Whistle and I'll Come To You (1968)

The colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. 

Among writers of ghost stories, few are regarded more highly than the Englishman M. R. James (1862-1936). For James, the writing of his stories was secondary to the telling of them to his students and friends at Cambridge and later at Eton. He dedicated his first collection of stories “To all those who at various times have listened to them.” The book was called Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary, and it appeared in 1904. It includes what is regarded as one of James’s best stories, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad.”(1) 

Jonathan Miller, one of the quartet of writer/performers that made up the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe, gave up performing in 1962 and turned to directing for stage and screen. Already well known for his unconventional 1966 film production of Alice in Wonderland, he directed an adaptation of the M. R. James story, its title shortened to Whistle and I'll Come To You, for the BBC Omnibus series for broadcast in 1968. It was so popular that the BBC repeated it at Christmas in ’69 and it inspired a series of Ghost Stories for Christmas, starting on 1972, based on other James stories. 

In the story, Parkin is a young professor of ontography, which is “the human response to the natural environment,” who goes to a seaside town in Suffolk called Burnstowe at the end of term to work on his golf game. In the film he’s a middle aged man who doesn’t play golf who goes for a week to an unidentified seaside town. After settling in at an old inn, Parkin keeps his distance from the other guests, sitting at a separate table at dinner. One of the other guests, known in the story as the Colonel, asks him if he would like to join him for a round of golf, but Parkin declines. He is there to do some sightseeing, take in the dunes and the local cemetery. The Colonel tells him it’s too spooky for him. 

On the strand, Parkin walks briskly, takes his lunch on the dunes, and climbs a low cliff to examine a quite dilapidated graveyard. One of the tombstones, on the very edge of the cliff, has been eroded, exposing some bones. Parkin sees something and finds an old object in the exposed grave. He puts it in his pocket, muttering “Finders, keepers,” and returns to the beach. Walking along, he notices a lone figure some distance behind him. 

Back at the guesthouse that night, Parkin takes the object he discovered out of his pocket. It’s some sort of bone whistle with an inscription carved on it. After cleaning some earth out of it, Parkin takes a pencil rubbing of the inscription, and makes out the Latin words “Quis es iste qui venit” – Who is this who is coming? Parkin raises the whistle to his lips and blows into it. It produces a clear note, and as soon as Parkin stops blowing, the sound of a great wind arises outside and he has a vision on the lone figure standing on the beach. The wind continues and Parkin goes to bed with a perplexed look on his face. 

At breakfast the Colonel asks Parkin “Do you believe in ghosts?” Parkin, all the while eating his grapefruit and haddock, informs the Colonel of his skepticism of the “survival of the human personality.” The Colonel then says, after Hamlet, “there are more things in heaven and earth than a dreamt of in philosophy." To which Parkin replies, “There are more things in philosophy than are dreamt of in heaven and earth.” This reply gives Parkin much satisfaction, but later in the day, alone on the beach, he hears himself repeat the opposite – there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

That night, Parkin has disturbing dreams of being chased down the beach by something unseen. He awakes to a shout. Closing his eyes, we see him turning to run from an object, a piece of clothing standing erect by itself and moving toward us. Parkin awakes again with a loud start. He turns on the light and tries to read until he can fall asleep again. 

After breakfast, a maid asks him on which of the two beds in his room he would like the blanket placed, since they were both slept in the night before. Parkin insists that he slept in just the one bed and there was no one else in the room. Who is this who is coming? repeats in Parkin’s mind. He will find out. 

The film is only 42 minutes long, but it’s plenty of time for Jonathan Miller to insinuate us into Parkin’s terrorized mind. Michael Hordern plays Parkin as a marginally batty, typically eccentric academic who lives very much inside his own world. He putters about and mutters to himself, almost as if he’s narrating a drama all his own, humming tunes that only he can hear. With what boyishness he charges about in the countryside – the strand and the woods – which is strangely deserted and overgrown with brambles and vines. The locations – in Norfolk and Suffolk – are perfectly chosen to reflect Parkin’s self-isolation. And Miller’s staging and clever use of sound make the nightmare scenes uncannily like the real thing. The last confrontation between Parkin and a poltergeist is more spine-tingling than any of the latest, CGI-driven horror movies precisely because what Parkin sees almost doesn’t appear to be anything at all. Some have suggested that it might only have been a figment of Parkin’s fevered intelligence. But when the Colonel responds to his moans of terror and sits him back down in his bed, Parkin's rational mind quickly reasserts itself as he mutters, “Oh, no” again and again. 

Whistle and I’ll Come To You is a quite perfect film that captures the atmosphere of M. R. James’s best ghost story. 

(1) The Robert Burns poem of the same title has nothing to do with the story.