The horror anthology may be one of the trickier types of scary movie to pull off. It’s not enough to have one scary story. There are multiple stories, they all have to work, and they have to tell their complete stories in fairly short order. That’s not always easy to pull off. Arguably, good horror is by itself hard to pull off because the movie has to tell a story that somehow spooks out the audience in an effective manner, and just doing a jumpscare and some gore isn’t enough.
Besides, I am pretty sure that the title Ghost Stories has been used a number of times, but this review refers to an 2017 British film from writer/directors Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, based on a stage play that they had written and producer earlier.
Philip Goodman (co-writer and director Nyman) grew up in a strict Jewish household to become a television presenter who debunks supernatural and psychic phenomena. He gets a parcel from Charles Cameron, his inspiration, a man who did much the same in 70s. Goodman is surprised to learn the fellow is still alive, and it turns out Cameron has a challenge for Goodman: try to explain away three of Cameron’s own cases. Those would be night watchman Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse) who ran afoul of a young girl’s ghost at his job at an abandoned mental asylum, teenage Simon Rifkind (Alex Lawther) who claims he ran over some sort of monster in the woods while driving home one night, and businessman Mike Priddle (Martin Freeman, the biggest name actor in the movie) who says he was plagued by a poltergeist while he is waiting for the birth of his first child. Will Goodman find flaws in these stories?
And, more importantly, does Goodman’s own story work? Yes, his own story is involved with what’s going on every bit as much as the stories he listens to. See, Goodman has some secrets of his own, and Cameron wasn’t exactly the most friendly of people, and this is more than just a case of how you should never meet your heroes.
I gotta say, this one was creepy in a good way, and perhaps because it started as a stage play, it’s a movie that didn’t rely on CGI scares. Instead, it goes for tight editing, lighting, and make-up effects. And that works very well. Every one of the stories Goodman hears comes across at the right tempo, the scares work, and it does it without a lot of gore or anything along those lines. This is more like an old-fashioned horror story, one where it’s more about the scares than the deaths.
That said, the movie takes a very different turn in the final section where Goodman’s own story comes out. It’s not bad, but it feels a little different, and it doesn’t work quite as well as the stories that came before it. I still really liked the movie, but that last section was just more weird than effective, even as the whole thing was tied together in the closing minutes.
Grade: A-
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