The Awakening is a welcome return to the big screen for writer Stephen Volk, self proclaimed ‘tub-thumper’ for the horror genre and the man behind the acclaimed small screen horrorshows Afterlife and Ghostwatch.

His new film (out in UK cinemas tomorrow ) was directed by Nick Murphy and is as far from the Death-by-irony gorefests which litter the horror landscape of the last ten years as can be. It is a proper character based ghost story which I enjoyed immensely and has Rebecca Hall and Dominic West investigating the supposed supernatural death of a boy at a remote boarding school.

Our conversation took place on Hallowe’en, nineteen years to the day since his celebrated and controversial TV drama Ghostwatch aired and I couldn’t begin the conversation without talking about the huge impact it has had on the depiction and popularity of the supernatural on TV.

During the conversation we wander into spoiler territory about The Awakening and The Turn of the Screw, so tred with care.

I  watched Ghostwatch again today and was surprised that it still got to me. Since 1992 TV has moved on so much, and I think Ghostwatch paved the way for things like Most Haunted and the Reality Ghosthunting programmes we see…

It is great fun watching it, as I did last night at the Mayhem film festival, with an audience and I always introduce with the proviso that you have to realise that this was made for a small screen and not for a hundred and fifty people watching it on a big screen, and that it was made twenty years ago. But they had a great time watching and I think the passing of time has been kind to it in some ways in that a lot of the people watching it weren’t even born when it was made, and it has a mythology around it. There was laughter but it was kind laughter, because it was getting under their skin a little which is always fun to see.

It quickly became a Hallowe’en tradition for me and a group of friends watching in video and looking in the shadows for any new sightings of Pipes. Nothing has come close to it since, possibly because of the reaction to the programme and no-one has attempted to make anything like it since, I doubt you could make Ghostwatch today.

No, it’s often that someone says, or a producer says to me ‘Would you do it again?’ and I think you wouldn’t. The climate of TV now is that if you were to do it then you’d do it as a reality TV show, you wouldn’t go to the bother of writing the damn thing and getting actors and making it into a drama. If you did do it as a drama what would it be commenting on? It would be like making a parody of something that was beyond parody, I mean Ghosthunting with Coronation Street, or everything with Yvette Fielding in… I was astonished when I saw a lecture by Ciarán O’Keeffe who used to be the resident skeptic on Most Haunted and he gave a talk on how paranormal reality TV started in the 80s and  I was astonished at how many of these show are out there now, people with their metal detectors and night vision cameras. It seems anyone with a camcorder now can make one of these shows, though I would like to think that Ghostwatch was the first to use the night vision camera for sinister effect, before then I’d only seen it in footage from the First Gulf War.

Looking at the Hallowe’en releases in the cinema we’ve got Paranormal Activity 3 and there are some very strong similarities to Ghostwatch with the two young girls about the same age and the shadows in the bedroom on lights out…

I haven’t seen any footage from it but I did get an email from Lesley Manning, the director of Ghostwatch, saying ‘Have you seen this! It’s awfully like Ghostwatch…’ I don’t even know what the premise of the film is…

It’s going back to the 80s to the two sisters as young girls and tells how the haunting began. The advertising plays heavily on the image, very similar to an earlier scene in Ghostwatch with the two girls in their bedroom and an eerie shadow cast on the wall between them.

Well, of course they could have got that imagery from some of the stills from the Enfield poltergeist, and there’s only so many ways you can shoot that to be innocuous and scary. But it’s the innocuous nature of it which makes it scary. I would be interested to see the film, but I keep thinking that the camcorder approach to filming hauntings must be running out of steam but it seems to be that new people come along and breathe new life into it so maybe it’s a sub-genre that’s here to stay?

