5 Excellent Horror Movies That Reinvented the Ghost Story

Hollywood's biggest experimenter, Steven Soderbergh, has a new movie out this week, and it's about ghosts. Presencehis excellent new film, and his first real foray into the horror genre, is filtered entirely from the perspective of a ghost who inhabits a house where a new family has moved in. In the hands of almost any other director, this kind of formal experiment could feel like a gimmick at best, or, at worst, an annoyance with the film, but instead, Soderbergh integrates it so effective and smooth that feels like the most natural way to tell this story. Soderbergh carefully allows the camera-ghost to become a character at exactly the right moments; Otherwise, let the concept rest and rely on the film's fantastic script and family drama.

So, in honor of Soderbergh's achievement in ghostly innovation, he got us thinking about ghosts as a subgenre of horror, and one that all the fascinating and inventive cinematic filmmakers have used to tell evocative ghost stories. You can probably think of a few movies that fit the bill in your head: there are The sixth sense and paranormal activityeven field of dreams If you're willing to stretch a little. But the well is much deeper than those few films. These are some of our favorite unique ghost movies, each doing something a little different with the genre.

Director: Herk Harvey
Cast: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger
Where to look: Top-notch video

This film follows Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), a young woman who survives a tragic car accident only to find herself haunted by a ghostly spirit with haunting eyes and a scarred white face. Aside from the spirit, Maria is also inexplicably drawn to an abandoned carnival, to which she finds herself constantly drifting for seemingly no reason.

Carnival of souls is a completely strange and inevitably disturbing classic, but the reason it belongs on this list is how quietly and effectively the haunting slides into the film. The ghosts in Carnival of souls They're not just brooding, they're attentive and almost unnoticed, mysteriously slipping through crowds before doing something tangible, like reaching out and touching Mary before she sees them. Watching it now, more than 62 years after its release, Carnival of souls It feels recognizable, in how deeply it influenced not only the ghost films but the horror genre as a whole, and also somehow surprisingly unique. While its inspirations are felt throughout the genre, it's not like any film that's come since.

Director: Joel Anderson
Cast: Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe
Where to watch: Top-notch video

Lake Mungo It is a mixed bag film that tells the story of the Palmer family, whose 16-year-old daughter Alice drowns in the Australian lake that gives the film its title. A few days after Alice's funeral, the family begins hearing strange noises and waking up to strange happenings in their house every morning. Alice's older brother, Matthew, sets up a video camera to see what is happening, and the family realizes that Alice seems to have returned home as a ghost, they just can't understand how or why.

There's no shortage of stand-up ghost movies, but few of them engage as meaningfully or interestingly with any concept as Lake Mungo does. What makes it unique is how actively it engages with the failures of memory and the failures of the film itself. He's constantly grappling with the ways images could be handled or altered, and what it might mean for the supernatural to interact with digital manipulation. For the viewer, it also means a constant interrogation of what we are seeing in this pseudo-documentary is real and what is not. The result is a film, very similar Presencewhich uses its ghostly subgenre to tell a deeply moving story about families and the secrets that bring them together and apart.

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Rentarō Mikuni, Tetsurō Tamba
Where to watch: Maximum

Kwaidan is unique on this list in that it does not tell a single narrative story, but is instead made up of four different ghostly short stories. One short story tells the story of an unfaithful swordsman, another of a man who makes a promise to a spirit, another of a musician who plays songs for the court of a dead emperor, and another of a man who sees another person's face in a cup. of tea.

Kwaidan is the easiest and hardest movie on this list to recommend. This is not because the quality of the film is exceptional, but rather it is due to the amorphousness of its influence and uniqueness. It's not just difficult to imagine what this horror subgenre could be like without KwaidanIt is frankly impossible. The film's haunting tone and camerawork and the distinctive style with which each of its tales are told has seeped into the foundation of horror films and become inextricable from the films we love today, which is a reason enough to include it here.

Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Fernando Tielve, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi
Where to watch: Profitable on Apple TV or Amazon Prime Video

The Devil's Spine is about an orphanage in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. One day, an orphan named Carlos arrives and begins to meet the other residents of the orphanage and explore its secrets. While most people might think that the orphanage's most interesting treasure is the cache of loyal gold hidden somewhere on the grounds, Carlos seems more fascinated with (and terrified of) the ghostly child who haunts the halls of the building by the night.

Many films include ghosts as more than just malevolent spirits, enough to make it a category that absolutely demands a spot on this list, but what makes del Toro's version of this narrative so compelling in The devil's spine It's how elegantly he weaves them into the story and tone of the film. The Spain of this film feels constantly haunted by the recent past and troubled by the wounds of its violence: a literal bomb lies in the orphanage's courtyard, unexploded but always threatening. Del Toro makes a ghostly presence in this place feel natural, as if you couldn't imagine somewhere scary not having a ghost. It's both a more hopeful and haunting ghost story than anything else on this list.

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cast: Kumiko Asō, Haruhiko Kato, Koyuki
Where to watch: Maximum

This 2001 masterpiece from Japanese horror legend Kiyoshi Kurosawa is perhaps the scariest film on this list. Legumes It follows several people in Japan whose dealings with computers, and time spent on the burgeoning Internet, allow them to see the slow decline of ghosts in the real world. These ghosts take the place of ever-living humans and appear to be constantly, but passively, seeking more victims.

Despite the fact that he is now almost 25 years old Legumes remains the definitive ghost story for the Internet age. Its concept of ghosts slipping into our world via the Internet feels as eerily plausible as it did when the technology was still mysterious, and perhaps even more metaphorically solid than anyone in 2001 could have imagined. Furthermore, the film's signature images of lonely people on webcams, desperate for connection, fading into black dots on the wall only to return as haunting specters waiting to turn the rest of the world into just what they are, is the is the most affecting, insightful, and tragic addition to ghost cinema since the first films of the subgenre.