Urban Ghost Story (13 Days Of Hallowe'en)

For an old country, awash with tales of spooky goings on, Scotland hasn't really produced many horror films. And the ones it has tend to be set in the wilderness and feature beasties attacking outsiders, be they city dwellers or foreigners. Ghost stories appear to be pretty rare. Ever rarer is one set in modern, urban Glasgow. Urban Ghost Story, in case you couldn't tell, is just that. It's a film that looks to combine the staples of gritty Scottish drama with the supernatural goings on of the traditional ghost story. Sadly it fails in its approach to both, coming off as cliche-ridden no matter which angle you approach it from.

It's set in a Glasgow tower block, replete with junkies, single mothers and troublesome, ecstasy driven teens. The setting itself is in fact perfect for a ghost story. It's doubtful that much set decoration was needed at the locations. If you've never been inside a set of highflats in the west of Scotland then you're lucky. Reeking of piss, fucked lighting and strange noises are par for the course. Even if the place isn't haunted it's scary as hell navigating your way through to your dwellings. Even in the flats there's the wind effect. It creates hellish noises and makes the tower block sway. Trying to get a good night's sleep in the place isn't easy. As such setting a tale that seeks to remain ambiguous as to how real the haunting is is a savvy move.

The problem is that on the ghost story side of things it's all very ho-hum. Characters walking through barely lit corridors looking to see if that noise was the lift or not, chest-of-drawers moving across the room by itself, bed's being broken and knocking at the door to find no one there has been done many times and much better elsewhere. Even the characters that come into the families life as a result feel well worn. There's a group of parapsychologists who are all beards, glasses and guts who seem to enjoy nothing more than a young girl having a violent nightmare. Then there's the kooky psychics who "see" what's present in the flat. They may be there for comic relief, their scene may have been designed to cause terror. It's a bit hard to tell. Slightly better is the cynical journalist, looking to exploit the family as the story of the hoax is better for his career than even an authentic haunting.

The urban drama side doesn't fare much better. We get a single mum struggling to keep her family together, surrounded by destitution and potential bad influences for her tearaway teenage daughter, namely the druggy single mother a couple of floors down. It's typically dour stuff, the sort of thing pretty much every Scottish filmmaker has to write if they want any sort of funding from the government to get a film made. You can just about accept all this as the addition of the ghost angle means it could be a film looking to subvert the usual Glasgow drama. But wait, it turns out that the single mum owes money to some local gangsters. Always with the bloody gangsters! Seriously, there are more gangsters in Scottish film than appear in the entire run of The Sopranoes. Even that bastion of gritty plight of the underdog cinema Ken Loach couldn't resist them when he made some Scottish films.

Another major problem with the film is the pacing. There appears to be a deliberate attempt to build tension, but rather it just leads to boredom. Also by keeping the ghost angle ambiguous too often it means it all but disappears from the film. Most of the real life story lines don't have any sort of satisfying payoff, instead most of the b-stories are just kind of dealt with in the sort of way you'd expect from any other Scottish drama. It feels somewhat of a cop out. In the end you don't really care if it's the girl acting out after her incident whilst joyriding or an actual ghost haunting her because of her wrongdoing. It's difficult to care because there isn't a single likeable character in the film. And for some reason they all talk with a bizarre syntax that involves the odd piece of Scottish slang, for, like, authenticity and that, being thrown into the most stilted sounding of sentences. It feels like there's an attempt to make sure international markets won't need subtitles, like Sweet Sixteen or Trainspotting, because a ghosty film is something that can be sold globally.

In the end Urban Ghost Story doesn't work. It's dull, dour, cliched and tedious. It's a shame because as previously stated there just aren't many Scottish horror films, ghost films or urban set ones. Instead of doing something original it falls back on tried and tested horror techniques and frankly lackadaisical storytelling. It appears to be trying to present the Scottish take on the modern ghost story, and I suppose in that respect it succeeds. But only by presenting a story of working class strife that has become synonymous with Scottish filmmaking. There's simply nothing original here and it stands as a perfect example of everything wrong with the films that this country produces. It's like we don't have the confidence to try something else, and sadly even if a Scottish filmmaker tried to do so, they wouldn't get the funding.