Borley Rectory

Wraith No More

Borley Rectory
UK 2017 Directed by Ashley Thorpe
Carrion Film Blu Ray Zone B

Borley Rectory burned down the same night in 1939 that my mother was born, so it’s always had a kind of special place in our hearts in this family. And here’s yet another movie about the place once named “the most haunted house in England”. This one’s a pretty good one though, as it happens. It’s not a full on drama and it’s something a little more than a documentary... so a docu-drama maybe? I’m not 100% sure what to call this thing, to be honest (and I don’t care). 

What singles this one out from many others, apart from being presented only in black and white (and resident shades and spectres of grey), is that the live action dramatisations are combined with a heck of a lot of animation. Indeed every frame is an animation with the live footage inserted and then worked over with various layers of animated detail to make a fairly unique viewing experience. It’s a little like the old technique that Peter Greenaway used for Prospero’s Books but with less obfuscation to the clarity of the message and, given it monochromatic status, it doesn’t threaten to overpower the audience while still throwing a lot at the frames. 

The documentary, for that is how I shall now refer to it from hereon, is narrated by the late Julian Sands, who would go on to play one of the real life characters in this in a later film based on this ghostly riddled piece of real estate (there have been so many made). Joining him are a fairly large cast for a relatively small scale project like this but the main two cast members were the only ones I recognised. The film stars Reece Shearsmith as newspaper man V.C Wall and the great film historian Jonathan Rigby as ‘ghost hunter’ Harry Price. I have to say, I’m used to seeing Rigby pop up in various physical media documentaries over the years but he’s always good to see live too, especially when he’s actually doing some acting, such as when he hosted and starred in the stage read through of Vampirella a few years ago (reviewed by me here).

The acting style from both these fine craftsmen and, pretty much the rest of the cast, is a bit over the top... quite deliberately I would think. Everyone gives this just a little more flamboyance with a stylised performance which I would expect is something which needed to happen to be able to match the quiet ferocity of the animated material going on all around them (and indeed, over them... I don’t think it quite gets to rotoscoping, at least not as far as I am familiar with it as a technique... but there might be some of that going on in here). So it’s a good call and, as far as I’m concerned, makes for an enjoyable series of performances throughout the film’s short, 73 minute running time. 

And it’s very well done, managing to create and maintain an atmosphere comprising lurking, sinister spirits who seem to be constantly watching this or that tenant of the property through various stages of the house’s history. I saw it, due to circumstances of who I was watching it with, in a fairly well lit room on a fairly large TV so it didn’t quite hit all the scares and fog the mind completely but, I imagine that if I’d seen this under slightly less well lit conditions or, ideally, at a cinema, then more of the scare moments would have landed better. 

The animated miasma of creepiness is done particularly well and with obvious relish, as little details which either illustrate or riff on the narrative commentary are brought in as needed. There was a nice visual allusion to the work of director Dziga Vertov fairly early on in the piece which was a cool moment, I thought. Similarly, the writing is pretty good and also pays respect to various works which, perhaps inarguably, were possibly influenced or inspired by the much publicised ghostly phenomena that surrounded the place. For instance, there’s a nice reference to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House, not just name checked at the end of the piece but also in terms of some of the lines, such as referring to the various spectres as those who “walk alone.” Indeed, it immediately made me think of Julie Harris delivering the line in the original 1963 adaptation, The Haunting (which I reviewed here). 

So, yeah, a short shout out of a review for Borley Rectory but it’s definitely one I would recommend to those interested in such things and, yeah, certainly one of the better movies about the place. The Blu Ray edition comes with a raft of extras concerning the film and the events it’s based on and, while I haven’t watched these as yet and usually skip most of the extras on these things (seriously, who has the time these days, much as I prefer to have them) I have left the disc out before removing the covers and disc for a space saving filing exercise, so I can sit down and work my way through these at some point soon, because they seem really interesting. Certainly, I can’t recommend the physical release of this one enough. Definitely worth a look if you are into other worldly delights.