Countdown to Christmas and A Ghost Story for Christmas

What’s scary?  Fashions in fear change.  Back when film was black and white by necessity rather than some half arsed artistic choice, fear was Universal in the sense that the Dracula and mummy and Wolfman franchises scared cinema-goers.  Then came Hammer and Technicolor blood.  Then came less gothic and much less subtle fear, usually involving college girls running round a lake being chased by somebody with a personality disorder and a utensil.  Things took a turn for the sexy with the Twilight movies, where the cheekbones of the male lead were more important than the fake fangs, and we have just recently come out of an ironically apparently unkillable trend in zombie movies and television.  Somewhere, things stopped being scary and became either thrilling or thought-provoking or, God help us, sensitive.  Vampires and zombies became just another group with food intolerances (garlic) and a specific dietary requirement (Type O, brains).  Like vegans, but healthier looking and less likely to bang on about it.

Fashions change but traditions are maintained, the Christmas ghost story being one of them.  There is a convention that the Christmas Ghost Story was invented by Charles Dickens, and perfected by M R James and arguably the BBC.  Some might contend that the practice of telling weird tales at Christmas might well pre-date Christmas, when a storyteller round a campfire might choose to spook the hell out of an audience on a long winter night by telling them when might be waiting for them in the shadows, in the darkness or beyond the cave mouth, tent flap or door depending on your epoch or cultural frame of reference.

Certainly though Dickens, in ‘A Christmas Carol’ refined and defined the Christmas Ghost Story.  It has ghosts, it has a redemptive message of new life which is so necessary in a midwinter’s tale, it has a strong social message about combating want and ignorance, an enduring message for the sort of people who read it in the comfort of their own homes while others are in want or ignorance, a contrast always particularly sharp at Christmas.  And it’s actually fairly scary, if you don’t find the notion of knockers transforming or being visited by ghosts in the middle of the night terrifying, then I’d question whether you are the sort of person who has the emotional development required to be allowed unfettered access to a knife draw.

M R James was a school-master and a writer of ghost stories.  Every Christmas Eve he would invite schoolboys to his study and read a ghost story to them.  Behaviour that was charming then is, of course, the sort of thing that would land you with a visit from Ofsted, possibly the local constabulary and probably reporters from certain tabloids today.  And the world is the worse for that.

Luckily, the BBC embarked on a series of programmes in the 1970’s and 1980’s that allowed all of us to attend James’s study, with their classic ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’ strand.  Some were dramatisations of M R James stories, the best was Robert Powell as a schoolmaster, telling a James story, like the scariest episodes of Jackanory ever broadcast.

The attraction is, I suppose, twofold.  Firstly, certainly in the James tradition where the protagonist comes to a sticky spectral end, the protagonist somehow brings things upon himself, as does Scrooge.  Our viewer sitting at home need not fear such folly, but will at the conclusion of the tale hopefully consider how they can improve themselves.  The second is that Christmas is a time of dark nights, candlelight and port, all excellent accompaniments to a good ghost story.

The undisputed modern master of horror, Stephen King, recognised the importance of the ghost story for Christmas in ‘the Breathing Method’, where the horror story itself is nested within a tale far less conventional; that of a club for storytellers where there is a tradition of ghost stories for Christmas.  This, we learn, is about all that is traditional about the club.

Maybe it’s just that a good shiver in the dark makes us appreciate the light and the laughter of Christmas, makes us appreciate comfort and company, family and friends.  Makes us appreciate Christmas.