As the 'silent', non-acting one from League of Gentlemen (although you can see him get slaughtered at the beginning of spin-off Apocalypse movie), Jeremy Dyson loves scaring people.
His stage show Ghost Stories has proved such a hit, it's progressed to the West End where it's earnt such praise as 'unsettling' and 'scary', and been dubbed 'not suitable for under 16s'. Who says stageshows can't be terrifying, eh?
Anyway, we got Jeremy Dyson to share his own favourite GHOST STORIES with us...
1) RAMSEY CAMPBELL 'Dark Companion'
"Stephen King raved about Campbell in a whole chapter of 'Danse Macabre', and he became the watershed for me, the one who made me want to become a writer. His short stories anthology 'Dark Companions' has six or seven of the greatest ghost stories ever written.
There was 'The Companion', set around English carnivals, 'Alone in the World', which was about a writer who returns to the hotel where he and his now dead ex-wife honeymooned, and 'The Show Goes On', which is set in a disused cinema. These stories were the best kind of creepy, all suggestion, no gore, plenty of reading between the lines and very delicate.
Another thing that marks them out is that they're very contemporary and all set in Liverpool at the time he wrote them. So they've got a streak of social realism, too. Campbell's the master of taking the feel of Victorian horror and transporting it into present day, but doing so in a a very English way."
[All of these stories are also featured in the more recently published anthology 'Alone With the Horrors']
2) ROBERT AICKMAN - anything you can find!
"I discovered Aickman a couple of years later after Campbell was raving about him. He had a much smaller output, but he was absolutely unique, in fact, I'd say he was one of the all-time greats. His style was baroque, very European, very Freudian and with a hint of Kafka . He took the ghost story metaphor and pushed it to the absolute limit in what you could do with it, in terms of meaning.
If Aickman was a mainstream literary writer, rather than a horror one, he would've been lauded with awards and Nobel prizes!"
3) VAL LEWTON HORROR FILMS OF THE '40s AND J-HORROR FILMS
"In terms of horror films, I tend to like the usual suspects such as The Shining and Robert Wise's original 1961 The Haunting. But I've also got a big thing for the American producer Val Lewton, who went onto head the horror/B-movie unit at RKO Studios in the 1940s. He ended up making about eight or nine films, all delicate and poetic in style that were probably very far from what the studio intended.
Cat People (1942), which is a classic, was his first big hit, but he also made I Walked With A Zombie (1943), The Ghost Ship (1943), The Body Snatcher (1945) and Bedlam (1946).
I'm also a big fan of the Japanese J-Horror films, especially Dark Water and Ringu. I guess they've captured the same spirit, and they're very, very scary."
4) THE 'TROLL-AND-BIRD' TERROR
"This was a real-life tale doing the rounds when I was about 11 or 12. He was supposed to be a preacher haunting the moors in Leeds, and who was half-man and half-bird. Then I discovered that 'The Trollenberg Terror' was actually just the name of a terrible 1950s B-Movie, and the name had been mis-heard to become 'Troll and Bird', so that spoilt it. And no, I don't believe in ghosts."
*See GHOST STORIES at London West End theatre Duke of York from 25 June, trailer at the top of the page!*
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