Grave concerns for Jason Watkins as Mr Wraxhall.
IN 1863, British travelogue writer Mr Wraxhall (Jason Watkins) visits Råbäck Manor in Sweden, which was built by Count Magnus de la Gardie. Now occupied by Froken de la Gardie (MyAnna Buring), servant Gustav (Jamal Ajala) and a set of ancestral portraits, Wraxhall declines Froken's invitation to stay and boards at the local inn. Here he learns more about The Count from innkeeper Herr Nielsen (Max Bremer): Magnus was a merciless landowner who was also notorious for his Black Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, bringing something - or someone - back with him. Nielsen also recounts the tale of poachers on The Count’s lands, which resulted in one going mad and the other having the skin sucked from his face. Obsessed with this uncovering sinister world, Wraxhall visits Magnus's mausoleum, which is sealed by chains and padlocks.
An illustration for Count Magnus by Rosemary Pardoe. Pardoe helmed the M.R. James related Ghosts & Scholars magazine for forty years.
Lawrence Gordon Clark originally intended Count Magnus to be the 1976 entry of the strand, before budgetary concerns and a consequent shift to THE SIGNALMAN. The soul of the text holds the half-hour together, and Watkins is perfect as the irritative researcher, suffering somewhat from an Englishman abroad syndrome (he acknowledges that the locale would be more akin to peasants, for example). It's a stoic entry in the series, with its festive notions of twisted family heritage and supernatural shenanigans, but there is too much daylight in this tale of darkness, and its locations never convince that we are anywhere near Scandinavia.
Faithfully adapted from the 1904 M.R. James story by Mark Gatiss, COUNT MAGNUS adds more layers of alchemy for its conclusion. Gatiss stands by James' ending to a point, as both feature the violent death of Wraxall, whose demise is ruled by jury to be caused "by visitation of God." In the original, the storyteller is revealed to be the man who acquired Wraxall's house, forced to demolish the property since nobody is willing to stay there. But here the narrator is revealed to be Magnus himself, his life prolonged by a deal with the devil, processing the tale from within his tomb. Before the credits we also see a modern-day young couple appear at the mausoleum, to illustrate that ages-old horror dictum, why don't you just leave such things alone ...
