‘Whistle And I’ll Come To You’: the British horror gem loved by Martin Scorsese
Having probably forgotten more about cinema than most people will ever learn, Martin Scorsese has curated an exhaustive list of the films that have inspired him over the years. It’s a selection which comfortably runs into the hundreds and borders on the thousands.
His favourites cover almost the entirety of the moving image’s history and span from stone-cold classics to unheralded gems. It’s indicative of his encyclopaedic approach that one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time who became synonymous with the hard-boiled gangster flick singled out a ghost story that only aired on television as part of the BBC’s long-running Omnibus in 1968 as a favourite.
Inadvertently kicking off a minor craze of sorts, Whistle and I’ll Come to You adapted a story written by M.R. James, who quickly became a staple of the station’s one-off specials. Blazing the trail that others would soon follow, writer and director Jonathan Miller set the stage for what would soon become a slew of spooky stories that formed the backbone of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series.
Within seven years, James’ A Warning to the Curious, The Stalls of Barchester, Lost Hearts, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, and The Ash-tree had all been brought to the screen, but none of them were singled out by the Academy Award-winning mastermind behind Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas as being worthy of special praise.
In Scorsese’s eyes, the first inspiration remains the purest. In the film, Michael Hordern stars as Cambridge academic Professor Parkin, who pitches up on the coast for some much-needed rest and relaxation. However, when he unearths a whistle poking ominously out of the undergrowth of a graveyard and decides to take it home, otherworldly shenanigans begin to befall him at every turn once he first catches sight of a foreboding figure looming in the distance.
Doubling down on his bad decision-making, Parkin blows the whistle, only for a storm to arise. Seeking a rational explanation for what’s befalling him, an encounter with an apparition reduces him to a bubbling wreck, which is why nobody should pick up whistles inscribed with Latin messages intoning ‘Who is this, who is coming?’ while on a trip to the seaside and then decide to blow into them.
An understated, dread-leaden terror that burrows further under the skin as the story progresses, Whistle and I’ll Come to You might be more ambiguous than its literary forebear in terms of conveying the veracity of Parkin’s ghostly experiences, but it’s undeniably effective. In fact, it has a brooding dread not unlike that portrayed in Shutter Island.
British horror was best known for the production line of Hammer flicks in the 1960s, so a more conventional and classical chamber piece was a breath of fresh air that took itself very seriously and was all the better for it. Here, we have a film that boldly declared that the mind is often the most haunting place of all. If Scorsese says it’s top-tier stuff, then there’s no other argument to be made.