A horror story has the ability to be told in many ways and from Ghostwatch almost twenty years ago to now when you have people with HD cameras built into their phones so you combine that with the domestic setting then you have something…

When I was doing Ghostwatch I was very conscious that I was trying to find in televisual terms the equivalent of someone saying, as they often do at the start of ghost stories, ‘Please believe me,’ or ‘this really happened…’ and of course it’s the documentary technique. Pointing a camera at someone and asking them questions is the equivalent of what you read in a ghost story on the page, and I think that has become the new language of authenticity. Another benchmark for me, but of the opposite sort, was What Lies Beneath – that ghost story with Harrison Ford, I thought that did almost everything wrong. It had the big stars, immaculate photography and it felt like a big Hollywood blockbuster and all those things mitigated against it being scary. That, for me, was the end of that kind of big budget scarefest. You couldn’t do something with those big stars in it and make it as creepy as these films which come under the radar.

Do you think the audiences are more savvy now?

I think it’s harder work to put George Clooney in a film and say ‘This is going to be a ghost story’ because the ghost story genre demands that you try and reject it. No other genre, comedy, western, war films, demand that you reject it, while supernatural films demand so much of your irrationality and your rationality fights that even though there’s an artifice going on. So at every conceivable moment you want to not get scared, to not get involved. It’s self protection and yet what you’re going in for is the exact opposite of that and maybe it’s the tension between the two which makes the experience so rewarding in the end. There’s a complex and banal kind of psychology going on which is that you have a jump moment, everyone in the cinema laughs as an expulsion of the tension you feel.

In The Awakening Rebecca Hall’s character could be seen as symbolising that rationality as she is initially resistant to being drawn into the mystery of the film.

The character who has doubt is very important in a ghost story. If people accept what’s happening to them then you have not a ghost story but a fantasy so something like Blithe Spirit or Randall and Hopkirk. Yes, there are ghosts there but there’s no threat. You don’t grapple with the nature of what we’re seeing. Because you always want your characters to go on a journey, the person who tries to dismiss the ghost is always the most interesting, especially if they have intelligence and perhaps scientific knowledge and can bring that rational thinking to challenge what’s happening, rather than some dumb eighteen year old kid who wanders into a haunted house, screams and runs out being chased.

The film is a very different type of horror film given the last ten years of Hollywood horror, not least the post First World War setting…

That was something it became, rather than something it began as, but Nick [Murphy] really developed the emotional landscape of that time but at the beginning it was set in the 1880s. I was teaching some screenwriters and a film I discussed was The Innocents and how I loved that there was always this sense of the uncanny because you always questioned the reliability of the narrator , was she neurotic, was it all going on in her head? And what struck me watching was at the end of the second act Flora, the little girl, is sent away and I wondered what happened to Flora when she grows up? So the first version of The Awakening was a sequel to The Turn of the Screw and it was about Flora grown up, who becomes Florence – so there’s still a connection there in the name – and she becomes a ghost-hunter, but a debunking ghost-hunter and she’s blanked out the memory of Quint and Miss Jessell. So, she busts seances because she believes in rationality and science and the process of the story was her returning to Bly, the house in The Turn of the Screw, which is now a school and she confronts the older Miss Jessell.

Why did it change?

The BBC felt we couldn’t do a straight sequel because only people who had read The Turn of the Screw would get it, so I changed the back story, though it had echoes of the idea, to a young girl and a benevolent maid who dies and becomes the ghost which she revisits. It was all about recovered memories, ghosts as recovered of denied memory. I had an image, you know like in The Piano with the bonneted women, I had an image of a bonneted woman floating around the inside of a school. I took a guess at how old Flora would be and set it in the 1880s and as it deals with repressed memory and repressed sexuality there’s a very Freudian element – all buttoned up, their clothes and the way they spoke. It was all about repression and finding the reality. But a lot of things changed, the main thing was that they wanted to update it to the 1920s as they thought it would appeal to the audience and that in setting it post war it made sense  in terms of spiritualism. Certainly the 20s was when Arthur Conan Doyle made his pilgrimages, preaching about spiritualism. So it went through about fifteen or so drafts, from a sequel to The Turn of the Screw to a film about grief and loss post following the war.

