The Stone Tape [TV] (1972)
Directed by Peter Sasdy

Film Review

Nigel Kneale's long association with the BBC began with his landmark Quatermass serials of the 1950s and culminated in what is arguably the spookiest play ever to have aired on British television.  In a similar vein to Kneale's previous Quatermass and the Pit (1958), The Stone Tape starts with an old-fashioned horror premise - an abandoned haunted house - and weaves in some innovative science-fiction elements to construct a truly memorable piece of television drama.  With the help of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which supplied the oppressively eerie soundscape that gives the play its unremittingly eerie atmosphere, Kneale drills deeply into his our darkest neuroses and for ninety minutes holds us spellbound with what is assuredly his most accomplished piece of writing.  Broadcast on BBC2 on Christmas Day 1972, The Stone Tape attracted a modest audience of just over two and half million in the UK but it was widely acclaimed by the critics and was the last of Kneale's great works for the BBC before he switched allegiances and moved to independent television.

Originally intended as part of the BBC's supernatural anthology series Dead of Night (broadcast in the autumn of 1972), The Stone Tape was made by the same production team (headed by producer Innes Lloyd) but was broadcast as a standalone play at Christmas.  Assigned to direct the play was the Hungarian born Peter Sasdy, an established television director who had recently delivered some impressive work on the classic serials Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  Whilst Sasdy devoted most of his career to television, he also distinguished himself with a handful of feature films for the cinema, notably his classy Hammer offerings Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) and Hands of the Ripper (1971).  Given the flamboyance he consistently showed on his Hammer horror films, Sasdy directs The Stone Tape with surprising restraint - only in the play's nightmarish climax does his penchant for visual extravagance become apparent, with some imaginative use of low budget effects used to terrifying effect as the true significance of the mysterious haunted room is revealed to us.

What makes The Stone Tape so effective is its simplicity.  Despite its sci-fi trappings, it is essentially a classic ghost story that plays on our irrational belief in and primal fear of all things supernatural.  If it were just a straightforward ghost story, however, it would hardly have had much of an impact.  The fantastic elements of the plot are for the most part a Hitchcockian MacGuffin - what drives the play and makes it so compelling and disturbing is its human dimension, primarily the conflict between the three main protagonists in the drama, played with remarkable conviction by Michael Bryant, Jane Asher and Iain Cuthbertson.  Kneale scripted these three characters as bold archetypes - the impetuous and domineering leader; the sensitive and meticulous researcher; and the humane pragmatist - but the principal actors imbue them with far greater depth so that they become the nexus around which the mystery is tightly fastened.  More than anything, it is the sustained intensity of the performances (helped by the old-fashioned method of multi-camera recording) that makes The Stone Tape so real and frightening.

Nigel Neale's play is also a dark, cleverly conceived commentary on science that still has a chilling resonance.  The arrogant exploitation mentality of Bryant's Peter Brock represents the very worst facet of scientific endeavour - driven by a destructive power complex, he attacks Nature like a rapist, brutally and without any thought to the consequences of his actions.  If Brock shows us the worst in man's materialistic and selfish instincts, Asher's Jill Greeley depicts man's better side - his desire to comprehend and engage with the natural world, to extend the frontier of man's knowledge for nobler reasons than the purely commercial.  The Stone Tape isn't just a supremely well realised ghost story - it's also a profound morality tale that cautions against the kind of opportunistic bad science that puts man in opposition to the natural world and risks leading him to his doom.  The vision of Hell that we fleetingly glimpse at the end of the play is nothing compared with what awaits mankind unless we change our ways.

Film Synopsis

A research team of a British electronics company intent on developing a revolutionary new recording medium moves into a Victorian mansion that has been deserted since the end of the Second World War.  The impatient head of the team, Peter Brock, is infuriated when his estate manager Roy Collinson tells him that the work to convert one of the rooms into a computer store has yet to commence.  This room is all that is left of the original building on which the house was built and has a reputation for being haunted.  Brock's computer programmer Jill Greeley proves to be acutely sensitive to paranormal phenomenon - she is the first member of the team to see the ghost of a young woman of the 1800s in the stone-walled room.  The image of the woman climbing a staircase that apparently needs nowhere before falling to her death haunts Jill and prompts Brock to concentrate his research effort on the room.  Brock is convinced that the ghost is nothing more than an image preserved by the stone walls and picked up by the human consciousness.  If he can understand how this process works and replicate it he will have achieved his dream of discovering a radical new method of recording that could consign conventional electronics to history.  Brock's clumsy experiments merely succeed in erasing the image of the young woman and he ends up returning to his original research when his paymasters begin to lose confidence in him.  Against Brock's wishes, Jill persists in her line of enquiry and discovers something even more terrifying has been preserved within the stone walls of the haunted room - a remnant of an ancient malevolent power dating back over a thousand years...