Ghost Stories (2017 film)

Ghost Stories, a 2017 British anthology horror film, was co-written and co-directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, adapting their own 2010 stage play. Nyman reprises his stage role as Philip Goodman, a professor and TV host who makes a career out of exposing fake psychics. He is asked to investigate three separate supernatural claims, each recounted by a different person: a night watchman (Paul Whitehouse), a troubled teen (Alex Lawther), and a financier (Martin Freeman). The film debuted at the London Film Festival on 5 October 2017, then went into UK-wide release on 6 April 2018 through Lionsgate. Critics generally gave it positive marks.

The story begins in 1979, when Goodman’s strict Jewish father disowned his sister for dating a Muslim man, with the religious aspect central to the conflict. As an adult, Goodman is lonely and single, driven to debunk psychics as a mission born from his family’s ruin by superstition. He gets a letter from Charles Cameron, a famed paranormal investigator from the 1970s who inspired him as a boy but has since vanished. Goodman finds Cameron living in a caravan, sick and poor. Cameron asks him to look into three supposedly real ghost sightings.

First is Tony Matthews, a night watchman haunted by a girl’s spirit in a disused women’s asylum. Tony feels guilty over his wife’s cancer death and for abandoning his daughter, who has locked-in syndrome. Second is Simon Rifkind, an occult-obsessed teenager with tense parents; his car breaks down after hitting a creature in the woods. Goodman, unsettled, still sees rational explanations rooted in each person’s neuroses. Third is Mike Priddle, a City financier tormented by a poltergeist while awaiting his child’s birth. His wife’s ghost appears as she dies in childbirth, apparently delivering an inhuman baby. Priddle then dies from self-inflicted knife wounds to the wrists, with a shotgun present but not used.

Goodman returns to Cameron, who tears off a latex mask to reveal he is actually Priddle. Goodman thinks it’s a hoax, but reality collapses. Priddle leads him back to a childhood memory: Goodman watched two bullies lure a mentally disabled boy into a drain, where he died from an asthma attack. Goodman has always felt guilty for not intervening. The boy’s decaying corpse appears, tormenting him, and forces him onto a hospital bed. The ghoul lies on top of him and pushes a finge