KINDLESTICKS
"For those of us of a certain age, Creeped Out is the finest genre kid’s show since Round The Twist."
Me, in 2018 for We Are Cult!
So yes, the genius of Creeped Out is well known by now, and so its a quick visit to our favourite poltergeist. Esme, our main character, is a godawful babysitter with good PR who scares her charges into early bedtimes so she can pig out on the parents kitchen and hang out with her boyfriend. She tells them about the Night Night Man, who is the somewhat gormless and allergy ridden Chaz, aforementioned boyfriend.
This modus operandi comes under scrutiny when she spends her night looking after small child Ashley, who has his own friend. A ghost called Kindlesticks who hates mean kids. Kindlesticks, you see, is a spiritual creature that appears when kids are being bullied or harmed.
ADVERT - If you like this article, you can follow Michael on Twitter, YouTube, Soundcloud or send some Irn Bru or bill paying funds via the donation button. Every little helps. Thanks!
The tricks or twists are heavily foreshadowed nicely and both Romy Weltman and Justin Paul Kelly play their roles well. The latter went on to do the Umbrella Academy last year.
Spoilers follow...
I like the joke on rewatch that Esme has tried to scare a ghost with a fake ghost story in The Night Night Man!
Also since we're in spoilers here, and you have been warned, "She looks so peaceful" is one of the great wham lines in kids horror.
This episode broke the CBBC scare-o-meter. This was made to be a useful Aesop for 10 year olds, but it remains one of the best little slices of horror anyone has made in years. It's only 23 minutes long, its PG, and its wonderfully creepy in places. I cannot recommend it higher. 10/10, modern classic.
If you don't believe me, take the word of my horror aficionado better half, MJ Steel Collins, who says that Kindlesticks was, and I quote: "awesome!" And we can count the amount of TV she's ever said that about on one hand.
MORE MONSTER BLOOD
So you have an episode outstanding of your TV series, limited budget, and a bunch of kids. What do you do? Well, what Rick Drew chose to do was take the basic ingredients of a popular RL Stine story, and place them in a new scenario.
Instead of filming Monster Blood II, where a hamster grows to be 50 foot tall, we have a bottle episode on a plane, when the infamous goo gets loose. For those of you lost here, Monster Blood was one of the most popular of the early Goosebumps books and wound up spinning off at least 4 sequels, toys, merchandise and making our beloved horror kids author quite wealthy. Which is ironic as the book itself is one of his weaker stories, but that's democracy for you!
The story was quite simple. Boy finds joke shop toy goo, plays with it, but finds that once you open the box, this stuff grows and grows and grows, Anyone who eats any of it grows and grows too. Also it eats people. And it was controlled by a shapeshifting immortal witch.
OK, you can probably see why that sold for kids like lobbying gigs to Tory backbenchers, come to think of it.
What you can do in print or radio, you can't necessarily do on your limited budget TV show for kids. They never did try to adapt the Camp Jellyjam story, alas, possibly as a 60 foot sentient slug which enslaves (and eats) kids was not only too grim for the time slot but impossible to realise on screen for 50p! The original Night of the Living Dummy got nixed for similar time slot appropriate reasons (also, so they could cut straight to the second dummy, Slappy, who is one of the franchise players in the entire series), which is a shame as its grim morale for kids is important even today, as Creeped Out showed in one memorable episode.
So, when it came to the Monster Blood sequel, what they've done is take the main characters from Monster Blood II (and onwards) and just chuck them all on a plane, coming home from summer camp, where they meet up with Evan, our main character, and don't believe in monster blood.
Unfortunately for everyone on the plane, the silly sod brought some monster blood on board, and oh boy, is it hungry.
(This was filmed nearly a decade before Snakes on a Plane, before anyone asks.)
With director Timothy Bond, they had someone who had much experience on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Friday the 13th TV show. Someone versed to making small sets look bigger than they are.
"Someone's in the cargo hold" and one of the air stewards goes to check. This ends badly.
They fit in some nice scares for kids. (I was a kid, I remember them!) The poor guy in the loo is a scene which heavily nabs shots from the X-Files. And as people start to get picked off by the monster, Evan struggles to convince his new friends they are in grave danger.
I mean, yes, the kids are basic actors, and the plot isn't exactly Pinter quality, but this is actually better than some of the adult horror US TV was showing around the same time. Possibly as it keeps nabbing production teams and camera shots from the successful ones, but then presenting it for kids.
And yes, they do have to reverse everything, but again, horror for kid audience. But then, oops, twist ending.
Having failed often with adult horror (this was a substitute for a mediocre Michael Gough thing), I find the kids horror to be more mature, interesting and even moving.
A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS
This is not for kids though!
Originally the tale was going to be set in 1917 (it is in the first drafts) but M.R. James scrubbed that out and went more oblique as to the exact time. In fact, the war took a terrible personal toll on James, as he buried countless friends and worse, students of his. In the intro to The Thin Ghost, written in 1920, he precedes a collection of melancholy and somewhat depressed tales by noting:
"perhaps also some one's Christmas may be the cheerfuller for a storybook which, I think, only once mentions the war."
But then he was a man who didn't do death very well. He never recovered from his best friends death in 1904, and he was in fact a surrogate dad/grandpa for the mans daughter for the rest of his life. Even when it came time to write other stories later in the 1920s (AWTTC first appeared in the London Mercury in August 1925), he was looking back with a sense of loss at what had once been - places and people. And so the actual ghost story of A Warning to the Curious happened "some time ago" - long enough for the narrators friend to have long since died of old age, in fact. It fits the nostalgic lens of the story, and the sense of the buried past, and how time buries all.
