“Look into the Dark”

Through the 1970s, the BBC produced a series of subtle, unnerving period ghost films for Christmas. For the most part, these confined themselves to a darkly nostalgic view of the English past. Though Hamlet is, among other things, a Christmas ghost story, it is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that sealed the bond between Christmas and the spooky. From then on, the link was a matter of course, one of the nation’s ongoing pieties, deeply linked to the preservation of traditions and the sense of place. Megahey’s adaptation actually improves on Le Fanu’s already excellent original tale, deepening and expanding the story into a pregnant meditation on love, money, and art. After the entranced landscapes of Gordon Clark’s films, Schalcken turns to the interior. It is hardly surprising that a film that depicts two great Dutch masters, the elderly Gerrit Dou and his pupil, Godfried Schalcken, should be so painterly in style.