Review of Ghostwatch

I can understand why this show scared people when it came out. Filmed like some BBC live documentary, the show looks generally real. There are some places where the editing or camera-work would not have happened that way in a real live show, but I would expect people wouldn't think about that, and obviously kids wouldn't notice.

The problem with Ghostwatch is because it wants to be convincingly real, it starts out convincingly slowly. Over the first half hour there are talking-heads style interviews and general chit chat and information stuff that would only interest people who were really interested in seeing a ghost documentary. In fact, I suspect one reason this show was so effective is that the most skeptical people would have tuned out through boredom early on, leaving only believers watching by the end.

After the first tedious half hour I decided to fast forward until it looked like something interesting was going on. I wound up moving ahead another half hour.

But once you're into the last third of the movie, things get pretty intense. Even if you know it's a mockumentary, the final moments are truly chilling, and I can only imagine how terrifying this was to those who thought it was a real documentary.

Keep an eye out for ghostly apparitions. I missed most of them, although there is a youtube video that collects them all.