The Stories of MR James

Olivia Laing

A large portion of my childhood was spent in the car, driving between my parents’ houses. To enliven these journeys, my father bought a sizeable collection of story tapes. As a consequence, my sister and I know Three Men in a Boat and The Wind in the Willows almost by heart. But the one we listened to most often didn’t involve benign picnics by the Thames. The Stories of MR James, read by Michael Hordern, was about a different kind of England: misty, haunted, malevolent.

James was a medievalist and provost of King’s College, Cambridge. His stories are populated by dons and curates, people who potter into country churches and take tea in their rooms after games of golf. After acquiring an object – a bone whistle, perhaps, or a painting that has caught their fancy at a county auction – they become subject to disquieting phenomena: small, unpleasant disturbances in the fabric of reality.

To this day, I still find it hard to read “Casting the Runes”, in which Mr Edward Dunning, engaged in research at the British Museum, is cursed by Mr Karswell, a petulant occultist from Warwickshire. The haunting proceeds incrementally, delicately, deliciously, building towards a night of horror. The lights go out in Mr Dunning’s house. When he slips his hand under the pillow to check the time, he encounters not his own familiar watch, but “a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being”.

It’s this tenebrous quality, this paralysing vagueness, that makes James’s stories so lingeringly disturbing. He understood that the half-glimpsed thing is far more frightening than anything encountered in full light. The writhing sheets in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”; the moving figure that emerges from a print of a country house in “The Mezzotint”: these slippery, malevolent objects have the capacity to unnerve me still.

Listening to the tape while driving at dusk through Hampshire, Buckinghamshire, the marsh country of Essex, it was easy to feel that James had found a way to tap the strangeness of the English countryside, with its crumbling houses, its blighted ash trees and deserted beaches. Even now, in a different millennium, that odd, uncanny power still abides, both in the land and in the stories that came out of it.

Crowhaven Farm

Michel Faber



The earliest thing that scared the bejesus out of me was intended to put Jesus into me. It was a Christian motivational film screened at my local church in Boronia, Australia, circa 1969. I must’ve been about nine and let me tell you, nine-year-old boys are not hot on allegory. In this movie, Jesus Christ was a clown. A Ronald McDonald-style clown, in a carnival. Clowns and carnivals are creepy as hell for a start, but the concept of this film (its title, unlike its imagery, did not get branded on my brain) was that the clown was compelled to take on the suffering of everyone else in the circus. So, in the act where the magician saws the lady in half, Pierrot Jesus takes her place, whereupon his mute paroxysms of pain indicate that he’s getting cut for real. In another scene, he’s in a barrel, contorted with agony as somebody thrusts a sword through slits in the wood. I’ve blanked out the rest, but I have an inkling that the climax involved a fatal fall from the trapeze. Jeez! The things we inflict on innocent children …



The earliest thing that scared the bejesus out of me was intended to put Jesus into me Michel Faber

I’m not actually that easy to scare. Horror movies in which monsters pursue hyperventilating victims to rip out their entrails don’t faze me. I rate the special effects on a scale of 1 to 10, assigning 8½ to commendably exuberant eruptions of innards. But there’s one horror movie which has haunted me for more than four decades: Crowhaven Farm. I’m just one of a worldwide coterie of people who were enduringly spooked by this obscure made-for-TV flick when they chanced upon it in the early 1970s. Meeting a fellow Crowhaven Farm survivor is a deeply affirming experience. So it got you, too?

By modern standards, the film is tame. No eyeballs are punctured, no skulls explode. An unhappily married couple move to an isolated farm in Massachusetts. The plot unfolds in a succession of low-key, unsettling events. The neighbours are friendly and welcoming and (of course) have been waiting for this couple since the 1600s. By the time the wife is out in a field, pinioned under a large wooden plank while her Puritan neighbours pile rocks on top, the awareness dawns that you will never get over how creeped out you are at this moment.

