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The Scientific Horror of ‘The Stone Tape’
This ghost story offers terrifying questions
What happens after we die? This question has concerned humanity since the first spark of consciousness and every culture has their own ideas. Despite the uncertainty it is likely that most people have their own ideas - it’s human to wonder and believe. Does something of us remain, as a ghosts or something else? Creatives have used and approached this question in many ways, and the ever popular ghost story often deals with this anxiety, this fear that there are things we may never understand that leach into our world in ways that may be terrifying. One of the more interesting theories about ghosts and the afterlife (as far as I am concerned) is the stone tape theory, and this 1972 ghost story from the BBC offers chilling and horrifying suggestions.
Warning: Some spoilers ahead.
In the 1950s screenwriter Nigel Kneale had made a name for himself with a series of successful works for the BBC (including the Quatermass trilogy of serials, later adapted into films by Hammer, and the very controversial adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four), and he would write several pieces for various other TV stations in the following years — the final piece he worked on would be the 1989 TV version of The Woman in Black, which I have written about…
