Ghostwatch

104/100 Horror Movies in 92 Days 2025 Like the majority of the British public who were alive in the early 90’s, I have a distinct memory of Ghostwatch. I would have been 9 on the Halloween when this came out, and while I definitely remember sitting in my living room watching Sarah Greene interact with a visibly shaken family, I was confident logging this as a first time watch because of my second distinct memory of Ghostwatch – my mom whisking me away from the TV as soon as ‘Mr Pipes’ appeared, telling me that it’s not real (although I’m still not sure whether she was trying to convince me or herself). I could talk about the genius approach that they took with this. Doing their best to fool the audience and doing such a good job that they received 30,000 complaints. I could talk about it being a pioneer of not only Found Footage style horror but realistic TV horror. I could even talk about the easter eggs and hidden ghosts throughout the production. What I want to talk about instead though is how well this holds up over 30 years later. I sat and watched this with my wife, who vividly remembers watching this with her cousins when she was only 8 and not being able to sleep afterwards, and we were both expecting to have a fun nostalgia bump and a good chuckle at the dated scares. What we didn’t expect was for it to still be so effective. The acting and realism is really well maintained throughout, the structure and approach to the scepticism and reveals is frankly still ahead of its time, and there are still very creepy moments (spotting ‘Pipes’ in the background is still thrilling even now). I’m so pleased that watching it with jaded adult eyes didn’t ruin the magic of Ghostwatch. It’s definitely not something that could ever be recreated in the same way. The previous generation had Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast, and our generation had Ghostwatch on TV. I wonder what the next iteration will be, because one thing has been proven time and time again – we want to be scared, and we want to believe.