To celebrate the release of our Self Made Hero book of M. R. James adaptations – Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Vol 1 – we’re going to be counting down to Christmas in true Jamesian style, with a new ghostly image and nugget of info every day.
Day 18: “THE ASH-TREE”
M. R. James hated spiders. As a result, spiders and spider-webs and spider-like things crop up in a lot of his tales, but never quite so overtly as they do in his story The Ash-Tree.
As luck would have it, the Hypnobobs podcast has just this very day released a brand new reading of the story which is free to download and enjoy at your leisure.
The image above is from the 1975 Lawrence Gordon Clark directed (adapted to screenplay by David Rudkin) version of the story for BBC’s Ghost Stories For Christmas. I had the pleasure of meeting Lawrence Gordon Clark at the very first Haunted Studies – M. R. James Convention in Leeds in 2015. It was very strange, and lovely, to have a conversation over plates of sandwiches in Leeds library with the man responsible for so many iconic moments of television, as if he and I were equals in the field of adapting James (clearly we were, and are, not).
Moore & Reppion will be introducing a rare screening of two classic films from the BBC’s Ghost Story For Christmas series – The Signalman & Whistle And I’ll Come To You – at FACT Liverpool on Wednesday the 21st of December at 7pm.
The screening is part of Picturehouse’s nationwide A Warning to the Curious: Ghost Stories at Christmas season.