I finally sat down to watch "The Innkeepers" today. I've been meaning to start watching Ti West's films for a while now and I had planned on starting with "House of the Devil" but this one just came out and I had the house to myself so the timing was perfect. "The Innkeepers" is a ghost story in case you're not familiar with it, and it scared the shit out of me and I'm wonderfully happy about it. So this is a post about ghosts.
If, like me, you're an adult and a horror connoisseur, you may share the exhilaration felt when finding a film or a book that actually makes you wish you weren't sitting alone in an empty house at that precise moment. The hunt for true terror is why we do it. I shouldn't say
true terror because I don't mean
real terror, like losing a child or facing imminent murder or anything like that. Those are real terrors and real fears and sure, people do sometimes seek those things out when watching horror films but as an adult, it's exceptionally hard to experience vicarious
horror when watching real life scenarios play out on the screen. We know it's not real and all we have to do is look away and it's not a part of our reality anymore. But ghost stories, see, ghost stories hide their strength in the fact that even if you look away, you could just be looking at the ghost standing beside the screen.
I think I need to clarify one thing; I don't believe in ghosts. I've never seen one and I don't think I ever will but they are still absolutely terrifying to me. Just the thought of ghosts can get me sweating in no time flat and nothing that exists in real life can spook me quite like ghosts. After watching "The Innkeepers", I sat there, alone in my house, during the brightness of late morning and admitted to myself that if my dog Napoleon wasn't calmly curled up beside me, I'd have to leave the house just to start feeling safe. Again, this feeling is what I strive for but seldom hope to achieve when watching a horror film, but I had to wonder why something as completely fictional as a ghost story could get me crapping my pants. So I went for a walk to think about it.
I started thinking about what ghosts represent. It's always the idea of something that's more terrifying than the actual thing itself, so what's the idea of a ghost? To me, a ghost represents the idea of something being out-of-place. Now, I'm a little OCD. Not so much, but just enough so that everything in my house has an arbitrarily assigned place and for me to be fully happy with my surroundings, everything has to be in its place. I think about what scares me and if I where alone in my home and I opened the cupboard where we keep the glasses and found a dinner plate right there, among the glasses... that would freak me out. I have to admit that even the thought of the plate in there with the glasses kind of makes me shiver, just a little bit. Granted, that's just me and it's a tad bit crazy but again, it's the representation of something being out of place that hits some primal fight-or-flight nerve in me.
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| Terrifying. |
As humans, we like to think that we control reality and everything it it and even when we know that's not true, we still like to try. Having control of your surroundings and knowing where things belong gives us a sense of reassurance that everything is okay. Something being out of place is a warning that things are not right, someone else has control and we need to be alert to something different impacting our reality. The scale of how out of place something is is a direct reflection of how alarmed we should be. If I come home and find a plate in the glass cupboard, I'm alerted to the fact that there could be somebody in my house,or that someone is playing with me, or has early-onset-Alzheimer's. If I'm in my house alone,and I know I'm alone and I close the pantry door and see the figure of a man walking towards me out of the darkness of the foyer, well, that figure is out-of-place. It shouldn't be there so I immediately go into fight-or-shit-my-pants mode (probably both) because that figure being out of place sends a warning to my consciousness that someone probably wants to do me harm. Now, if I where to look up from my computer right now and see my dog sitting on his bed, with a human's head instead of a dog's, then that's an altogether different sort of panic. Something's definitely out of place and so much so that the fabric of reality itself must be drawn in to question. This is what ghosts are to me; something so out of place that if you see one, you have to start questioning the very fundamentals of our existence and our perceived reality.
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Macbeth knows
what I'm talking about. |
As I said, I don't believe in ghosts but I do believe that some people have seen what they take to be ghosts. People see strange shit all the time, it's the nature of the world we live in. So what are these people seeing? I'm of the belief that the human mind is strong enough to imprint extreme fears or hopes into our reality in the form of mirages or hallucinations. If someone is terrified just enough, the chemical balance of their brain can shift so that they think they are seeing what they fear. If you had any sort of imagination as a child, you'll know what I'm talking about. The thing is, as we grow older and reality's concrete nature is drilled into us over decades of mundane life and work, we lose the ability to project imagination onto our field of vision. But if we had the ability as young children, then there must be some small part of us that has retained the "skill" and it is lying dormant, waiting for the perfect time, a time when we have scared ourselves silly from watching some ghost story, a time after we have been completely indoctrinated in the solidity of our reality to spring back and project an image of fear on the focal point of our mind's eye and appear as the manifestation of something horribly out-of-place. The figure of a person. A person who can't be there, but is. I cant think of anything more frightening.
