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Ghost
Story Tribute - Page 1
To
define a ghost is not easy.
To define a ghost story is even harder.
Ghosts are usually known as spirits of the dead, but as they seem to come in many shapes, sizes and appearances, there is really no easy definition for them. Older generations may regard ghosts only as shrouded human forms wandering in the mist, while new generations tend to bundle up all kinds of grotesque and eerie creatures as ghosts.
A "ghost story", however, can easily be any scary or twisted tale without specific ghosts. Folklore all over the world has established these tales as cautionary or moral tales, but during the last two centuries the popular culture - literature, music, movies and comics - has emphasized the scare factor. Despite of all the grisly and gruesome details, the essence of ghost stories has managed to survive surprisingly well: the best tales are psychological studies on the human being itself.
Enter Peter Straub. His 1979 bestselling novel Ghost Story is not an old-fashioned ghost story. It does not even tell about specific ghosts. The book offers quite adventurous and epic supernatural tale by presenting cool shapeshifters spreading their horror, with slight gore and huge amount of neverending psychological twists.
The 1981 motion picture version, however, offered a very different view on Straub's Ghost Story. The movie, directed by John Irvin, seemed to interpret the book for older tastes, emphasizing its Gothic and Romantic tones while offering a much more accessible psychological whole with important issues of morality, humanity, lust and love. Despite the movie's respectable box office earnings of 1981, Ghost Story has gained an unfair reputation of being a bad movie. Produced and released by Universal Pictures - the company with strong roots in Gothic horror - Ghost Story was indeed a troubled production, but the few bad choices, several unfortunate cuts and some very late additions did not destroy the movie's stylish overall quality.
The best way to experience the Ghost Story movie is to forget its link to Peter Straub's novel. This modest Tribute by KenNetti is actually a user's manual to John Irvin's Ghost Story - a guide to understand all the intriguing aspects of the movie that celebrated its 30th Anniversary on December 2011. Let us take you into a place where you have never been and show you things you have (perhaps) never seen.
-
Kenneth Sundberg -
January 2012
UNIVERSAL
PICTURES PRESENTS
A BURT WEISSBOURD
PRODUCTION
A JOHN IRVIN
FILM
“GHOST STORY”
S t a r r i n g
FRED ASTAIRE
MELVYN DOUGLAS
DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, JR.
JOHN HOUSEMAN
CRAIG WASSON
PATRICIA NEAL
ALICE KRIGE
a n d
JACQUELINE BROOKES
TIM CHOATE
KURT
JOHNSON
MARK CHAMBERLIN
MIGUEL
FERNANDES
LANCE
HOLCOMBE
KEN
OLIN
The Ghastly Apparitions by
DICK SMITH
CARL FULLERTON
ALBERT WHITLOCK
CAGLE
D. GREEN
KYRA
CARLETON
PAMELA
ZINSZER
LORETTA
SCOTT
ALFRED CURVEN
RICK BAKER
STEVE
JOHNSON
Based on the Novel by PETER STRAUB
Screenplay by LAWRENCE D. COHEN
Visual Consultant MICHAEL SEYMOUR
Art direction by NORMAN
NEWBERRY
Set
Decoration by MARY
ANN BIDDLE
Costume design by MAY ROUTH
Director of Photography JACK CARDIFF
Special Visual Effects by ALBERT
WHITLOCK
Make-up Illusions by DICK SMITH
and CARL FULLERTON
Music Composed by PHILIPPE SARDE
Orchestrated and Conducted by PETER
KNIGHT
Co-Producer DOUGLAS GREEN
Produced by BURT WEISSBOURD
Directed by JOHN IRVIN
A UNIVERSAL PICTURE
COPYRIGHT © 1981
UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC.
I
n t r o d u c t i o n
The Time Has
Come To Tell the Tale
A
True Story and Principal Review
by Kenneth Sundberg
-
without specific spoilers -
Chapter I - The Innocence
I saw the rental video cassette of Ghost Story in a local video store sometime in the middle of the 1980s, when I was about 10 years old. The cassette had an intriguing cover (of a funeral scene) and the tagline "The time has come to tell the tale" in Finnish. As the subject of ghost stories had always fascinated me, it was a most natural thing that I wanted to see the movie. An adult family member of mine finally agreed to rent the video for me. At that particular evening I was, of course, home alone - but somehow I was courageous (=foolish) enough to put the cassette of Ghost Story into the player. I had watched the movie less than twenty minutes when the second appearance of a ghastly corpse lady was enough for me to stop the video. I simply didn't dare to watch the movie any further.
Little did I know, that the first 20 minutes of Ghost Story contain the movie's biggest shocks. If I had known that, it wouldn't have taken several years for me to finally see the movie in its entirety. As I had reached the magical years of puberty, Ghost Story was shown on Finland's television. I taped it - and to my own surprise I fell completely in love with the movie!