And Florence or Flora remains the centre.

It was still this character who was essentially based on Houdini who, as well as being a fantastic escapologist and magician, used to debunk mediums and it was always claimed by the medium community that secretly he was desperate to believe in the afterlife and it always intrigues me about any kind of extremist is whether they’re afraid of the opposite of what their agenda signifies. So there’s that element but also the idea that ghosts can give some kind of closure on the past.

It’s fascinating to think there’s a version of the film linked to The Turn of the Screw, I’m almost sorry you didn’t make that version…

Well, there’s also a version which I set in Paris and had Florence as a nurse and a young Sigmund Freud who is a doctor at Salpêtrière hospital and the story she tells is in a flashback. At that stage I called it The Interpretation of Ghosts which is still a reference in the film. That was the title of the screenplay for most of its life and then when the setting was changed it lost its Freudian repression so it didn’t feel right.

But the characters are still what drives the story forward rather than the mystery.

I really believe that it’s all about the characters – it’s about who sees the ghost rather than the ghost itself. John Carpenter always says that horror is about the internal projecting into the external, that horror visualises what is in the mind. There was a Telegraph interview with Rebecca Hall and the journalists said something along the lines that taking a part in a genre film wasn’t the best career move and I thought ‘Bloody cheek…’ I’m a real tub-thumper for the genre but I’ve never thought that it needs to be less than intelligent and the person who proved that to me many years ago was Nigel Kneale. Two outstanding films which have affected my work are The Stone Tapes and Quatermass and the Pit. The intelligence there is so lively and not po-faced. The way he uses technology in a supernatural story and the way he incorporates characters in a way that they are not dumb but the story is nevertheless exciting.

The Awakening is out in the UK tomorrow. Read our review here.

Long time readers of the site will have seen this before as I’m reposting my love letter to Stephen Volk’s Ghostwatch on the occasion of Hallowe’en. A year shy of its twentieth anniversary it remains a landmark of paranormal drama and has just been reissued on DVD at a ridiculously low price.

Things have changed since the initial (and only) BBC broadcast. Reality TV has infected almost every aspect of television and Most Haunted and the recent Paranormal Activity films simply would not exist without it. Familiarity with the presenters may have made he suspension of disbelief a little difficult initially but nineteen years on there is no such problem.

Ghostwatch joins The War Game, Orson Welles’ Hallowe’en broadcast of War of the Worlds, and the US TV programmes Special Bulletin and Without Warning as moments in broadcast history which signalled a shift in what was possible, and it’s still a damn scary yarn.

If you have a copy, or can find one in the shops today I implore you to watch along with the Ghostwatch: Behind the Curtains National Seance (details here), that way – you wont be watching alone. And if you’re still in the mood for a scare I can recommend Volk’s The Awakening which he wrote with director Nick Murphy – my review is here and it’s out in cinemas on the 11th of November.

Here’s my Hallowe’en Video Vault for Ghostwatch.

On the 31st of October 1992 at 9:30 in the evening, as the BBC logo was spinning and the Announcer began to introduce Ghostwatch I was not watching, I was out somewhere, missing out on one of the scariest TV programmes ever broadcast.

It is seventeen years since the only terrestrial airing and it still has the power to convince and terrify. It can be set alongside Nigel Kneale’s Stone Tape and Barry Hines’ Threads as a singular event, a controversial landmark of Television broadcasting that was deemed so effective that it was banned from being shown again.

In the internet age, where iPlayer, iTunes and torrents mean that most tv programmes are readily available and easy to acquire, yet Ghostwatch wasn’t available, via a repeat or video release, for ten long years. The backlash against the programme was such that many believed it a deliberate attempt to scare seven shades of suburbia out of the general populace, and as it was linked to the sad suicide of an individual, the BBC complied and hid it from view until the 2002 BFI DVD release.

I was lucky not to have to wait this long however, as seventeen years ago this Halloween my video was turning, recording the moment, and the next morning I sat down to write an essay for school and put Ghostwatch on in the background. I wrote nothing for the next 90 minutes.

