Ghost Story (1981)

Director: John Irvin                                            Writer: Lawrence D. Cohen
Film Score: Philippe Sarde                                Cinematography: Jack Cardiff
Starring: John Houseman, Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

In 1985 I read my first horror novel, Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. I was blown away by nearly everything in it at the time, and to this day it’s the most well constructed novel I’ve ever read. As a result, I wanted to like the film version so much that it almost pained me to watch it. Unfortunately, Ghost Story is not a very good film. And even if it’s a bad one I’m not sure I’m in a position to make that judgment because of how much I completely enjoyed Straub’s novel. Nevertheless, I think there are good things to take away from the experience, not the least of which is the superb casting of four cinematic legends at the time: John Houseman, Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. British director John Irvin has made a string of films throughout his career that have never risen above a solid mediocre, and this is one of them. Straub’s previous two novels, Julia and If You Could See Me Now, were made into moderately successful films in the seventies, but those were fairly straightforward stories. Beginning with Ghost Story the writer embarked on a much more ambitious and sophisticated style that would launch him onto the bestseller list, and simultaneously prove to be unfilmable. But it’s not just the screenplay and the direction that’s bad. The score by Philippe Sarde is average, and the editing is terrible. The greatest sin the film commits, however, is that it’s not really very frightening. The whole production seems like something that should have been made for television.

The film begins in a snowy, New England village, John Houseman pacing his study with a snifter of brandy. In another house, Melvyn Douglas is talking in his sleep through a bad dream. Across town, Fred Astaire seems to be having a real nightmare. Finally, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is so physically affected by his dream that he’s thrashing about in a sweat. Then a wonderful credit sequence begins, with a milk-like substance dripping down the screen, revealing names and ghostly images of the moon. When the action returns Houseman is telling a ghost story to the rest of the old men. It’s a meeting of the Chowder Society, a club where the members dress in tuxedos and tell scary stories to each other. From there the scene shift to an urban high rise apartment, water spilling over the bathtub and Craig Wasson, in a towel, ignoring it. He wants to know the identity of the naked woman, face down in his bed. But she won’t tell him. Finally, he turns her over and her corpse-like face makes him recoil in fear, right through the window to his death. Later the phone rings and Wasson, this time with no moustache, answers the phone to learn that his twin brother has died. Turns out the boys are Fairbanks’ sons and Wasson goes home for the funeral. He thinks the death might have something to do with his brother’s fiancée, and when his father winds up dead after falling off a bridge he confronts the Chowder Society about what they’ve been hiding. It turns out, it’s a lot.

Straub’s story is purposefully complex, and while that kind of literary technique can sometimes work in film, it doesn’t here. Later, Astaire goes to look at what seems to be the old Psycho house and finds a couple of squatters. This is a subplot that probably could have been done away with, but screenwriter Lawrence Cohen kept it, and tried to shoehorn everything else from the novel in as well. There’s a reason that Hollywood never tried to film Straub’s other two great works of horror, Shadowland and Floating Dragon. Like this one, the books are tangled webs of plots and subplots that don’t really make themselves understood as part of a whole until almost the end. And that almost never works onscreen. Ghost Story is the case in point. Wasson eventually decides he needs to join the Chowder Society if he’s going to get anything out of the old geezers, and has to tell a ghost story as the price of admission. The one he tells is about his brother’s fiancée, Alice Krige, who was his girlfriend first. This really sets things in motion when the geriatric gang realize she might be a ghost from their past, out for revenge. While the novel was fantastic, the screenplay, the direction, and the acting all fall flat. The old stars do their best with an uninspired script, but most of the other actors are not very good at all, and that includes Krige. Though Craig Wasson probably would have been a decent TV actor, he’s not up to the skill level required to make the story work on the big screen. Ghost Story is such a brilliant book that the film is probably better enjoyed after reading it. It’s just too bad it wound up in the hands of a creative team that couldn’t make it work better onscreen.