Horrible Thoughts Reviews: Martin's Close

Here at the Lair, one of our favourite Yuletide traditions is the Christmas ghost story, an extension of the old Christian belief that spirits are more active on the eve of saints' days and holidays (which is also, incidentally, the source of the Christianised Hallowe'en which falls on the nigh before All Saints' Day). In recent years, thanks in part to BBC4's attempts to bring the tradition back and to the current horror renaissance in both television and cinema, the Christmas ghost story has had something of a revival, and this season we've been spoilt for choice with three new television adaptations of literary ghost stories over the festive period. Naturally, the television at the Lair was tuned into each of them, so the next few Horrible Thoughts entries will be reviews of this year's entries.

Let's start with the shortest and perhaps the most unusual of the three, Martin's Close a half-hour short which aired on BBC4 on Christmas Eve, based on one of M R James' lesser known ghostly tales and adapted once again by Mark Gatiss. Gatiss has cemented himself as the BBC's resident horror buff, thanks to a number of successful ghost stories and his excellent documentaries A History of Horror and Horror Europa, and his reverence for and knowledge of horror fiction and cinema is matched only by the most seasoned of nerds. Unfortunately, Martin's Close is a lesser known tale for good reason. Like many of M R James' less popular works, it's more of a vignette than a story, told as a curious but eerie anecdote. Gatiss' adaptation keeps the anecdotal style with a framing device of an elderly historian sharing the tale of a trial before Judge Jefferys, the notorious "Hanging Judge", in which the case against the accused is built around a series of ghost sightings.

It's an intriguing concept, but neither the original story nor the adaptation does much with it, but whereas James' tale benefited from being sandwiched among a number of other subtly unsettling stories, Gatiss' adaption suffers from being isolated and only thirty minutes long, which proves not enough time to really develop an atmosphere but too slow to pack a punch. This is not for want of trying of course, there's some nicely subtle use of out-of-focus background shots and I enjoyed the repeated use of a folk song to build tension. Peter Capaldi is excellent as an eccentric but gifed prosecutor, and Elliot Levey is enjoyably dotty as Judge Jefferys himself.

Worth a look for fans of M R James, or as an appetiser for a ghost story marathon, but it's certainly no Whistle and I'll Come to You.

Five ghostly footprints out of ten.