Ghostwatch (1992)

directed by Lesley Manning

UK

91 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I tried to watch this some years ago but was too impatient at the time to sit through it, so I turned it off. This was a huge mistake on my part and it's a travesty that it took me so long to revisit it. Ghostwatch was an event as much as it was a movie, and knowing the background behind its original broadcast enhances your experience: I am not familiar with the general pantheon of '90s British TV presenters, but apparently the people in this faux documentary were faces the audience would know and trust; not ghost hunters, not no-name actors dressed up as newscasters. So the result was a kind of War of the Worlds situation, except a lot of stories about the panic surrounding War of the Worlds were fabricated, and the panic around Ghostwatch was real - so real, at least one death has been attributed to it.

So what is it that got audiences so worked up on Halloween 1992 that it became an infamous television event? A mostly quiet, extremely droll fake TV broadcast where you barely see any ghosts unless you're glued to the screen. People have tried to pull this off, and the whole genre of found-footage is based off of this concept, with varying degrees of commitment to the bit, but the people who made Ghostwatch knew that if they were going to make something that really scared people, they had to work with an audience that was not expecting to see a ghost show up in front of the camera and shout "Boo!" Nearly everything about this movie is believable, with people reacting to things in what feels for all the world like an unscripted broadcast. The acting is as amateurish as it needs to be (which is in itself good acting) and no one seems to hog the screen or be played as the main character, even the people whose house is being investigated. Besides the subtle visual tricks, there's also subtle tricks of writing and editing that I can't even describe here because I still haven't caught all of them.

Upon reflection, one of the things Ghostwatch is best at and one of the biggest reasons why it feels so authentic is because the reveal of information doesn't feel like a typical film narrative. I imagine that this couldn't have been easy to pull off: To show us things and give us backstory on the haunting in a way that feels like everybody involved is genuinely discovering it in real-time, and had no idea what was going to happen beforehand. Ironically, this is also the only part where I personally felt like the film faltered, because giving Pipes (our ghost) a sort of macabre generic backstory in which he's a twisted criminal is... well, generic. But even with that backstory, Pipes gets elevated after death into something far more sinister than simply the ghost of a bad man.

And despite almost never showing up directly, always requiring you to stop and rewind or have him pointed out to you by somebody else, Pipes is scary. Pipes is not just a knocking-sounds-and-cold-spots ghost. Pipes is not even a throwing-stuff-and-touching-you ghost. Pipes is something else. You get the feeling that he, or it, could manifest fully if desired. That feeling of only seeing a little bit of what's actually there is what makes the really creepy "authentic" ghost photos and videos out there so unsettling. And when the people start calling into the station saying that they're experiencing weird phenomena in their own homes, it becomes something personal - you start to fear, or at least the people watching in 1992 probably did, that you might be the next person to have to place a call.

It seems from other reviews that the very end is what lost some people (new viewers, I'm not sure what the original response to it was, or if it broke the authenticity for people back in the day too). It may have lost me as well if I was looking to feel completely convinced throughout 100% of the film, but I wasn't, not truly - I was looking at Ghostwatch as more of a concept, and the ending was the capstone on that concept. The ending tells us that this isn't just people following one idea and that idea is "make a fake broadcast that looks like a real one"; the ending says that there's something this movie wants to say about the nature of haunting in the age of television. It's the idea that television can become a seance. That line from Doctor Who is cemented in my head forever since the first time I watched "Blink" - "The image of an Angel itself becomes an Angel". That's what this is, an accidental summoning. It's an in-built human fear to feel a little like talking too much about something can bring it to you, and we may try to tamp that down as we become more "civilized", but Ghostwatch reveals that it's still in us.