Whistle and I'll come to you

 Whistle and I'll come to you is a BBC production from 1968, apparently broadcast as an episode of the arts documentary series called Omnibus.  This explains a documentary-style voice-over (the director Jonathan Miller) prefacing the program.  The show is genuinely frightening.  Shot in somewhat grainy black and white, an effect that enhances the sinister quality of the program, the movie is unpleasantly scary (I don't like horror) and unnerving.  It's an adaptation of a renowned ghost story by M. R. James, the British writer who specialized in tales involving antiquarian themes, macabre relics, and remnants of forgotten cults.  James is a somewhat pedantic writer, limited in scope, but within his bailiwick, his stories are memorable -- he's part of the generation of Edwardian writers that included Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood (all prominent authors of "weird" tales).  The name of the source story is "Oh, Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad" published in James' 1904 Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. 

Prof. Parkins, an academic from Cambridge, travels on holiday to a hotel located on the British seaside.  In the film, Parkins has something seriously wrong with him -- he fidgets, flinches, mumbles inaudibly, and suffers from spastic tics.  Whilst hiking along a seaside beach, he encounters a grave undercut by tidal erosion -- a femur is protruding from the sandy bank.  A strange bone-whistle inscribed with Latin words is also visible near the skeletal remains.  The autistic-seeming Parkins, who is always muttering to himself, says "Finders, Keepers!" and takes the bone, making a rubbing of the Latin words on it.  (The Latin translates to "Who is it who is coming.")  He clears the whistle and blows on it.  A figure appears on the strand, walking a couple hundred yards away from him. (Probably, it's just another person strolling by the sea, but who knows?)  That night, Parkins is afflicted by nightmares:  something is pursuing him along the beach and he hides but can't escape the apparition.  There are ghastly sounds and, then, when he awakes, noises in his room as well.  The next day, the maids inquire as to why both beds in his room have been slept in.  Parkins denies using the other bed which is, nonetheless, seriously rumpled.  That night, Parkins repeats the only really audible words on the soundtrack:  "Who is it that is coming?"  (he spoke these words the previous night).  There's something in the other bed.  Parkins cries out and another guest at the hotel enters the room to help him.  

The story is simple, even primitive.  The film is frightening because of the way that the anecdote is dramatized.  From beginning to end, the imagery is off-kilter and dream-like.  Some shots are held too long and the emphasis seems all wrong.  It's not scary, but rather mundane, even trivial in exposition until suddenly the show becomes very frightening indeed.  In the opening sequence, Parkins is driven to the hotel, sort of a nightmare version of Fawlty Towers.  A very corpulent man appears after Parkins waits a long time in the hotel hallway.  The fat man, who is old, carries Parkins two suitcases up the steps to the room, a task that seems almost herculean since the luggage is imponderably heavy and the steps steep and very long, in fact, two flights.  The effort of moving the luggage upstairs is palpable and disturbing.  Scenes are shot in mirrors creating disorienting spatial effects.  The colloquy with the fat man is shot from considerable distance and, since both men mumble and swallow their words, you can't tell who is speaking nor what is being said.  At supper, Parkins comes to the table in a sort of tuxedo seated apart from the other guests, flinching and whimpering and muttering to himself.  A woman with piercing eyes glares at him.  The scenes on the beach are shot to emphasize the notion that some unseen presence is following Parkins.  In a couple of sequences, a maid draws a bath for Parkins who whispers incomprehensibly to her and seems to be about to burst into tears.  When Parkins sits in the bath, the camera angle is obtuse and suggests that something is about leap out of the corner of the frame -- it doesn't.  Parkins' suitcase is heavy because it is laden with huge dark books.  When he cowers in his bed, the camera focuses on Parkins' terrified face, his brow furrowed and his wet eyes reduced to tiny, shivering slits.  An example of the film's idiosyncratic nature is a long opening scene that shows us two maids wearing caps changing the bedding in a room -- the mise-en-scene emphasizes the two beds in the chamber.  Sometimes, Parkins writes in a notebook or reads from the books, one of which is about spiritualism.  In the final scene, lit in a chiaroscuro style, Parker seems to have gone mad from terror.  He is whimpering and sucking his thumb.

Parkins is played by the famous English actor, Michael Hordern (1911 - 1995).  Hordern is instantly recognizable -- he made over 160 films and appeared as a character actor in numerous movies that everyone has seen.  (He was also a famous Shakespearian actor who played the parts of Polonius in Hamlet and, then, King Lear -- this is the sort of actor that seems very familiar, but can't name.)  Hordern's performance, apparently mostly improvised, is brilliant and very disturbing.  As the dictum goes, there are no "haunted places only haunted persons" -- and this is certainly true as to what we see in Whistle and I'll come to you.  The episode was directed by Jonathan Miller.  Miller was a physician, wrote several books about medicine, but is primarily known as a director of TV programs, theater, and opera.  It seems clear to me that Miller designed Hordern's performance to reflect some sort of medical pathology -- the man is clearly afflicted with some neurological disorder.  Whistle and I'll come to you is readily available in a reasonably legible print on YouTube.