Behind the Couch

1973 Dir. Lawrence Gordon Clark Part of the BBC’s annual series A Ghost Story for Christmas , which ran from 1971 to 1978 and featured some of the small screen’s most chilling moments, Lost Hearts was adapted from the short story of the same name by MR James. It tells of a young orphan boy sent to live with his much older cousin at a remote house in the countryside. The boy begins to catch glimpses of two ghostly children with holes in their chests where their hearts should be and suspects his cousin may be involved in something deeply sinister indeed… This was the first of Clark’s adaptations for the Yuletide series he didn't write himself (it was written by Robin Chapman). While it isn’t as downright terrifying as some of the other titles in the series (namely Whistle and I’ll Come to You, A Warning to the Curious and The Stalls of Barchester ), it is just as atmospheric and the subject matter is perhaps the darkest written by James; child sacrifice. With its imperilled...