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Whistle and I’ll Come to You (2010)

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Dir. Andy de Emmony After placing his senile wife in a care home, retired astronomer James Parkin (John Hurt) heads for the coast to revisit their ‘old haunts’, including the now out-of-season hotel they honeymooned in. By day he is stalked along the windswept beaches by a spectral figure dressed in white, and by night he is terrorised by strange sounds and someone, or something, attempting to enter his room… In the 2000s BBC4 attempted to reignite the old Ghost Story at Christmas tradition by adapting MR James’s A View from a Hill (2005) and Number 13 (2006). This series was seemingly short lived though, as their next outing wasn’t until 2010, and an unusual reinterpretation of James’s classic chiller Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad . While de Emmony’s direction captures the atmosphere and tone of James very well, this film differs significantly from other adaptations, including Jonathan Miller’s supremely unsettling 1968 take . Neil Cross’s screenplay only incorpo
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Experiment IV – Kate Bush

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A couple of years back I wrote a piece about the influence of horror cinema and literature on the music of Kate Bush. I recently acquired The Whole Story , a ‘best of’ compilation released by Kate in 1986, and have since become rather ‘obsessed’ with one of the tracks featured on it: Experiment IV . Said track was written especially for the compilation and released to promote it. Along with the accompanying video it once again demonstrates Kate Bush’s singular vision as a musician, an artist - and a lover of horror. Taking the ‘storyline’ from the song quite literally, the video tells of a top secret and highly dubious government experiment to create a sound that can kill. That sound is, of course , portrayed by Kate in the video – initially as an alluring siren-like wraith (underpinning the notion of deadly music at the heart of the song; sirens lured seamen to watery graves by bewitching them with their irresistible but deadly voices), and then as a nightmarish spectre reminiscen
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Random Creepy Scene # 416: Salem’s Lot

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Adapted from Stephen King’s best selling 1975 novel of the same name, Tobe Hooper’s supremely creepy TV mini-series follows writer Ben Mears (David Soul) as he travels back to his hometown of Salem’s Lot in order to write a new novel and research the old Marsten house. The house’s latest tenants are causing quite a stir in the town. One of them, sinister Richard Straker (James Mason), runs a small antique shop in the town; the other resident, the mysterious silent partner Kurt Barlow, has yet to be glimpsed by anyone. It becomes clear as the series unfolds, that Barlow is an ancient master vampire and is gradually turning the residents of Salem’s Lot into vampires. One of his first victims is a young boy, Ralphie Glick. Glick disappears soon after Straker and Barlow move into town. His grisly fate becomes clear later in the series in a scene that makes the blood run cold and hairs prick up… Ralphie appears floating outside his brother Danny’s bedroom window, feebly scratching
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