Halloween Treat Three: Clive Barker's Book Of Blood (2008)

After the distinct, bright colours and dark humour of Drag Me To Hell and Trick 'R Treat, the muted palette and grim Britishness of Clive Barker's Book Of Blood was a stark contrast.

This was no laughfest, but a straight-up ghost story; a cautionary tale of the dangers of playing with supernatural forces, fake seances and claims of mediumship (Derek Acorah and Sally Morgan pay heed!)

Sophie Ward stars as a superhot college lecturer and paranormal investigator, Mary Florescu, who befriends a shy and handsome student, Simon McNeal (Jonas Armstrong from the recently-axed Robin Hood series on the BBC), who she believes has the gift of foresight and may even be able to contact the dead.

For her next book, Mary and her sidekick Reg (Paul Blair) are investigating a house in Edinburgh with a history of strange and brutal murders connected with attempts to commune the afterlife.

But things don't go quite according to plan.

Writer/director John Harrison's script - an adaptation of two Clive Barker short stories The Book Of Blood and On Jerusalem Street, the first and last stories from the magnificent six-volume collection of Clive Barker's Books Of Blood - is an intriguing mix of misdirection and investigation that would make Derren Brown proud with genuine ghoulish horror straight from the Hellraiser file (shady removal men, mattress action, cracking walls, peeling skin etc).

While not as mythology-birthing as the original Hellraiser, Harrison is clearly aiming for the same atmosphere - and has wisely retained Barker's British roots rather than relocating the action to the States as happens with many attempts to bring Barker's visceral horror to the big screen.

If nothing else the original Book Of Blood story gave us the concept of "highways of the dead", which later became a prevalent theme in some of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer spin-off novels, and - after Lovecraft - got me hooked into reading horror fiction when I first discovered it in the late '80s.

The main story, about the relationship between Mary and Simon and the creation of the titular Book Of Blood, is bookended with a suitably grubby tale of a bounty hunter capturing Simon for a mysterious "collector".

What this does mean is that after the initial establishing shocks, the story settles down and it isn't really until about half-an-hour in that things start to get going again.

It's also quite bleak (a lot of that can be attributed to its Scottish setting) and the performances are quite understated from the leads, which doesn't make them particularly sympathetic - but then again that is a trait I've found in a lot of Barker's fiction.

Nevertheless, especially for fans of intellectual side of the Hellraiser franchise or slow-burning Lovecraftian horror, Book Of Blood is a powerful piece, effectively moving the Most Haunted concept sideways into a fictional world where ghosts really exist... and don't particularly appreciate being disturbed by people unable to truly understand what they are trying to say.