In 1837, in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, Charles Babbage declares that “No motion impressed by natural causes, or by human agency, is ever obliterated.” Over a century later, in the 1972 film The Stone Tape, written by Nigel Kneale and directed by Peter Sasdy, we hear a character declare that “the room holds an image, and when people go in there they pick it up. […] It must act like a recording, fixed in the floor and the walls, right in the substance of them, a trace of what happened in there, and we pick it up, we act as detectors, decoders, amplifiers… it would have to be in the stone.” The rhyming nature of these statements, I believe, is not coincidental. My aim here is to demonstrate how this film reframes 19th century spiritualistic theories of matter such as Babbage’s in the context of 20th century technological paradigms and the generic conventions of folk horror, and how from this a model of both film spectatorship and the materiality of film itself emerges—one which is, given its provenance, appropriately spooky.
Kneale and Sasdy’s film played a significant role in popularizing the idea that psycho-sensory impressions could be “recorded” by inert material, in particular by certain kinds of stone—significant enough that it’s sometimes mistakenly believed to have originated it. As the Babbage quote suggests, however, this concept can be traced back to much earlier sources. Its full history is complex and beyond the scope here, but it may be understood as a form of psychometry, a parapsychological practice based on “reading” the history of an object through direct physical contact. The term was coined in the 1840s by Joseph Rodes Buchanan, an American physician who believed that “The Past is entombed in the Present!” and that in the future “the psychologist and the geologist will go hand in hand.”
There are two points worth emphasizing: first, that the “stone tape” is fundamentally a 19th century idea, emerging from the same early modernist context as photography and, by extension, cinema; and second, that the language used to describe it could, with minimal adjustment, resemble writing about cinema from decades later. These ideas are not identical, but they arise from similar cultural conditions and share overlapping conceptual ground.
This conceptual overlap opens the possibility of treating the stone tape as a model for cinema itself. To see how, we turn to the film. Produced for the BBC in 1972, it follows a team of corporate electronics researchers who move into a disused manor house to develop a new recording medium superior to magnetic tape. Upon arrival, they discover their intended workspace has not been renovated—the workers refused. Investigating, project lead Peter Brock uncovers a sealed stairwell. Soon after, Jill, the team’s computer technician, perceives the image of a woman and hears a terrifying scream. Others begin to report similar experiences, though Jill appears uniquely sensitive.
Unlike many ghost stories, the film does not hinge on belief versus skepticism. The phenomenon is quickly accepted as real, even by those who cannot perceive it. As in the writings of Babbage and Buchanan, the paranormal is approached with a quasi-scientific mindset. Yet this approach proves ineffective: tapes record silence, cameras capture nothing, sensors detect no anomalies. Eventually, Brock proposes that the phenomenon is a form of recording directly received by the mind, bypassing conventional sensory and technological interfaces. Convinced they have discovered a revolutionary medium, he becomes obsessed with unlocking its principles.
Jill remains uneasy. The recording appears to capture the moments leading to a servant girl’s fatal fall, yet inconsistencies remain—the stairs are not high enough to have caused death. She suspects something more is present, something overlooked in the rush toward technological exploitation. Nonetheless, the team proceeds. Brock, under pressure, initiates an aggressive attempt to trigger playback by bombarding the room with sound and light. The result is failure: the phenomenon disappears, seemingly erased.
Jill alone senses that something remains—something older. Learning that the stone predates the building itself, she theorizes that recordings degrade over time, and that an earlier, more corrupted layer may still exist beneath the erased one. Before she can pursue this, she is dismissed. Returning alone, she encounters indistinct shapes that drive her up an impossible staircase, from which she falls to her death. The film concludes with Brock revisiting the now-sealed room and hearing a new recording: Jill’s final moments.
The parallels to cinema are difficult to ignore. Film, like the stone tape, captures ephemeral traces and replays them to a semi-passive consciousness. What the stone tape externalizes is the variability of reception: identical stimuli produce radically different experiences, and these experiences remain inaccessible to empirical measurement. The film extends this further, suggesting a danger in attempting to fully understand or control this process. The pursuit of knowledge—particularly technological knowledge—carries a cost.
This aligns with a central theme of folk horror: the danger of uncovering forbidden knowledge. By framing this within a technological and empirical context, the film invites reflection on cinema itself. Early photography was often imagined as a soul-stealing device, preserving not just appearance but essence. The Stone Tape inverts this notion. Rather than preserving being, it preserves only an empty trace—an image without substance, endlessly replayed and gradually degraded.
This degradation mirrors that of film itself. As physical media deteriorate, images blur, details vanish, and meaning dissolves. Even the seemingly eternal “stone tape” cannot resist this process. In this sense, the film challenges the modernist ambition of perfect preservation. Movement and sensation cannot be permanently captured; all recording contains the seeds of its own decay.
Contra Babbage, motion is not only obliterable—it is always already in the process of being obliterated. Every recording entails loss, and this loss increases over time. The “real” slips further out of reach with each act of preservation. Cinema becomes, in this model, a haunted echo: a medium defined as much by absence as by presence. The spectator, in turn, becomes a receiver of incomplete transmissions, never fully grasping what is being shown.
It suggests cinema as a practical demonstration of a fundamental truth: that all things, eventually, will be forgotten.
David C. Porter is a writer and photographer from the American northeast. He edits Keep Planning (keep-planning.net), and writes Garden Scenery (https://gardenscenery.net/). His work has also appeared in various other places. He can be reached on Twitter @toomuchistrue, or via his website (https://davidcporter.net/).