Mark Gatiss serves up a suitably chilling festive tale for the BBC

If anyone knows anything about spooky, it’s Mark Gatiss. He wrote the book – or at least fronted the trio of documentaries – on the history of horror movies in 2010. So, there can be no doubt he knows all about Jacques Tourneur. He directed B-movie horror films in the 1940s, and could do amazing things with no money but just made a mess when given a decent budget.

And, so you can appear wise and knowledgeable in the pub later, he directed Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man and Curse of the Demon. This last film may well have influenced Gatiss, who has resurrected the BBC’s ‘ghost story for Christmas’ strand with the eerie and strangely titled The Tractate Middoth.

In Curse of the Demon, the hero sets out to debunk the claims of a mysterious cult leader, only to find himself drawn into a terrifying and deadly game of occult cat and mouse with a creature from the bowels of hell. In the film, mysterious flashing lights herald the arrival of beast.

In Gatiss’ adaptation of MR James’s short story, mysterious motes of dust herald the arrival of a terrifying and vengeful apparition from beyond the grave, which is unleashed by one man’s obsessive hunt for an ancient Hebrew text.

Tourneur wanted the flashing lights and movie-goers’ imaginations to conjure up their own personal terror for the monster in Curse of the Demon – but studio bosses lost their collective nerve and insisted on an animatronic beastie that waved its arms unconvincingly, and said “Grrr…. argh”. It toned down genuinely scary scenes into ones that looked more like the Mutant Enemy monster at the end of the credits on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

So it goes with The Tractate Middoth. The monster is a 21st-century special effect improvement on the one from Curse of the Demon, and it is a little bit scary, but after its first appearance, about 20 minutes in, The Tractate Middoth loses much of its chill factor. Which is a little bit of a shame.

Its PG-rated, safe to watch with your kids and the mother-in-law fear factor aside, The Tractate Middoth is a smart and slightly spooky worthy successor to the BBC’s festive ghost tales of the 1970s.

THE WHO, WHAT, WHEN OF IT

WHAT’S IT CALLED?

The Tractate Middoth

WHEN IS IT ON?

9.30pm, Wednesday, December 25th

WHAT CHANNEL?

BBC2

WHO IS IN IT?

Louise Jameson, Eleanor Bron, John Castle, Roy Barraclough, Sacha Dhawan, David Ryall and Sherlock stalwart Una Stubbs

WHO SHOULD WATCH IT?

Anyone who loved the Beeb’s Christmas ghost stories from the 1970s

WHO SHOULDN’T WATCH IT?

Fans of the Saw franchise and anyone else who rates horror by its blood-spatter levels