User Reviews

This was a very nicely executed concept of Nigel Kneale's.

Effects, directing and budgets had grown up a little since the cash-strapped days of Quatermass in the 1950's.

The premise was that if an event impacted upon the human psyche with sufficient vigour, a remanence of the emotional distress was recorded upon the physical fabric of the immediate world. As stone is usually much more resilient a substance than organic materials such as cloth or wood, the remanence would endure in it longest.

Of course, the story wasn't quite that simple. Sometimes there were overlays of imparted memory from different ages. Sometimes history not only repeated itself, but was induced to repetition by an earlier memory. The basis of all hauntings.

There were lots of subtle plays upon the idea, and likewise the susceptibility of individuals to detect or respond to these recordings. The question was posed; if nobody could see the ghost walk, would it actually walk?

Against this scenario, came a team of modern - what might be called boffins - attempting to develop a new type of recording medium. They stumbled upon the haunting and began to research a method by which it might be commercially exploited.

For the most part it was intelligently realised. The creepy borderline between human emotional frailty and the timelessness of its seeming persistence on the substance of the world, evolved in a suspenseful - if rather slow - revelation.

If I have a criticism of the drama, it is one of Nigel Kneale's in general. Characters were just too emotional at times. Conflicts seemed needlessly exaggerated, arguments and reactions too histrionic. There were occasions when I found myself muttering 'oh, for heavens sake, sit down and stop shouting', or 'why not just talk this over rationally'. As I say, this seemed to be a Kneale trademark, but I found the lack of a 'safe pair of hands' in most of his work tended to detract from the entertainment. But maybe that's just the way I was brought up.

If you get a chance to watch it by all means do. However, I saw it when first broadcast, and though I found the evolving conflict between science and supernatural extremely gripping, the strident characterisation rather irritated me even then.

If somebody hands me a copy, I'll give it a whizz. But for the most part hysteria just turns me off. It is too often used as a prop for a poor script.

Not an easy movie to find, but finally got to watch a copy. Enjoyable overall, though fairly low budget....felt like I was watching an old Avengers TV show. (spoilers to follow) However, very early in the film I was immediately reminded of The Haunting of Hill House (a much better film). We have: 1)a female lead who is clearly unbalanced, somewhat hysterical (though the subtleties of Hill House are replaced by crawling on the floor crying), 2) a group of people studying a "haunted" location, 3) some of whom are more "sensitive" to the events than others. While that may seem a bit of a reach, the ending (the woman dies and becomes part of the haunted location) fairly well closes the case. Once you then see the parallels, some of the charm of this film fades. Again, not bad, not great, interesting....but a poor shadow of Hill House. IMHO

After reading the positive reviews here, I was expecting the work to have the caliber of say, "The Innocents", or "The Haunting of Hill House", ... I couldn't be more disappointed.

Even science fiction/fantasy has its limits of credibility. Typing furiously into a teletype to 'program' a computer to recover 7000 year old events recorded into stones is not an intelligent premise or believable in my book, especially when the computer didn't really tell us anything more than what the human beings perceived. This group of supposedly hot shot research scientist then thought this was a breakthrough opportunity in the technology of recording medium. That just sent me howling.

Now if the characters were convinced that the hauntings were nothing but recorded signals from the past, why were they so frightened by it? Finally the ensemble of actors must thought that they were performing a Greek tragedy in an open air amphitheater. You see, they enunciated loudly and clearly to one another all the time even when they are in a small room. It gets very irritating quickly.

Approach it as a comedy if you must watch this.

Nigel Keale exists at the center of two lines, between horror and science fiction, finding ancient evil with modern technology, placing learned men in the howling maw of ancient occult terror. Also: this movie has informed so much of my own theories on hauntings. We aren't seeing ghosts. Reality is like a videotape that has been taped over so many times that some things, often the worst things, keep reappearing through the new footage.

Peter Brock leads a team at Ryan Electrics that is trying to create a new recording media to get ahead of the Japanese. Instead of an office, they all move into an old Victorian mansion with one room no one will ever finish, because the builders claim that this place has been haunted since it was built some time in the time of the Saxons.

When they go into the room, they hear a woman screaming and one of the team, Jill, claims she has a vision of a woman falling to her death. Instead of working on their real mission, the team starts digging up the past, like how a maid killed herself here and there had been an exorcism inside the walls of the building.

Peter belives that the ancient stone that forms the room can act as a recoding device for memories and emotions. He wants to exploit this but no one experiences the stone the same way. They fail to replicate the recording and are soon forced to share the space with a team seeking to create a better washing machine. Peter cruelly sends Jill away and refuses to let her share the theory that the past recording has now been erased. She's right, as the room overpowers her, recording her last moments, screaming for Peter.

England being England, this aired as a ghost story over the holidays. It ended up influencing several filmmakers in America. Just a few moments of watching this and you can see that Prince of Darkness starts as nearly the same movie and then Carpenter decides to stop paying homage to Keale and switches channels to Italian horror.

Director Peter Sasdy also made Taste the Blood of Dracula, Hands of the Ripper, Countess Dracula, Nothing but the Night, Welcome to Blood City and, perhaps most essentially, The Lonely Lady.

Nigel Kneale serves up a revised version of his classic Quatermass plot, without the aliens. The basic idea for The Stone Tape ghost phenomenon can be found amongst the numerous brilliant ideas in Kneale's earlier Quatermass stories. Unfortunately this revised take on paranormal phenomenon examined by scientists, falls short of a satisfactory resolution. A major issue with this film is the two lead characters; one of whom is a complete unrepentant bastard and the other of whom walks into any room with resolve but rarely leaves without disintegrating into a dithering idiot. By about the fifth time the woman falls apart and the man screams at her to get over it, you just want to smack the both of them. Michael Bryant's over-acting is at such a gratingly fevered pitch, it's as though he thinks he's single-handedly moving the entire plot forward. The lack of sympathetic characters makes this film far inferior to the amazing performances in something like Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit serial (1958-59).