The Corpse Can’t Play

October 28, 2023 10:15 PM

The Twisty Tale of the BBC Show Supposedly So Terrifying That It Was Destroyed
posted by brundlefly (8 comments total)

A little off-topic but

The Tales of Beatrix Potter, a ballet film that premiered in 1970

That was actually one of the scariest things I saw as a child. Even the picture book version of the ballet was scary. Beatrix Potter's original books often had mood of menace about them but something about the ballet made the characters unbearably creepy.
posted by BinaryApe at 1:46 AM on October 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

First rule of Corpse Club...
posted by fairmettle at 3:12 AM on October 29, 2023

I can't be the first person who thought immediately of Garth Merenghi's Darkplace, which was a show so radical, so dangerous, so risky, so god-damned crazy that it was immediately shelved, never to see the light of day, until the courageous author brought it to light decades later.
posted by Shepherd at 7:32 AM on October 29, 2023 [28 favorites]

posted by brundlefly

Fire up that #eponhysterical tag!
posted by doctornemo at 9:38 AM on October 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

"I can't be the first person who thought immediately of Garth Merenghi's Darkplace"

You are not.
posted by jonathanhughes at 9:52 AM on October 29, 2023

I would love to watch this, not because I'm expecting it to be some gateway to utterly unexplored ideas in horror, but because zero budget productions are often little gems in and of themselves. It's like why I'll eagerly rewatch 1970s Doctor Who but don't feel drawn to the modern incarnations at all; when your alien-creation workshop is "let's paste some feathers on this bloke's head and put a funny robe on him" and you're passing off random quarries as mysterious alien landscapes week after week, you have to sell it with all your heart because you have no CGI and no studio wizardry and no other choice.

Also going to check out Darkplace now that I've realized that it's on Amazon, which may send me down a Matt Berry rabbit hole (no pun intended, already watched Year of the Rabbit) for a while.
posted by delfin at 2:54 PM on October 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

the [BBC] network is principally funded by taxpayers, through a decree first proclaimed in 1926 by King George V with a Royal Charter, a document whose roots date back to the 13th century

Some forward thinking, there.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 3:06 PM on October 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

I enjoyed this article a lot! Recovering lost horror--and being the first in decades to view it--has such a spooky tension to it.

I realized that the story the episode is based on (John Burke's "Party Games") is in an anthology I own, so I just read it--it had a really great build-up of dread and unease.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 10:13 AM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]