On Halloween night 1992, the BBC aired Ghostwatch, a scripted television movie that had been shot a few months earlier. It purported to be a live event – an investigation into a paranormal occurrence at a house in London. They did an amazing job at it.
They hired Michael Parkinson, a real-life TV presenter and journalist, to host the show. He sits in the studio with Dr. Lin Pascoe (Gillian Bevan), who is a true believer in the paranormal. Also in the studio is a phone bank where they take phone calls from folk who have also experienced strange activity in their lives. This is something real news programs did at the time on the BBC. They say the real phone number was inundated with calls from actual viewers. You might call this the English version of the War of the Worlds radio program Orson Welles did many years prior.
On location is Sarah Greene, also a real television presenter at the time. Her crew is portrayed by real BBC crew members. The house is owned by Pamela Early (Brid Brennan), who lives there with her two daughters, Suzanne (Michelle Wesson) and Kim (Cherise Wesson).
They get all the details right. I remember watching similar shows when I was growing up in the late 1980s/early 1990s. There were lots of pseudo-documentaries on during the Satanic Panic, and folks like Geraldo Rivera were always doing paranormal specials. It feels very real.
Parkinson is perfect for this type of thing. He sits and talks to Dr. Pascoe for a bit, then he’ll throw it to the phone or the location shoot. It all feels like a live shoot, as if he’s working off the cuff just a bit. Sarah gives her part a nervous energy, like someone who doesn’t really believe this stuff, but is still just a little bit scared at first.
The film starts off a bit slow. There is no indication that any of it should be taken seriously (the ghost stuff, I mean; the movie is deeply serious in its setup). But then weird things start to happen, but slowly. Some viewers call in saying they saw a shadowy figure in the girl’s bedroom. In the studio, they play the clip again. Something is visible for just a second. It looks like a man standing by a curtain. But the hosts say they see nothing. They look at it again, and the figure we saw is gone.
There are several moments in the house where we see flashes of something or someone. Stranger things happen. Loud noises occur. Tensions build. And build some more. I know this thing is fake, but it still got me. It took me a little while to get into its groove. Because they got the production values so perfect for an early 1990s TV show, I was taken back to my youth. This is exactly the sort of thing I would have watched as a teenager, for real. But it’s now the sort of thing I’d scoff at. But once it got going and I fell into its lure, I absolutely loved it.
What a unique, incredible little film.
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