cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/21672340

When Mark Gatiss was young, he loved combing through the TV schedules at Christmas time looking for anything supernatural.

“I was always very disappointed if there wasn’t a ghost or a monster,” he says.

Gatiss, an actor and writer perhaps best known for co-creating BBC series such as Sherlock and Dracula, remembers that TV in the 1970s usually had “something lurking in the shadows”.

Like the 1974 drama The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, part of the BBC strand A Ghost Story for Christmas. That film sees an antique collector haunted by a ghost, described in the drama as “a thing of darkness and slime”. For Gatiss, it was love at first fright.

Gatiss’ latest contribution to A Ghost Story for Christmas is Woman of Stone - based on the 1893 story Man-Size in Marble by author Edith Nesbit - about a newlywed Victorian couple warned of a local legend about a pair of marble knights who rise from their slumber on Christmas Eve.

“It scared the wits out of me,” Gatiss remembers about the first time he read the story.

Earlier films in the BBC festive series have adapted the tales of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle.

But in a first for the strand, this year’s Ghost Story for Christmas is based on a story by a female writer – Edith Nesbit, best known for novels The Railway Children and Five Children and It.

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Other films in the series have also sought to challenge expectations.

Gatiss’ 2013 film The Tractate Middoth, starring Sacha Dhawan as a librarian haunted by a mysterious book, featured an ethnically-diverse cast - but Gatiss doesn’t see this as “colour-blind casting”.

Mawaan Rizwan’s role in Woman of Stone, meanwhile, took inspiration from George Edalji, a solicitor of Indian descent who lived “in the middle of rural England in the Victorian age,” Gatiss says, “but you just don’t get these stories, you’re not told them.”