A classic tale of mystery and the supernatural

“No, no, Miss Dunning. You’ll have to be more clever than that.” With these words, Julian Karswell dismisses Prudence Dunning’s attempts to undo his satanic spell—a curse that terrorized and ultimately killed a writer a decade earlier.

Drawn from one of ghost-story master M.R. James’s most frightening tales, Casting the Runes pits an innocent television producer against a fiendish alchemist. While working on a piece exposing would-be mystics, Dunning brings unwanted attention to the reclusive occultist. In retaliation, he delivers a runic scroll that dooms her to a horrific fate, unless she can devise a way to turn the tables in her favor, at any price.

Iain Cuthbertson (Gorillas in the Mist, Children of the Stones) is thoroughly chilling as Karswell, and Jan Francis (Just Good Friends, Under the Hammer) plays the increasingly desperate Dunning to the hilt in this tense and atmospheric British thriller.