We're Rather Better Equipped

On Hauntology, Nigel Kneale, and Recording Trauma

The Stone Tape (1972) Dir. Peter Sasdy

A team of scientists move into a state-of-the-art research facility built on a Victorian mansion. They discover a ghostly presence in one of the rooms and set about trying to record and understand it with the aid of technology. 

“These walls are a lot older than the rest of the house. They've just been - built onto. In fact, they must have been knocked down and rebuilt and generally messed about a lot in the last thousand years. Oh, yes. The foundations might be Saxon.” - Roy Collinson

Nigel Kneale is one of the biggest and most influential names in British horror. But I hadn’t watched any of his work until after I’d seen some of the culture he’d gone on to inspire. When I eventually sat down to watch Quatermass and the Pit, I realised how much of The League of Gentlemen was a loving homage to the work of Kneale.

The Stone Tape, if you’ve not seen it before, will encourage that sense of déjà vu. Peter Brock, the head of the team at Ryan Electric Products, could easily be played by Reece Shearsmith in a wig. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that Alice Lowe’s character in Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place - Madeleine Wool - is modelled on Jane Asher’s performance in The Stone Tape. There have been so many parodies and playful nods to this type of seventies BBC horror, that it might be difficult to completely immerse yourself in the story at first, but I’d really encourage persevering.

The story is generally framed from Jill Greeley’s (Jane Asher) perspective as she joins the team and discovers the ghost. As such, the film unfurls as a critique of the rampant misogyny of the seventies, with Jill often being dismissed as a hysterical woman and rarely, if ever, being listened to. The fact that she’s a computer programmer feels significant too. Women were the first “computers” and hired to carry out calculations and computations that were considered to be beneath the men, and thus were less well paid. Jill’s hypotheses about the ghost almost always end up being correct, and usually go ignored. She hasn’t been hired for her analysis or her opinions, she’s there to program. 

There’s also a suggestion that Brock and Greeley had a deeper relationship once, or maybe an affair. The way Brock tries to reframe it as something one sided is transparently manipulative. 

The Stone Tape is interested in exploring what a ghost is from a fresh, and believably scientific perspective. It posits that ghosts are just projections or data that has been imprinted on the nearby environment. Trauma that has been married to brickwork and rock. We spend a lot of our lives surrounded by four walls, does it not stand to reason that a part of us etches itself into those walls at heightened times of emotion?

Running with this idea, the research team become excited about the prospect of stone being a natural recording device. A new resource that can allow people to transmit and record themselves at will. It’s such a great concept and one that continues to excite and interest people even now. The Stone Tape Theory, despite generally being debunked, continues to have plenty of fans. I think it also folds quite neatly into postmodern cultural theories of hauntology, psychogeography and spectral ethnography. 

“The ontological horror at the core of these stories is that the stone – which represents the natural world and the uses we carve out for it – is unknowable. It’s been here, affecting the land, whether erected as a monument or laid as bricks, for longer than we can fathom, and its inaccessible past has some frightening bearing on the present. Unlocking the secrets of these stones exposes the mind, audibly and visually, to thousands of years of recorded trauma. The stone tape triggers a cataclysmic playback that overloads the psyche. The ultimate reminder of our own “impermanence” is the vast archive of others.” - Sean McGeady

The past surrounds and haunts us. It is inescapable. Those who have the hubris to believe that they can ignore it, or worse: harness and exploit it, will themselves be forced to reconcile with it.

The Stone Tape has been a consistent source of inspiration for various science-inflected horror like Poltergeist and John Carpenter’s 1987 film The Prince of Darkness which even had a reference to Kneale University. I love Kneale’s unimpressed response to this: 

"For the record I have had nothing to do with the film and I have not seen it. It sounds pretty bad. With a homage like this, one might say, who needs insults?" - Nigel Kneale

Love it (and I’m a bit of a Prince of Darkness apologist).

I don’t want this post to go on too long but it would be wrong to finish without mentioning the use of sound in The Stone Tape. The sound design and score was recorded and composed by Desmond Briscoe at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It’s haunting, deafening, menacing stuff. Worth watching just for the sound alone.

Where can I watch it in the UK?

Sadly, it’s not available to stream legitimately anywhere (even on BBC iPlayer) but someone has uploaded it to YouTube here.

Pairs well with

Ghostwatch (1992, dir. Lesley Manning, available to rent for £3.49 on Amazon, but also available on the internet archive here) was released by the BBC as a DVD double feature with The Stone Tape in 2013. 

It makes sense as a double bill. Both were made-for-tv features for the BBC, both were about ghostly hauntings, and both were largely about the intersection of technological progress and the unknown. It was originally conceived as a mini-series in the vein of Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit, which further illustrates Kneale’s lasting impact on British horror.

I saw Ghostwatch “live” on TV when it came out, so I must have been 11. I would watch Sarah Greene, one of the hosts, on Saturday morning TV every week and so I absolutely believed this was real. It was one of the most terrifying things I’d seen. 

If you’re not already aware of it, Ghostwatch is a mockumentary/found footage film. One that influenced and inspired Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick to make The Blair Witch Project. The conceit is of a “live” broadcast from the “most haunted house in Britain”, where Sarah Greene and Craig Charles, as roving reporters, investigate the house while Michael Parkinson hosts and conducts interviews from the studio. “Callers” would spot ghostly happenings in the footage that would be played back and analysed.

As we discover more about the ghost and the history of the house, it becomes clear that the very act of watching the broadcast is making the ghost stronger. As with The Stone Tape, the very act of observing and recording/broadcasting the haunting mutates it in unexpected ways.

Further Reading

• That Sean McGeady quote (above) is from a Quietus article looking back at The Stone Tape 50 years later.

• In 2016, Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio, In Fabric) directed a BBC radio drama version of The Stone Tape with Julian Barratt. That’s not on iPlayer right now but it is on YouTube here.

• An interview with Mark Gatiss about the legacy of Nigel Kneale.

• The Kneale Tapes - documentary about the writer.

• There’s a documentary about Ghostwatch - Ghostwatch: Behind the Curtains - available to stream on the BFI Player.

Other Recommendations

• There’s a new adaptation of a lost Nigel Kneale play - You Must Listen. It has Toby Jones and Reece Shearsmith. I should have written about this earlier in the month as I think this has just left iPlayer (luckily, someone has uploaded it to YouTube).

• Mark Gatiss stars in this radio adaptation of Kneale’s The Road. 

• A two hour collection of Nigel Kneale related radio content.