Review: Haunted Ulster Live – “a cracking bit of viewing for the Halloween season.”

Directed by Dominic O’Neill
Starring Mark Claney, Aimee Richardson, Siobhan Kelly, Dave Fleming, Antoinette Morelli, Owen James, Dan Leith

It’s Halloween in Belfast, 1998 – the Troubles are still ongoing. A local station is doing a live, outside broadcast from a purportedly haunted house, complete with the “Ghost Tent” (where local paranormal investigators have set up their equipment for the night). Vox pops on the street outside with locals, all eager to appear on the telly, of course (including a trio of youngsters all dressed up as Power Rangers, leading co-host Michelle (Aimee Richardson) to smile and comment that at least the street is protected tonight!). Inside the house the other host, a middle-aged veteran broadcaster, Gerry (Mark Claney) talks to the mother and children about the hauntings, and introduces a couple of paranormal experts, including a medium, Sinead (Antoinette Morelli), while a local radio DJ Declan (Dan Leith) is staying alone in the loft and broadcasting all night from there to raise funds for charity.

Those of you familiar with your British TV history will, of course, guess right away that Haunted Ulster Live is something of a homage to a famous/infamous live broadcast from the early 1990s on the BBC, when they aired Ghostwatch. Presented by a range of very well-known public broadcast figures like Michael Parkinson, the show managed to fool a large segment of the viewing audience into thinking they were watching a real documentary coming to them live (some of us were not fooled, we’ve seen too many horror films! But many were). The film quite lovingly re-creates that 1990s live TV experience – the mix of the veteran prima donna presenter and the younger one, the overbearing producer, the almost embarrassing interviews on the street with people just desperate to get their face on the screen, even the colour schemes, the screen size ratios, the local station idents and cuts to ads and the main studio, all evoke the look and style of the period’s broadcasting. They even manage a nod to our old friend, the Satanic Panic.

However, despite the short run time, there’s a lot more going on here than simply taking a well-remembered broadcasting hoax and running with it. While that provides the basic skeleton of the film, as it progresses, O’Neill rather cannily starts to feed some other material in there, including elements of folk horror, and mixes some light-hearted comedic moments with increasingly dark material. Even the presenters, who seem straight out of 90s broadcasting stereotype school, develop more character as the events begin to take on their own route, away from the Ghostwatch formula.

I don’t want to discuss those later elements too much because we’d been moving into Spoiler Territory, but I was quite impressed with the way O’Neill used Ghostwatch more as a foundation, not a whole blueprint, taking it to get the concept launched, then building his own fascinating horror take on top of it (and keeping it to a tight running time, so it maintains the tension and doesn’t exceed its welcome), with some clever ideas saved for the final reel. In addition to lovingly recreating the colours, styles and looks of live broadcasting from the era, O’Neill also reminds us that 1990s Belfast was a different place from now – a very loud noise prompts one presenter to reassure visitors that it was not an “incident” (in other words, a terrorist attack). A terrific combination of loving homage to a famous 90s live TV event and also very much its own thing, this is a cracking bit of viewing for the Halloween season.

Haunted Ulster Live is available on digital platforms from October 15th.