"We don't want to give anybody sleepless nights ... "

Halloween, 1992: I was 13 years old and staying over at a friend's
house. As devotees of all things supernatural, we were excited because BBC1 was showing a programme called Ghostwatch.

Its premise was to get a bunch of then-popular TV presenters (Michael Parkinson, Sarah Greene, Mike Smith and Craig Charles) and have them broadcast 'live' from a haunted house as they searched for spooks. The show began in an innocuous - if not downright vapid - manner but, over the course of ninety minutes, built to a climax that had my nerves jangling like the Polyphonic Spree's tambourine section.

There was my naive teenage self, sat on my friend's couch, pointing rabidly at a scene in which 'the ghost' appears behind a curtain, screaming, "LOOK! You CAN'T do that with a camera! You can't fake that!" while my friend's mum rolled her eyes and told me quite calmly that you could. The technicalities didn't matter. I, along with several thousand others, had been thoroughly spooked.

Predictably, the complaints came in droves. The British public were
outraged that upstanding pillars like Parkinson, whom they relied on to deliver the truth, were hoaxing them. People were claiming that the show had caused symptoms of mania, had traumatised their children or had even made their household objects move and explode!

All of this hysterical malarkey was basically a shamed cover-up for the fact that half the nation had been scared to death by just a clever script and some sharp direction.

At the Fortean Times unConvention in 2003, I was fortunate enough to attend a talk from its director Lesley Manning and writer Stephen Volk. After the talk, attendees were treated to a full Ghostwatch screening.

For many of us, it was the first time we'd seen it since the original showing (the BBC were banned from ever repeating it) and, with the knowledge that it was all a fake, there was much embarrassed laughter as we saw how cleverly we'd been duped.

But what makes Ghostwatch special - like War of the Worlds before it - is that it works on many levels beyond a wind-up. For one, it is
genuinely very funny. As a pastiche of live television, Volk's script
mercilessly sends up the patronising presenter (Parkinson), the
earnest on-the-spot reporter (Greene), the flustered phone-in
co-ordinator (Smith) and the zany sidekick (Charles). You get sucked in because the parody is so accurate.

Remarkably, once you're in, it's still a very scary place to be, even
when you know it's not real. I watched the BFI DVD of Ghostwatch
just last weekend with a fellow Den Of Geeker and both of us found we were unable to sleep soundly afterwards, the curtains having taken on a new, menacing quality ...

You can happily take it out of its original context. As a straight
piece of horror television, it remains the creepiest I've ever seen.
Volk's use of familiar ghost lore and the slow burn effect of so many story arcs building up on one another creates a feverish state of terror for the show's finale. Manning's obsessively careful direction ensures that the tone of the piece remains consistent, even when in the grip of its most intense spectral delirium.

It really does baffle me that something as brilliant as Ghostwatch -
a rare treat for any horror fan - has been consigned to only fleeting
mentions on those 50 Scariest Moments As Chosen By Talking Head No-Marks shows. It deserves better.

Thank God then that Manning and Volk have teamed up again to bring the world Telepathy later this year, a big budget sci-fi horror film with Cillian Murphy playing twin astronauts separated by space. I, for one, can't wait for this and I hope it might just bring the mainsream spotlight back onto Ghostwatch for a much-needed reappraisal of its many merits.