M R James’ work has inspired many adaptations over the years, and this month, Audible releases The Conception of Terror, Volume 1 – a quartet of plays providing a modern take on the classic tales, produced by Bafflegab. The first is an update of Casting the Runes, penned by Stephen Gallagher (read our review here)…

How did you become involved with the project?

Simon [Barnard] of Bafflegab read my unproduced BBC Dracula screenplay (printed in Dark Mirages, PS Publishing) and suggested I might adapt it for audio. I gave it serious consideration but I was deterred by the number of full-cast audio Draculas out there already, including a Mark Gatiss project for Radio 4, so I offered my take on Runes instead.

When did you first read an M R James story?

It’s pretty well impossible to nail that down… When I was growing up my local library had dozens of classic horror collections and omnibus editions, and between those and the used paperback stall on the Saturday market I got most of my early literary education. There were the Pan Books of Horror, Cynthia Asquith’s ghost story selections for Fontana, all those titles bearing Alfred Hitchcock’s name… even Boris Karloff had a horror anthology. I don’t think James featured heavily in the contents because those story picks mostly tended toward the twisty and unsubtle—when the cover of a book features a severed head in a bucket you pretty much know what you’re getting. But the chances are I first met his work somewhere in that period, in some dusty forgotten volume from a library shelf. Which seems kind of appropriate.

Why did you choose this particular story to adapt?

It had a special meaning because Charles Bennet’s screenplay for Night of the Demon was an early object-lesson in screen adaptation. I looked at that movie and I looked at the source and I got it. I saw that true adaptation isn’t actually adaptation, it’s fidelity in re-imagination. You need to work out what the author set out to do, and be faithful to that while you build toward it with the tools of a different medium. Tackling a new Casting the Runes began as a thought exercise, and the moment I reframed the story for the present day it ran away with me. I reckoned I could honour what had gone before while producing something fresh. I was working with Carnival Films at the time and I pitched it to them, but we ended up making Life Line instead.

What were the particular challenges with bringing it into the 21st century? I’m particularly thinking of the very different social and societal set up that existed when they were written.

I don’t know that I sensed any real challenges, in that for all the story trappings of James’ world I was finding ready equivalents in the present day. I didn’t have to struggle for them, they were just there. The new British Library is no less a route to arcane knowledge than the British Museum’s Reading Room. Amateur academics still self-publish their fringe ideas and take a critical peer review just as badly. But the core of the story is that something ancient and terrible breaks through the everyday, and I took care to keep the ancient elements ancient and the terrible terrifying. Having a terrific cast didn’t hurt.

What was your process – did you work out the beats from the original and then allow imagination to flourish, or did you want to use as much of James’ structure as possible?

The structure’s the first thing you tackle. Absorb the original, step back from it, put yourself in the position of a storyteller with the job of relaying your experience to someone else. Organise your thoughts as to how you’ll put it over in the new medium and, when you can see the dramatic shape of it, pick your key incidents and get them into order to make that shape work. At that point you can start returning to the original for material to fill the shape out. What you don’t do is go line by line, scene by scene, word for word. You try to make a new vessel and fill it with the author’s spirit. Credit for that is credit enough.

Did you find the original story limiting in any way (i.e. the fact that this was an adaptation rather than riffing off the same themes that James used meant it needed to be recognisable)?

Quite liberating rather than limiting… James’ writing is so firmly rooted in prose technique that you either dramatize it radically or not at all. Even the Ghost Stories for Christmas, which can look like very close adaptations, do a lot of careful work to put the stories on their feet. I did rewatch Night of the Demon before starting a draft, for the sole purpose of ensuring I wouldn’t unconsciously lift anything that the movie had added, and was struck by how much of it came straight from the original. Bennet gave the characters contemporary jobs and reframed everything for a ’50s setting, but what made it tick was all James.

What was the biggest challenge overall of the project for you?

Biding my time until I saw the chance to see it made.

And finally, do you have another James story you’d like to tackle?

Last time I was asked this the answer was no, it’s a one-off. Now it’s a maybe. But I’d be inclined to bypass the Greatest Hits and take a look at one of the lesser-known titles.

 

The Conception of Terror is available via Amazon here.