'It scared the wits out of me': Mark Gatiss on his new Ghost Story for Christmas

When Mark Gatiss was young, he loved combing through the TV schedules at Christmas time looking for anything supernatural.

"I was always very disappointed if there wasn't a ghost or a monster," he says.

Gatiss, an actor and writer perhaps best known for co-creating BBC series such as Sherlock and Dracula, remembers that TV in the 1970s usually had "something lurking in the shadows".

Like the 1974 drama The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, part of the BBC strand A Ghost Story for Christmas. That film sees an antique collector haunted by a ghost, described in the drama as "a thing of darkness and slime". For Gatiss, it was love at first fright.

Gatiss' latest contribution to A Ghost Story for Christmas is Woman of Stone - based on the 1893 story Man-Size in Marble by author Edith Nesbit - about a newlywed Victorian couple warned of a local legend about a pair of marble knights who rise from their slumber on Christmas Eve.

"It scared the wits out of me," Gatiss remembers about the first time he read the story.

Earlier films in the BBC festive series have adapted the tales of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle.

But in a first for the strand, this year's Ghost Story for Christmas is based on a story by a female writer – Edith Nesbit, best known for novels The Railway Children and Five Children and It.

"I think there's a great tradition of telling stories at this time of year," says Gatiss.

"The turn of the year is both a happy and sad time," he adds. "There's something about the darkness and the light in conjunction, sitting around a fire. You're surrounded by jolliness. But soon, it starts to get dark."

Actress Celia Imrie, star of Calendar Girls and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, plays the role of Edith Nesbit on her deathbed in the BBC adaptation.

And Gatiss' telling of her story Man-Size in Marble - the first ghost story he ever read - takes inspiration from the author's own life, which Gatiss describes as "bohemian and very fascinating".

For example, her husband had numerous affairs, including with a friend of the family who ended up living with the couple and having two children with the writer's husband.

"I've reconfigured it as a feminist revenge drama," Gatiss says.

Gatiss' version of Nesbit has come to regret being so indulgent towards her husband, he explains, and Gatiss gave one of the characters a lot of what he perceived as her real husband's characteristics.

The character of Jack (Éanna Hardwicke) is domineering, as Gatiss explains: "He calls her 'Pussy' and 'Kitten' and 'Wifey' and all kinds of strangely passive aggressive terms."

Other films in the series have also sought to challenge expectations.

Gatiss' 2013 film The Tractate Middoth, starring Sacha Dhawan as a librarian haunted by a mysterious book, featured an ethnically-diverse cast - but Gatiss doesn't see this as "colour-blind casting".

Mawaan Rizwan's role in Woman of Stone, meanwhile, took inspiration from George Edalji, a solicitor of Indian descent who lived "in the middle of rural England in the Victorian age," Gatiss says, "but you just don't get these stories, you're not told them."

Those only familiar with Nesbit's work from Sunday afternoon viewings of The Railway Children might be surprised by her more gothic work, but Gatiss sees it in all her writing.

The Railway Children, he says, "isn't cozy. It's about a fractured family. There are lots of darker corners. Even her most jolly children's stories are full of phantoms."

This, Gatiss thinks, comes from an early experience in the author's life during a trip to Bordeaux with her older sister in 1867 when she was nine.

"She was in France, and someone asked if she wanted to see the mummies," Gatiss says. "She was taken to the catacombs, which are basically full of desiccated corpses on wires. It scared the life out of her and never left her. Her stories are full of inanimate things coming to life."

In an article written nearly three decades later, Nesbit would call this "the crowning horror of my childish life," which had caused her "long years of bitterest fear and dread".

And Gatiss says his own early experiences of being scared also crop up in his work.

"There's a scene in Dracula where a character is burned alive - and I realised it was just [James Bond film] Diamonds Are Forever. The sequence where Sean Connery is about to be cremated alive scared me to death."

And he was just as frightened by the 1970 film Scrooge, starring Albert Finney, which he thinks made it inevitable he would be drawn to making ghost stories of his own.

"It just imprinted on me."

Woman of Stone is available on BBC iPlayer from Tuesday 24 December.