The Stalls of Barchester

Our take

The film that started the tradition is still one of the best: a small, perfectly judged tale of clerical ambition and guilt, played with dry humour by Robert Hardy before the dread takes hold. Shot in and around a real cathedral on a tiny budget, it has candlelit choir stalls, a snowy wood and a single shock that has haunted viewers for fifty years. The most Christmassy of the classic films.

What happens

In the Edwardian era the scholar Dr Black, cataloguing the library of Barchester Cathedral, finds a mysterious box that holds the papers of a former archdeacon. From the old diaries he pieces together a chain of events in Victorian times. Archdeacon Haynes, ambitious and impatient, had waited year after year for his aged predecessor, Archdeacon Pulteney, to die, passing his house with mounting frustration, and finally saw him off. Installed at last, Haynes began to feel he was not alone. Under his hand a carving on the choir stalls seemed to become a surface of thick black fur, and in the empty cathedral after evensong the verger showed him the carvings of the damned. His diary returns again and again to the need to be firm, until one night in the dark close a long, unnaturally coloured hand reaches over and touches his shoulder. The papers lead up to Haynes's own death. At the end Dr Black visits a museum to learn more about the cursed carving.

Can the kids watch it?

Rated 12 by the BBFC for moderate horror, so best for 12 and over, and properly creepy for anyone younger.

Cast and crew

Starring

• Robert Hardy as Archdeacon Haynes
• Clive Swift as Dr Black
• Thelma Barlow as Letitia Hayes
• Harold Bennett as Archdeacon Pulteney
• Erik Chitty as Priest

Writer

• Lawrence Gordon Clark

Director

• Lawrence Gordon Clark