"A sad tale’s best for winter" says irritating show-off child Mamillius in "A Winters Tale." nb sad, rather than frightening. Shakespeare's prototype Fotherington-Thomas only wants to make our eyes weep, rather than our flesh creep.
If there is a tradition of telling Ghost Stories in the winter, it may have been codified as recently as the 1960's when the BBC began their own tradition of MR James dramatisations.
Site is an active character in James' work. For James,the supernatural chooses its venues carefully; his cast of clerics and antiquarians are drawn to Diosecan buildings, Great Houses, Follies and Outbuildings, This was James's world, and that of his first audiences. Exceptions are the flat expanses of "Whistle And I'll Come to You My Lad" and "A Warning To The Curious" all the more terrifying for their sunlight and open spaces; in the unsettled and unsettling land at the limits of habitation, there's nowhere to hide.
In the 40's the democratising impulse of the BBC Light Programme had produced "Appointment With Fear" in which Valentine Dyall - as The Man In Black- had used the infinitely flexible medium of radio to construct the corridors, cellars and cloisters of James, Poe and others in British parlours and sitting rooms, or at least in the minds of the people who sat in them .
Alongside this the gothic interiors and sodden over-lush landscapes of "The Turn Off The Screw",and the contemporary settings of "Casting The Runes" and the framing episodes of the portmanteau "Dead Of Night" had led us to discover annexes of shifting space and time in the darkness of the cinema.
NIGEL KNEALE 
Kneale - who grew up in Barrow - has his own cast of Boffins, Military types and Sensitives sent by Upstairs to evaluate phenomena, but gradually becoming subject to them. His settings for TV were contemporary and recognisable to his audience. Technology was foregrounded, but the conduits he describes were located within people and the environments they built. In "The Stone Tape" (1972) he explores the theme of the occupying presence of the past. A team of scientists working in an abandoned mansion to develop a new recording medium discovers that one of the rooms, considered by locals to be haunted, may be made of a type of stone that can store sounds and images. A Hard Drive that proves able to transmit as well as store. In his 1955 "Quatermass", another site long assumed to be haunted is the subject of an excavation that reveals an alien craft. Kneale posits communal memory as something in a file - assumed inaccessible and obsolete -that can be accessed by the activation of software; the problem and it's solution both rise from the realization that some of us have the patch, others don't.
In Kneale, agency is found at a cellular and mineral level; in Quatermass after the exhumation of the craft and the subsequent transmission of an ancient frequency we see the reanimated behavioural impulses of a vestigial community. The behaviour is divisive and violent; hierarchies emerge, pogroms are launched. In the Stone Tape the analytic enquiries of science are opposed by the emotional and intuitive responses of individuals; the damage done is personal rather than societal, but the causal role of the awakened impulse - buried as much in the psyche as in land and stone - is common to both stories.
You might read either as a negative version of a legend of buried potential, dark and damaging and best left buried. Perhaps a sad tale is best for winter after all. This blighted and divided winter, anyway...
..anyway... we just completed our 3-night season, Iain and Karen have read their choices from James, EF Benson and Agatha Christie. We have been led through strangely abandoned rooms, overgrown and encroaching gardens, and watched arcane ceremonies alongside a cast of tweedy antiquarians and fox terriers. My three originals will be recorded and put online over Christmas, each is set in a different era, each is to do with how buildings and the histories they contain assert themselves and affect the lives of their occupants.
What's in the walls and how it makes itself known.
Our thanks to our audiences, to Sue Fletcher and Lindsay Ward for Hall-decking, to Mark Robson of Furness Creatives for his illustration made in response to James' The Mezzotint and to Sutton's Bookshop,Market Street Ulverston.
John
..anyway... we just completed our 3-night season, Iain and Karen have read their choices from James, EF Benson and Agatha Christie. We have been led through strangely abandoned rooms, overgrown and encroaching gardens, and watched arcane ceremonies alongside a cast of tweedy antiquarians and fox terriers. My three originals will be recorded and put online over Christmas, each is set in a different era, each is to do with how buildings and the histories they contain assert themselves and affect the lives of their occupants. What's in the walls and how it makes itself known.
Our thanks to our audiences, to Sue Fletcher and Lindsay Ward for Hall-decking, to Mark Robson of Furness Creatives for his illustration made in response to James' The Mezzotint and to Sutton's Bookshop,Market Street Ulverston.
John
Previous projects..http://artspacesjb3.blogspot.com/
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