Operation Bogeyman (Simon Aeppli, 2025)
Within Ken McMullen's film, Ghost Dance, Jaques Derrida says, “Cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms. It's the art of allowing ghosts to come back.” If this is true then Simon Aeppli’s, Operation Bogeyman, is a seance.
Readers with good memories may recall last year at Docs Ireland, Aeppli gave a film-lecture hybrid of the same title to his film. He detailed at this event that he had hoped to make this film, but that when traditional routes dried up, he undertook a Phd, in order to make it. It was a sort of work in progress event and we were left truly excited to see what the final film would look like. Thus, we were enthused to see it on this years docs Ireland Programme.
Operation Bogeyman is a truly fascinating documentary, that follows the story of a clandestine British intelligence department in charge of Black propaganda and Psyops in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, led by Colin Wallace. For example, they would claim the IRA had stolen £10,000 from a bank when in fact they had taken £5000, with the purpose of creating infighting and distrust within the ranks of the IRA. It was the original fake news disinformation campaign. Colin Wallace however had grander ideas, and embarked to create fake black magic rituals across Mid-East Antrim with the ultimate goal of associating the IRA with Satanism and thus disconnecting the Catholic community from the IRA. It would also ward children off entering derelict houses where British soldiers may be encamped, keeping watch over communities. The sensationalist story of ‘Divilry’ as yer granny might say, swept newspapers and created a sort of satanic-panic in Northern Ireland.
The film itself is an essayistic desktop film, meaning, to the audience it largely takes place within a computer screen. We see Simon pull up and scrub through video clips, redacted documents, old newspaper articles and a wealth of his own interviews and research, all while staying on that familiar MacBook screen. It gives the sense that we are descending down the rabbit hole with the filmmaker, we are sharing in his personal obsessions, and the film is deeply personal. Interspersed within the film are vignettes from Aeppli’s life, he grew up in Carrickfergus in and around the areas where these Psyops would have been perpetrated, his father was obsessed with the occult and the folk horror films of the day and he has been researching the films topic for years.
Of course the film is about the landscape and the ghosts that haunt it and so the film is full of beautiful shots that ground the film in an an immense sense of place. Sometimes scenic and vast, other times brutally enclosed and militaristic and other times drab and bureaucratic, yet within these spaces, remarkable or seemingly unremarkable, history- violent and secretive-simply happened. We also see lots of shots of signs, moss covered and faded, chipped away and ghostly, they embody our very sense of these histories.
The story is more than just the psyops, we’re given a richly painted cultural and social context of the time, that draws on everything from The Troubles themselves to local folklore and ghost stories and the horror films of the day that may have fed into Colin Wallace’s schemes. Aeppli, in this way, is a true ghost hunter. He is delving into the other world of archive, the second spaces of history that exist under thick layers of dust and black lines of redaction.
The film is also a form of folkloric and cultural preservation. We are in a period of history where The Troubles, and the atrocities committed, could be at the least taken for granted, and at the worst forgotten. Where in the past people went round collecting stories of banshees and the paranormal, Aeppli here is collecting another type of ghost story, a story of The Troubles that wouldn’t be in your GCSE history textbook. The ghost of truth, and there lack there of, the apparition of our past that, as Aeppli discussed in a Q&A after the screening of his film at Docs Ireland, will not stop tapping at the bedroom window of the collective Northern Irish consciousness as we try to drift off into the slumber of Game of Thrones and Titanic based history. What do we do with all the violence and pain that exists in our culture? Well if the art responding to them is as good as this, we might be able to begin to exercise these ghosts, or at least learn to live with their rattling chains.
