Movies

“Harry Price: Ghost Hunter” (TV movie, reviewed)

Harry Price (1881-1948) was unquestionably the premiere paranormal investigator of early-mid 20th century England. This excellent website devoted to his career and legacy should be required reading for anyone interested in the ghost racket.

This 2015 ITV telemovie is very loosely based on Neil Spring’s HP-inspired novel, The Ghost Hunters (2013). In effect, being filtered through two different fictional media, the detail of the movie’s plot admits only a little historical accuracy; but of course, as a work of fiction it makes no claim of documentary realism and can only be fairly judged on its own merits.

The story opens with HP (Rafe Spall) conducting a dramatic seance at a home in London during, or very shortly after, the First World War. As it then transpires, Price has gimmicked the sitting for maximum spooky effect. Clearly, he is riding high as a ghost racketeer – until, shockingly, a disturbed young soldier who has bought into Price’s line of afterlife patter commits suicide right in front of him.

(Cut to the opening titles, a nice montage of the tools of the ghost-hunter’s trade – ’20s-vintage cameras, phonographs, metronomes and other such apparatus.)

Several years later, a sadder and wiser Harry Price has changed tack and is making his living as an investigator of seemingly paranormal phenomena, with the cloud of his former charlatanry hanging heavily about him. He is hired to investigate the strange case of Grace Goodwin (Zoe Boyle), the young wife of fast-rising Liberal MP Edward Goodwin (Tom Ward); Grace has recently been discovered wandering the streets of London, naked and disoriented, and seems to be suffering from a case of ghostly possession.

Price visits the couple’s home and quickly learns that it is a former workhouse. Sarah Goodwin’s strange visions seem to revolve around the ghost of a young boy who died there many years before.

HP is assigned the couple’s maid, Sarah Grey (Cara Theobold) as an assistant and discovers her to be a natural skeptic and a shrewd detective in her own right. Sarah has her own reason to distrust psychic mediums; her mother is a seance groupie, spending money they can’t afford in a series of attempts to contact her late husband. The point is effectively made that mediums, for all their frequent chicanery, were often the closest thing to therapists available to ordinary people during the early 20th century.

In an interlude from the main action, Price disrupts and debunks one of these public seances, for all the good it does; the true believers in the audience boo him off the stage and then the angry psychic strikes a nerve in aggressively cold reading Harry backstage, provoking Harry to knock him down. Eventually, we gather that Harry’s wife was sadly lost to insanity and that Harry seems to blame himself for not being able to help her.

Harry and Sarah proceed to puzzle out clues and mysteries towards discovering the real source of Mrs. Goodwin’s bizarre behaviour, calling upon the additional help of two of HP’s associates as the case becomes ever more convoluted.

Albert Ogoro (Richie Campbell) is a chemist by day and faux-voodoo witch-doctor by night. His main function in the story, other than to provide chemical analysis, is to illustrate another perspective on the ethics of the ghost racket. From Albert’s point of view, his clients are in such desperate straits that, if his sham-shamanism offers them some comfort, what’s the harm? He applies that logic in “assisting” Harry during a late-night vigil at the Goodwin home, but in this case his trickery (in the form of a rather implausible mechanical spider device secreted inside a grand piano) does no particular good.

Vernon Wall (Lewis Reeves), a hard-nosed young reporter who clearly has some unresolved “history” with Harry, nevertheless also agrees to help and tracks down a former secret lover of Mrs. Goodwin’s, whose presence in the Goodwins’ lives seems to have sparked the current dire situation. As it transpires, the politician is insanely possessive of his wife and, upon discovering her infidelity (and that she was pregnant with another man’s baby), he began secretly dosing her with home-brewed barbiturates, causing her to miscarry and then suffer terrifying hallucinations as she withdrew from the drug.

Goodwin reacts violently when Sarah confronts him with the truth and knocks her unconscious. Very curiously, as she comes to, she seems to see the same ghostly young boy who has been haunting Grace Goodwin. Charitably, it might be assumed that Sarah is now so deeply involved with the case that her imagination conjured a spectral child; less charitably, this vision reads as an incongruous “maybe it’s all true after all” cop-out on behalf of the writer. There’s no time to worry about that, though, as Mr. Goodwin has gone berserk and is attempting to drown his wife in the bath tub – but Harry Price arrives in the nick of time and saves the day.

The story ends with Harry inviting Sarah, who is now out of a job, to become his full-time assistant. She says she’ll think about it – leaving the way open for their adventures to be continued in some form, perhaps as a regular series …

RATING:

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Seven ibangs out of ten for this effective, atmospheric and well-acted ghost-hunter procedural.

