Topical Ponderings: What Makes the Perfect Ghost Story?

Horror: one of the most repetitive genres out there.  But what is the winning formula? What makes the perfect ghost story?

Tonight (26/4/13), disappointing supernatural drama Lightfields, which had been about as pale and insubstantial as the ghost at the heart of the story, comes to a presumably disappointing end. Anyone with half a brain cell is way ahead of the lazy, meandering plot, which makes it all the more infuriating when it casts suspicion on people we know didn't kill Lucy Felwood. The parallel lives of the three different generations are too disparate, with a few of the same characters crossing over but no thematic links apart from the ghost of Lucy Felwood, who is irritating.

Lucy isn't a particularly good ghost. In Lightfield's 2011 precursor Marchlands, at least the little girl was inventive when she chose to pounce on you, at one point being in the washing machine. Lucy is just very good at counting, which isn't particularly terrifying. So if Lightfields fails, what makes a really chilling ghost story?

If asked to name the best haunted house film of recent years, many would say The Woman in Black. We are presented with good old fashioned scares involving a seemingly omnipresent spectre and an ensemble of dead children. And because somehow it was only a 12A, it's probably succeeded in condemning several children to nightmares involving ghosts attacking Harry Potter. Speaking of our protagonist, Daniel Radcliffe isn't very good, but mercifully all he's called upon to do is look scared. However, beneath the creepy music, it's fairly run of the mill. The thought of children committing suicide is repulsive, but I prefer something a little more chilling in more supernatural yarns.

Films like The Woman in Black are brilliant when you're in the cinema, and Insidious is another example, but they don't leave much of a lasting impression afterwards (other than the embarrassment of clutching one of my friends knees in sheer panic, but we wont go into that). Proper ghost stories send a shiver down your spine whenever you recall them.

The Awakening is a better film for me. While the scares are less frequent and sometimes less impactful, a shock twist at the end makes the film stick in your memory. And it's creepier than The Woman in Black or Insidious, as dead children are always worse and we all fear the spectres that may be lingering in our memory. Another shock ending is The Sixth Sense, but the rest of the film is fairly average so doesn't live up to the final revelation.

\But yet again, these films don't quite cut it, as the movie needs to be brilliant all the way through, it can't just have a good ending. And with all the dramatic music and sharp editing, its easy to become detached and not care about our hero's fate. We need to feel like we're stuck in the same situation as our protagonist, to fill our pulses rise in sync with theirs. And if that's going to happen, the film needs to have a lower budget.

Lets talk about Blair Witch Project. In the great scheme of things, it's done more bad than good, Cloverfield and the boring Paranormal Activity series. But although many disagree, I thought it was brilliant. The atmosphere was so electric that you could really feel our heroes isolation and desperation growing, and it was as if you were in the forest with them. Yes, the plot is almost non-existent, but it generally is in ghost stories. The ending, which many find insubstantial, I think makes the film. We never discover quite what caused the death of our intrepid film makers.
spawning an overwhelming number of found footage films, including the appalling

Another ambiguous ending concludes the equally experimental Silent House. Featuring Elizabeth Olsen, who was so brilliant in Martha Marcy May Marlene, the film is made to look like it was shot all in one take, moving in strict real time rather than the days that Blair Witch Project spans. Olsen is very good at being scared as she dashes through the darkened house, and we feel everything with her. The jaunty camera work means that sometimes we're not quite sure what's set her off, and robbing us of this knowledge is a master stroke. The movie sets itself up to be fairly low key, but it spirals into a surreal nightmare. In a strange nod to to The Evil Dead (you just can't escape that film), Olsen finds herself in a bathroom with a strange girl in a bath and blood pouring out of a cistern that's facing out of the wall for some reason. By the end, the trust we've invested in our fellow sufferers is shattered. Of the cast of four: three of them are murderers, one of them's a child abuser and one of them's a figment of the imagination.

These two films are fantastic, but can what we've learnt about disorientation and ambiguity be applied to a traditional ghost story? For anyone who's read The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, the answer is yes. And the book is such a good ghost story because it's never really about ghosts, in fact it's questionable if there's any ghosts in it at all. It seems to be about the disintegration of the upper class, the ghost of country house dramas is still a reminder of a simpler life before the woes of the modern age. But it's also about madness, family ties and love. The whole book is fantastic, but with the ending it really hits the nail on the head. Because we're never sure who killed the final inhabitant of Hundreds Hall. The easy explanation is that it was the ghost of the little girl (and this is an improvement on the norm, we have a homicidal ghost), which is in keeping with all the oddities that have occurred thus far. But if we move away from the comfort of supernatural explanations, we're left with the bare facts that our protagonist, the kindly Dr Faraday, chucked his jilting lover down the stairs. And if you think about it, this does seem the more rational explanation. After all, there has to be a touch of evil about a man who takes advantage of a woman's fragile mental state to seduce her. And if there's no ghost, then the family was mad, or maybe our doctor killed the rest of them. The moral of this story, living people are infinitely more scary than dead ones.

So, in our discussion of Lightfields we've made many important discoveries. First of all, you have to be moderately interesting before you die. Lucy Felwood is about as insipid as they come. Secondly, it's not all about the shocks if you want long term impact, a creepy concept will serve you well. And finally, for a killer ghost story, you need a touch of uncertainty. It can't be clear cut, there must be some detail that haunts the viewer, like a ghost that just refuses to go away.