The Stone Tape (1972)

Spooktober Challenge 2025

Premise: it’s the early 70s and this team of nerds is at this spooooky victorian manor working on some new flashy recording equipment. Lo and behold, they find out one of the rooms is HAUNTED. One of the dudes is like “wait” (in a really thick british accent) “I think what we are seeing is a recording that was imprinted on the stone itself” and maybe he’s right. The problem is that things go very wrong after that.
Under 90 minutes? it is exactly 90 minutes!
Do they say the title? oh yes they do!

One sentence review: eat your heart out A24, this movie is not even subtle about the whole trauma-as-a-ghost thing BUT it’s also about ghosts!
Okay, more: this was surprisingly spooky and effective. Props to making the best out of basically no budget, just atmosphere, dread and seeing how the pieces land where they should. John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness owes a lot to this movie, which is somethign I can say as John Carpenter’s Biggest Fan, there’s a lot of really neat dumb stuff here that will make you go “yes… yes!” if you like ghost stories. Very cool stuff!
A simple way to improve it: all 70s movies kind of smell like stale beer and tobacco. If we could get rid of that they’d be better.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia:

Near the end of the film, as Jill climbs the staircase and holds the railing, you can see how the supposedly stone wall stretches where it’s attached to the railing.

yeah, that’s the kind of thing you might expect if YOU’RE AT A MEGAHAUNTED LOCATION geez. please just try to enjoy movies uuuurgh.