Theme: Hauntings and Ghost Stories

A ghost is a person whose spirit continues to live on following death in non-corporeal and insubstantial form (as opposed to other more physical forms of undead such as vampires and zombies). Hauntings refers to ghostly phenomena – films featuring ghosts and/or haunted houses and other places.

A common plot in a many ghosts stories is of the living investigating a haunted place to find who the ghost was and achieving a form of exorcism by aiding them in complete their Unfinished Business and depart.

The haunted house is a long-standing tradition and concerns the investigation of a large old gloomy mansions. More modern variants have tried numerous other form of dwelling from suburban houses to hotels, supermarkets, ships and submarines.

There is the misconception that the ghost story and haunted house film originated in the 1930s. The first Hollywood effort was not until well into the 1940s and the genre did not fully develop until the 1950s/60s, reaching a peak in the 1970s.

The 1980s brought the introduction of visual and makeup effects. The 1990s/2000s introduced the Found Footage investigation of the haunted house. In the 2000s onwards, the ghost story has become so prolific that it is rare to find efforts that stand out from the formula and cliches.

There is also the Asian ghost story – see Asian Horror – where hauntings tend to be less centred around dwellings and more about personal vengeance and the grievances.

The depiction of ghost stories is so numerous that this topic has been split between actual ghost stories (here) and those that depict ghosts in a comedic or other vein – for which see Ghosts in Light Fantasy