Ghostwatch (1992, Lesley Manning) (Patreon)

58/100

Funnily enough, I both was and wasn't the ideal viewer for this remarkably deft mockumentary. Ideally, it should be seen in a state of complete ignorance, and they don't come any more ignorant, on this subject as on many others, than me; I went in completely cold, and consequently spent much of the first 20 minutes or so uncertain whether I was watching a very droll comedy or a slow-burn horror film. (Never really thought it might be "real," and in any case I recognized Colin Stinton, who plays the satellite-linked skeptic, from his role as Desmond Curry in Mamet's The Winslow Boy. Though it took me a moment to place him.) However, one should also ideally be at least passingly familiar with what I discovered only afterward are a bevy of actual British TV personalities—quite well-known at the time, from what I can glean—all of whom are essentially playing themselves (e.g., the married couple genuinely were married in real life) and performing more or less the same on-air function they generally did back then. If you haven't seen Ghostwatch, the best description I can offer is this: Imagine Paranormal Activity as a live episode of something like Ghost Hunters* crossed with 60 Minutes, hosted by Mike Wallace and featuring, I dunno, Kathie Lee Gifford as the final girl on location in the haunted house, with Frank handling calls back in the studio. I'm dating myself with those examples, but there's no question in my mind that the whole fake-out would be orders of magnitude more effective—and probably significantly more chilling, especially at the very end— if you've seen its participants do this sort of thing countless times before.

Ironic, then, that I wound up appreciating Ghostwatch much more as an expert simulacrum (of a TV format I don't watch, featuring people I didn't recognize) than as a sneaky horror movie / War of the Worlds '38-style prank. Screenwriter Stephen Volk specializes in scary—by '92, he'd already penned Ken Russell's Gothic and contributed to the mess that was William Friedkin's The Guardian—but he clearly also did his homework for this project, as every structural and procedural aspect of the broadcast feels utterly credible, right down to including an aggressively glib funnyman (Craig Charles, whom Brits would have known from Red Dwarf, likewise playing "himself"; add Kevin Hart to my hypothetical U.S. version above) who's on hand to provide comic relief. The useless viewer phone calls; the forced badinage; the poorly chosen camera angles in the house; the game but slightly sweaty efforts to maintain interest during stretches when nothing much is happening—it all rings true, forcefully reminding me of why I avoid stuff like this. And yet the case itself, along with the earnest debate thus inspired, does exert a certain fascination, especially as it starts to look possible that what we're witnessing is the inadvertent exposure of a rather clumsy hoax. I remained engrossed throughout, enjoying the mimicry for its own sake and curious about what would happen next. Alas, when the time finally arrived to deliver on the boo! factor, my flesh did not crawl. What frightens people is notoriously subjective, and I guess the almost-subliminal-glimpse method doesn't rattle me as it does some others. Furthermore, the payoff to one then-innovative (I think), now-familiar wrinkle—call it "Wait, that footage isn't live"—turns out to be surprisingly bland, so much so that it almost needn't have happened at all. Plus I just think the whole nationwide-TV-audience-as-unwitting-séance thing is kinda silly. Again, though, the last 30 seconds would surely pack more of a punch if you know who Michael Parkinson is. I did not. 

* Not a show I've ever seen or honestly had even heard of; I just googled "tv shows paranormal" and it seems like a rough American equivalent, presumably minus the newsmagazine aspect we get here.