In short: A Child’s Voice (1978)

The golden age of radio in the UK. The excellently named Ainsley Rupert Macreadie (T.P. McKenna) writes and narrates serialized ghost stories on a nightly radio program that closes out the daily programming schedule. Things turn rather spooky in real life when he starts to tell the story of a little boy and stage magician’s assistant who disappears under curious circumstances. After the first episode, a child calls Macreadie on the phone, asking him, in words very close to ones the little boy in Macreadie’s story uses to not continue with the tale. Macreadie does continue; things do not go well for him.

This short film from Ireland directed by Kieran Hickey is very much made in the spirit and style of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas. Clearly, something was in the air on the isles at this time. This is a lovely little film that makes all the right decisions to create a thick, decidedly creepy atmosphere out of a lot of shadows in a couple of very small rooms, sound design that at times might as well have come from the Radiophonic Workshop, and an unhurried (which is code for “slow, but purposefully so”) pace that understands that it’s much easier to let the uncanny enter after you’ve prepared your audience properly for it. And, because this was clearly made with my tastes in mind, it really is the uncanny, so no complete explanations are ever forthcoming, and the whole truth about what is happening here is left as undisclosed as the end of the story Macreadie is beginning to tell will be.

McKenna’s lead performance is lovely, making the character neither too pompous nor too nice. In a very clever touch, the film adds Valentine Dyall’s well-oiled voice as a narrator, so the story about a man telling ghost stories on the radio is told to us by a man who did indeed tell ghost stories on the radio, an extra frisson in a wonderfully effective tale that uses the spookiness of certain kinds of technology, like the telephone and the radio in their early years, the liminality of the disembodied voice, to great effect.