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It’s only natural to experiment at university, but Oxford student Edward Bellingham perhaps takes things too far when he starts dabbling in ancient Egyptian necromancy.
Lot No 249, Arthur Conan Doyle’s late-Victorian tale about a campus tormented by the undead, is the latest classic supernatural horror to be adapted for the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. Like every entry in the anthology since 2013, it has been written and directed by Mark Gatiss, who marries the gothic with the festive through his playful pastiche of genre traditions and old TV melodramas.
We begin, but of course, in the dead of night with a trainee doctor called Abercrombie Smith (Kit Harington) begging a friend for refuge from “the devil” and some brandy for his nerves. Once settled by a glowing hearth, he opens up about his ordeal, casting us back several weeks to his first encounter with his mysterious college neighbour. A mercurial young man recently returned from adventures “out east”, Bellingham (Freddie Fox) unsettles Smith from the off, partly because his effete eccentricity and arcane, exotic interests are anathema to the latter’s stolid Englishness. But mainly because he keeps an uncased Egyptian mummy in his room.
Smith soon starts to be spooked by eerie noises and ominous shadows. Before long, fellow students report being attacked by an uncanny assailant. Suspecting that there’s something living beneath the bandaged relic next door, Smith himself begins to unravel.
While it’s debatable whether Doyle meant the piece as an allegory about the ills of empire and orientalism, the story of a colonial acquisition causing trouble for an august British institution has a certain timely resonance. There’s a contemporariness too in how Gatiss teases out a homoerotic subtext and implies that Smith’s mummy issues are a manifestation of his threatened masculinity.
A half-hour film, however, is ill-equipped to meaningfully grapple with these themes, or even build much in the way of suspense. In truth, the knowingly affected performances and mannered production are more likely to make your eyes roll than hair stand on end. But if it’s a slice of well-done Christmas ham you’re after, this might just hit the spot.
★★★☆☆
BBC2, December 24, 10pm
