by Brendan Foley
Whether or not you end up watching 1981’s Ghost Story, new on Blu thanks to Shout! Factory, you should definitely read the book by Peter Straub. Straub’s prose often recalls a more literary, almost post-modern Stephen King (their voices are so alike that the two collaborated seamlessly on the masterful The Talisman. The less said about the King-dominated sequel, the better) and the story of a small town slowly imploding as ghosts from the past lay siege is an absolute delight. While Straub’s style is often slow, there’s a relentless sense of mounting dread, making it all the more satisfying when the narrative explodes into hallucinogenic psycho-sexual supernatural craziness.
Great book. Anywho…
I wish I could say the same positive things about the Ghost Story film but it’s an unfortunately limp and bloodless affair (I don’t mean bloodless as in the absence of gore [although, yes, that too] but in the sense that film’s pulse never gets up). While genre fans will no doubt find things of interest in the film, Ghost Story is a frustratingly minor and shallow work.
The plot! So, in a small New England town, four elderly friends form what they dub the Chowder Society, which mostly consists of them dressing up to the nines and exchanging ghost stories by the fire. It’s all well and good, until all four members begin being plagued by terrifying dreams. When tragedy strikes and mysterious occurrences begin piling up, it becomes clear that something from the past has awoken and is hungrily stalking the group.
Straub intended his novel to be a kind of master class final statement on the tradition of American ghost stories, and he used the novel format as his plaything. The book will happily halt for dozens of pages to let Straub regale you with different spook stories of a wide variety of styles, and it is only after hundreds of pages that the thematic and narrative connections become crystal clear. As a novel, it’s a tremendously satisfying and rewarding experience.
As a film though, it comes across as downright sluggish. Nothing actually seems to happen, besides the characters sitting around discussing things that have already happened. There’s no clear narrative throughline or momentum (the main characters of the film don’t take a single proactive step against the thing that is killing them one-by-one until waaaaaaay too late in the game) and because neither the writer nor director could crack the book’s shifting-perspective style, it’s one of those movies centered around a ‘mystery’ that 4/5 of the cast already know the answer to, they just don’t feel like sharing it.
If there’s a reason to see Ghost Story, it’s the cast that forms the Chowder Society. Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and John Houseman are the old men at the center of the film, and it is a true delight to see such Hollywood legends at play together. Astaire in particular is a wonder, that trademark merriment in his eyes frozen over by life and sorrow.
Craig Wasson is the nominal hero of the film as Don Waverly, the son of the one of the Chowders, who gets sucked into the mystery, and Alice Krige haunts the film as the mysterious woman who seems to be driving the mayhem. Both characters have only two modes (he’s confused, she’s off) and instead of being compelling or engaging, they both come off as often-naked bores.
Unfortunately, it seems that Ghost Story comes down to a director that has no feel for horror and a screenwriter that could not figure out how to write this book for the screen. Director John Irvin achieved renown for his work with the BBC, and Ghost Story is laden down with the sexless, fussy flatness of so much British television. Alice Krige’s character spends literally the entire movie trying to fuck or murder (or both) every male character on screen, and yet Ghost Story has all the eroticism of septuagenarian nuns doing laundry.
(I hate to throw ‘dated’ at films made before the ’90s, mostly because ‘dated’ is bullshit terminology, but Ghost Story often appears to be twenty-years out of date from its own contemporaries. There’s a scene where a naked guy falls off a building [Sound like an entertainingly crazy thing to happen? It ain’t] that not only looks worse than modern films, but it looks worse than the bit in Point Blank where Lee Marvin threw a naked guy off a building, and that came out almost twenty years before Ghost Story!)
Even on the basic level of being ‘a horror movie that is scary’, this film fails. Irvin has no idea how to accumulate dread or use atmosphere against the audience, instead resorting to having the same water-logged zombie puppet lunge at the camera every twenty minutes or so. Not helping things is the score by Philippe Sarde. While a perfectly fine piece of music in its own right, it’s all wrong for the film, an endless series of “THIS IS SCARY THIS IS SCARY THIS IS SOOOOOOOO SCARY” music cues, totally clashing with the subdued tone of the rest of the film.
What a shame. I love Straub’s book and had long looked forward to seeing this film. Even going in knowing that it wouldn’t live up to the novel, I was still excited to see this cast together and assumed that the film would work as a creepy little genre picture from one of my favorite eras of horror filmmaking. But Ghost Story proved to be almost entirely limp, a deservedly forgotten little relic. Genre completists will find stuff to enjoy, undoubtedly, but everyone else would do well to just rent something like The Changeling or The Fog for a truly creepy ghost story from this era.