in perhaps the cleverest touch unless you were physically taping the show yourself and were willing to interrupt your recording to go back and look at the recording to check whether or not you had seen something you were hostage to the “live” format. The reason this is so clever is that the show itself takes rather frequent advantage of the fact that people are watching this as it’s broadcast to their rather-fuzzy CRT tvs and so will have spooky figures appearing in the backgrounds of shots yet when they go back to “check the footage” it will show nothing as the entire program had been shot and edited weeks before.

    Similar to the infamous Welles broadcast of “War of the Worlds” there were numerous stories about people mistaking the show as non-fictional but since it was 1992 instead of 1938 these are much better documented. Although the outrage has grown in the telling there officially were around 30,000 complaints eventually filed about the show and it was banned from rebroadcast for over a decade. To this day it’s never been re-shown on UK television, although it is available on DVD and streaming. Many people were genuinely scared by this show.

    Although obscure to the general US public it’s very well known among horror aficionados and its influence can be felt far and wide. The makers of ‘The Blair Witch Project’ claim not to have been aware of it before making this movie, although that has been questioned. The entire found-footage horror genre has its arguable start here and rather pleasingly ‘Ghostwatch’ had already solved most of the problems people have with how those movies are presented. It’s explicitly a news broadcast by the BBC so any questions of why there are so many cameras, how are they getting footage, how is stuff supposedly filmed live being edited (Parkinson will frequently turn off-camera and request that the staff pull footage from earlier in the broadcast and they’ll have it several minutes later), it’s all answered by the very format its aping.

    With the benefit of hindsight it’s fairly obviously fictional on a re-watch. For the most part they do a very good job fitting everything together but a lot of it is clearly staged and some of the performances don’t really ring true. Oddly enough it’s not the presenters who give the off performances, they’re clearly experts at appearing as their “on” personas at all times and seamlessly channel it into their acting. The two child actresses are very good too and the actress playing their mother interacts with them well. The most mannered performance and the one that I feel would have clued me in almost instantly if I’d been watching at the time is that of Gillian Bevan playing Dr. Lin Pascoe, a paranormal expert. In my opinion she’s trying too hard to make things seem scary and dramatic while the more detached presentation style of Parkinson does a much better job.

    The show does a very good job for the first 45 minutes or so of laying things out in a clear, precise manner giving the audience the facts, having some nice banter between the presenters, and in general just acting like a news program about a possible haunted house where nothing particularly scary is happening. At around 50 minutes we’re presented with the first couple of seemingly supernatural events and things go a bit wobbly in terms of suspension of disbelief before it’s then revealed that one of the children is banging on some pipes herself and the entire thing deflates as a likely hoax, with the paranormal expert instantly becoming defensive and coming across as being rather desperate to believe. Parkinson is particularly good in this section, coming across as a polite but aggressive skeptic and increasingly challenging the in-studio expert.

    Around the hour mark more and more things start to happen that can’t just be waved off as the children making noises and at around an hour fifteen the show basically turns full supernatural with things like a mirror jumping off the wall and injuring a camera man, mysterious noises coming from the walls and in particular a small room under the stairs, and the studio itself supposedly becoming haunted by the ghost. There’s some hurried exposition about the broadcast itself having turned into a “nationwide seance” before the lights go out and the camera cuts for a few moments before turning back on to show a possessed Michael Parkinson wandering alone in the studio. Cut to credits which reveal the writer, director, and actors’ names, just like any other fictional presentation.

    By that point the damage had rather already been done and quite a lot of the public was furious. On Sarah Greene’s next appearance on tv she had to assure any children watching that she was fine. All of which begs the rather obvious question: is it any scary? As I said at the beginning that’s hard to say. Is it scary by today’s standards? Honestly, no, without even knowing the backstory it would come across as just another found-footage production. Would it have been scary at the time? To a lot of people it obviously was. With the names attached and the way it was presented if I’d been watching it back in the day I may have given it more of the benefit of the doubt but certainly by the end I would’ve been clued in enough to check the end credits. Is it worth a watch now for the first time? It’s certainly a well-told and well-presented ghost story and as long as you don’t actually expect to be frightened I can see any horror fan having a good time with this. If nothing else it’s useful for seeing where all of these other movies got their ideas from. It’s much more culturally relevant in the UK where it’s entered into something like their broadcast folklore, something people around my age and older can tell stories about what it was like to live through. I’ve heard about it for so long that I’m glad I’ve finally gotten around to watching it and I can certainly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it before. In a way I almost feel like the BBC’s reaction to banning it from rebroadcast has only helped its reputation in the long run. Unless you go to the effort to track it down and watch it it’ll always be that scary broadcast they tell stories about panicking the nation all those years ago. Not a bad way to be remembered.