Ghost Stories, or, Creepy Watson

(Or, Bil-BOOO Baggins)

While searching for Spooktober-appropriate movies on Kanopy, I stumbled on Ghost Stories, a 2017 adaptation of an earlier stage play. I’d never heard of it, it had generally favorable reviews, and it contains the ever-affable Martin Freeman, so I gave it a shot.

The format is an anthology of three stories of the supernatural. The framing story centers around Philip Goodman, a skeptic who has a television show where he investigates and debunks cases of mediums, ghost sightings, and other claims of paranormal activity. He’s contacted by one of his heroes, a skeptic who made similar documentaries throughout the 1970s, who challenges him with a folder filled with three separate cases that he’d never been able to debunk.

Goodman accepts the challenge and visits each of the men who’d reported a story of contact with the supernatural. We’re introduced to each one, Goodman starts recording, and then we see their account of the encounter play out.

The movie starts out pretty strong; I especially enjoyed the presentation of the earlier documentaries, perfectly mimicking the 1970s BBC style. You gradually get a sense of Goodman as a character instead of just the person documenting the stories, since everyone he meets seems to be dismissive or outright insulting of him and his dogmatic skepticism.

Unfortunately, the stories themselves just aren’t very good. It’s all shot and performed well, with pretty interesting mid-2000s style cinematography and lighting and jump scares. If you’re familiar with Steven Moffat’s adaptations of Dracula and Jekyll, I got a very similar vibe overall. But by the end of the first story, I was left asking, “that was it?” and hoping the other two would be better, or at least scarier.

Instead, the second seems to be going for creepy comedy that doesn’t land at all1, and the third is barely even a story before jumping back to the framing story.

Overall, it ended up seeming very pleased with itself, which is something that I might’ve indulged had the “ghost stories” promised by the title been more compelling. I did get a vague sense that it would land better with people who grew up in the UK, because while there are no specific callbacks that I recognized, it feels like it would be immediately nostalgic to people who’d seen Ghostwatch when they were younger. Like if someone in the US made a modern anthology with the same vibe as In Search Of…, I would be extremely forgiving of that.

Or it’s possible that it just worked a lot better as a stage play?

As it is, I’d recommend giving this one a pass. It’s tough to dismiss it completely, since it manages to coast pretty far on style alone, but in the end, none of it worked for me, thematically, cinematically, or spookily. It hints at questions of guilt, faith, and belief, but it doesn’t actually say anything about any of them, and it doesn’t make up for that lack of depth with any satisfying scares.

By the way: if you’re unfamiliar with the term “Creepy Watson,” it’s a meme in reference to a Sherlock Holmes video game that was a little too aggressive in making sure you always had your sidekick close at hand.

1
Plus it’s not a ghost story ↩︎

1 Plus it’s not a ghost story