Ghostwatch, in many ways, was my perfect television programme. I became fascinated with the Enfield Poltergeist, a clear inspiration for the show, through the book This House is Haunted and poured over Harry Price’s tales of Borley Rectory; poltergeists and the domestic terror they inspired invaded my mind and not until Ghostwatch did I realise that I was not alone. The show touched a national nerve and set pulses racing long into the night.

Remember of course that the X Files hadn’t yet captured the global consciousness, the dubious stage of Most Haunted and the recent, Alan Partridge inspired, Ghost Hunting with the Happy Mondays was a long way off and TV productions regarding ghosts were limited to the occasional Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, but Ghostwatch changed that.

Taking the incredible success of the micro budget scare fest Paranormal Activity as a recent example of taking the clichéd pitch of a haunted house movie to a new level of effective terror through its manner of telling the story, Ghostwatch used the “˜modern idiom’ of the outside broadcast and the live program to draw the audience in, scare their faces off and leave them wondering “˜Was it real?’. The spate of horror films using the internet and documentary style footage in the early part of the 21st century, coupled with the rise of Reality TV, show how far ahead Ghostwatch really was. The directors of The Blair Witch Project both saw Ghostwatch before embarking on their film, and other films such as The Last Broadcast experimented with documentary techniques to nail their audiences to their seats in fear. Derren Brown’s recent Seance was, in part, inspired by the 1992 BBC Screen One production.

Part of what made the broadcast so effective was the use of ‘real life’ presenters, populating the programme with familiar faces and concepts such as a bank of phone desks to receive viewer’s calls (via the standard BBC number, which if you called played a message telling you it was just a TV play) gave the production a level of authenticity that belied its fictional nature. Sarah Greene was well known to the public and, controversially, to children as a host of many BBC programmes and it was her ambiguous fate that was to whip up a small frenzy of moral panic in the aftermath. Red Dwarf’s Craig Charles was on hand to ape and mock, usefully mirroring the audience’s skepticism, however it was the involvement of eminent TV personality Michael Parkinson (pre-knighthood) who fronted the programme, that gave Ghostwatch its authoritative foundation.

Ostensibly a live broadcast, similar now to Most Haunted and the like, from a house in North London that was allegedly haunted by an unseen spook, the investigation centred on the household consisting of the mother, Pamela, and her two daughters Susan and Kimmy. At first they appear as a family under siege and much of the early part of the programme deals with their experiences thus far. Tales of benign activity such as bent spoons and clocks stopping, familiar staples of poltergeist manifestations, gave way to scratches appearing on the elder daughter’s face and we hear incredible thumps coming from the walls. The programme cuts back and forth between Sarah Greene in the house and Parky in the studio discussing the events with a para-psychologist. Everything was done exactly as if it was a genuine investigation into the paranormal. It is a little twee, and at times fairly pedestrian, but don’t be fooled – this is simply the build up for an outstanding climax.

The writer Stephen Volk used the fundamental live programming vocabulary, such as the use of phone calls from the public, pre recorded interviews (with obscured faces) and outside broadcast to create a complete world in which the Early family allowed TV cameras into their home to try and document their poltergeist. It carefully lays traps (the incredulous American scientist, the young teenage daughter seeking attention, the phone calls making fun of the programme) for the unwary viewer, many of them convinced it was really happening, and slowly the atmosphere of expectation and dread intensified. Through scratched writing in a school book, the wailing of cats trapped in the walls, some eerie phone calls and the frantic activity taking place in such a small, and familiar, location the tension builds.

As the programme goes on it emerges that something is very wrong in the house, glimpses of a ghoulish figure are seen and a sense of real panic kicks in as the activity in the house takes a tangible, nasty turn. All the time we are looking for, as the resident psychologist has it, ‘faces in the fire’, some of the sightings of the ghost are so quick the video I had became worn with the amount of pausing it endured. The use of diegetic sound is perfect, as the walls rumble with thick, heavy thuds and the scratching of starving cats emanate from the floorboards smash through the portentous silences, and the screams, when they come, provide no relief.