Ghost Story, directed by John Irvin, is among the movies that made the biggest influence on me during the years I grew up. These significantly influential movies include Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Charles Walters' The Glass Slipper (1955), Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Freddie Francis' Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), and Walter Murch's Return to Oz (1985). From Murch's convincing psychological view of a child's world, the next natural step was John Irvin's Ghost Story - a highly moral tale of "growing up" with deeply psychological studies on the human being and the essence of evil. And yet, there was also a visually intriguing surface in Irvin's movie. Make-up maestro Dick Smith's ghastly corpse apparitions will haunt me forever. (One specific photo of these gruesome "corpse ladies" developed a minor trauma to me - but that's another story, revealed on this Tribute's last page!). The real star of the movie, actress Alice Krige, made even deeper impact. With the uncanny mixture of radiance and naturalness she became the basis for my "Princess Charming". I had seen Krige already in Tale of the Two Cities (1980) with Chris Sarandon, but it was Ghost Story that really made me to notice her great talent. And this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she bares it all in the movie; I usually loathe nudity for "shock effect", but in Ghost Story it's done with taste, tact and elegance.
Ghost Story also sealed my love towards movie music. By the time the movie was shown on television, I was already an admirer of the great movie scores by John Williams - particularly Dracula (1979), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). But it was Ghost Story which made me to realize that John Williams definitely wasn't the only composer creating pure orchestral magic for movies. Philippe Sarde's lush, beautiful and strongly melodic score for Ghost Story is still one of the absolute Gothic-Romantic gems.
And now, the twist. If I had read Peter Straub's novel first, I would never had the desire to watch the movie - simply because the book is, despite its few moments, not so great as everyone else thinks. As a teenager I gorged myself with similar "let's fight the monsters" literature of the German writer Jason Dark ("Geisterjäger John Sinclair") but ultimately I grew enormously tired of the clichés that all "monsters" are evil and must be destroyed with cool weapons during epic confrontations. Unfortunately I still see too much of this kind of "b-literature" in Straub's Ghost Story, even though the book's psychological side is intriguing and provocative.
Thus the undersigned is a walking proof that John Irvin's movie adaptation of Ghost Story works splendidly on its own - and that the movie should really NOT be compared to the book.
Chapter II - The Dark Side
I don't praise anything blindly. More than 20 years have passed since my falling in love with John Irvin's Ghost Story. During those twenty years I've grown into a most critical old geezer who knows that childhood favorites can turn out to be embarrassing when seen as an adult. While Irvin's Ghost Story has mostly stood this test of time, I can totally admit that it's not a perfect movie. From the beginning I've felt that there is something missing from its whole. There is one specific scene which I have never liked due to its clumsy editing. There are also some things that seem to have very little logic, and the movie ends in quite hasty and abrupt fashion.
Alas, there are distinct answers to the imperfectness of Irvin's Ghost Story! The movie could be best described as convoluted and contradictory. During the somewhat troubled production John Irvin, the director, changed his mind too many times. At its core, Irvin's Ghost Story is masterfully psychological, mature and believable, but on its surface the movie feels occasionally like an inane "b" movie.
Also, from the day I read Straub's novel, I have had no problem in understanding how huge disappointment this movie continues to be for all Peter Straub fans. The fact is that Irvin's movie is not Straub's book.
It seems that Universal Pictures and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen (who also wrote the script for Brian DePalma's masterpiece Carrie) had the intention of filming Straub's Ghost Story mostly as it was written. The movie seems to have been a "pet" production of Thom Mount (Universal's head of the production) and Marianne Moloney (Universal's production executive). Both of them had become enthusiastic about the cinematic potential of Straub's book at very early stage. For the movie version of Ghost Story Thom Mount chose Burt Weissbourd as the producer. Weissbourd had a background mostly in educational films, but he had also some experience in the horror movie genre; he had worked as a producer for Herb Freed's psychological horror movie Haunts (1977).
Weissbourd selected the award-winning British documentary director John Irvin to helm the movie version of Ghost Story. Irvin had directed the critically acclaimed motion picture The Dogs of War (1980) for United Artists, and perhaps even more significantly, a short psychological horror film Haunted: The Ferryman (1974) for television. Irvin had always had a Gothic heart - drawing macabre and expressionistic pictures, and being fascinated by gargoyles and cathedrals. But with Ghost Story he used the Straub book only as an inspiration for a very different view on the supernatural. Irvin ended up keeping his own fantastic dark side extremely restrained, by abandoning several originally planned epic scenes and details in favour of realism and believability. Matte artist legend Albert Whitlock's gorgeous paintings were left out from the movie, along with Dick Smith's most nightmarish ghost creation, and the many amazing optical enhancements by Peter Kuran of Visual Concepts Engineering (VCE). For the original ending, actor Craig Wasson appeared as two characters, and for the alternate ending Rick Baker created another rotting corpse - only to be discarded for a shortened compromise ending of the final movie.
