As the yuletide logs crackle and mulled wine warms the chilliest of evenings, the BBC’s venerable tradition of festive frights returns with a vengeance, proving once again that the best Christmas gifts come wrapped in shadows and whispers. This year’s A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Room in the Tower, Mark Gatiss’s eighth spine-tingling contribution to the anthology, plunges us into the fog-shrouded inter-war years, where a gentleman’s nightmare refuses to stay confined to the realm of sleep. Starring the luminous Dame Joanna Lumley and the brooding Tobias Menzies, this 30-minute gem—adapted from E.F. Benson’s 1912 short story—has ignited hearths and hashtags alike since its December 22, 2025, premiere on BBC Two and iPlayer. Viewers, huddled under blankets with the firelight dancing on their faces, are flooding social feeds with declarations of delight and dread: “Watched with the lights on—Lumley’s gaze alone could curdle eggnog,” one tweet gasps, while another confesses, “Menzies’ Roger is every bad dream I’ve ever had; Gatiss has outdone himself.” It’s not mere seasonal spookery; it’s a velvet-gloved grip on the psyche, a reminder that the ghosts we fear most are the ones that echo our own unspoken terrors. In an age of jump-scare overload, this adaptation harks back to the subtle horrors of M.R. James—Gatiss’s frequent muse—while venturing into Benson’s more languid, psychological labyrinth. Airing amid the mince pies and midnight masses, it’s the perfect antidote to saccharine specials, a chill that lingers like frost on the windowpane, urging us to question: what if our subconscious isn’t a sanctuary, but a summons?

E.F. Benson, that Edwardian polymath whose quill danced from society satires to spectral chills, penned “The Room in the Tower” as a cornerstone of his ghostly oeuvre—a tale that ensnared readers with its insidious blend of the mundane and the macabre. First published in his 1912 collection The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, it draws from Benson’s own fascination with the liminal, the spaces where waking logic frays at the edges. Benson, brother to explorers and archaeologists, infused his fiction with an archaeologist’s precision: ghosts not as ghoulish grotesques, but as inexorable forces, archaeological layers of the soul unearthed against our will. The story’s protagonist, Roger Winstanley, endures a recurring dream that spans fifteen summers, each iteration more vivid, more visceral—a polite invitation to a country house that curdles into claustrophobia. The tower room, with its oppressive oak and moonlit menace, becomes a metaphor for inherited dread, a familial curse disguised as hospitality. Benson’s prose, elegant yet edged with unease, builds to a revelation that’s less a scream than a sigh— the horror of recognition, where the dreamer becomes the dreamed. It’s this cerebral shiver that Gatiss, a self-professed Benson devotee, latches onto, transforming a century-old whisper into a widescreen wail. As Gatiss himself enthused in pre-airing interviews, “I’ve always wanted to adapt the great E.F. Benson’s ghost stories, and this is one of his chilling best.” In an era craving escapism, The Room in the Tower offers no flight—only a descent into the self, where Christmas cheer curdles into quiet horror.

The BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas strand, born in 1971 from the ashes of M.R. James adaptations, has long been a bauble on the broadcaster’s festive tree—a counterpoint to the carols and crackers, reminding us that Yuletide was once a season for wassailing wraiths and hearthside hauntings. Revived by Gatiss in 2010 with A Warning to the Curious, the series has become his personal Yuletide workshop, blending reverence with reinvention. From the sepulchral The Tractate Middoth (2013) to the Doyle-derived Lot No. 249 (2023), Gatiss’s entries honor the originals’ restraint—no CGI specters, just fog machines and flickering candles—while injecting contemporary unease. This year’s pivot to Benson marks a departure from James’s donnish dread, embracing instead the inter-war ennui of drawing rooms and debutante balls, where the ghosts wear tweed and tiaras. Filmed in the spring of 2025 at Kent’s majestic Cobham Hall—a Jacobean pile with towers that pierce the sky like accusatory fingers—the production captures the era’s brittle elegance. Cobham’s Long Gallery, with its portraits of powdered ancestors glaring from gilt frames, stands in for the dream-house’s opulent decay; its grounds, tangled in wisteria and whispers, provide the perfect proscenium for nocturnal unease. Producer Isibéal Ballance, of Adorable Media, orchestrated the shoot with period fastidiousness—costumes by Verity Lewis evoking Chanel’s quiet revolution, sets redolent of beeswax and regret. Gatiss, directing with his trademark mise-en-scène of shadows and sidelong glances, conjures a world where every creak is a clue, every courtesy a curse. As commissioning editor Mark Bell noted, “Mark and the team have gathered a wonderful cast for this atmospheric treat where dream meets terrifying reality. ‘I have given you the room in the tower’ is a sentence nobody will want to hear once they have experienced this festive haunting.”

At the heart of this spectral symphony beats Tobias Menzies as Roger Winstanley, the everyman ensnared by ethereal entanglement. Menzies, whose crown-adjacent gravitas in The Crown and Outlander has made him a marquee name for measured menace, embodies Roger with a porcelain fragility that fractures under pressure. We first meet him in 1910, a fresh-faced youth of perhaps eighteen, his nights plagued by the same insidious reverie: an engraved card summoning him to Aswarby Hall, home of the affable yet unnerving Captain Martin. The dream unfolds with Benson’s deceptive decorum—cordial cocktails in the gun room, a procession of peculiar guests whose faces blur into foreboding. Menzies navigates these sequences with wide-eyed wariness, his Roger a vessel for our vicarious vulnerability; each awakening leaves him paler, more hollowed, as if the dream drains him drop by drop. Fifteen years on, in the 1920s’ jazz-age afterglow, Roger is a seasoned solicitor, his bachelor life a bulwark against the subconscious siege. Yet the visions persist, the Martins aging in tandem with real time—Captain Martin’s mustache whitening, his sister’s décolletage deepening with décolleté years. Menzies’s masterstroke is restraint: no histrionics, just a gathering gauntness, his eyes—those Menzies eyes, pools of quiet accusation—betraying the toll. When the invitation arrives in waking life, penned in ink that might as well be blood, Roger’s acceptance is a gambler’s plunge. Menzies sells the escalation with subtle spasms—a twitch at the tower door, a gasp as moonlight reveals the room’s true tenant: Mrs. de Roulaincourt, her portrait’s vampire lips parting in a feast of familiarity. It’s a performance that peels back layers of British reserve, exposing the raw nerve beneath, earning murmurs of “Menzies at his most mesmerizing” from early screeners.

