While "Ghost Stories" takes off from a simple monologue in a spotlight, Mr. Nyman's $500,000 production has its share of elaborate effects too.
The clues are as much as a mile apart, and the organizers — three shadowy figures known to us only by their first names — seem more interested in absurdist humor and elaborate effects than in pure deductive logic.
Nearly all the elaborate effects work – the "square, dark" door of the house, the "flurry of gestures", and particularly the flock of birds at the end "smashing against" – presumably – the frame the writer has chosen to enclose this view!
The Baghdad sets of Harryhausen's "Sinbad" movies seem to have been borrowed directly from Abbott and Costello's "Lost in a Harem"; he worked within budgets so small that even elaborate effects often had to be achieved in a single take.
But all those bells and whistles — an extensive cast, elaborate effects and sets depicting a bucolic town in crisis — cost more than CBS wanted to spend on a 13-episode summer series.
Some of the small number of tragedies that were staged were filled out with long processions of animals, gaudy costumes, and elaborate effects, all emphasizing the hollowness of both theatre and audience.
The resulting one-and-a-half hours of delirious flesh-chewing fun – a hot-blooded genre pic called Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead – flies in the face of the golden rules of making shoestring-budget productions (in other words few actors, a bare minimum number of locations and no elaborate effects).
After a decade of performing at the Globe — a London amphitheatre patterned on the inn courtyards where plays used to be staged, with little more scenery than what language could paint on air — Shakespeare's company succeeded in taking over the Blackfriars theatre and, in 1609, began winter performances there, out of the weather, with more elaborate effects.
With raffishly tousled hair and boyish good looks, Mr. Mailer sniggers and leaps around in a strenuous effort to appear creepy but misses the mark even when he's literally creeping down the wall, in one of the production's more elaborate effects.
