The Classic Ghosts: Deadly Visitor

When a writer takes up lodging in an old boarding house, a familiar story of haunting transforms into a small marvel of genre filmmaking, with astonishingly sexy vim! Gothic thrills from the director of Dark Shadows (1966-71).

The Classic Ghosts was something of an experimental production in its time, as an attempt at doing late night television a bit differently. The five, one-hour episodes that make up the series were made by a predominantly female crew of artists and artisans headed by producer Jacqueline Babbin, on a shoestring budget, demonstrated, in part, by the fact that it was shot not on film, but video, back then considered an inferior material used only for lesser occasions.

Lela Swift, the Deadly Visitor‘s director, was well acquainted with video, as she had worked with it for years, as the main director of the first and still most famous horror daytime drama, Dark Shadows (1966-71). Her touch for Gothic thrills delivered sometimes with melodramatic panache and sometimes with a pinch of coolly detached irony turns this story of a writer’s haunting in an old boarding house into a small marvel of genre filmmaking, with quite astonishing sexual undertones!

– Olaf Möller

Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

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