Review: Ghost Story (1981)

Most critics of Ghost Story bitch at length about the fact that the movie so severely condenses and truncates the story taken from Peter Straub's best-selling novel that it's nearly unrecognizable. But what's so new and different about this complaint? Hasn't just about every novel that's been adapted for the big screen suffered in the process? (Jaws is the only example that leaps to mind that was actually better as a movie than it was as a novel.) And while I've yet to read Straub's 600-plus page book (it's somewhere in my closet, I think, gathering dust alongside my copies of The Stand and The Shining), I'm sure it lost quite a bit when shoe-horned into a film that runs under two hours. So it's probably more fair to pretend that one has nothing to do with the other and judge each on its own merits (or demerits, as the case may be). And since I haven't read the book, I can only render semi-intelligent opinions on the movie.

Director John Irvin very wisely has John Houseman open the film by telling a ghost story before a roaring fireplace much the same way John Carpenter had Houseman use his wonderfully authoritative voice at the very beginning of The Fog just a couple of years earlier. Houseman is one of four members of the oddly-named Chowder Society--the other members are played by Hollywood legends Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.--who gather regularly to tell spooky stories to one another. The members also happen to share a deep, dark secret involving the death of a young woman (Alice Krieg) some 50 years earlier.

But as all we horror film fans know, deep, dark secrets have a way of crawling out into the light and affecting current events. And so when the son (Craig Wasson) of one of the members of the Chowder Society dies under mysterious circumstances, it's up to his younger brother (also played by Wasson--economical casting) to dig up the past and find out the truth. It turns out that the ghost of the young woman has returned, seeking revenge and enlisting the aid of a couple of mental hospital escapees.

Irvin sets this story up with much mood and restraint, recalling the style of the horror films Val Lewton produced at RKO in the 1940s. The violence is minimal, and only the occasional rotting corpse clearly marks this a horror film at all. In fact, the only reason Ghost Story got an R rating was for nudity, including a brief frontal shot of Wasson and abundant coverage of Krieg's lithe frame. Not that I'm objecting to seeing Alice Krieg naked--even years later, as the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact (and a reprise of that role in the final episode of Star Trek: Voyager), she had the capacity to set one's libido racing. It's just that the nudity here seems thrown in to make the whole thing seem modern and bad-ass when it's really a much more traditional horror film than it wants to admit. Even the few special effects present are restrained, thanks to the abundant talents of Universal Studios veteran Albert Whitlock, who worked on quite a few Hitchcock pictures.

In lieu of naked bodies, I'd much rather have had even a half-assed explanation as to why the wraith waits so damn long to see revenge on the men responsible for her death. There have been plenty of other movies with a similar theme, including the aforementioned The Fog, in which the vengeful sailors rise on the 100th anniversary of their deaths, and the much older, low budget Strangler of the Swamp, in which an unjustly hanged man causes the strangulation deaths of those responsible for his lynching as well as their offspring.

That latter theme is touched on in Ghost Story as well, with Krieg seducing Wasson (as the younger brother) before getting engaged to and killing the older brother. But why? Why not tear after the members of the Chowder Society themselves some time before they become octogenarians? Why use escaped mental patients to help her? Maybe all of this was explained in the novel. I'll have to read it sometime and find out.

Despite its flaws, Ghost Story works on a number of levels. It displays great respect for a ghost story well told (even if it doesn't tell its own story as well as it could have), and it pays tribute to the golden age of Hollywood by stocking the movie with stars from that era. Astaire, in particular, acquits himself well in his last big screen role (he appeared in at least one TV movie, The Man in the Santa Claus Suit, before his death in 1987) and is ably assisted by Patricia Neal as his wife.

Most of all, Ghost Story is a throwback to a simpler time in moviemaking, when shadows and well-chosen words meant a great deal more than special effects, creative cursing and gore. When enjoyed on that level-taken on its own terms and embraced despite its shortcomings--Ghost Story is a stately, satisfying thriller, regardless of how slight its resemblance to the source material that spawned it may be.