PIXAR

When I was eight, a strange 
thing happened. I was on my way 
up the stairs of my old house, 
about ready for bed, and heard 
my mom gasp from the kitchen. 
I looked back to her to see her 
clutching her coffee cup with 
her eyes somewhat wide. “The 
basement light just turned on,” 
she said. No one was supposed 
to be downstairs. My sister was 
next to me, my dad in the living 
room. Warily, my parents headed 
to the basement armed with steak 
knives and searched every corner. 
Of course, they found nothing 
out of the ordinary. My dad even 
trudged out into our snowy 
backyard to look for footprints. 
He didn’t find any. The whole 
thing was silly, in retrospect.
Many of us have memories 
that fringe on the preternatural, 
that are somewhere between 
the almost explicable and the 
undeniably spooky. But a place 
that nearly everyone has seen 
the supernatural at work for 
themselves is in film. Film ghosts 
are everywhere — they’re not 
limited by genre or archetype. In 
fact, they span an array of abilities, 
personas, and motivations.

Casper:
At 
their 
shallowest, 
and 
arguably their most fun, ghosts in 
film are odd companions, comic 
relief and maniacal antagonists. 
Casper the Friendly Ghost, first 
created as a cartoon character 
in the 1940s, has become our 
collective 
interpretation 
of 
how the average ghost should 
look like: a cloud-like, white 
apparition hovering wherever it 
pleases. Casper is the ultimate 
“everyghost,” 
the 
spirit 
of 
the afterlife most relatable to 
the living. His relation to the 
supernatural is a giddy and purely 
benign one. He shows us that we 
don’t have to be scared of ghosts 
at all. They may be a little more 
translucent and monochromatic 
than we are, but that doesn’t 
mean they can’t be companions.

Moaning Myrtle:
J.K. Rowling brought to life 
a whole new kind of ghost with 
the “Harry Potter” series, and 
while these ghosts are largely 
underrepresented in the film 
adaptations of her novels (most 
notably Peeves the Poltergeist), 
Moaning 
Myrtle 
steals 
the 

ethereal spotlight in the second 
installment of the series, “The 
Chamber of Secrets.” Myrtle is 
not simply the wailing tormentor 
of 
a 
decrepit 
bathroom 
at 
Hogwarts; she also provides 
the key piece to the story’s 
central mystery of unlocking the 
Chamber. Behind her hilarious 
melodrama, deceptive coyness 
and ear-splitting wails, Myrtle is 
the ghost with the missing answer 
— the solution that has evaded 
Harry and his friends from the 
beginning. She’s wonderful.

“Beetlejuice”:
Tim 
Burton, 
a 
director 
known 
for 
his 
theatricality 
and 
otherworldly 
atmosphere 
decided to push the boundaries 
of the spirit world with 1988’s 
“Beetlejuice,” a film as over-
the-top as it is rewatchable. 
Michael Keaton’s full-throated, 
comical performance as the film’s 
eponymous villain is something 
of a twisted delight to witness. 
Beetlejuice is both grotesque and 
sloppily charming. Of course we 
find him repulsive, but there’s 
something 
uncannily 
inviting 
about 
Keaton’s 
exaggerated 
gestures, snarky delivery and 
clownish affectation.

“Coco”:
At their most profound, ghost 
stories provide far more than 
goofy 
characters 
and 
visual 
spectacle. Ghosts in film have the 
capacity to express our shared 
human expectations, ruminations 
and anxieties about death itself. 
Perhaps no movie captures this 
depth better than Pixar’s “Coco,” 
a poignant journey about a young 
boy lost in the land of the dead 
with only the assistance of his 
departed family members to find 
his way home.
“Coco” explores the spirit 
world in ways that few other films 
have. Not only are the ghosts 
of the film benign, but they are 
Miguel’s own ancestors, shedding 
light on his heritage and the 
lost truths that have ultimately 
torn the family apart. The film 
uses these ghosts so effectively 
because they become essential 
vehicles to tell the story at hand 
as well as unravel more complex 
quandaries of grief, detachment 
and reconciliation.

“A Ghost Story”:
The most on-the-nose title 
for a tale of the supernatural 
also managed to become one of 
the most heart-wrenching and 

philosophical examples of ghosts 
in film. “A Ghost Story” is an 
affecting story about supernatural 
forces that act through the bond 
of love. As mawkish of a premise 
as that may sound, director David 
Lowery (“The Old Man and the 
Gun”) maximizes the emotional 
impact of the movie in a way 
that feels fresh and simplistic. 
Rooney Mara’s performance as a 
mourning widow is empathic and 
legitimately haunting, enhanced 
by the invisible presence of her 
late husband outfitted plainly 
in a white sheet, played by 
Casey Affleck. Lowery’s work 
is a testament to the simplicity 
ghost stories can operate without 
losing their sweeping cosmic 
implications.

