Director – Lesley Manning, Teleplay – Stephen Volk, Producer – Ruth Baumgarten, Music – Philip Appleby, Visual Effects – Steve Bowman, Designer – Ken Starkey. Production Company – BBC.
Cast
Michael Parkinson (Presenter), Sarah Greene (Reporter), Gillian Bevan (Dr Lin Pascoe), Brid Brennan (Pamela Early), Mike Smith (Phone-In Presenter), Craig Charles (Interviewer), Michelle Wesson (Suzanne Early), Cherisse Wesson (Kim Early), Chris Miller (Cameraman), Mike Aiton (Sound Recordist), Mark Lewis (Alan Demescu), Colin Stinton (Dr Emilio Silvestri)
Plot
A live broadcast on BBC1 on Halloween Night of 1992. Michael Parkinson presents from the studio as a team headed by Sarah Greene conduct an investigation into a suburban house on Foxhill Drive in Greater London. There Pamela Early and her two daughters have been experiencing poltergeist phenomenon. As the broadcast gets underway, the film crew on site indeed report ghostly phenomena, although there is the question of whether these are being faked by the family. As the team seek the secrets of the house, the broadcast becomes a terrifying experience.
Ghostwatch was a tv special that aired on the BBC. It featured a team investigating a supposedly haunted house live broadcast live on Halloween Night, which was hosted live from the studio by Michael Parkinson. At the same time, there was a live phone-in line where viewers could call in and discuss their own experiences. In actuality, the entire production had been pre-recorded and there were no live aspects at all.
Ghostwatch had originally been conceived as a mini-series by writer Stephen Volk in the vein of the Quatermass serials where he intended that it culminate in a live-broadcast final episode. Volk took inspiration from The Enfield Haunting where a mother and daughters claimed to be haunted by poltergeist activity – the supposed real-life story was later adapted into the mini-series The Enfield Haunting (2015) and substantially more fictionally in the film The Conjuring 2 (2016).
Ghostwatch is one of several works that could lay claim to being the first Found Footage film – it is cited in the documentary The Found Footage Phenomenon (2021). The Blair Witch Project (1999), which laid the foundation of the genre, was still some seven years away and it would be fifteen years before Paranormal Activity (2007) caused the genre to explode. Many subsequent Found Footage films adopted aspects of the Haunted House film, particularly of Paranormal Investigators armed with cameras. The scenes with the camera crew trekking through the house and observing incidents are all familiar but none of these others were so audacious as to copy the live broadcast aspect.
The presenters – (l to r) Mike Smith, Sarah Greene and Michael Parkinson
Ghostwatch also has an added level of realism that the average Found Footage film doesn’t due to the casting of several real-life people, who are blended in along with actors playing the family and paranormal expert. The most noted of these is the internationally renowned talkshow host Michael Parkinson. In addition, there is Sarah Greene and her real-life husband Mike Smith, both local presenters of the day, she on children’s tv, he on Top of the Pops (1964- ), as well as Craig Charles, an actor better known for Red Dwarf (1988- ) floating around on the periphery for no particular reason.
The live element creates another whole level of realism that no other film in the Found Footage genre has come anywhere near touching. This is further enhanced by the fact that the show had a phone-in switchboard, which we cut away to at various points where Parkinson and Gillian Bevan answers some of the calls. Apparently the BBC line was swamped by callers during the broadcast. Some of these are featured on air but these are also blended with ones that are faked.
On a level of plotting, Ghostwatch is fairly ordinary, no different than any of the other Found Footage ghost stories. The difference is all in the unique means of presentation. That said, as a ghost story, it works well. By establishing a kitchen sink realism, there is undeniable effect when things start falling over or we think we momentarily see the image of people in the background, so brief we cannot be sure.
Ghostwatch: Behind the Curtains (2012) is a documentary about the making of the show.
Screenwriter Stephen Volk has also written the likes of Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), The Kiss (1988), William Friedkin’s The Guardian (1990), Superstition (2001), the psycho-thriller Octane (2003), the British tv series Afterlife (2005-6), the ghost story The Awakening (2011) and the mini-series Midwinter of the Spirit (2015).
