The Inexplicable and eerie English ghost

Supernatural International

Recently I have briefly examined one quirk of American supernatural Horror films; the Poltergeist. A vengeful, confrontational and often violent paranormal manifestation, the Poltergeist is a perfect receptacle for both the American obsession with good and evil moral narratives, and Hollywood's need for constant on-screen spectacle and excitement. However, this cannot be simply boiled down into an analysis of whats good and whats bad in Horror. There was plenty to admire in the films I looked at in the previous post, Poltergeist (1982) and Paranormal Activity (2007). They were both innovative in their own ways and, as a result, very entertaining at times. Yet, it wasn't so much the films themselves that were at fault as much as the culture they fed.

Unlike some more strictly art-house films, a lot of Horror cannot be viewed entirely outside of its cultural context. As a form of popular culture, it corresponds closely to social or political circumstances, including the appetites of the public. This is what makes Horror so interesting as a genre, it reflects the dynamic between people and institutions. The brief success of the Paranormal Activity series is a prime example of this, illustrating a clear logic of supply and demand. Just as the effects of a horror film linger with us long after the credits have rolled, so too can its ideas and implications stay and influence us on a wider cultural level. Establishing an orthodoxy of popular Horror can be damaging to those that stray from it. Such was the case for M. Night Shyamalan's The Village (2004) and Robert Egger's The Witch (2016), both victims of false expectations. Currently, Horror suffers from a very narrow emotional and intellectual spectrum. In truth, we're horrified by a lot more than we ever see on screen, and we're scared in a variety of different ways. The industry has abandoned this in favour of simple, tried and tested formulas that bring the production of new culture to a halt. Ofcourse genre is defined by its conventions, but it also relies on innovation within these conventions, approaching things from a different perspective and bringing in new elements, to progress.

As such, Both Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity, despite their good bits, can be partially blamed for their contribution to popular culture. Whilst we live in a world where pop culture can be transported and replicated across the globe, these films highlight a specifically American tendency which arises from its own cultural and social formations. This week I'll be looking at the British film; Jonathan Miller's Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968). The Ghost, with its attachment to place and time, serves as a very good illustration of cultural differences in cinema, and comparing these two films to Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity is proof of this. In The English Ghost Peter Ackroyd writes,

"The popularity of the English ghost tradition – the English see more ghosts than anyone else – is deeply rooted in its peculiar mingling of Germanic, Nordic and British superstitions. The English are also in many respects obsessed with the past, with ruins, with ancient volumes. It is the country where archaeology is placed on national television, and where every town and village has its own local historian." (Peter Ackroyd, The English Ghost, 2010)

In Poltergeist, there is a gap between the pristine, new suburban house and the Native American burial ground it stands on, whereas the continuity of History is a lot more present in English ghost stories. Rather than echoing the utter devastation of racial genocide and colonisation, the English supernatural is usually found tucked away in small and hidden corners. The ghost is far more likely to be a Romantic manifestation of the vertigo felt by people when confronted by sublime, ancient places. This is the case with many of M. R. James' stories, which often involve a city-dweller travelling out to somewhere in the countryside and undergoing a supernatural experience. A lot of the time, usually in country houses, the supernatural presence (often ancestral) is tolerated and accepted as a necessary part of the home, providing some sort of bond between family and place, and thus spiritually legitimising heritage and ownership. The English ghost can still be hugely political though; its poetic undercurrents embody the uneasy relationships between classes and the shifting of urban/rural dynamics. Sometimes the ghost is a manifestation of tragic, forbidden love, or deeply buried family secrets, dead relatives who refused to conform in life. Other times the ghost represents the oppression of rural peasantry, the moving of the nation from agriculture to industry and then to finance, resulting in the depopulation of the countryside.

By the time of M. R. James, the English countryside was an eerie and uncanny place, the pastoral qualities often shrouding something much darker and disturbing. An example of this can be found in his story, A View from a Hill, cited by Robert Macfarlane as one of the author's "most unsettling" in the article, "The eeriness of theEnglish Countryside" (click for link). It's about a Cambridge academic who travels down to the deep south-west of England to stay with a friend. When they propose to go on a long walk, the academic asks if he can borrow some binoculars, whereupon his friend gives him an old, heavy pair in a wooden box which he explains were made by a local antiquary who died mysteriously years earlier. On a hilltop, the academic looks out to another green hill which is dense with trees and then, viewing it through the binoculars, sees that it has altered radically and become barren and bleak, with a dead body hanging from a gibbet. This is only the opening of the story, but it serves almost as a checklist for M. R. James stories; the rational academic, the deep and idyllic countryside, the deceased antiquarian and the ancient artefact, the reveal of an unsettling, eery other side. All these elements can be boiled down to a narrative of progress versus conservation, wich isn't so much a battle as an exploration of the two forces. The same goes for James' other story, Oh, Whistle, and I'll come to You, My Lad, which was adapted in 1968 by Jonathan Miller for the BBC and re-titled, Whistle and I'll Come to You.

Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968, dir. Jonathan Miller)

Set along the coast of East Anglia, Whistle and I'll Come to You sees Geography and History converge in a way wholly typical of M. R. James. It follows an arrogant Cambridge academic, Professor Parkin (played by Michael Hordern), staying at a guest house who, one day, stumbles upon an old grave. From it, he finds a bone whistle which he decides to keep and, back in his hotel room, he notices that it's inscribed with the words, "Quis est iste qui venit", which translates to, "Who is this who is coming?". After blowing on the whistle, the wind picks up outside and, later that night, he hears noises in his room. Parkin's self-assured, academic rationality is slowly and steadily brought into question as he faces increasingly bizarre occurrences that one wouldn't hesitate to call supernatural.

The film builds to a quiet and unnerving climax which is made all the more powerful for its simplicity. It is an efficient and effective horror masterpiece that is by turns chilling and hilarious, and it is perhaps this latter quality which maintains its status as a classic. Professor Parkin is a brilliant creation, detached from reality by his introvertedness and pompous pretension. He mumbles incoherently like a pot boiling over with useless self-importance, and his pedantically calculated responses seem unaccustomed to physical speech, perhaps rather more suited to being written out on a letter behind a cushy desk. He is a cartoon philistine whom the audience can laugh at as much as they can be frightened with simultaneously. These small details and comical flourishes do more to characterise and entertain than many latter day "non-believer" horror protagonists. Incidentally, a lot of recent horror seems so much engaged in creating a marketable and scary monster that they forget to give their protagonists a personality. With a monster so intangible and seemingly absent from sight, it is Hordern's job to imbue the ghost with a psychological presence and reflect it through his character. And when he finally drops his condescending affectation out of sheer terror, one can only be convinced of a supernatural presence.

This psychological reflection serves as one of three essential ingredients to any good ghost story, with the other two being; place and time. The bleak and windswept Norfolk coast, punctuated by the eternal roll of the waves and a watchful but apathetic sun, encapsulates these other ingredients perfectly. A grave, overgrown with vines and hidden away, evokes a sense of temporality, of life returned to the Earth, whispering from a forgotten corner of the landscape. Parkin, the mortal intruder, disturbs this natural balance and pays the price for it. But one can only be sufficiently moved by this paranormal threat if they invest themselves enough in the setting. The place-time continuum is one that has the effect of dwarfing the individual and his ability to reason. They become overshadowed by not just the scars and memory of a shifting and eternal landscape, but their innermost thoughts and feelings, a primal instinct which is much greater than them. Ghost stories are about our involuntary animal reaction to a place, anthropomorphising it with a malevolent and omnipotent agency. The idea of a "ghost" draws on the inexplicable and concentrates it into a mysterious phantom Other who always has a greater claim to place than the mortal individual. Where the individual has conscious knowledge, the ghost has unconscious knowing.

The geographical focus of a ghost, though, cannot be attributed to a nation. Rather, a ghost belongs to a locality. Folklore and myth precede the existence of nations, and are created from the act of dwelling. Ghosts are particular to a house or village, tangible places. The nation, on the other hand, is abstract. The only way in which one can have a discussion about the ghosts of different nations is simply to find patterns in their geographies. America has a lot of wide open flat spaces, deserts, mountains, old sacred grounds and new developments, and therefore the type of ghost which occurs will correspond to these features of landscape. The English, on the hand, have a landscape filled with history, green rolling hills, curving roads, ancient villages and towns, ruins. Both nations have their own civil wars to draw from (historical violence and struggle always makes a good ghost). Britain has the ghosts of Empire, the US has the ghosts of the slave-owning south. But only in these patterns can we associate the paranormal with a nation. Culture exists first and foremost on a regional scale, and the folklore of, say, Yorkshire, would differ greatly from that of Somerset. One has to take into account the socio-economic aspects of an area, how populous it is, its language and colloquialisms, its own particular history, to get a true understanding of the ghosts one can find there.

I'm currently reading George Monbiot's Feral (2016), in which there's a chapter about how the drastic spike in big-cat sightings is a collective psychological response to our need to re-wild ourselves, attributing it to a much older phenomenon, "Certain paranormal phenomena afflict every society, and these phenomena appear to reflect our desires; desires of which we may not be fully conscious." He notes how Victorians saw more ghosts because of their higher mortality rates. This is analogous to my own ideas, of the ghost as a romantic response to the place-time continuum. Their attachment to the land could be seen as inherently conservative, but in the impermanence of things they could also be simply distant memories. There isn't a simple answer to what a ghost represents; they are that which is beyond reason, as we see in Whistle and I'll Come to You. This is more the case than in Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity, which essentially rationalise the ghosts into being. There could be any number of reasons for this, be it; historical, religious, cultural or geographical. Typically, the English ghost story stops where the comprehension starts.