'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. 

But the latest installment in the anthology, Woman of Stone, clearly feels like a product of modern horror – gone are the extended, observant moments of picturesque dread, replaced with dialogue hammering home themes whenever it can be. The subtext is literalized, and revisionist interpretation distracts us from horror craft – despite noble ambitions and a pleasant slice of Victorian terror, Woman of Stone doesn’t endure in the recesses of our speculative, anxious imagination.

Newlyweds Jack (Éanna Hardwicke) and Laura (Phoebe Horn) have just moved to a charming country house in a small village – both are creative; however, the meek, kindly Laura talks down her story-writing despite making some money from it, while we never see any evidence of Jack’s talent as an artist despite his overconfidence in his prospects. We meet Jack and Laura as their housekeeper, Mrs. Dorman (Monica Dolan), lays down some rules – namely, fish is served on Fridays (a Christian tradition) and mutton on Wednesdays (no known religious connotations). Jack is verbose, over-talkative, and casually condescending to his more timid, genial wife – a fault Mrs. Dorman is wary about.

Through Mrs Dorman, we learn of the village’s local ghost story – two stone effigies of medieval knights in the church that come to life on Christmas Eve to stalk the town and wreak out an ancient punishment. Mrs Dorman is superstitious, but one of Woman of Stone’s most decisive choices is giving her perspective a grave, conflicted sincerity that doesn’t belittle her irrational faith in the spooky story – often wordlessly expressed by the capable Dolan. In contrast, the town’s young doctor, Zubin (Mawaan Rizwan), steadies Laura’s nervous disposition with reason and friendliness, quickly becoming a source of jealousy for the temperamental and slyly controlling Jack.

In Gatiss’ version of The Railway Children author E. Nesbit’s ghost story “Man-Size in Marble,” the threat of haunted knights mirrors the intentional mistreatment that patriarchal marriage enforces on women (Laura fearfully dreams of Jack’s face replacing the stone visage of the effigies). The husband’s inadequacies are perceived as deliberate efforts from his wife to undermine him because the Victorian man would sooner believe that women were a subversive order than question his own authority.

It’s a good modern reading of a Victorian text (after Sherlock and Dracula, Gatiss is pretty good at those), but Woman in Stone’s primary source of unsettlement is the sense that it could have unfolded with sharper visual craft and a less didactic script. A few shots of the knights play with shadow and silhouette (accompanied by satisfying gravelly sound design), suggesting ambiguity about their supernatural form but pales compared to Clark’s misty, disquieting images. 

Woman in Stone is so willing to explain itself – including a historically implausible resolution for Jack – that it saps the venom from Gatiss’ interpretation of the text. A framing device casts British icon Celia Imrie as an infirm Nesbit who tells the ghost story to the attentive doctor (also Rizwan) visiting her. The film concludes with a delicate, touching reflection from Nesbit on the suffering she endured from an abusive husband. Still, this thoughtful coda would feel more meaningful if the ghost story itself had been more subtle and evocative of its themes.

Woman of Stone is streaming on iPlayer and is expected to join the rest of the modern episodes from the A Ghost Story for Christmas anthology on select PBS Passports in early 2025. As always, check your local listings.