Broadcast in the dying hours of Christmas Eve, the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series was a fixture of the seasonal schedules throughout the 1970s and spawned a long tradition of chilling tales, which terrified yuletide viewers for decades to come. This much-requested release gives four landmarks of the series their Blu-ray debut, having been newly remastered by the BFI from original film materials.

Interviewed in 2008, Gatiss said that Lost Hearts is his favourite adaptation because it is the one that frightened him as a child [50] and that "I absolutely love The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.A Warning to the Curious, The Signalman and Miller's Whistle and I'll Come to You were released as individual VHS cassettes and Region 2 DVDs by the British Film Institute in 2002 and 2003. Abney, combining a boffin's eccentricity with the warmth of a lively uncle to create a character seemingly incapable of harming another being, but who is clearly up to something from the moment we first meet him.

So imagine my excitement when the BFI announced that it would be releasing the first four of these films on Blu-ray in what they have teasingly titled Ghost Stories for Christmas, Volume One. Black (Clive Swift) is cataloguing the Barchester Cathedral Library when he comes across an old diary belonging to Archdeacon Haynes (Robert Hardy) who died mysteriously. The later adaptation uses more conventional scare tactics, its night-time sequences well constructed, the Cinemascope frame stretching out its space, diminishing the lone figure at the mercy of its unnerving elements. BBC Four revisited the series at Christmas 2004, and in 2005 began to produce new adaptations of stories by M. As his carriage approaches the hall, Stephen briefly sees two wan-looking children (Christopher Davis and Michelle Foster) standing in a field, their arms slowly arching in a synchronised wave.Simon Farquhar suggests that the film is the first evidence of Andrew Davies's gift as an adaptor of literary fiction: "despite an extremely arduous shoot, Davies and Clarke's fog-wreathed, flame-crackling masterpiece manages something the production team could never have imagined: it's better than the book. It's a similar story for Lost Hearts, where the contrast is well balanced, the black levels solid, the colours pleasingly rendered, and the film grain as visible as in the preceding two titles. On the plus side, John Hurt expertly captures the loneliness of a man facing a future without the woman who has been his companion for most of his adult life. Unfolding as a dual timeline, with Haynes' diaries dramatised in flashback, the film is over a third of the way in before the first signs of supernatural activity put in an appearance.