Mainstream movie business is almost always filled with difficult decisions and compromises. The unfortunate imbalance of Irvin's Ghost Story was caused by several reasons. Firstly, Universal Pictures wanted the movie to stay less than two hours long. (In 1980s it was quite unheard of that a box-office hit could take three hours - not like today's moviemaking in which half-an-hour concepts are stretched to three-hour torture sessions). Secondly, the initial cut of the movie didn't survive the "bad" feedback of test screenings. A more experienced director could have fought for his original vision, but with Ghost Story, the profit-hungry executives of Universal must have stepped in. Thus, the movie became one of the major victims of test audiences - and it is this extensive cutting and replacing that makes nearly anyone notice that the final cut is definitely missing something. The third reason for the movie's imbalance was also caused by inane test audiences expecting another Friday the 13th with lots of visual gore. Irvin's Ghost Story would have worked quite splendidly without the majority of ghastly rotted corpses popping around, but due to the test screenings even the director adopted a silly belief that doubling the amount of the rotting corpses oozing slime would improve the movie.
Some of the cuts and replacements were made very late during the post-production. Since there were several test screenings of the different cuts, Ghost Story may be remembered very differently by people who have seen a test version or two. However, there may also be some truth behind the rumours that different versions of Ghost Story were distributed in movie theatres (accidentally or not) - and further into television. For example, some UK television prints of Ghost Story feature details that are not included in the final, official Universal cut. There may be more than four different versions of this movie still circling around.
Despite of the very troubled post-production of Ghost Story, it is obvious that producer Burt Weissbourd and director John Irvin shared the same passion for psychological horror. This approach wasn't even forced into the movie version; Peter Straub's original Ghost Story is as deeply psychological. Therefore it is quite ironic that both the original book and its completely different movie version have serious problems in keeping the more outrageous parts of the story believable and justified. While Peter Straub went completely overboard with his shapeshifters in the book, John Irvin worked definitely harder in trying to find a balance between the supernatural horrors and the realism. Unfortunately Irvin forgot that supernatural doesn't follow the rules of realism. If Irvin had trusted in his initial macabre and expressionistic visions, the movie would have moved significantly closer to the nightmare world of Straub and yet been a much classier achievement.
All the abandoned, cut and replaced material of Irvin's Ghost Story will be revealed on further pages of this tribute by KenNetti.
Chapter III - The Absolution
As much as it may irritate Straub fans, Ghost Story the movie is not Ghost Story the book. Working together, director Irvin and screenwriter Cohen turned the novel quite splendidly into intelligent cinematic language (with the exception of all those ghastly corpses). As cinema history shows, there are very few movies that are faithful to their original books. For instance, one of the very best Dracula movies ever - Hammer's 1958 Horror of Dracula - bears very little resemblance to Bram Stoker's original masterpiece novel. Irvin's Ghost Story works actually splendidly in the same vein as Hammer's fairytale horrors; there's plenty of elegance, spellbinding mood, powerful music score, a memorable monster, and solid actors who make the movie familiar and approachable. I can easily see why "horror" aficionados hate Irvin's Ghost Story, because it's actually not a horror movie per se (as most Hammer horrors) - but more of an essay on humans and humanity.
As long as I can remember, I have believed that living human beings are much more scary than the dead ones. I have never regarded "monsters" automatically evil. I thought that I had figured it out myself, but only very recently I found out that it has really been John Irvin who taught it to me!
“I'm not a great believer in cosmic evil. I think it's too easy to say there's an evil force in the universe. I think that the things people do to each other, and are capable of doing to each other, are much more frightening than just a black shadow in the night.” (John Irvin in an interview for the Cinefantastique magazine in 1981).
Thus it is no wonder that the undersigned belongs to those few readers who were not impressed by Peter Straub's original novel, because it relied on the cliché that supernatural would always be evil. Ever grateful to John Irvin's more open-minded Ghost Story, I have compared nearly every supernatural movie to it - and found only a few movies that contain the same intelligent philosophy.
I have said that Ghost Story is not a perfect movie. But believe me, it turns better and more intriguing the more you view it - and the more you know about its secrets. If you don't mind spoilers and want to know the best possible way to enjoy this movie, do step deeper into this tribute! Index listing is found below.
