Combining aspects of science fiction and horror, the story concerns a team of scientists who move into their new research facility, a renovated Victorian mansion that has a reputation for being haunted.

Its juxtaposition of science and superstition is a frequent theme in Kneale's work; in particular, his 1952 radio play You Must Listen, about a haunted telephone line, is a notable antecedent of The Stone Tape.

The play was also inspired by a visit Kneale had paid to the BBC's research and development department, which was then located in an old Victorian house in Kingswood, Surrey.

Since its broadcast, the hypothesis of residual haunting – that ghosts are recordings of past events made by the natural environment – has come to be known as the "Stone Tape Theory".

Brock's failures are compounded when his superiors signal their lost confidence in him, requiring him to share Taskerlands with a rival research team working on a new washing machine.

As Brock directs the team to resume their past projects, the vicar reappears, claiming to have found records of the unsuccessful exorcism, not in 1892 but much earlier, in 1760, before the house even stood.

He makes a final visit to the room and discovers to his horror that the stone tape has made a new, crystal-clear recording: that of Jill screaming his name as she dies.

Nigel Kneale was a Manx television playwright who had first come to prominence in the 1950s thanks to his three Quatermass serials and his controversial adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, all of which were produced by the BBC.

In the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, Kneale had been coaxed back to the BBC, writing such plays as The Year of the Sex Olympics, Wine of India and, for the anthology series Out of the Unknown, The Chopper, the latter two of which no longer exist.

Accepting the commission, Kneale quickly decided that, in keeping with Christmas tradition, he would write a ghost story, but with a difference – ancient spirits would come into collision with modern science.

The concept of mixing the supernatural with high technology had long been a feature of Kneale's work – most notably, his 1952 radio play You Must Listen, which concerned a telecommunications engineer who discovers that a telephone line has somehow preserved the final conversation between a woman and her lover before her suicide, was an important antecedent of The Stone Tape.

Because of its subject matter, it was felt that the play would be best handled as an instalment of Dead of Night, a supernatural anthology series produced by Innes Lloyd.

Selected as director was Hungarian Peter Sasdy whose credits included adaptations of The Caves of Steel and Wuthering Heights for the BBC and Taste the Blood of Dracula and Hands of the Ripper for Hammer.

[7] Cast as Peter Brock was Michael Bryant, who had starred in the BBC's 1970 adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's Roads to Freedom and had a reputation for playing "bad boy" roles.

Its virtues aren't just the main spine of the story, but the way the characters shift, as in real life, the bitter comic conflict between pure and impure science".

He had become increasingly disenchanted with the organisation, mainly as a result of the rejection of several scripts such as Cracks, a proposed Play for Today, and a fourth Quatermass serial.

[17] The Stone Tape was a significant influence on John Carpenter's 1987 film Prince of Darkness in which a group of scientists investigate a mysterious cylinder discovered in the basement of a church.

[18] In the 2004 BBC7 Radio Serial "Ghost Zone", a character refers explicitly to the "Stone Tape theory" as an explanation for the way an invading alien intelligence is "replaying" scenes and figures from the past of the remote Scottish village in which the story is set.

Author Marty Ross has explicitly acknowledged the influence of Kneale's work, and the Quatermass serials in particular, on his own BBC SF drama.

[21] The writer and critic Kim Newman regards it as "one of the masterpieces of genre television, an authentic alliance of mind-stretching science fiction concepts with horror and suspense plot mechanics".

[18] Writer and member of The League of Gentlemen Jeremy Dyson feels that The Stone Tape "strikes a note that it just circumnavigates your intellect and gets you on a much deeper level [...] it just has this impact on you, rather like being in the room itself.

"[22] Sergio Angelini, writing for the British Film Institute's Screenonline, has said that "The Stone Tape stands as perhaps his (Nigel Kneale's) finest single work in the genre.

The soundtrack from this film, composed by Desmond Briscoe at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, was released on 13 April 2019 on 10" green vinyl for Record Store Day 2019.