The program inches, ever so slowly, into creepier and creepier elements, until finally exploding in its last minutes with genuinely frightening and unnerving bits.

As I said, the TV special is a very, very slow burn, and brilliantly captures the slapdash aesthetics of a low-budget live broadcast. But like Welles’ famous broadcast, Ghostwatch pretends very convincingly to be a live television broadcast that goes disastrously wrong - in fact, it is almost too convincing. You would have heard about this history-making “documentary” on the news long before it hit theaters if it actually contained footage of people being killed by ghosts. Only an idiot or the most socially detached individual could go into The Blair Witch Project and think it was real. While Ghostwatch, along with 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, can now be viewed as a grandfather to the “found footage” genre, its own roots most directly lie with Orson Welles’ 1938 Halloween Eve broadcast-turned-inadvertent-super-prank radio play of The War of the Worlds. Is It Good: For those who love a slow burn (and dry British sensibilities) it is rather remarkable. Lin Pascoe (Bevan) by his side, while field reporters Sarah Greene and Craig Charles investigate a home in Northolt, Greater London, supposedly haunted by a malevolent spirit nicknamed “Pipes” by the locals, due to the ghost’s penchant for knocking on the home’s plumbing. In the studio, veteran British television personality Michael Parkinson coordinates the program with paranormal expert Dr.

The Premise: It is Halloween night and BBC1 is airing a live edition of Ghostwatch, a series that explores supernatural phenomena and also invites callers to phone in with stories of their own ghostly encounters. The Principals: Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene, Mike Smith, Craig Charles, Gillian Bevan.

The Longest Night by Stephen Volk