Three Oncologists by Ken Currie Photograph: Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Three Oncologists by Ken Currie

Kathleen Jamie

In traditional Scotland, Halloween or Samhain was the Celtic festival when this world and the otherworld were at their closest; the boundary between could be crossed. A sinister time. It was possible to foretell the future. The dead could walk.

It seems to me that Ken Currie’s eerie and brilliant portrait Three Oncologists occupies this very Celtic space. It’s an official portrait, commissioned in 2002 by the National Galleries of Scotland. The three men depicted (it would have to be three, like the weird sisters) are Professor RJ Steele, Professor Sir Alfred Cuschieri and Professor Sir David P Lane, all then of the department of surgery and molecular oncology at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee.

It’s a portrait, but far from flattering. Nowhere are the pomp and curly wigs of earlier portraits of surgeons and physicians. Currie’s painting reaches back into another cultural tradition. The three men are lit with a ghoulish inner light; they seem to be haunting the threshold between life and death. They are shown poised to move through a curtain, which is the black cloth of the theatre, the operating theatre, the veil between worlds. This curtain appears also to radiate from the figures, like an aura or ectoplasm. Like mediums, they can move back and forth into that place which is for most of us, an otherworld.

Furthermore, they hold their tools or means: Steele raises his gloved and bloodstained hands, Cuschieri holds a surgeon’s implement, Lane carries a paper. Whose sentence is written there?

Currie's three men are lit with a ghoulish inner light; they seem to be haunting the threshold between life and death Kathleen Jamie

Though it was painted in 2002, I believe the chill of this work lingers from the 19th century, when the medical colleges procured bodies to dissect without asking enough questions, when that demand was satisfied by body-snatching and even murder, as in those committed in Edinburgh by Burke and Hare. The surgery and science that saves us today is built on these misdeeds – Currie’s painting seems to acknowledge that horror. The medics themselves are pallid, corpse-like, but human, all look hunched, raddled, interrupted in their task. Are they slightly guilty? Is what they are doing transgressive? “Spooky” is not the word; there is a greater fear here, that of the unseen patient.

As we grow more able to say the word “cancer” out loud and more of us survive it, thanks in no small part to our surgeons and physicians, this painting will become a historical record of an emotional state, as well as honouring three esteemed medics. But it will still send a shiver down the spine.

The Simpsons Halloween special

Mark Lawson

Now as fixed a part of the schedules as the Queen’s Christmas broadcast, television’s most sustained and impressive Halloween project is the Treehouse of Horror series of annual episodes of The Simpsons, which reached its 26th instalment this month. Fittingly, these shows are both a treat (the only individual episode each season that viewers can anticipate) and a trick, incorporating narrative or graphic experiments and occurring outside the regular storyline.

For me, the most memorable remains the first Treehouse from 1990, in which Lisa reads “The Raven” as a rather inappropriate bedtime story, with the yellow-faced family becoming caught up in the action of Edgar Allan Poe’s horror monologue. The sequence shows to perfection the series’ multi-layering of references.

Although the series posts semi-jokey warnings about these stories being unsuitable for younger viewers, the terror factor is limited by the time slot and genre. In the same way, Doctor Who – for which a traditional viewing position has been behind the sofa – is frightening mainly because its target audience has a low nightmare threshold.

Among television shows intended to make adults jump, I have a fondness for Rainy Day Women, an intelligently unsettling 1984 BBC Play for Today by David Pirie, in which hysteria develops in an English village fearing a German invasion in 1940. The BBC’s Ghostwatch, a Stephen Volk play taking the form of a purportedly live broadcast from a haunted house, was so effectively terrifying that it has never been repeated in Britain, although it is available on DVD for brave home entertainers, as is The Stone Tape, another BBC play in which research scientists regret basing their facility in a Victorian building with a history. It was one of the finest achievements of Nigel Kneale, the greatest writer of small-screen frighteners, to whom a modern admirer, Mark Gatiss, paid tribute in the 2013 BBC production of The Tractate Middoth, a truly spooky contemporary ghost story.

Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491

Mozart’s C Minor Piano Concerto K491

Tom Service

Of course Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain is self-consciously spooky with its evocation of a witches’ sabbath and its cauldron of dissonances, as are the final couple of movements of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, when the hero dreams of his own execution and another lot of witches consign him to a hallucinogenic oblivion. And then there are the modernist masterpieces that Stanley Kubrick turned into a definitive soundtrack of spookiness in The Shining and 2001: pieces by Penderecki, Ligeti and Bartók that are now the sonic embodiments of deep-space eeriness and elevator doors deluged by blood.

All of the above might seem scary, but they’re frightening in the way that Halloween costumes are superficially frightening. True musical terror, those chills that come from a cold sweat that’s created by the drama of the work itself, is a different matter. And that’s why the final movement of Mozart’s C Minor Piano Concerto K491 is a piece that makes my blood run cold. It’s a set of variations on a tenebrous theme – what terrors could that possibly hold? Well: this winding, chromatic melody has ice in its veins, in the way it snakes and sighs around itself, in the implacable way that it shuts out any possibility of a major-key resolution. The transformation of minor-key despair to major-key happiness was a stock-in-trade of late 18th-century musical convention, so that you could make sure that your listeners left laughing after visiting a place of emotional darkness. Mozart himself did just that in the D minor piano concerto that he wrote a year before this one, when minor-key torment becomes D major glory in its final bars.

But that’s not what happens here. Mozart’s variations create a kaleidoscope of musical and expressive darkness, and they have a suffocating cumulative power. The composer gives us an ironic sense of hope with a vision of startling major-key brightness in one of the variations – only to rip it away again. The piece ends with a triple-time dance to the abyss, in music that has always sounded to me like the fulfilment of a bleak prophecy, a curse from which there is no escape. It’s frightening in a way that speaks to your soul as much as to your senses, and as such, it’s properly, profoundly scary.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Joanna Briscoe

This 6,000-word story captures the substance of nightmares. An inspired bookseller, knowing my own dark and twisted imagination, strongly urged me to read it, and it instantly gripped and chilled me.

In the lightest of tones, a female narrator describes how she has been prescribed a rest cure for her “slight hysterical tendency” by her physician husband. He has rented an empty ancestral hall for the summer, where he insists that he and his wife sleep in an old nursery complete with bars on the windows and torn wallpaper. Forbidden to write for fear of over-stimulation, the narrator has little to do but watch the effects of the sun on the disquieting paper lining the room. She also writes.

As her tale becomes darker, much of the creepiness lies in that very buoyancy of tone, all exclamation marks and echoes of her husband’s supposedly caring instructions: “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.” The claustrophobia thickens as she sees a sub-pattern begin to grow, trapping a woman’s figure in the paper. The wallpaper’s “colour is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight”. Its patterns go “waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity … a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus.”

Published in 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper” was astonishingly ahead of its time in sentiment and language, its phrases – “great slanting waves of optic horror” – often enjoyably modern in sound. It is open to so very many interpretations, and its refusal to provide an answer enhances its unsettling effect on the mind. Is the narrator insane? Is this a valid response to “kind” incarceration? Is Gilman writing of postnatal depression, or offering a comment on women’s general or medical oppression? Is it a tale of the paranormal? As one critic once put it: “It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not.”

Like the patterns themselves, the meaning slips, blooms, plunges into uncertainty, looping and doubling back, the territory shifting until the story becomes almost sickeningly haunting.

Clowning around … Reece Shearsmith in Psychoville Photograph: BBC

Clowns

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

I enjoy watching comedians clowning around, from Buster Keaton, deadpan under his pancake, to Ricky Gervais in The Office, fingering his tie like someone auditioning for the lead in a new Laurel and Hardy film. But a real clown always sends a shiver down my spine. That white mask of a face. That painted-on rictus of a smile. My queasiness is mild compared to sufferers of “coulrophobia”, the pathological fear of clowns, but they still spook me. It’s hard to explain why. I certainly can’t remember any traumatic encounters with balloon animals as a child, and I’m not a big fan of horror stories like Stephen King’s It, in which a group of children are hunted down by a sewer-dwelling monster in the form of a clown with a puff of blood-red hair.