The adaptation cuts down the narrator and Long's roles, and makes them both Clive Swift. Which is a shame, because in the story you get to see from others the effect the haunting has on Paxton, and how desperately he tries to make amends. They also flip the narrative, which was probably a necessity of TV. In a surprisingly post-modern take on the ghost story for someone who'd hate that term, in A Warning to the Curious, we actually have two old academics who stumble into someone who is in the middle of an M.R. James story! So when open, most of the deed is already done and it's already about setting what went wrong right and trying to protect poor young Paxton. (Peter Vaughan is far too old for the role, but, you know, it's Peter Vaughan, we can let that one slip! Although this does change Paxton's motivation from young glory* to being more of an aging amateur who wants to prove he can do as well as the experts. More of a chip on the shoulder. It also means that in the TV version, Paxton specifically is hunting down the crown, whereas in the story, he stumbles across clues to it looking up something up else and that curiosity is the downfall of him… Although despite this change, it works far better than the root and branch changes implemented in the 2010 Whistle adaptation.)
*As I have noted elsewhere, you can reverse engineer Paxton’s rough age. The story takes place a while ago, but our narrator is still alive. His friend Long is, err, long gone. Paxton was considerably younger than both of them. So he had to be in his early 30s at the oldest. Also, youthful naivety plays a key role in his downfall, he has the book knowledge but not the experience!
Although I would point out here that detection was all the rage in the early 1900s and it’s not Paxton’s fault that he didn’t realise he was in an M.R. James tale!
““It began when I was first prospecting, and put me off again and again. There was always somebody—a man—standing by one of the firs. This was in daylight, you know. He was never in front of me. I always saw him with the tail of my eye on the left or the right, and he was never there when I looked straight for him. I would lie down for quite a long time and take careful observations, and make sure there was no one, and then when I got up and began prospecting again, there he was. And he began to give me hints, besides; for wherever I put that prayerbook—short of locking it up, which I did at last—when I came back to my room it was always out on my table open at the flyleaf where the names are, and one of my razors across it to keep it open. I’m sure he just can’t open my bag, or something more would have happened. You see, he’s light and weak, but all the same I daren’t face him. "
I’m never sure if the spirit is testing Paxton to see if he’ll avoid hunting the crown, or not.
One thing I dislike is showing the revenant (or real life) Ager at the beginning, which sort of takes the mystery aspect away from it - as we're hearing from another, we're not sure till the ending (which makes it rather blatant) if Paxton really did undergo all this or its mind playing tricks as he feels guilty. After all, if the real Ager actually did kill someone before the story began, surely he would be more infamous nationally than he was, even decades later. James notes how murders linger in the folk memory, hence why this scene doesn’t happen in his story – and when it did, in Martin’s Close, it was still remembered centuries after!
And they didn't use the actual Martello Tower, which still stands in Aldeburgh right where James says it does. Sorry, Seaburgh, of course. Ahem. The actual inn/hotel is long gone, but there is a lot of Warning to the Curious you can actually go and tourist spot even today. Which is cool, in my book.
Where the story works on TV better is the soundscape, which never ceases, and how every day objects build into the sense of unease. Also, Agar himself is fantastic – we don’t get the “lungless laugh” of course, ,but we do get his running speedily and unnaturally down the beach after poor old Paxton. This story is bulletproof, you could tell it by semaphore and it’d pack a chill, but Lawrence Gordon Clark knows how to make the most out of his material. Well, except for that time he filmed the godawful Stigmata story and didn’t get to film Count Magnus instead. Which we’re still waiting for.
Mind you, what a hypocrite Monty was. He wrote once that his good friend EF Benson “sometimes overstepped the mark” regarding how much horror you show in a ghost story, presumably referencing Negotium Perambulans and the fantastic Room in the Tower. Having said that, he goes and writes Paxton's mouth of sand and stones here. What an image. James subtly leads us into some of the more horrific scenes in horror in my book – the inverse chase shown here for example, or elsewhere, the ghost kids in Lost Hearts, the hounds of hell themselves in the massively underrated Residence at Whitminster, or the tram incident in Casting the Runes.
But, yes, everyone loves A Warning to the Curious in whichever form it appears, because it remains one of the most successful ghost stories ever written. I mean, the story is only 10 pages long, and look how many films, stories and crit it’s inspired! More than some doorstoppers! Mackenzie Crook is a huge M.R. James fan, which makes you imagine some of the rural tales redone in the style of Detectorists, and we’re half way there already. The more folk writing horror for the Beeb, the better, in my book. Now ‘mon with Count Magnus for 2022, Mr Gatiss.
The ending does appear in the story, too, but it’s part of Paxton’s haunting:
"when I began to meet people going to work, they always looked behind me very strangely: it might have been that they were surprised at seeing anyone so early; but I didn’t think it was only that, and I don’t now: they didn’t look exactly at me. And the porter at the train was like that too. And the guard held open the door after I’d got into the carriage—just as he would if there was somebody else coming, you know. Oh, you may be very sure it isn’t my fancy,” he said with a dull sort of laugh.”
This has been used in so many films and TV ghost things since!
Finally, for the record, Lawrence Gordon Clark made up the “No Diggin” catchphrase that everyone associates with this story now!
No comments:
Post a Comment