By
Andrés Emil González
If any single monster or supernatural entity has a claim to shaping horror film and literature as we know it today, it is almost certainly the ghost –and with good reason. The figure of the ghost or spirit embodies (so to speak) some of horror’s fundamental traits, including liminality between states of being, glimpses of a world or truth beyond our own, and a sense of powers that act on human lives without our awareness or comprehension.
Perhaps because of its ability to evoke such a variety of ideas, fears and even hopes, however, spirits in modern horror cinema have tended to take wildly different forms, often within the same film or television series. Most are familiar to any fan of horror. Many times, ghosts are only represented by their effects on the visible world: a chair slides across a room, the planchette of a ouija board moves on its own, or a person is dragged off by their hair. Other times, ghosts are made visible to some combination of audience and characters, as memorably occurs several times across James Wan’s The Conjuring series, to name just one example. In this case, ghosts may be visible only to one character, or to all, or they appear only for the briefest of moments. And while of course, there are myriad distinctions to be drawn between demons, ghosts, poltergeists and other assorted spirits, for our purposes all of these beings tend to be represented within this shared set of parameters.
The ghost of Bathsheba Sherman in James Wan’s The Conjuring (2013)
In less frequent, though not less intriguing cases, there may be moments in a film where a spirit is represented visually to the audience, but is not seen by any character. This technique is applied extensively in Mike Flanagan’s series The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), but astute viewers may also recall it in moments from The Haunting in Connecticut (2009) by Peter Cornwell, as well as in James Wan’s Insidious (2010). The eeriness of such scenes goes beyond evoking the suspense of “he’s right behind me”-style jump scares, however. What exactly are we, as an audience, seeing in these moments?
The “Plague Doctor” ghost in Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)
One way of thinking through this representation of ghosts may be the unusual, but perhaps illuminating frame of diegesis. Readers may be more familiar with this term from discussions of sound in film, where “diegetic” sound (e.g. music played on a jukebox within a film’s world) is usually contrasted with “non-diegetic” music or sound effects (e.g. a film’s score). Depictions of ghosts only seen by audiences may function as particularly creative “non-diegetic” film elements, more similar to voice-overs, title cards, or text superimposed over image than to a character as such. How exactly might a visual element function like more familiar sound elements in horror? One notable example of experiments with non-diegetic sound comes from Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), in which the soundtrack by frequent Argento collaborators The Goblins features growls and groans that at various points, get deeply entangled with similar sounds that come from “inside” the world of the film. Likewise, possession films like The Exorcist (1973) often distort the victim’s voice in ways that, to an audience, can only suggest the supernatural, only to have characters dismiss the possibility until more solid evidence arises. In both cases, the line between an internal element of the film and external ones is problematized.
But even with these edge cases, why not simply assume that, especially in films where characters do eventually interact with the supernatural, spirits are as present for the characters as they are for the audience, even if they remain unseen? One possibility has to do with the importance of representing (and manipulating) agency to create eerie and horrifying scenarios. Let me explain what I mean.
I’m cribbing here from Mark Fisher’s extraordinary book, The Weird and the Eerie (2017), where he puts forward the two titular concepts as alternative ways of thinking about the feeling of the uncanny that is one of the most common products of horror fiction. The eerie, in Fisher’s analysis, centers around questions of agency. In his words, “there must…be a sense of alterity, a feeling that the enigma might involve forms of knowledge, subjectivity and sensation that lie beyond common experience.” The extent to which spirits can or even want to act as agents is one of the basic ambivalences that makes them frightening: are they merely echoes or images left over from the past, or is there a reason that they return to haunt or harm the living? Why do they knock over furniture or grab a sleeper’s leg, only to disappear the following instant?
When ghosts appear in horror as encounters with the supernatural (i.e. floating objects, frightening apparitions, unearthly sounds, etc.), the agency of a given spirit confronts the agency of any human characters involved. And horror is quite clear about what happens when human agency is activated to its fullest extent. Characters begin researching history, they communicate with trusted figures such as priests or scientists, and, in the most dire cases, they simply run away. In some films, notably The Amityville Horror (1979), characters try all of the above. Indeed, the only thing that consistently seems to limit human agency when faced with spirits is the oft-lingering uncertainty about the presence of ghostly agency at all.
The lens of diegesis, then, suggests that —like music or on-screen text— unseen ghostly presences can communicate ideas to audiences outside of typical tools like dialogue, imagery or other aspects internal to the film’s world. If non-diegetic music, for instance, so often expresses emotional cues and shifts, it may be that in stories where the presence and absence of agency vacillates in form or intensity, spirits that appear only to audiences may function as a similar non-diegetic cue that we should feel the increase of ghostly agencies, without having to telegraph that sensation through the feelings or physical senses of a character. The possibility of non-diegetic ghosts is just one of the ways that horror as a film and literary genre has to communicate meaning outside of traditional means such as character construction, plotting and theme. As the ghost hunters and haunted families of so many horror narratives tell us, rather than limiting ourselves to communications in the forms that we expect, perhaps we should be more open to the presences in horror fiction that are waiting for our call to make themselves known.
Andrés Emil González is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Brown University. His current research focuses on formal experimentation in contemporary horror of the Americas, particularly contemporary Latin American horror literature. His scholarly work can be found forthcoming in Studies in the Fantastic.
