It's All Hallows Eve, that time of year when it is said the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest, and all kinds of spirits and specters can cross over. A perfect time to share ghostly tales of the unknown! And so this evening I share, courtesy of YouTube, one such tale.
Lawrence Gordon Clark's made-for-TV adaptation of Charles Dicken's The Signalman scared the crap out of my brothers and I when we first saw it as kids in the late-1970s. It features Denholm Elliott as a railway signalman in nineteenth-century England, haunted by the repeated appearance of a specter at the entrance of a railway tunnel. Disaster follows each ghostly apparition until . . .
Well, I can't give too much away, now, can I?
What I will share is Helen Wheatley's observation that Clark's adaptation of The Signalman maintains the original story's "sense of decorum and restraint . . . withholding the full revelation of the supernatural until the very last moment, and centering on the suggestion of a ghostly presence rather than the horror of visceral excess and abjection."
And here's what John Coulthart's has to say about The Signalman in the anthology Horror! 333 Films to Scare You to Death.
The Signalman conjures a palpable quality of dread from a few simple ingredients – a dismal railway cutting with a baleful warning light, the black mouth of a railway tunnel and Denholm Elliot's haunted features.
When an unnamed stranger comes to visit Elliott's lonely signalman a series of fireside talks lay bare the workman's recurrent premonitions of disaster haunting his stretch of the line. The unpredictability of this setting works in its favor [with] The Signalman summon[ing] new fears for an industrial age, of sudden calamity and death delivered by an alliance of thundering steam engines and an implacable fate. The scenes in the dank railway cutting have an authentic, visceral chill and [the film] successfully withholds the tragic secret at the heart of the tale right to the moment of its shattering climax.