13 FOR HALLOWEEN #5: Ghosts

There is a tradition wherever ghost stories are told – but particularly so in England – that railways are rife with ghostly phenomena. Charles Dickens’s ‘The Signalman’, adapted by Andrew Davies and directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark as a BBC “ghost story for Christmas” in 1976, stands as probably the finest example of the subgenre.

Waaaaay at the opposite end of the spectrum is Steven M. Smith’s ‘Ghosts’.

Since I hit eject on the DVD some 24 hours ago, I’ve been racking my brains for a handy, catch-all description that gets across how soul-drainingly awful it is on every level.

This is the best I can do: ‘Ghosts’ is what you’d get if the cast of ‘The Only Way is Essex’ decided to recreate the notorious BBC mockumentary ‘Ghostwatch’, working from a script by an intellectually subnormal hamster, and their overriding aesthetic for the project was that it needed loads of old trains, only they didn’t have the budget to shoot at Neen Valley or Great Central Railway where they actually have, y’know, working steam locomotives, so they made the film at a dismal little railway museum in Essex instead.

Now, there’s precious little to commend here – the script is barely literate, the performances fucking dreadful, the camerawork uninspired at the more palatable end of its visual spectrum and a right old bleedin’ mess at the other, and the attempt at effects work during the rushed and shoddy climax is frankly embarrassing – but there’s no denying that there’s the kernel of a good idea at the heart of the film. The touchstone is ‘Ghostwatch’ – that’s obvious from the mumsy presenter (Vivien Creeger) who narrates to camera the legend of a Victorian haunting whilst standing on the wind-swept platform upon which the events supposedly happened, from the gradual accretion of unexplained events that become increasingly frequent as the film unfolds, and from the fact that the participants in the documentary are stranded in a single location.

But ‘Ghosts’ is also beholden to a strand of singularly awful and intellectually retarded small screen fare that hides behind the seemingly verité sobriquet “reality television”. And if anything sends a shiver down the spine of the aesthete more repulsively than the phrase “reality television”, then I don’t know what it is and I sure as hell don’t want to. ‘Ghosts’ takes the ‘Ghostwatch’ template and throws into the mix a group of “guest investigators” – the actors appear under the actual names – who have been selected to take part in the documentary. They’re all Essex types with fake tans and grating accents and they say things like “naffink” and “axshully” instead of “nothing” and “actually” and they all talk over each other and say the same thing, ad naseum, for entire chunks of the running time.

An example: Freddie (Freddie Fuller) draws the short straw and has to spend a certain period of time on his own, in the dark, sitting in an old, decommissioned London Underground carriage parked in a siding outside the railway museum. He’s given a hand held camera in case he witnesses any supernatural activity. What follows is about five minutes of Freddie waving the camera around like it’s a bonfire night sparkler while he waffles onto himself along the lines of “faakin’ ‘ell, it’s bit naughty, this, faakin’ creepy, innit, I’m gonna faak this off in a minute or two and get a cup of faakin’ tea”. Then he thinks he sees a face at the window, screams like a girl, and goes legging it back to the museum. Once there, he spends ten minutes trying to convince the others that he saw something. When they finally give a modicum of credence to his account, they accompany him outside and return to the carriage and ask him to take them the through the sequence of events once more. Which takes another five minutes. In a film that runs eight minutes short of an hour and a half, an entire fifteen minutes is given over to Freddie saying “I saw sumfink at the windar”. Over. And. Over. Again.

There’s also a scene where Gemma (Gemma Gurvitz) expresses the paradox that although a lot of weird shit is going on, she feels safe inside the museum. This takes five minutes and her voice is like nails on a blackboard in a dentist’s office where root canal is done without anaesthetic and the dentist’s drill is hooked up to an amplifier borrowed from Metallica’s road crew.

Still, there’s something here that could have worked. The random selection of “guest investigators” could have been developed as a plot point. A discourse could have been set up into the relationship between gullible reality TV participants and the audience who feed, vampire-like, off their embarrassments and exhibitionism. The outmoded exhibits in the museum could have been played off against the trappings of modernity. Smith, in short, could have done something and it wouldn’t have taken much more of a budget than the shoestring he so evidently shot on to make it come to life.

But ultimately he squanders it, and the only genuinely scary thing that emerges is Smith’s ability to bend 82 minutes into a fugue of mind-draining endlessness. Just as Nietzsche gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed also into him, I watched a Steven M. Smith film and it stared back from the screen at me and gave me naffink in return. Naffink at all.