There is a sublime moment when, after a volley of violent activity occurs and the genuinely unsettling events really start to unfold, the live feed to the house is cut, leaving the studio and the viewer watching static. After a moment it reappears and all appears fine, though there is no way to contact the house. The girls are all sitting and playing a board game, nothing untoward seems to have happened and yet the subsequent discovery by the psychologist in the studio sends a chill down your spine as we realise all is not well in the house.

Pipes, Mother Seddons, Raymond Tonstall. All names of entities that would seem tremendously clichéd if written into a film script, however the magic of Ghostwatch being set in the real world gave these names and figures menace, and we believed in them and their dark history. Ghostwatch used the conventions of live TV against its audience; programs of the era were often live, and bought a sense of excitement and expectation with it that today we take for granted. As the activity in the house turned darker and the programme ended on a sinister note the reality that the audience was so comfortable with had collapsed; the loss of control was immediate and the resulting backlash was inevitable. When people realised that they had been fooled the reaction was so extreme that it has took 10 years for Ghostwatch became safe to release.

Ghostwatch has been documented as one of television’s greatest hoaxes, but his is to misunderstand it. Hoax implies that it was a deliberate attempt to fool people, Ghostwatch never tried, it didn’t have to. The intrusion of cameras and crew into people’s houses was frequent in the late 80s and by the early 90s it was not anything special, but never before had it captured something so horrifying and the control associated with television was lost.

It is all about audience sympathy and involvement. The key to Ghostwatch was the use of the everyday. It could have been anybody’s house, anyone’s next door neighbours; it meant that it could be happening to you. Hysteria is so much more effective if it hits people directly and singularly, it’s a very isolating experience to be scared by yourself, and Ghostwatch’s strength came from the fact that for those 90 minutes you were watching helplessly as this house was overrun with something real and horrifying.

In the years following a group of my friends and I would crowd around the television and let it scare us all over again. We knew it backwards, we laughed in anticipation of Kevin Tripp’s phone call (the cheese and pickle sandwich? Come on”¦), we watched intently when the camera panned around the bedroom catching the briefest of glimpses of Pipes. Though we knew it was fiction we enjoyed losing ourselves in the programme, and despite the apparent paradox seeing Ghostwatch again and again always felt as if it  was live, and always exciting. We would put on the video, sit back and enjoy until one of us would see something half hidden in the background, or reflected in a mirror and the fear and excitement would come flooding back. It was a unique experience for us to see something that bore repeated viewings and managed to maintain a real sense of terror from images and obscured moments that could easily have been missed first time around.

While writing this Video Vault I watched Ghostwatch again, and though I knew it word for word there were moments when the feelings of unease and fear resurfaced. Scenes I had watched literally hundreds of times came back on and a chill went through me – after all this time. It takes great power to do something like this and though it has dated there has been nothing like it since. It is a truly inspired piece of television.

Nineteen years have dulled its effect slightly. The profusion of live TV and reality shows have resulted in an inbuilt cynicism for what we watch, and if Ghostwatch was to be realised today it would a harder task to convince the audience of its true, fictional status. In his book Dark Corners the writer Stephen Volk produced something of a sequel to the programme in his short story 31/10 and it is a fascinating read. Personally I’ve very much looking forward to the fan-created retrospective documentary Behind the Curtains which you can follow on their YouTube page.

Ghostwatch was an important part of my past. It was the first time a TV programme physically shook me, and I was so enamoured with it that for a long time I couldn’t see the, admittedly few, shortcomings. Now I can enjoy it as a true original, a programme so accomplished in execution and so effective in its purpose that it remains a Halloween classic which has never been bettered. As time wore on the acting got more ropey, the video tape was deteriorating, but for 90 minutes our programme was on, nothing on television before or since gave us this thrill.

Happy Halloween.