A child's fever dream or a ghost scratching at reality's wallpaper?
Colonel Mortimer returns to his family after a long spell in India to find his young son in bed ill, and tormented by a wailing voice... but is it in the boy's imagination or not?
Acting
Jack Hawkins' restrained patriarch slowly cracking open
Sound
That wail—primitive audio terror, no jump scares needed
Director
Joan Kemp-Welch
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This was part of BBC's 'Mystery and Imagination' series, adapted from a 1908 Algernon Blackwood story—he pioneered 'weird fiction' alongside Lovecraft.
The 'returning colonial officer' was a post-war British trope: men who'd 'civilized' empire coming home to find their own families alien. The horror isn't the ghost—it's what he brought back.
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