Opposite this unraveling stands Dame Joanna Lumley as Mrs. de Roulaincourt, the story’s enigmatic epicenter—a figure who transcends the veil with aristocratic allure and arterial hunger. Lumley, 79 and eternally effervescent from Absolutely Fabulous to Motherland, dons prosthetics that age her into ethereal menace, her cheekbones sharpened to scythes, eyes sunken to abyssal gleam. In the dreamscapes, she’s the portrait come alive, her pallid skin luminous under lantern light, a garnet pendant pulsing like a second heart. Lumley infuses her with a languorous lethality—conversations laced with double entendres, her laughter a rustle of dry leaves. “My dear boy, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” she purrs in one sequence, her voice a velvet noose, drawing Roger deeper into the domestic danse macabre. As the narrative folds dream into dread, Lumley’s Mrs. de Roulaincourt emerges as more than vampiric; she’s a symbol of stifled desires, the inter-war woman whose appetites outlast her era. Filming her pivotal scenes at Cobham’s tower—candle flames flickering on her latex-veined visage—Lumley later quipped to the press, “I’m not tremendous on gore, but I do love a frightening story. This one’s got teeth, darling—literal ones.” Her chemistry with Menzies crackles with unspoken eroticism, a forbidden feast that elevates the horror from supernatural to sublimely sexual, echoing Benson’s undercurrents of repressed longing.

The ensemble elevates the eerie to ensemble artistry, each player a pillar in Gatiss’s Gothic edifice. Nancy Carroll, her The Crown poise honed to haughty perfection, slinks through as Lady Martin, the captain’s sister whose solicitude masks a spectral complicity—her sidelong smiles hiding fangs filed to finery. Ben Mansfield, rugged from Endeavour’s mean streets, grounds the piece as the Captain, his bluff bonhomie crumbling into cadaverous candor, a host whose hospitality harbors horrors. Polly Walker, Gatiss’s Bookish collaborator and Bridgerton veteran, weaves in as a peripheral guest, her knowing nods knitting the nightmare’s web— a cameo that curdles into crescendo. Supporting shades include Miles Yapp as a bumbling butler whose banalities belie the building dread, and a cadre of dream-dwellers whose faces morph across montages, aging in accelerated agony. Gatiss’s script, faithful yet fleet, condenses Benson’s 5,000 words into 30 minutes of mounting malaise—voiceover narrating Roger’s journal entries, their ink bleeding into iris-out transitions that mimic morphine haze. Cinematographer Will Nicholls bathes the proceedings in desaturated sepia, moonlight bleaching the Martins’ manor to bone-white, shadows stretching like sanguine streams. The score, a sparse susurrus of strings and sighs by Debbie Wiseman, underscores the subtlety—no stings, just swells that mimic a sleeper’s shallow breaths.

From its velvet-draped premiere, The Room in the Tower has haunted the holiday zeitgeist, drawing 3.2 million viewers on debut night—a 15% uptick from 2024’s Woman of Stone—and topping iPlayer charts for supernatural specials. Critics crowned it a corker: The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan lauded its “elegant evocation of Benson’s dread, with Menzies’ subtle spasms stealing scenes,” awarding four stars for “festive frights that finesse the formula.” The Telegraph’s Anita Singh deemed it “Gatiss’s most intimate haunt yet, Lumley’s vamp a vintage vintage,” while Radio Times hailed the cast’s “chemistry colder than December fog.” Fans, from X’s armchair antiquarians to TikTok’s terror-tots, have threaded the needle of nostalgia and novelty: “Finally, a ghost story that ghosts me—that ending? Chills till Candlemas,” one viral clip captions, synced to the portrait’s parting leer. Another user, costumed as Mrs. de Roulaincourt for a fireside recap, warns, “Skip if you’re solo; this one whispers your name.” In a streaming season stuffed with Scrooges and serial killers, Gatiss’s gift gleams for its restraint—horror honed to heirloom, a tower room that towers over trends.

What lingers longest is the adaptation’s acuity: Benson’s tale, a product of post-Edwardian malaise, resonates in our fractured now, where dreams of invasion—be they viral or visceral—invade the id. Gatiss, ever the archivist of unease, amplifies the ambiguity: is Mrs. de Roulaincourt a metaphor for marital entrapment, colonial guilt, or simply the savage id unchained? The finale, a moonlit merger that defies disclosure, fades not on shrieks but a sigh—the room’s door clicking shut, Roger’s reflection rippling into revelation. As Christmas 2025 folds into memory, The Room in the Tower stands as a sentinel: a story that summons us to our own subconscious spires, daring us to sleep sound. Whether you’re a James junkie or a Benson beginner, this is the chill to chase away the cheer—a haunting so honed, it haunts holly and hearth alike. Tune in on iPlayer, dim the tree lights, and heed the summons. The tower awaits, and once entered, there’s no waking without a whisper.