Ghost movies like The Awakening are best when they give up the ghost | Horror films
Anne Billson on filmHorror films This article is more than 12 years oldGhost movies – like The Awakening – are best when they give up the ghost
This article is more than 12 years oldAnne BillsonForget all the collapsing staircases, revolving rooms, daft CGI and haunted hair-dos. You barely need to show anything to make a truly petrifying ghost movieI bet I'm not the only horror fan who is fed up with watching people tied to chairs and tortured, or couples terrorised by home invaders, or characters dying in grisly ways you can't see properly because their camcorder got dropped on its side. Horror films, which don't require stars or lavish spectacle, remain one of the cheapest and easiest routes for first-timers to break into movie-making, but I wish more of them would realise there are creatures even cheaper and easier than zombies. Ghosts!
Perhaps it's wishful thinking on my part, but there seem to have been a few more things going bump in the night lately. For a while, it was Hispanic film-makers carrying the torch with films such as The Others, The Devil's Backbone and The Orphanage. But Nick Murphy's The Awakening, co-written with Stephen Volk, brings the haunted house back to Britain. It's set after the Great War; professional debunker Rebecca Hall is summoned to a boys' school to disprove the existence of a restless spirit, leading to (give or take the odd bit of CGI) a full complement of minimalist movie haunting – strange noises, barely glimpsed figures, and the "Lewton bus", the sort of fake scare named after a moment in the Val Lewton-produced Cat People (1942) in which an already nervous heroine is startled by a bus suddenly drawing up in front of her.
The problem with ghosts is that cinema is often thought of (understandably but erroneously) as a purely visual medium, leading to film-makers assuming they have no choice but to pile on the special effects. But ghosts, unlike other movie monsters, are arguably more frightening when they're unseen or, at most, only glanced at. Exhibits One and Two in this thesis are the contrasting adaptations of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Robert Wise's 1963 The Haunting is an exemplary study in the deployment of noise, shadow and camera angle to reduce even the most sceptical spectator (that would be me) to a state of whimpering terror. Jan de Bont's 1999 "remake", on the other hand, piles on revolving rooms, collapsing staircases, possessed bedlinen, haunted hair-dos and doughy CGI apparitions to tiresome and ultimately somniferous effect. There's a time and place for the carnival funhouse, and I'm sorry, but Jackson's story isn't it.
Jim Sheridan's Dream House promises to be another haunted-house story but screws the pooch with the reveal (it's in the trailer!) that the phantoms are all in Daniel Craig's mind. I prefer the unapologetically supernatural shenanigans of Insidious, which (like Dead Silence) suggests James Wan and Leigh Whannell might be more at home with spooky noises, faces at the window and ghostly tableaux vivants than with the explicit tortures of the Saw franchise they created seven years ago.
Perhaps the most interesting tendency in 21st-century hauntings is the FFFF (Faux Found Footage Film), assumed to have been launched with The Blair Witch Project, though I would contend the real kicking-off point came seven years earlier, with Ghostwatch. Penned by The Awakening's Volk, the BBC's controversial 1992 Halloween offering was aired prior to the camcorder boom, but its then-innovative format, chatshow-cum-documentary rather than obvious fiction, convinced some viewers the ghostly events were actually happening. One wonders if they'd fall for it now, when a surfeit of reality TV has left everyone sceptical as to how much of what they see is staged.
But Ghostwatch's lo-tech but effective scares are still regularly recycled in today's FFFF. A few weeks ago I was lamenting the dearth of long takes in today's commercial cinema, yet only the other day found myself watching Paranormal Activity 3, directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (co-directors of the faux-or-not doc Catfish) and marvelling at how a packed cinemaful of rowdy popcorn munchers were somehow tricked into staring for long minutes at CCTV footage of nothing happening in someone's living-room. They'd never tolerate this sort of thing in a Béla Tarr movie. But – film-makers please take note – they'll do it for a ghost story.
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