Originally planned as part of the BBC's horror anthology series Dead of Night and shown on Christmas Day 1972, The Stone Tape merges the classic haunted house narrative with 1970s science and technology to create a Christmas Chiller very much of its time. In fact everything from the fashion to the technology to the ridiculous casual sexism is so 70s it occasionally almost feels like an over-egged parody of the decade made much later (one character appears to be wearing a shirt made out of the carpet in The Shining). Fortunately there is a strong edge of humour in the writing, satirising the attitudes of the day and the computer programmer protagonists' endless rivalry with "the Japanese" and a research project into washing machines from their own company. At the same time, however, there is a real sense of optimism that rapidly advancing new technology may allow us to answer questions that had forever seemed unanswerable. The Stone Tape was written by Nigel Kneale, perhaps the most influential writer of genre stories on British TV, who had already explored a combination of classic horror tropes and contemporary sci-fi with his Quatermass series. Kneale's teleplay has a group of scientists and engineers set up in a Victorian mansion mid-way through being renovated as they look to try and develop better recording equipment. As they discover the ghostly figure repeating the same action of running up stairs and falling, they theorise that hauntings are a form of residual recorded images preserved in the building's stone. This they seek to record using their own equipment, but only succeed in uncovering a darker, more malevolent presence. A young Jane Asher, who had previously appeared as a child in the Hammer film of Kneale's Quatermass Xperiment (the X makes it look cool), stars as the only woman in the group, programmer Jill. Her position as the only woman in a man's world gives her the level of isolation required for a good ghost story and this makes her more receptive than most to the spirits in the stone tape recordings. Asher gives a perfectly decent performance, but it's Kneale's ideas and originality that most impress about The Stone Tape. Its legacy is clear in any of the myriad modern stories of attempts to track and record ghosts with digital equipment and in the real world tgeory that ghosts exist as residual recordings, known, known in honour of this film, as the Stone Tape theory.
