Dead of Night: The Exorcism

*Spoilers ahead*

BBC Four repeated this rare archive production over Christmas 2007 as part of its week of spooky festive stories. It's quite different to the traditional Ghost Stories for Christmas made by the BBC in the 1970s, but it complements that series well as it has a similarly uneasy atmosphere at times.

Where it differs from the Lawrence Gordon Clark productions most starkly is in the overt use of socio-political commentary - the entire production is centred around a discussion by four friends about socialism, the borgeousie and social structures. This sounds pretty dull, and I have to admit that while it adds a little colour to the piece, these exchanges between the characters do little to endear them to the viewer - they just come across as dry and arrogant.

However, the atmosphere of the drama is built up well. The premise of four people trapped in a haunted cottage in the middle of nowhere at Christmastime is a juicy one. The doors and windows won't open, the electricity is failing, and there's something odd going on at the dinner table.

The dinner table scenes are my favourite. First Edmund (Edward Petherbridge) tastes his claret as blood (but nobody else can), then all four of them are made nauseously ill after tucking in to a specially prepared Christmas meal.

Then, when Rachel (Anna Cropper) goes upstairs she sees the corpse of a child on the bed, and from there on everybody starts experiencing something odd, until the climax comes, with poltergeist activity, possession and a final gruesome reveal in the bedroom!

Some might dislike the way the characters try to rationalise what is happening to them as the play progresses, but I found this a very natural reaction for four intelligent, opinionated people who, by and large, do not believe in the supernatural at first.

The centrepiece of the play is Rachel's ten minute monologue while possessed by the spirit, which forces the characters to examine the basis of their privileged existences. Anna Cropper does a sterling job of performing the possession monologue, but from a viewer's standpoint it lasts far too long and is scripted with a sledgehammer tendency rather than subtlety. And anyone with an aversion to people's foaming spittle should look away during this scene!

Future Doctor Who effects man John Friedlander creates some startlingly convincing and gruesome corpses for the final reveal of the play, with the camera lingering playfully on the dead mother's pained expression. The epilogue sees police searching the abandoned cottage the next day, and we learn that the four people we have spent the last 45 minutes getting to know have met their own untimely end.

The Exorcism is a suitably spooky tale for Christmas but told with very little subtlety or artfulness. Writer Don Taylor has a message he wants to get across, and get it across he certainly does - nobody watching can fail to know what he wants to say. There's a place for socio-political posturing and the dissemination of personal ideologies, but I'm not sure it works particularly well here. Taylor's message overshadows and restricts the atmosphere of the play, and I'm not surprised to learn he had been "blacklisted" by the BBC in previous years for his political views. If he wrote all his drama as plainly as The Exorcism, no wonder the BBC wanted to distance itself from him.

Dead of Night: The Exorcism, originally transmitted November 5th 1972.
Written and directed by Don Taylor.