Coming to You Live

Film: Ghostwatch
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

The made-for-the-BBC film Ghostwatch puts me in mind of a number of things I have seen in the last couple of years. This film is from 1992, but it very much has a found footage feel to it; this feels in a way like a precursor to a film like The Blair Witch Project. It also has some things in common with a film like Deadstream or Host (which specifically cites this movie as an influence) from the last couple of years. There is a sense of what is happening going on live while a huge audience is watching. There are also shades of a series like Dead Set, again, with something happening life. It also has shades of The Stone Tape, another BBC production. The important thing to remember about Ghostwatch, though, is that it predates all of these except for The Stone Tape.

The conceit of the film is, more or less, akin to the Orson Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Some folks at the BBC spin a tale about a house whose residents have had experiences with what they claim to be a poltergeist. The BBC has sent a crew to the house to investigate the phenomenon in a live broadcast, hosted back in the studio by long-time presenter Michael Parkinson as himself. In studio with him is Dr. Lin Pascoe (Gillian Bevan), who is put forth as an expert in the paranormal.

What is not going to surprise you is that as the night progresses, we’re going to start getting increasing evidence that something is actually happening. While there will be some evidence that all of this is a hoax, more and more, people will call in the show and talk about their own experience, some from the past and some happening during the broadcast. As the night goes on, the events in the house build, and the two girls (Michelle and Cherise Wesson) and their mother (Brid Brennan) go deeper and deeper into what they might be doing, or not doing, regarding the poltergeist they have nicknamed Mr. Pipes.

The genius of Ghostwatch is that it uses actual known-at-the-time BBC presenters as themselves to lend a sense of reality to the proceedings. In addition to Michael Parkinson, the broadcast includes married couple Sarah Greene (at the haunted house) and Mike Smith (in studio) as well as comedian Craig Charles. For a casual viewer, this would look like a real, live broadcast.

And, in fact, this is exactly what happened when this was broadcast in 1992. Evidently, the BBC was inundated with calls about what people were seeing on their television sets. There are plenty of people who will tell you that Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast didn’t fool as many people as we have been led to believe. This, however, created a wave of 30,000 phone calls from pissed off and terrified viewers. Honestly, that’s got to be a badge of honor for any horror film.

If there is an issue with Ghostwatch, it’s that it is very slow to get going. It manages to stay interesting for a lot of the running time, a lot of this coming from how intelligently it is written. The first half of the show is peppered with interviews, jokes and fake scares played for fun, and a great deal of background. We get some fun ghost stories from the people on screen as well as an appearance from a New York skeptic (Colin Stinton) who shows up a few times to tell everyone that he thinks everything is a hoax. In fact, one of the shortcomings of the film is the fact that our skeptic doesn’t show back up near the film’s end.

There’s a lot to like here, though. The slow burn actually works really well, and while there is a long red herring moment that doesn’t work very well, the plot itself progresses in a steady and escalating manner. The red herring, though, is a real issue. We know going into this that, because of what it is, we’re not going to get a hoax, so when it heads in that direction for a few minutes, it’s a head fake that doesn’t work.

But that’s trivial. Ghostwatch is smart, and appears to have been done on the cheap, which makes it even better.

Why to watch Ghostwatch: Once it starts, it really goes hard.
Why not to watch: The pump fake in the middle doesn’t work.