A Warning to the Curious (1972)

 

Director: Lawrence Gordon Clark

Screenplay: Lawrence Gordon Clark

Based on the short story by M.R. James

Cast: Peter Vaughan as Mr Paxton; Clive Swift as Dr. Black; Julian Herington as the Archaeologist; John Kearney as Ager; David Cargill as Boots

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #34

 

No diggin' 'ere.

Broadcast as part of the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas strand, the public broadcaster made a staple one hour TV films especially at Christmas of supernatural and horror genre stories¹. They made good in general, regardless of the time of the season, for fascinating productions over the decade just in the seventies in terms of horror storytelling, including feature length stories or one-shot series, and one such production. From the series, not the only M.R. James adaptation over decades, A Warning to the Curious is a famous one.

Most will know of James, an English born author, for Casting the Runes. Adapted as Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957), in which a man is hexed by an occultist with a slip of paper with hexing runes snuck onto his person, James for me came early in my life with a BBC adaptation of Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968), which I saw in secondary school as a young teenager. James, between that story where a man finds a whistle buried in the sand and is constantly, after blowing it, afraid he is haunted, and A Warning to the Curious, James has made the English coastline a haunted place, proto-hauntlogy as well as here playing with our folklore as it begins with the idea of three Saxon crowns of Anglia. Only one, in the prologue, of these crowns buried to protect the land from invaders is said to survive, one which a clerk named Mr. Paxton (Peter Vaughan) wishes to discover in ‘Seaburgh’ in north Norfolk.

This television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark, who directed and wrote the adaptation, actually condenses and rearranges the original short story to work on the screen better. Originally set up with two men encountering Paxton, who recounts back the progress to finding the remaining crown, the tale in that extended flashback now becomes half of this TV film's length whilst the two men become merely Dr. Black (Clive Swift), who at first is the only other person at the bed and breakfast with Black only to be pulled into his tale when Paxton has the crown, only to be immediately haunted by a shadowy figure.

Digging up the past, especially graves and sacred sites, are a moral quandary, finding old (centuries old) graves and placing the discoveries in museums a morally complicated idea. In colonial history, expositions to the likes of Egypt have been rightly condemned. Even in our own lands however, how we treat the past earth is carefully done, such as when construction accidentally uncovers burial grounds and everything shuts down to carefully move them. Then you have an event such as King Richard III being found beneath a Leicester car park in 2012, after a search for his remains, where even the decision of when he would be reburied carefully debated. Here, there is a supernatural and folklore slant of this moral, to never transgress the dead, which I would argue we still have even in a materialistic worldview. Here however the dead get angry, as even before that, the prologue introduces the last living guardian killing a man digging the ground where the crown lays just for his landowner.

Even after his death however, this figure will haunt the film. Both in his existence, as Paxton learns of him as a very physically ill man, the last of his family, who shortened his life in his task, but also after the crown is found, as a shadow over Paxton's shoulder who people if they squint can see. An audible motif, of strained breathing, builds this film's eerie atmosphere immensely.

The TV movie is completely successful. Lawrence Gordon Clark himself made his career with productions like this and with this adaptation, it embraces the tone of the short story whilst adding its own ominous one. The results evokes the aforementioned "Hauntology" movement, a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida which was latched upon retroactively to tackle how a huge part of British pop culture still effected people reflecting upon it, the eeriness of the past haunting the present which can intertwine with nostalgia but with as much an ill-ease too. This usually referred to the culture of the seventies, including horror television, though whilst not set in the then-modern day A Warning to the Curious is tapping both into this idea through its subject matter, literally unsettling the past, but that its production values and style helps stamp it to its era but also stand outside of it.  The steam trains in particular stood out for this. They were still easy to access for productions like this, elaborate instant production design, yet they are ghosts of the past even before they were replaced by electric railways. Their existence here as archaic forms to my generation, and more so to the ones after mine, startling as with fully accomplished design to capture the plot's time period, such details were still available with ease alongside costumes or the timelessness of Norfolk, which is a new geographical location from James' original narrative one of Suffolk.

The film has many virtues. The music is exceptional, quiet until necessary when its crawls under the skin. The performances are good, not surprising as, with Clive Swift for example, British actors would move between our television and cinema with ease, none looked down as inferior to either. The setting is perfect in how it evokes how the British countryside is beautiful yet haunting, and it is fascinating that the production changed the location of the narrative completely as a creative choice. The decision evokes that, whilst what is British in the modern day is rightly multinational and multifaceted, one of said facets this belong to should not be forgotten. The ageless world of railways, bed and breakfasts, of curiosity stores, things you can find even decades later in the post-internet day, where you can still find 19th century books and taxidermy foxes as here, and these coastal locations are still in existence in the modern day.

It should not be pinned down as one specific type of British/English culture, as it can change and flutter in spectrum of context, but it is persistent even today as there are still B&Bs, haunted beaches and local woodland, making this slow burn drama still striking as a horror tale you could set in the modern day. Positively, M.R. James's tale has become timeless as a result, without any problematic ideology of the author or antiquated language have, or at least anything severer than being by all accounts reactionary, the tale feeling more a quaint lark before its own finale is macabre and more so due to its matter-of-fact nature. It is goreless, but the result is even more startling than even the source material in its tone, a dark moral conclusion of not angering the dead that ends the tale, even punishing the bystanders...

 

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1) One time they even screened, as part of the arts-based British documentary series Omnibus on 23 December 1979, a feature length adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's Schalcken the Painter, an impressive production worthy of its own review.