'Woman of Stone': A Pleasant Slice of Christmas Victorian Terror

Despite being an oddity for 1970s British television, A Ghost Story for Christmas is now considered the ideal, classic form of British horror filmmaking. The films (around 30-50 minutes long) were produced by the BBC and broadcast around Christmas for eight years straight. With one exception, they were all directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, whose creative control and atmospheric vision for the films (which mostly adapted the ghost stories of M.R. James but could also come from Charles Dickens or original scripts) ensured they stood out as Britain’s relationship with horror on the big and small screen developed in the latter half of the 20th century.

British horror has never been shy of ghastly and taboo scares; however, the country’s long history and entrenched, punishing class system means that the injustices and unaddressed agony of ghost stories have become the definitive means of expressing horror in British culture. There’s also the fact that the garish, gruesome excesses of the genre were tacitly frowned on by an industry that relegated its shocking, bloody monster tales to the lower-budgeted outsider realm of Hammer Horror.

But A Ghost Story for Christmas didn’t rely on unease and chills rather than apparent or explicit scares just because it’s a more palatable form of horror to a 20th-century British audience, but because it was shown on national television with strict broadcast standards and had to make do with limited budgets. It is a time-honored tradition to have budget constraints at the BBC, which the revived version of A Ghost Story for Christmas has apparently honored.