Jim Howick on the Ghosts movie: 'The scale of it was really massive’
James Mottram creeps up on Ghosts star Jim Howick and director Simon Hynd as this monster TV hit floats onto the big screen. Is the film purely for hardcore fans or can anyone join in the freaky fun?
Most TV shows don’t get to choose when they come to an end, but Ghosts was an exception. The team behind this BBC sitcom about a group of spirits from different eras always wanted to bring it to a close after its fifth outing. ‘I think five series of anything is probably enough,’ remarks co-writer Jim Howick who also plays Pat, the youth group leader shot through the neck by an arrow back in 1984. ‘When you’re confronted with more than five series on a streaming service, then the tendency is to not be arsed to watch it.’
That probably wouldn’t be the case with Ghosts, a show that grew in popularity with every season. The very final episode, broadcast on Christmas Day in 2023, pulled in 6.6 million viewers, while the show’s concept has been franchised in America, Australia and beyond. Were there any regrets on calling time on such a popular enterprise? ‘We all started to think that it was a mistake,’ admits director Simon Hynd who helmed every episode of the final two seasons. ‘The ghosts were, I think, starting to regret their decision.’ So when the idea of a movie was raised, everyone jumped at it.
‘What attracted us to making a film was exploring more cinematic ideas,’ says Howick. ‘We tended to avoid the supernatural in the sitcom, apart from the odd scene where we walked through doors or floated a little bit and threw ourselves out of windows; we wanted to humanise these characters. I think had we hammered the high-concept element of the sitcom it perhaps wouldn’t have been relatable and wouldn’t have been quite as successful. The film has given us licence to explore more grand ideas.'
Returning us to the show’s country pile setting, Ghosts: The Possession Of Button House is set shortly after the TV show’s finale when the occupants Alison (Charlotte Ritchie) and Mike (Kiell Smith-Bynoe), now with a baby, finally sold up. With Button House standing empty, ‘we wanted to create a haunted house story and incorporate kids within that mythology,’ says Howick. As such, a group of teens sneak into the grounds to snoop around, only for one to succumb to Simon Farnaby’s dead Tory MP, Julian Fawcett, who snatches his chance to inhabit a body and head back out into the real world.
Happily, the entire Ghosts team is back: Mathew Baynton (as the Romantic poet Thomas Thorne), Martha Howe-Douglas (pompous Edwardian Fanny Button), Laurence Rickard (caveman Robin and headless Humphrey) and Ben Willbond (WWII officer The Captain) who all co-write with Howick and Farnaby, plus Lolly Adefope (as Georgian-era noblewoman Kitty). Alison and Mike are also returning, so alongside the new teen characters that’s a lot of juggling. ‘There’s one scene that’s got 26 cast in it,’ recalls Hynd. ‘The scale of it, compared to the TV show, was really massive.’
A Scottish filmmaker based in Edinburgh, Hynd revelled in the challenge of bringing a beloved sitcom to the big screen. ‘The stakes are a lot higher. There are the stakes of Button House because that becomes under threat; but there’s also a life and death element to it as well that I daren’t say too much about. As with all sitcoms, you reset at the end of every episode. But with this, there is the opportunity for the ghosts and other characters who are back from the TV show to grow and for the stakes to be a lot higher.’
With the film shot once more at West Horsley Place (a Surrey manor house that has taken full advantage of the show’s success, even offering Ghosts tours), Howick admits it was ‘genuinely quite moving’ to slip on Pat’s uniform once more. ‘I think for all of us, it was weird and it was moving. But then it was like yesterday: nothing had changed. But also we didn’t have time to soak it in because we had to get to work and there was so much to do in such a short space of time. We didn’t have an awful lot of time to indulge ourselves in this kind of mad reunion.’
One question needs to be asked: is Ghosts: The Possession Of Button House just for the hardcore fans or can newbies come and enjoy this Halloween treat? ‘I think for someone who isn’t well versed with Ghosts, it would be an easy entry level film,’ claims Howick. ‘But there are definitely Easter eggs in there. There’s probably an Easter egg in every scene if you look hard enough.’ Hynd agrees but feels the balance is just right, with enough for new fans to sink their fangs into and hopefully inspire them to visit the sitcom. ‘Hopefully, if we can get them into the cinema, we’ll convert them to the cause.’
Ghosts: The Possession Of Button House is in cinemas from Friday 23 October.
Scream test
Here’s a batch of new scary movies that might be a little more icky than the Ghosts offshoot
Need a film-based fright this month? Fear not, there’s plenty of competition. Other Mommy stars Jessica Chastain as a mother who has to go to extreme lengths to protect her daughter from a supernatural entity that resembles her. There’s body horror business with Clayface, the DC Comics character otherwise known as Matt Hagen, a rising movie star who is horrifically disfigured and is eventually made of living clay. Sounds bad. Meanwhile, when an eccentric governess arrives at a remote gothic manor, it doesn’t take long for her secret to emerge: she’s a Victorian Psycho! A monster movie set in the Amazon rainforest, Beware Boiúna is all about a ‘colossal mythical serpent’. Needless to say, that will not be for everyone.
Two of the brains behind The Blair Witch Project reunite for another found-footage chiller, The Influencer Project: real-life digital content creator Chiara King is shooting a documentary about online fame when a stalker enters the frame. Big Baby is a meta-slasher in which a writer is inspired by his nightmares about a mad killer in a toddler mask. But is it really just in his imagination after all? Fun fact: Cher is an executive producer on the film.
The Twisted Childhood Universe (TCU) continues apace and after horror twists on Winnie-The-Pooh, Peter Pan and Bambi, here comes Pinocchio Unstrung in which Geppetto builds a boy so his grandson will never be lonely again. Unsurprisingly, it all goes horribly awry. Horror icon Robert ‘Freddy Krueger’ Englund does the voice of the devious Talking Cricket. Trashfest II comes to Glasgow’s Drygate on 25 October showing five films across a full day, including The Devil’s Rain, Event Horizon and a ‘diabolical mystery movie’. If you’d rather stay indoors for your horror fix, then Terror On Tubi is a devilsend, bringing you an anthology of short-form horror stories entitled Bite Size Terror as well as the classic Tales From The Crypt, with 93 individual episodes introduced by a wisecracking corpse.