Until it was finally demolished in 1944, Borley Rectory in Essex was the stuff of paranormal legend, dubbed “the most haunted house in Britain”. Its Victorian rooms and corridors were the backdrop for unexplained footsteps in the night and a number of ghostly apparitions, including a headless coachman, a phantom nun and a violent poltergeist. The house was famously investigated by paranormal researcher Harry Price in the late 1920s and early 1930s, his observations published in book form as The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory in 1940.
Given the house’s fearsome reputation it’s surprising that film-makers didn’t come calling sooner. Andrew Jones’ terrible A Haunting at the Rectory (2015) was more concerned with a tedious love triangle and its sex scenes than it was with the hauntings and it was left to Ashley Thorpe’s Borley Rectory: The Most Haunted House in England – a film that fairly defines the phrase “labour of love” – to do the legend justice. Boasting a genuinely creepy ambience and a unique look (imagine Guy Maddin directing a 1970s BBC Ghost Story for Christmas and you’re in the right area, but it still doesn’t adequately describe what Thorpe has achieved here), it pitches itself as a dramatised documentary – with the cast performing in front of green screens and the backgrounds, dense in detail and with unnerving glimpses of things that really shouldn’t be there, added later using computer animation.
Narrated by Julian Sands, it rattles through the whole history of the hauntings in a brisk 75 minutes. The opening scenes fill in the background, with the building’s various residents – the Reverend Harry (c) and Ethel Bull (Sara Dee), the Reverend Guy (Nicholas Vince) and Mabel Smith (Claire Louise Amias) and the Reverend Lionel (Steve Furst) and Marianne Foyster (Annabel Bates) – encountering an increasingly terrifying array of phenomena. The latter stages chart the investigations of Price (Jonathan Rigby) and Daily Mirror journalist V.C. Wall (The League of Gentlemen‘s Reece Shearsmith). Performances are uniformly top notch and the entire cast commendably treats the whole enterprise with the seriousness it demands.
The gradual accumulation of detail is what makes Borley Rectory so unnerving – a ghostly form materialising in a child’s bedroom, an ethereal nun stalking the grounds, a barely glimpsed clutching hand reaching around a door… Unlike 2017’s other big British ghost film – Ghost Stories, based on the hit West End play by Andy Nyman and Shearsmith‘s League colleague Jeremy Dyson – Borley Rectory doesn’t rely on sudden jump cuts and loud noises to make its point. Instead it trades on old-fashioned “old dark house” spookiness to worm under the viewer’s skin and stay there, worrying away at all our fears of the supernatural.
The performances are perfect and the score – by Mick Grierson and Steven Severin, the latter former bass player with Siouxsie and the Banshees – is equally impressive but the real star of the show is Thorpe. Toiling away for six years, Thorpe has created a film that looks unlike anything else in British horror. It’s no simple pastiche – the retro stylings aren’t the tedious nostalgia of many American genre films that try just a bit too hard to reproduce the look of the 1970s or 80s. The 30s stylings of Borley Rectory are integral to the film’s success – the flickering, black and white images, heavy on the shadows, make the ghostly apparitions all the more unsettling, never more so than in the figure that materialises in a child’s bedroom. It seems to flow from the shadows, as if part of the very fabric of the building, slowly coalescing out of the darkness until we realise, with a jolt, that we’re looking at the face of an old man perched on the edge of a bed.
Borley Rectory is full of these little touches – a sudden face at the window, the nun’s face replaced by a grimacing skull, mysterious writing materialising on the walls. Those tired of the same old same old from the lower-budgeted end of British horror will find much here to restore the faith. Richly textured, with an extraordinary attention to detail, it’s the kind of film that haunts the memory long after the end credits have rolled in much the same way as the ghosts stalked the real life Rectory. “It feels like it should be in a double feature with something like Dead of Night (1945)“, Thorpe has said of the film. In that he’s succeeded admirably and one can only hope that we don’t have to wait six years for his second film.
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