Hodgeson wrote a bunch of great purple prose thriller/ghost stories - admitedly a genre one either loves or hates it seems.
We just started watching a film - The Judas Ghost, which has The Carnacki Institute as the ghost hunting bunch, which reminded me of the books. [Available on feedbooks.com, by teh way as well as Gutenburg if I remember correctly]
I was wondering, since they are set in the more or less real world, in a reasonably recent period [no arms or armor or elizabethan costuming, just Edwardian goodies], how difficult would they be to make now without recourse to the full might of something like Weta Studios? I know there is a group working on putting out various Lovecraft as black and white period pieces, and think that Carnaki woul dbe sort of interesting as well.
Logistically? There shouldn’t be any reason you couldn’t do most if not all of the Carnacki stories as low budget films. Hodgson relied on building mood and atmosphere. Even the most gonzo of the Carnacki stories don’t really have much in the way of actual “special effects” - Carnacki feels the presence of the Outside much more than he actually sees dramatic manifestations.
But that’s a real problem. Jump scares are easy - building mood and atmosphere is hard. Also, you’d need the right actor for Carnacki. He’d have to do most of the heavy lifting through his acting, since the stories are very much centered on him as a character and his reactions to the “haunting” he’s investigating, more than the haunting in and of itself.
You’d also have some other problems. The Carnacki stories are split roughly 50/50 between Carnacki debunking a fake haunting (he has at least a couple of stories that could literally be Scooby-Doo plots with almost no alterations) and genuine, supernatural, reality and sanity shattering horror. In a series of short stories, that’s passable. As a movie, I don’t know how you’d do it. You’d pretty much have to just concentrate on the genuine supernatural stories, but then you’d lose a lot of what makes Carnacki Carnacki.
There’s also the issue that Carnacki the Ghost Finder is an obscure character, with little name recognition even in geek circles.
Still, I think a BBC mini-series, especially if Mark Gatiss were involved, could potentially be pretty good. At least until the last episode, when Gatiss gets too clever for his own good and the whole collapses under its own weight…
I hadn’t seen feedbooks before. It looks interesting. But do I have to download books in Epub format or is there an option to do it in a different format?
I enjoy vintage horror and dark fantasy, but I abhor “ghost detectives.” I’ve avoided Carnacki, as well as the “John Silence” stories by Algernon Blackwood.
Love Hogeson’s and Blackwood’s normal stuff, though.
It is true that Carnacki is a pretty obscure character now - though in watching the film I did notice that it seemed that the screenwriter at least had read some [use of the name Carnacki, the whole ‘fiat lux’ and magic circle thing] but then again, I wouldn’t expect to have a fan base, not immediately. Though as a mini series, it would be cool. I noticed there is now a series of films about the British Detective Jack Whicher fictionalized recently. I also caught some of those, which gave me the idea of some different ‘cozy British mysteries’. You are right about the scooby doo one, though the one with the ring in the bedroom was chilling. I like his electric circle of protection and thought that would be a killer special effect for the right tech builders =)
I don’t know, I use it through Aldiko on an android phone, so that is the format it gives me. I do use calibre on my laptop to manage my books, and it will convert pretty much anything to anything else with the right plug ins, so that might be an option? [it doesn’t handle really huge PDFs well though.]
I love that vintage read, though my English Lit prof referred to them as ‘turgid’ <snicker> I like them because the writing can be so intricate I lose myself in them because they slow me down to visualize more than something that is stripped down like Mickey Spillane. There is some fun science fiction in that early 20th century stuff I found through feedbooks, ans Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu is good. Have you read any non-ghost detective horror/thriller of the time? I am really fond of Abe Merritt [he wrote 3 books that ended up as films]
The Carnacki stories were one of the first public domain books I read when I first got a Kindle, lo these many years ago. I really enjoyed them, partly because of
Because (1) it increases the mystery if you don’t know, going in, whether the hauntings are real or fake, and (2) it’s reasonable that in a universe where ghosts and supernatural phenomena really existed, you’d have more people, not fewer, faking them.
Exactly=) I watch a fair amount of Acorn/Britbox tv programs of various vintages [anything from Ripper Street, penny Dreadful, Foyle’s War to Father Brown] and think it would be fairly easy to film the Victorian/early Edwardian period aspect, tweak it to a little Ghostbuster/steampunk with his electric circle and use of recording old school [wax cylinder] and glass plate photography.
Correct, electric pentacle =) blame a combination of not having read them/reread them for about 4 years and chemo brain =)
It would make a great diorama - the whole pentacle thing is why it struck me that it could be a great visual for not overly much money - I remember the purplish glow, and rainbow glow, and leyden jars and sparks and such - thinking that the special effects could end up being moderately inexpensive to rig up with modern tech combined with the CGI ability at lower levels of computing than full on WETA computers [I mean, have you seen some of the stuff youtubers are doing now?] A lot of the stuff going on is more athmospheric and mental than full on huge armies and mountains exploding.