- Kenneth Sundberg -
KenNetti
Presents
JOHN IRVIN'S GHOST
STORY
The Tribute
Research,
analyse, text,
design, and image processings by
Kenneth Sundberg
Warmest
Thanks to
Matt Murray &
doctorcrimedog @ Imdb,
filmscoremonthly.com's
message boards,
Charles Routh, and
Jake Henttu
All original
Ghost Story
photos, images & artwork
© 1981 Universal City Studios, Inc.
Ghost Story
make-up creature photos
© Dick Smith
Rick Baker's
creature photos
© Steve Johnson
Other
principal
information & image sources
Cinefantastique magazine:
Volume 12, number 1, Feb 1982
(published by Frederick S. Clarke /
written by Paul R. Gagne, Kyle
Counts,
Bill Kelley, Mike Childs & Alan Jones)
Fangoria magazine: Dick Smith Part Two,
Issue 17 / 1981 (published by Norman Jacobs
& Kerry O'Quinn, O'Quinn Studios, Inc /
written by David Everitt)
Fangoria magazine: Dick Smith Part One,
Issue 2 "Bloody Best" (year not known,
O'Quinn Studios, Inc / written by David Everitt)
Nigel Andrews: Horror Films (1985,
Multimedia Publications [UK] Ltd)
Ghost Story - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
(1981 MCA Records, Inc / 1990 Varése Sarabande
Records, Inc / Liner notes by Kevin Mulhall)
Maple, Humberstone & Myring: Supernatural World
(Usborne Publishing Ltd, 1979 / Published in
Finland as "Noidan käsikirja" by
Kustannusosakeyhtiö Tammi, 1983)
Peter Haining: The Dracula Centenary Book
(Souvenir Press Ltd, 1987)
John & Anne Spencer: The Encyclopedia of Ghosts
and Spirits (1992, Headline Book Publishing plc)
Legrand, Karney, etc: Chronicle of the Cinema
(1995, Dorling Kindersley Publishing, Inc.
/ Chronik Verlag)
Cinema / Kino magazines (Kino Verlag GmbH)
Alain Littaye & Didier Ghez: Disneyland Paris
- From Sketch to Reality (2002,
Nouveau Millénaire Éditions)
www.imdb.com
/ wikipedia.org
www.best-horror-movies.com forum
www.cultmovieforums.com forum
www.thespinningimage.co.uk
and Kenneth Sundberg
!!
WARNING !!
KenNetti's Ghost Story Tribute pages
contain VERY scary images.
Young children and
impressionable persons
should not view these pages
without supervision.
!!
VAROITUS !!
KenNetin "Ghost Story Tribute"
sisältää erittäin pelottavia kuvia.
Pienten lasten sekä vaikutuksille alttiiden
henkilöiden ei tulisi katsella
näitä sivuja ilman huoltajaa.
Detailed
Tribute
I
N D E X
You're
here!
PAGE 1
Introduction &
The Principal Review
The Innocence
The Dark Side
The Absolution
Detailed
Tribute Index
Tribute Credits
Links
PAGE
2
A Thorough Analysis
- Part One -
WITH SPOILERS
The Essentials
The Novel in a Nutshell
The Movie in a Nutshell
The Central Idea
The Logic
The Logistics
(Cast & Crew)
PAGE
3
A Thorough Analysis
- Part Two -
WITH SPOILERS
The Abandoned
(And the Honoured)
The Discarded Things
and Other Stuff
PAGE
4
A Thorough Analysis
- Part Three -
WITH SPOILERS
La Musique Hantée
The
Haunted Music of Ghost Story
The Score vs. the Album
Track Lists and
An Analysis
PAGE
5
A Thorough Analysis
- Part Four -
WITH SPOILERS
The
Ghost Story Legacy
Scary Hairs,
Ghostly Brides
and Sinister Bathtubs
"The
Bathroom Corpse"
(Kenneth
Sundberg's Anecdotal Story
About the Ghost Story Legacy)
Other Ghost Story Links
A beautiful
unofficial site
for Alice Krige:
www.krige-page.com
An inspirational
review
of Irvin's Ghost Story:
www.cornponeflicks.org/
ghoststory.html
* * * * *
Continue
to page 2
of KenNetti's Ghost
Story Tribute
* * * * *
KenNetti is a totally non-commercial website by Kenneth Sundberg to pay tribute and to honour the work of the talented people behind some of the most wonderful things found on this planet. All the material is gathered here only to inform, to promote things that need to be noticed, and to entertain people all over the world. KenNetti and Kenneth Sundberg are not affiliated to any of the companies, theme parks, movies, people, ghosts or other things appearing on this site. No rights of reproduction have been granted to KenNetti or Kenneth Sundberg, except where indicated. If You feel that some image or material whatsoever should not appear on this site, please CONTACT Kenneth Sundberg so that we can quickly resolve the problem.
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