The Stone Tape (1972; Peter Sasdy; written
by Nigel Kneale) is a very modern and very English ghost story that may look
cheap by today’s standards, but is so
rich in ideas that will challenge you and stimulate the brain.
Superbly crafted by the legendary genre
writer Nigel Kneale, best known as the creator of the Quatermass series, The
Stone Tape follows the R&D division of a large electronics corporation as
it sets up shop in an old mansion (chosen for its privacy and out-of-the-way location
to prevent industrial espionage—from the beginning, tension is set).
They discover one of the basement rooms is
haunted—and in true technocrat style, they treat the haunting like “a mass of
data waiting for the proper interpretation.”
They set up their gizmos, and after some
trial and error, hypothesize that ghosts are “recordings” of extreme psychic or
physical incidents, usually painful.
These “recordings” are trapped in the
walls and floor (thus, ‘the stone tape’), and, when psychic energy is provided
by humans entering the room, the “recording” is activated in a loop.
The engineers get to work, but in trying
to isolate the signal, manage to “erase” it.
Thinking that because the signal (the
ghost) is “erased,” the “tape” must be “blank,” the techies shut down the
experiment and pack their gear.
They didn’t hypothesize that it wasn’t the
rocks of the walls that “recorded” the “signal,” but that something (that has
been in the rocks for 7,000 years) is mimicking
the signal.
And without a signal to mimic, the Unnamed
Ancient Weirdness (a cousin to Lovecraft’s Old Ones, perhaps?) is very, very annoyed…
A fabulous and very spooky twist on the
haunted house subgenre, this film cannot be recommended enough, for both
science fiction and horror fans. There are no cheap scares, but plenty of
unnerving tension as director Sasdy keeps things moving at a breathless pace
that increases the fear.
But the real star of The Stone Tape is
Kneale’s dialog and structure—he doesn’t waste any time, and if an element of
the script isn’t being used to be propulsive to the plot, then it is used to
flesh out the casts’ personalities. I think the writer is a believer of
Heraclitus’ dictum that “your character is your fate,” with the chief engineer
of Kneale’s teleplay (with his awful treatment of coworkers and girlfriends)
setting himself up for a big fall.
Meanwhile, from the “Humans are Martians”
thesis of Quatermass and the Pit, to the surveillance-state game shows of The
Year of the Sex Olympics (1968),
I’ve always found Kneale’s ideas to be so
thought-provoking that they make the ganglia twitch: Kneale was perhaps the most intelligent
writer who worked in science fiction television.
While most of his work, because it was for
the BBC, is unfortunately not available in the US
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