Something About Adapting The Tractate Middoth

Rant verses rave.

I recently watched an adaptation of The Tractate Middot, the 1911 M. R. James ghost story. The BBC adaptation aired on Christmas Day back in 2013 and is one many excellent adaptations of James's stories available. One reason I was interested in watching this one was seeing how the producers created the cob-webbed-face specter who appeared to Mr. Garrett:

I tell you, he had a very nasty bald head. It looked to me dry, and it looked dusty, and the streaks of hair across it were much less like hair than cobwebs...Though, for one reason or another I didn't take in the lower part of his face I did see the upper part; and it was perfectly dry, and the eyes were very deep-sunk; and over them, from the eyebrows to the cheek-bones there were cobwebs-thick.

Bellairs wrote in The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb (1988) of Willis Nightwood, an eccentric lawyer from Stillwater, Wisconsin, who supposedly succumbed to an accident during occult ceremony and consumed by a demon. It’s the so-called oil lamp demon, described as short with a pale, bald, freckled face covered with a crisscrossing mass of black strands similar to spider webs, that appears to be one of Bellairs many allusions to Jamesian motifs.

It’s just as fun seeing new takes on the Bellairs Corpus characters and scenes from contemporary artists as it is seeing modern interpretations on the material we know inspired Bellairs.  It also makes me wonder how the Bellairs Corpus could look were it ever adapted visually.