In short: Borley Rectory (2017)

This is a lovely animated documentary by Ashely Thorpe about one of Britain’s favourite haunted places, Borley Rectory, home of haunted vicars, a dead nun with a habit of staring into your window when you’re trying to eat, a headless coachman and many a rock thrown by Harry Price (or ghosts, depending on one’s preferences).

The film is putting all kinds of these wild and less wild tales into a mix of rotoscoped actors, digital as well as hands-on animation, with narration by Julian Sands, and people like Reese Shearsmith and Jonathan Rigby involved in the acting. This seems rather heavily involved with a certain generation of intelligent (mostly male) British horror etc people like the above mentioned and works in its animated documentary format on parallel interests to them: the Usborne Book of Ghosts is invoked, Stephen Volk is quoted, the gothic elements of the best Borley Rectory stories are put to the fore, and there’s a playfulness that never devolves into wink-wink nudge-nudge style irony on display. The film’s highly distinctive visual style creates the properly spooky mood, meant to feel as if the viewer is gazing at old film material run through a digital filter, and meeting this goal wonderfully. There’s a vein of nostalgia apparent here to, and, given the artificiality of the form Thorpe has chosen, one that is very conscious of the fact it is nostalgia for a time, perhaps things, that never really did exist. I believe one can fairly use the “hauntology” label here.

Of course, if you want your supernatural documentaries to be either involved in debunking or long conspiratorial speeches about them trying to keep the truth hidden, this is most probably not going to be for you. When it comes to its hauntings, Borley Rectory is decidedly uninterested in questions of truth and fakery, deciding to tell the story of a place that has taken on the quality of folklore as such stories should be told.