Price: £13.00
UK Certificate: TBC
Director: Stephen Featherstone and Robert Lloyd Parry
Country: UK
Distributor: Nunkie Films

Many readers will be familiar with the work of Montague Rhodes James, the mediæval scholar and Provost of Eton and King’s Coll­ege, Cambridge, now best remembered as the author of what many consider the finest ghost stories ever written in the English language. James, as is well known, wrote many of his exquisitely spooky tales to be read aloud among friends at Christmas Eve gatherings; and anyone who has ever sat before a winter fire and done just this knows how well-suited the stories are to such treatment (the BBC even dug up Christopher Lee to read some on telly a few Christmases back).

Robert Lloyd Parry has been touring his one-man stage shows based on MR James’s stories for some years now, and this DVD captures two of them for posterity under the title A Pleasing Terror – “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” (see FT206:56–57) and “The Mezzo­tint”, a pairing of two delightfully creepy tales in which James’s characteristically obsessive yet naïve antiquaries come upon disturbing pictures of things that you really don’t want to see…

Parry, who here bears a striking resemblance to James himself, is the ideal teller for these wonderfully suggestive tales, capturing perfectly the rhythms of the author’s prose, the circumlocutions that skirt the unnameable and the deceptively breezy tone that is gradually overtaken by ghastly horrors. If you haven’t read these stories, I shan’t give anything away here; and if they are – as for me – old favourites, then it’s a real pleasure seeing them read by someone who so obviously knows and loves his James.

Filmed precisely and with a minimum of fuss in the suitably atmospheric Cambridgeshire locale of Hemingford Grey Manor, this DVD reminds us that, for all the special effects and CGI we’re constantly bludgeoned with in contemporary horror movies, there’s not much that can compete with listening to a good ghost story by flickering candlelight – Jackanory for forteans, and highly recommended.