The Woman in Black - YouTube Ghost Story Competition

When I saw that Daniel Radcliffe was launching a ghost story competition for the release of the film adaptation of The Woman in Black I thought I'd have a go. The criteria being that the story must be read aloud by you on YouTube in 2 minutes. I tried chopping back an old 1600 word story but that was taking way too long to read, so I thought I'd write something original, and calculated that it needed to be about 400 words in order to fit the time slot. Not easy to tell a story in 400 words, but here's my entry...

I uploaded it yesterday, and saw that of the other 77 entries in the official YouTube channel for the competition, only a handful seem to abide by the actual entry rules. Many entries came from the US but the competition is only open to UK and Ireland residents. Some people had uploaded existing videos of "true" ghost stories. Some had uploaded videos that were radically overlong (yes, I know mine clocks in at 2:08, but some entries are over 4 minutes). Some had uploaded videos of the written text with some spooky music over the top. When I say spooky music, I actually mean it sounded like someone had dusted off their old Yamaha DX7, plugged it into an amplifier, selected SynthViolin, and sat on the keyboard.

Another type of video people were uploading were short horror movies. One was genuinely spooky and extremely well made, but it wasn't what the competition asked for. I'm intrigued that these videos, which are not appropriate for the competition, are being added by the competition staff to the official channel. Unless I'm missing something.

I don't want this to come across as sour-grapes. After all, I won't know that my entry has lost until 6th Jan 2012, but it's intriguing, and I am interested to see how many actual law-abiding entries I am up against.

On a final note, please go and "Like" my entry on YouTube if you have the time. You never know, it might actually help.