![]() Nyman plays the lead: professor Philip Goodman, a lecturer, TV celebrity and paranormal debunker who is an atheist and rationalist, driven to expose hoaxes and frauds. ![]() But Nyman and Dyson pull it off with tremendous verve. The action is wrapped up with a time-honoured narrative trick that has been with us since cinema’s earliest days. ![]() On screen, it was the subtler touches I found more disturbing: the strange dreary worlds and interiors with a putrefying wintry light: a seaside caravan park, a crepuscular pub in the middle of the day, a blank modern church. I never saw Ghost Stories in the theatre but I wonder if the broader, brasher moments might have been more effective live. Writer-directors Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson have adapted it from their colossally successful stage show: Nyman is the actor, writer and magician who has devised productions for Derren Brown Jeremy Dyson is the actor, comedy writer and co-creator of The League of Gentlemen. Each story is made individually stranger and tinglier by the way the film allows you to notice an overarching narrative between them, becoming increasingly visible through the uncanny accumulation of coincidental detail. It’s an anthology of creepy supernatural tales in the intensely English tradition of Amicus portmanteau movies from the 1960s, such as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, or the Ealing classic Dead of Night. Ghost Stories is a barnstormer of an entertainment, a fairground ride with dodgy brakes.
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