A Warning to the Curious (1972)

Here's a little BBC gem I never heard of until I found it on DVD at Monkey Beach, THE go-to DVD shop in Stockholm. I can't say I'm an expert, but British TV from the seventies in the horror genre was often something very special. From immortal classics like The Stone Tape to the excellent horror series Beasts, not to forget the predecessor, The Omega Factor - everything is so top-notch it's absurd. The budgets was almost low, but scripts and acting better than anyone could dream of. A Warning to theCurious aired on Christmas eve 1972, based on the famous short story by M.R. James...

An older man, just fired from his job since 12 years back, Paxton (Peter Vaughan) goes to the little town of Seaburgh to find a hidden treasure, a crown belonging an ancient king. He starts poking around in the history of the village and finds out that there was a family named Ager who was the guardian of the crown, but the last one died twelve years ago. Soon he finds some clues and locates the crown... but someone, a dark figure, is watching him. Guarding him, and wants him dead...

A Warning to the Curious is of course an excellent - and cheap - TV movie, just 50 minutes - but not one minute too short or long. The actors are few and most of the locations are some old streets, the exterior of a church and lots of forests. This is it, and it's hard to make a story like this better. What always surprises me with productions like this one is how simple the scares are. We're not talking jump scares, it's just something weird or out of place looking at you. And that's it. The filmmakers trust that the audience cares about the story and sits down and concentrates, more or less inhaling the atmosphere. You can't have breaks for TV commercials in a movie like this. You can't make it too long. You just need to tell the story and act with your guts. Yeah, if you using a flashlight in a room and you suddenly see someone staring at you, that's fucking scary. It would be scary in real life and if you just shoot it like it is, it's still scary in the TV.

I wish more director could understand that.

This is a genuinely eerie little fucker and if you can find on DVD (it's out in the UK on a very OOP DVD, but Sinister Cinema has released a quite good looking version in the US) it's worth a purchase. Just don't expect shocks, gore and action. This is way more complex than that.