“Fairy Tale: A True Story” (review)

This is what really happened; in 1917, and again in 1920, two rural English schoolgirl cousins went into the local woods and took photographs of paper cutouts shaped like fairies. All historical evidence suggests that the girls intended nothing more than a simple, silly prank, which then spiraled out of their control. As one of them said, much later in life, “I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in.”

“They” were the True Believers; Theosophists and Spiritualists, wonder-seekers championed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who took the Cottingley fairy photographs as clear proof of the existence of the supernatural. To a nation reeling from the devastation of the First World War, the photographs offered a glimmer of hope “beyond the veil”; if fairies were real, then perhaps death did not equal the extinction of identity.

Fairy Tale: A True Story is a clever, subtle and deeply compassionate examination of the nature of faith and skepticism during this very turbulent time. Each major character has his or her own perspective on the fairies. To Sir Arthur, for example, they represent the possibility of life beyond death and the vindication of his own father, who spent many years confined in a “lunatic asylum” and who frequently painted and wrote of seeing fairies.

To arch-skeptic Harry Houdini, who fought hard to expose the exploitation of the bereaved by fraudulent mediums, they represent a clever magic trick; an ultimately harmless and charming illusion.

Gardner, the Theosophist, comes up with increasingly far-fetched, pseudo-scientific theories about the fairies’ true natures.

To the comically nasty and cynical reporter, Mr. Ferret – who is, other than Houdini, the only adult who figures out how the photographs were actually produced – the fairies are a juicy story, perhaps part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Sir Arthur.

Several charming sequences show actual fairies flitting about, the director wisely leaving it ambiguous as to whether these scenes are intended to be taken literally, or more in the poetic spirit of Peter Pan’s urgent plea to “clap if you believe in fairies!”

It is also implied that the girls themselves come to realize the power of their own myth-making, as when they are shown making a solemn “vow of fairy secrecy”, which can either be interpreted as a promise not to reveal the magical secrets of real fairies, or as a promise not to reveal the simple trickery that has accidentally deceived the famous Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and so many others. At several points, when they are asked point-blank “are the fairies real?” by people for whom belief in fairies is clearly of great emotional importance, they exchange knowing looks before kindly nodding their heads.

RATING:

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Nine ibangs out of ten for this underrated modern classic.

EMERGO! The Re-Emergence of a Classic Fright-Film Gimmick (1958)

In the schlocky world of ’50s/’60s horror film marketing, William Castle was the undisputed king, and the “Emergo” effect was possibly his greatest promotional gimmick.

Castle was a producer and director with a live theater background and a reputation for being able to crank out competent, crowd-pleasing B-movies on time and under budget. He also possessed a showman’s shrewd understanding of what it took to fill cinemas in an age when television was slowly overtaking the movie-going experience.

In 1958 he had the idea for a live-action special effect he called “Emergo”, and so he produced a movie to justify that effect, telling the screenwriter that he didn’t care what the story was about as long as it featured a skeleton emerging from a vat of acid.

The resulting film was titled House On Haunted Hill and starred Vincent Price as an eccentric millionaire who invites guests to stay in his haunted mansion. In true proto-Scooby Doo style, it is eventually revealed that the millionaire was faking the haunt in self-defense against a murder plot. None of that mattered very much to Castle’s first matinee audiences, who were on the edge of their seats waiting to experience Emergo.

At the crucial moment, as the apparently ghostly skeleton appeared on-screen, a glowing plastic skeleton would emerge from behind the screen and “float” out over the cinema audience via a system of wires and pulleys. Meanwhile, Vincent Price’s on-screen character was seen manipulating a gadget that appeared to be controlling the flying specter, maneuvering it until it returned to its lair.

The novelty of Emergo caught the public imagination and, as word slowly spread from town to town, local kids would compete to see who could be the first to hit the flying skeleton with thrown popcorn. The important thing to Castle, of course, was that they had paid to get in.

Castle’s later promotional gimmicks included “Percepto” (electric buzzers installed in cinema seats, for The Tingler) and the “Punishment Poll” (in which audiences were purportedly able to “vote” for the punishment of the on-screen villain Mr. Sardonicus). They also inspired the underrated movie Matinee (1993), which starred John Goodman as the very Castlesque “Lawrence Woolsey”.

In recent years, some small cinemas have begun staging William Castle homages (especially around Halloween), offering modern audiences the same tongue-in-cheek thrills that were his stock-in-trade sixty years ago. Of course, no modern screening of House on Haunted Hill is complete without its own take on Emergo:

Note – an earlier version of the above article originally appeared on the Past Tense blog.It is re-used here by permission.