“The Others”:
Unfortunately, 
it’s 
nearly 
impossible to discuss my favorite 
ghost story without spoiling 
its whirlwind of a conclusion. 
Suffice it to say that what “The 
Others” does best is to blur the 
line between the real and the 
ghostly, investigating death as 
a process rather than an event. 
“The Others” uses a hackneyed 
haunted 
house 
premise 
to 
take advantage of a viewer’s 
expectations, but subverts them 
ruthlessly by the end of the film. 
What seems like a traditional 
horror story on first watch turns 
ultimately into a spellbinding 
tragedy that might be the single 
best example of cinematic ghosts.
It was only much later, years 
after my family’s strange incident 
with the basement light, that 
we realized what had actually 
triggered our panic. The pressure 
from my sister and I walking up 
the stairs had likely disturbed 
wiring 
above 
the 
basement, 
causing the stairway light to 
switch on.
The aspect that differentiates 
film ghosts from the supernatural 
phenomena 
that 
we 
recall 
around campfires and during 
thunderstorm blackouts is this: 
The ghosts in movies need 
no explanation. They can be 
make-believe 
because 
film 
itself is an escape from reality. 
In real life, we have a tendency 
to explain away the initially 
inexplicable to feel in control of 
our surroundings. But in film, 
there is no desire, no necessity to 
do such a thing. We can interact 
with the supernatural, become 
endeared or frightened by it. But 
most importantly, we don’t have 
to challenge it.

The scary and familiar 
image of ghosts on film

ANISH TAMHANEY
Daily Arts Writer

WARNER BROS

“You don’t seem too haunted, 
but you haunted,” poet Terrance 
Hayes writes in the ninth sonnet of 
his collection “American Sonnets 
for My Past and Future Assassin.” 
In the context of the collection, 
this haunted thing is a black body 
in modern America (“You will not 
assassinate my ghosts,” he writes 
at the end of the 13th sonnet). But 
literature of the present moment, 
too, is a haunted thing that does 
not, perhaps, immediately present 
itself as such.
There has been a resurrection 
in American fiction of a fascination 
with the dead, undead, half-dead 
and dying. And even when these 
texts aren’t filled with literal 
ghosts, there’s a hauntedness — an 
uneasy feeling that things are not 
quite as they should be — that seeps 
out of everything I read.
It’s like walking down a dark 
hallway late at night in your own 
home, which is safe because it’s 
your home and monsters aren’t 
real. And yet, you feel for a moment 
as if something could slip out from 
the shadows are grab you. Even 
though you are an adult, you feel 
it. That’s what reading in 2019 feels 
like.
Ghosts are not new, of course. 
But this ghost, the modern, literary 
ghost is something unlike those 
that trolled the halls of Edith 
Wharton or Shirley Jackson’s 
haunted mansions and wreaked 
havoc on barefoot children in 
nightshirts. It’s not like Stephen 
Dedalus seeing his mother’s grey, 
melting face, but it’s also not not 
like that.
A ghost is an odd supernatural 
being because it doesn’t come with 
guidelines. Vampires drink blood, 
avoid the sun and (as popular 
teen media constantly reminds 
us) have sex. Zombies do not have 
sex, but they lumber and represent 
consumption and capitalism in 
their purest, most disturbing forms. 
Witches are persecuted because 
— for better or worse — they are 
women with unchecked power. 
But ghosts are a harder thing to 
define. Perhaps because they are 
(often) noncorporeal, voiceless and 
vague: existing literally without 
the definition of body or self. Or 
perhaps because the thing they 
represent—something that was, but 
isn’t any long — is more malleable 
than fears of sexual “perversion,” 
consumerism or power.
A ghost is a reminder that 
the past lives, even when we 
don’t want it to. In that way, it 
can mean trauma, memory, loss. 
It’s no wonder ghosts crop up in 
narratives of immigration (like Viet 
Thanh Nguyen’s “The Refugees”), 
sexual trauma (Karen Russell’s 
“Swamplandia!”) 
and 
racist 
violence (Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, 
Unburied, Sing”). When people 
want to forget, ghosts resolve to 
stay. They remind and in that, they 

find their fearful power.
There’s the ghost towns (and 
supermarkets) 
of 
Alexandra 
Kleeman’s “You Too Can Have A 
Body Like Mine,” the campfire-
story-esque spin of the stories in 
Carmen Maria Machado’s “Her 
Body And Other Parts,” and the 
nosy, curious spectors of George 
Saunder “Lincoln In The Bardo,” 
all of which, in their own distinct 
ways, have fun with these dark, 
indefinite beings.
Even on the more benign, 
domestic level ghosts represent 
the things we don’t want to look 
right in the eyes. Michael Furey 
in James Joyce’s “The Dead” is a 
ghost only in that his presence is 
felt supernaturally: He represents 
the impossible and horrible truth 
that the people we love, loved other 
people before us. Snow comes down 
on the windows like tiny, tapping 
hands at the story’s close, and Joyce 
maintains narrative reality and 
casts a ghostly emotional aura.