A clown always sends a shiver down my spine, with that white mask of a face, that painted-on rictus of a smile Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

So why do they seem so alien and uncanny? Maybe it’s because they behave so oddly, like someone who has been given an instruction manual on how to be a human being but abandoned it halfway through. Maybe it’s the way they move, with that weird mixture of clumsiness and grace, creating a world where choreography meets chaos. Or maybe it’s just their unnerving silence, as they walk around with planks of wood and custard pies, giving the impression that, however chirpy they seem on the outside, much darker thoughts are bubbling away under the surface.

A couple of years ago, the BBC comedy drama Psychoville featured Reece Shearsmith as Mr Jelly, an embittered clown with a metal hook for a hand, whose red nose acted like a warning beacon to anyone foolish enough to mistake him for his great rival Mr Jolly. The world of books is full of equally menacing clowns. One of the stories in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers features a haggard alcoholic performer, whose “glassy eyes” contrast horribly with the “thick white paint with which the face was besmeared”. The narrator gives him a few shillings, and as he turns away hears “the roar of laughter which followed his first tumble on the stage”. A few days later he is dead. It’s a strange little story, and one that resonates far beyond the obvious warning about the dangers of drink. Looked at from another angle, it’s as if this sad figure has worked out what a clown is really for. He is a capering death’s head.

Trailer for 13 Tzameti

13 Tzameti

Anthony Quinn

I’ve only seen this film once, nearly 10 years ago, but I recall its insinuating mood of dread as if it were yesterday. The Georgian-born French director Géla Babluani’s low-budget debut sidles along for much of its length, then plunges us abruptly into a scenario that’s about as close to a waking nightmare as cinema gets. A young immigrant labourer steals the identity of his late employer and travels to Paris on a mysterious assignation, trailed by unnamed pursuers. It’s difficult to say what the young man thinks he’s getting into – there seems to be drugs and cash involved – but he ends up in a place he could never have imagined. It involves a contest in which strangers gamble on the outcome and yet it’s filmed in a matter-of-fact way that catches you off-guard. That’s part of its fascination: to have things that are unimaginable suddenly stare you coldly in the face, as black and real as a gun barrel. Shot in monochrome, the film nods to Jean-Pierre Melville’s fatalistic gangster noirs and to Kafka’s dreamlike fables of dislocation; maybe a pinch of Patricia Highsmith lingers too. But in the event 13 outruns its influences. I can’t exactly remember how it ends, and it hardly matters – what survives in the memory is that horrific sense of entrapment, of knowing that your fate has come to meet you. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it, and I’m not sure I’d want to again.

Illustration by Andrew Rae

The Listeners by Walter de la Mare

Helen Dunmore



A moonlit clearing in a dark forest; a deserted house; a traveller who comes to knock at the door and calls out “Is there anybody there?” The setting is eerie enough, but slowly a deeper and more disturbing strangeness settles. A bird flies up out of the turret and the sills are fringed with leaves. It is a long time since this was a place of human habitation, and yet the house seems to hold its breath as the traveller strikes upon the door. The sound does not echo into emptiness. The air is “stirred and shaken” by the knocking and the cry of the man who seeks entry, but no one responds. There is “only a host of phantom listeners” there. They possess the house. They have never left it, even though green things tangle at the windows and birds build their nests in empty rooms. Like the house, they wait and listen and do not answer “that voice from the world of men”.



At around the 15th line, gooseflesh rises on my arms. It always happens: it makes no difference that I know what’s coming, or that I’ve read the poem dozens of times. The presence of the listeners is so palpable that figures begin to take shape in the imagination. They are there, and not there. They are summoned up, but they will not answer.

Throughout the poem it is the traveller who acts and speaks, but the listeners who lie at the heart of the mystery. There are no stanza breaks: it is all one poem, wrapping itself around the reader like an incantation. Read it on Halloween, and see what comes.