A Ghost Story for Christmas – The Room in the Tower – review

Director: Mark Gatiss

First aired: 2025

Contains spoilers

The tradition of a ghost story at Christmas is well established in the UK and, in recent years, the BBC ghost story has been brought to us by Mark Gatiss. I was rather excited at this year's, as it was a rendition of E F Benson’s The Room in the Tower (1912), a subtly drawn vampire story. This does not use the “V” word but follows the story exactly bar two aspects. Firstly it moves the story forward in time to the second world war and secondly it adds a coda to the story, which is new but fits with the story and I won’t spoil.

shelter from the Blitz

The episode starts with a siren. We are in London, the blitz is ongoing and we are with people sheltering in an underground station. Roger Winstanley (Tobias Menzies, Underworld Blood War and Carmilla (2019)) and Verity Gordon Clark (Nancy Carroll, Father Brown) strike up a conversation. She is in naval uniform and was heading to a concert when the sirens sounded. He is a teacher – a reserved occupation excusing him from service, and was invalided out in the first world war. He asks about dreaming and dreams coming true and she intuits he has a story to tell.

the tower

From being a teen, he has had a recurring dream. In the first one he arrived at the home of Jack Stone – a lad at his school but not one he was friendly with. The house is dominated by a tower, and he is led to the family, none of whom he knows. Eventually, Jack’s mother Julia (Joanna Lumley, the Satanic Rites of Dracula) tells him she has assigned him the room in the tower. The room has a feel and then he spots a shape in the night – and bolts awake, escaping the dream. He repeatedly had the dream of variants thereof – the players aging, as he aged. One night he had the dream and she was not there, yet her disembodied voice assigned him the room.

self-portrait

Verity mentions that he said about dreams coming true and he mentions a time with his friend John (Ben Mansfield), during the time of the Chamberlain Government, when John took him to the family home. It was the building with the tower, bought not long before by John’s family from the Stones, but the atmosphere is a happy one and he knows many of the people in attendance. There is a storm and he is given lodging but the only room is… the room in the tower. He gets up there to find a portrait of Jack (looking as he did the last time he had a dream) and a large self-portrait of Julia – the picture makes her look ghoulish.

blood, but no wound

John arranges to have the heavy portrait remove and, having moved it out of the tower he, Roger and the servant who helped all have blood on their hands but no apparent cuts. Later John confides that his dog has a habit of staring at a spot in the garden, though no one is there. Roger retires but wakes in the night; the portrait is back and a shrouded figure approaches him. It lunges but he manages to push it away and get out. John finds him, investigates and finds a mouldy shroud in the room.

the coffin of blood

Roger asks Verity if she remembers the death of a suicide in the newspapers of that period, a suicide who was buried in consecrated earth but each morning (for three times) the coffin had been expelled from the earth. It was then buried in un-consecrated ground – the suicide was Julia Stone, she had killed herself in the room in the tower and was buried in the spot the dog stared at. John and Roger have the coffin exhumed and open it to find it brimming and bubbling with blood. The connection of vampirism and suicide, as well as a vampires coffin filling with blood, are common folkloric tropes, further, one guesses that, when alive, she had been a living vampire hence the connection to Roger’s dreams when younger.

Tonight I shall feast!

Everything, bar the second world war setting, is as per the Benson story – it is an atmospheric and story accurate film. Gatiss adds a coda, as mentioned, and I won’t spoil it but for those unconvinced about the vampiric aspect of the story… well, Benson did not use the “V” word either, but the story is recognised as a vampire story. The suicide and the coffin of blood fit with the genre as does Stone (undead) saying “Tonight I shall feast!”. It is great to have a vampiric ‘ghost’ story for Christmas and I enjoyed the tale, the atmosphere and the accuracy to the original story. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.