Dialogues on "The Secret of Crickley Hall"
Watched that three part, three hour, BBC drama 'The Secret of Crickley Hall', filmed in Manchester and based on a book by James Herbert. It was a nice, spooky old school ghost story set in both modern day and the 1940s. It reminded me of such movies as 'The Orphanage', 'The Awakening' and 'The Woman in Black'. Unfortunately, it wasn't as scary as any of those. However, due to the strength of the story it was much better than 'The Awakening', which I thought was overrated and dull, if not as good as the other two. It was also seriously depressing, and whatever punch it lacked in terms of scares it made up for in terms of sheer sadness and tragedy. It did suffer a little from being televisual and some of the the acting not up to movie level, but as a Manchester based TV drama I'd say it was a resounding success.Really? I'm sorry, but I proper disagree with virtually all of that (except it WAS a lot like the Orphanage and it wasn't remotely scary)
The random cuts between past and present were ridiculous. For the most part it was like two completely unrelated programs had been spliced together. The villagers in the modern day were almost all wearing old fashioned clothing, and the ghosts were sometimes solid, making it incredibly difficult to work out what time period any particular scene was in, and who was dead and who wasn't. The story basically boiled down to: Woman loses kid through her own negligence, gets haunted by ghosts for absolutely no reason, finds out her kid died ages ago for reasons entirely unrelated to the ghosts, gets attacked by an old man for virtually no reason, then watches the ghost kids leave the house even though they died in the house.
Review for BBC Drama The Secret of Crickley Hall
It was very straightforward to follow and the cuts between past and present were all related. The villagers in modern day were all wearing modern clothes. I never had a single issue with not knowing which time it was in; it was obvious.Ghosts don't need a reason to haunt; they haunt because they are ghosts; they do need a reason as to why they're lingering and they had reason. The man attacks for a reason too. The ghosts leave because the lady takes them away like she had always planned to to end their suffering; they'd been waiting for her, but she needed her body to be found first. Most of your criticisms could be aimed at any ghost story really; they don't tend to be that credible because they're ghost stories and not based on anything real.
The thing that bugged me was that she was in denial about her child being dead for the first two episodes, hearing his voice telling her he was alive and such things, found out he had died over the phone, and was like "Noooooooo! Okay, I'm completely over that now." and was quite chipper for the rest of the program, even happily grinning as the ghosts left the house.
Also, a large part (virtually all) of the series revolved around the headmaster abusing a Jewish kid who refused to speak English (or couldn't - I wasn't sure which). This kid, Stefan, was absolutely fine and lived until 2009, yet still appeared to be haunting the house. Or possibly want haunting it, it was impossible to tell who was a ghost and who was just in the past due to the dodgy editing.
None of my family had any idea who the old man who was determined to either have a child or murder one was though, or where he'd got the idea that he had to sacrifice a kid into the well, and this seemed important. Presumably he was one of the kids in the orphanage, but this wasn't remotely clear to any of us, and he didn't seem to have any motive at all (except he was getting whipped by the headmaster when he was in the house, who had no real reason to whip an elderly man. So maybe, rather than a ghost, he was a memory of the abuse the man had received as a child? No, because he also whipped the mother for no reason in an earlier episode.