1978's The Ice House proved to be the final episode of A Ghost Story for Christmas, until the program was revived in the twenty-first century. With Lawrence Gordon Clark having gone freelance and left the BBC after the previous year's episode, Derek Lister directs the episode, which like the previous year's Stigma is based on an original screenplay. Clark's absence is immediately and painfully obvious; The Ice House really isn't very good.
The episode was written by John Bowen, who previously provided the script for The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, and sees John Stride's Paul visiting a countryside retreat following a messy divorce. He gradually discovers that the mysterious siblings who run the retreat have strange secrets, which seem to revolve around the mysterious ice house and the unusual flowers growing on its roof. The idea of city folk finding that the countryside is rather more sinister than it might seem is not a million miles away from the folk horror trappings of Bowen's later Robin Redbreast, but The Ice House is unfocused and sloppy. The mannered dialogue given to the siblings is awful; the significance of the flowers is left so ambiguous that one suspects Bowen got halfway towards an explanation and gave up; and there are vague incestuous and homoerotic undertones thrown in that don't get developed and thus just feel gratuitous and silly.
It's almost worth watching the episode for the bizarre denouement, which reveals what is really going and the significance of the ice house, but for an episode that is only thirty-four minutes long, this is astonishingly dull at times. Part of the reason for its frosty reception at the time may be that it isn't actually a ghost story, Bowen instead opting for psychological horror with fantastical elements thrown in. The problem is, whilst Clark might have managed to milk some real suspense out of the premise, Lister does not. Although he does provide a memorable scare when Paul finds Bob frozen in ice in the ice house, the rest of the episode suffers from flat and lifeless direction.
The acting doesn't help. John Stride makes a believable leading man as Paul, but Geoffrey Burridge and Elizabeth Romilly veer embarrassingly between wood and ham as mysterious siblings Clovis and Jessica. The stilted lines that they are given undoubtedly don't help, but their atrocious performances rob their scenes of any possible suspense. Ultimately, the weak script, the lifeless direction and the bad acting all add up to a mess: the only thing that is chilling about The Ice House is the eponymous ice house itself. Whether or not the poor reaction to the episode was the reason that A Ghost Story for Christmas came to an end in 1978, it certainly ended the series on a damp squib. No doubt the cold reception received by both Stigma and The Ice House was part of the reason why when the program was revived some twenty-seven years later, it would go back to basics and the short stories of M. R. James.
The episode was written by John Bowen, who previously provided the script for The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, and sees John Stride's Paul visiting a countryside retreat following a messy divorce. He gradually discovers that the mysterious siblings who run the retreat have strange secrets, which seem to revolve around the mysterious ice house and the unusual flowers growing on its roof. The idea of city folk finding that the countryside is rather more sinister than it might seem is not a million miles away from the folk horror trappings of Bowen's later Robin Redbreast, but The Ice House is unfocused and sloppy. The mannered dialogue given to the siblings is awful; the significance of the flowers is left so ambiguous that one suspects Bowen got halfway towards an explanation and gave up; and there are vague incestuous and homoerotic undertones thrown in that don't get developed and thus just feel gratuitous and silly.
It's almost worth watching the episode for the bizarre denouement, which reveals what is really going and the significance of the ice house, but for an episode that is only thirty-four minutes long, this is astonishingly dull at times. Part of the reason for its frosty reception at the time may be that it isn't actually a ghost story, Bowen instead opting for psychological horror with fantastical elements thrown in. The problem is, whilst Clark might have managed to milk some real suspense out of the premise, Lister does not. Although he does provide a memorable scare when Paul finds Bob frozen in ice in the ice house, the rest of the episode suffers from flat and lifeless direction.
The acting doesn't help. John Stride makes a believable leading man as Paul, but Geoffrey Burridge and Elizabeth Romilly veer embarrassingly between wood and ham as mysterious siblings Clovis and Jessica. The stilted lines that they are given undoubtedly don't help, but their atrocious performances rob their scenes of any possible suspense. Ultimately, the weak script, the lifeless direction and the bad acting all add up to a mess: the only thing that is chilling about The Ice House is the eponymous ice house itself. Whether or not the poor reaction to the episode was the reason that A Ghost Story for Christmas came to an end in 1978, it certainly ended the series on a damp squib. No doubt the cold reception received by both Stigma and The Ice House was part of the reason why when the program was revived some twenty-seven years later, it would go back to basics and the short stories of M. R. James.