The Stalls of Barchester
Directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark
The discovery of a mysterious box in a library leads a scholar to piece together a chain of events leading to the murder of an archdeacon.
An ambitious cleric engineers the murder of an archdeacon.
Cast: Harold Bennett, Clive Swift, Erik Chitty, Robert Hardy, Thelma Barlow
Member Reviews
First rate adaptation of the M. R. James ghost story. Robert Hardy is perfect.
Robert Hardy, from All Creatures Great and Small, was a childhood flashback. This series is well done from the Masterpiece Theatre factory.
Very atmospheric and creepy little story. It seems the best episodes in this series are those based on M R James stories. This one has good acting and a great setting, plus it made me look up Psalms 109, which honestly is a pretty brutal scripture. I love this series and wish they were all grouped together for ease of access.
Richard Bucket is in this tale.
I appreciate James' understated style of horror writing. His tales terrify but are not dependent on gore, over the top stories and characters. He has buttoned-up characters who are not the sort you expect to go in for ghost hunts and adventures, and so when they encounter the numinous, they are all the more terrified and leave us feeling this same terror. His stories lend themselves to understated filmmaking like this. What some call boring and slow, I think are precisely what James was master of.