Following in those footsteps, 
much 
of 
contemporary 
ghost 
literature straddles the line of 
belief, never letting on wholly what 
it thinks is real and not real. In 
“Swamplandia!” a teenage girl runs 
away with her ghost boyfriend on a 
ghost ship. The terms are explicit 
and because a child’s point of view 
is privileged, belief is everywhere. 
But what the characters believe 
and what the text believes are 
maintained as two seperate things. 
Maybe those things meet and 
maybe they don’t.
Ghosts need this ambiguity. 
Unlike 
their 
cousins 
in 
the 
supernatural world, ghosts rely on 
belief. You don’t believe in zombies: 
They exist or they don’t. But you 
believe in ghosts, even if you can 
never know for sure.
Surprisingly 
enough, 
ghost 
shows — yes, like the “Ghost 
Adventures” kind of ghost shows 
— operate in the same way. They 
present themselves as scientific 
investigations with video and 
audio and radio equipment. And 
regardless of whether they fake the 
results these machines produce, 
they’re very careful about what 
they don’t fake. There’s a reason 
we never see a ghost as anything 
more that a streak of light. It could 

be dust or a lens flare or a glitch, 
but we don’t know. If you know. If 
you see the transparent child in a 
nightgown in the upstairs hallway, 
it isn’t fun anymore. Because you 
don’t have to believe, you just know.
In literature, the relationship 
between knowing and believing 
opens up even further the narrative 
possibilities. Do we believe in 
ghosts? And if we do, do we believe 
the character who sees the ghost? 
And if we do believe the character 
who sees the ghosts, does the 
novel? The very convention of ghost 
stories denies closure and answers. 
Because we can never know.
And, when this endeavor into 
belief is done well, it doesn’t feel 
anything 
like 
“Contact,” 
that 
horrible movie with Matthew 
Mcconaughey and Jodie Foster 
that equates belief in aliens and 
belief in God. In the world of 
narrative fiction God is much 
more like vampires and ghosts are 
much more like aliens. God has 
canonical rules and institutions 
and customs. Aliens and ghosts are 
more indefinite things.
Every new ghost requires new 
belief, and every new ghost story 
must establish the terms of that 
belief.
Casey Affleck being a terrible 
person aside, I think “A Ghost 
Story” (David Lowrey’s 2017 white-
sheet-ghost film) handles this 
question of belief in a particularly 
interesting way. The film spends a 
long time (perhaps too much time) 
on one insufferable man’s nihilist 
monologue without ever hinting at 
whether it agrees with him or not. 
The ghost, when he rattles the light 
bulbs at the end, give an indication 
of an opinion, but the film does not.
This ambiguity is particularly 
powerful in the modern era of ghost 
stories because the physical things 
many of them represent are real. 
Real in a way that negates belief. 
But these stories don’t often deal 
with the real explicitly, but rather 
the less physical, less tangible 
effects of the real. You cannot feel 
the shape of generational trauma in 
the same way you feel the shape of 
a bed or a chair, but the characters 
of these stories live in it as if it 
were a house, carrying with them 
the ghosts of their histories and 
parents and home countries.
What stays behind is not 
something 
(sorry 
“Ghost 
Adventures”) that can be measured 
by any device or apparatus, no 
matter how strong or advanced. 
And that is precisely what makes 
America in 2019 the haunted place 
that it is. We can’t see or feel or 
know everything that is here. But 
that doesn’t make it all less here.
Ghost stories remain strongholds 
of the literary canon because, to be 
sentimental and a little reductive, 
history is itself a kind of ghost 
story. To live in the world is to walk 
through a minefield of ghosts that 
both belong to and because of you 
and your people and where you 
come from.

The permanence of ghost 
stories in the imagination

B-SIDE: FILM

MADELEINE GAUDIN
Daily Arts Writer

B-SIDE: BOOKS

A24

FACEBOOK

Ghosts need this 
ambiguity. Unlike 
their cousins in 
the supernatural 
world, ghosts rely 
on belief.

4B —Thursday, February 7, 2019
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com