The Stone Tape (1972) (2025)

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1972

Directed by Peter Sasdy

Synopsis

A research team from an electronics company move into an old Victorian house to start work on finding a new recording medium. When team member Jill Greeley witnesses a ghost, team director Peter Brock decides not only to analyse the apparition, which he believes is a psychic impression trapped in a stone wall (dubbed a "stone tape"), but to exorcise it too - with terrifying results...

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  • Cast
  • Crew
  • Details
  • Genres
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Cast

Michael Bryant Jane Asher Iain Cuthbertson Michael Bates Reginald Marsh Tom Chadbon John Forgeham Philip Trewinnard James Cosmo Neil Wilson Christopher Banks Michael Graham Cox Hilda Fenemore Peggy Marshall

DirectorDirector

Peter Sasdy

ProducerProducer

Innes Lloyd

WriterWriter

Nigel Kneale

EditorEditor

Geoff Higgs

Costume DesignCostume Design

MakeupMakeup

Maureen Winslade

Studio

BBC

Country

UK

Language

English

Alternative Title

石头记

Genres

Horror Mystery Drama TV Movie

Themes

Horror, the undead and monster classics Terrifying, haunted, and supernatural horror Creepy, chilling, and terrifying horror Chilling experiments and classic monster horror Twisted dark psychological thriller Spooky, scary comedy Show All…

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Theatrical

25 Dec 1972
  • The Stone Tape (1972) (3)UK

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The Stone Tape (1972) (4)UK
25 Dec 1972
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  • Review by laird ★★★★ 3

    There may be unfilmed Nigel Kneale stories out there, but there's still going to be a Cabin Fever remake. Imagine the horror future generations will experience when they find out what we left behind.

    I love that this sidesteps the usual British approach of pragmatic non-believer versus the inexplicable by making it about scientists who immediately believe what they're experiencing, but want to understand it (and being good capitalists, exploit it. Dan O'Bannon was taking notes from Kneale when he came up with Weyland Corp). Also, they're racist, sexist assholes who minimize the contribution of their female co-worker. This 1972 movie underlines these traits as negative, which makes it (from what I've heard) more progressive than that new Jurassic Park movie.

  • Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★ 4

    A group of scientists move into a haunted mansion with the intention of doing certain researches, especially whether the stones in a specific room serves as a recording medium for past events, but ends up unleashing something much evil.

    So I genuinely had no idea about this, and apparently many people have this project in high regards and seeing all these comments here makes me feel like I am missing something. That being said, this TV play is a spooky one and while I am sure the story has been told before, the concept here seems sorta fresh and the whole thing with the stones adds a whole new take to the genre and its very well executed. Performances for…

  • Review by Tony the Terror ★★★★ 5

    This is a really solid little British made for TV haunted house horror movie that I had never heard of, but I’m glad I finally did because it’s got that lovely 70’s British vibe.

    The TV movie budget constraints do hold it back a bit and I think a theatrical release version of this might have really made for a classic of the time, but it’s still very good as it is.

    The whole idea this presents of ghosts existing because their energy is trapped in the porous stone walls that were a common building material is an interesting one I don’t immediately recall being used in a movie before? I could be wrong, but it’s neat either way!

    Now…

  • Review by pd187 ★★★½ 3

    thought this was gonna be footage of roger stone watching a guy in a bird mask fuck his wife... zero stars do not recomend

  • Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★★ 2

    2nd Peter Sasdy (after Doomwatch)

    A film certainly about the odiousness of men in positions of power but, more pertinently, how trauma is made a thousand times worst in its replaying and exhibition. The maid whose scream becomes the film's Macguffin is, effectively, repeatedly violated by having her most terrible, most intimate moment (that of her violent death) repeated over and over for the intellectual edification of a bunch of male scientists obsessed with progress.

    It's telling that the one most affected by the ghost screams is the only woman in the department, who explicitly describes herself as a medium. Her sensitivity to something other than herself (arguably the men in the film don't see the women as human beings…

  • Review by Herb Gallow ★★★★½ 4

    Every time someone talks about the ballyhooed Golden Age of Television, they act as though well-constructed drama designed for the small screen is somehow a new phenomenon. Which ignores a long tradition of cross-pollination between the dramatic theater mindset and the extended television feature, coming to prominence with stuff like Playhouse 90 back in the 1950s. Nigel Kneale is a product of that tradition, writing a number of feature-length television dramas for the BBC in the 1960s and 70s, one of which being The Stone Tape.

    This is one of my favorite ghost movies, mostly because of how idiosyncratic and unusual it is. That starts with a refreshing deviation from the standard formula. Jill (Jane Asher) is checking out the…

  • Review by Joshua Dysart ★★★½ 9

    Very well done science-v-ghost story about how being the only woman around an entire team of men is the real horror.

    Another example of what we mean when we say that 1970s BBC was an absolute high water mark for television. I love this era of British TV. I was weaned, in the late 70s and into the 80s, on British science fiction and supernatural TV shows that our PBS station aired in South Texas. I would hassle the shit out of my working class single mom during the entire PBS fund drive because the fuckers would threaten to pull their British programming if it couldn’t raise enough money.

    I loved it all. Loved that video-quality image with the light…

  • Review by Paul Thomas ★★★

    Low budget British TV film from Peter Sasdy, who also directed Taste the Blood of Dracula. There are times it is genuinely creepy, almost a found footage feel to it. It makes me wonder why they didn't dive into the horror more as times it felt overly procedural to the crew's mission. We get it. Give us more of the spooky parts because you're nailing those.

    But I can see why some hold it in high regards.

  • Review by threepenny ★★★★★ 2

    A group of engineers trying to invent the next storage medium after cassette tape stumble onto a haunting, and posit that the stones themselves are storing data and projecting it, and test their hypothesis in an attempt to "read" the data by bombarding it with vibrations, temperature changes, ultraviolet, and so on. And now that there's a scientific explanation, they keep going deeper into it the more they look. No wonder the first CD Player came out of Japan - focus, guys. Jane Asher stars as the smartest of the bunch and the only one who isn't some level of obnoxious ass. When Michael Bryant, as the womanizing, patronizing, condescending, bullying leader of the team says to her, "we can't…

  • Review by Soumajit Nath ★★★

    THE STONE TAPE has few exceptional shades of promising horror in it's super-interesting prelude only; and about it, I would say only that, these horrors are mostly of it's first kinds: carefully has been chosen out of the explainable facts and is been composed as in completely out of the sight of any horror films of any time; that's why the idea, only here, seems completely different, more petrified, more gradually terrifying and more gradually beguiling in vein of old conflict of perspective-play: point of highlight, here, is that illustrious tussle in between science oriented modernist's mind and the ultimate inexplicable, about which still we don't have any broader enlightening ideas!! One can easily see how horror films are always…

  • Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🐝 ★★★½

    You Have 90 Minutes To Comply: The New Year Project

    Nigel Kneale was a masterful writer who I suspect the work of whom has never quite been given the attention and respect outside of the UK that it deserves.

    I can sort of understand why that might be the case. The Quatermass films that he is perhaps most famous for are good to very good films but with their wobbly sets and TV-looking production values, they do perhaps fade into the background when compared to the bigger budgeted and glossier American offerings of the era. A lot of his work has been devalued in some spheres too as a result of 'ageing' accusations.

    The main problem with The Stone Tape…

  • Review by Sam ★★½

    "IT'S IN THE COMPUTAAARGHHH"

    This is a low budget TV film and looks and feels exactly like that. Nevertheless, it's a decent ghost story and there are a few effective scares and chilling moments scattered throughout.

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