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 20: “IT WAS PINK, AND I THOUGHT, HOT.”
Guillermo Del Toro is a fan of ghost stories. A lover of all the classics like Blackwood, Machen, and of course, of M. R. James.
In a 2015 interview talking about his gothic ghost romance Crimson Peak, Del Toro mentioned the influence of James, and one of his works in particular, on the film.
I felt it was important for the ghost to be rather unique in appearance, and I chose to colour-code them in a way that has never been done before. There is a story… after M.R. James died, they found some papers of his and one of them was a sketch for a story that seemed to scholars to be quite autobiographical because the setting reminded them of a childhood property of his parents. And in it, he said he saw a ghost behind a little wooden door – and it’s the only time he didn’t describe them like crumpled linen, as he did in Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad or as featureless thing, as he did often – he described a ghost with features which while seemingly human were of a bright pink colour. That struck me very strongly.
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.