I’ve decided to round off Switcheroo Month at the Gutter with ghosts. Are ghost stories reputable, you might ask? As a genre, not really, but as a literary device they’ve been used to explore some of the most serious themes imaginable, from personal tragedy and grief to unresolved trauma and reconciliation on a historical scale. Ghosts can make you laugh or scare the pants off you, but they can also give voice to the past, hold people accountable for their actions where society has failed to, and offer an opportunity to learn from history and avoid repeating it. In short, ghosts are only reputable if they’re metaphors. So here, on a scale from Scooby Doo to Shakespeare and Beetlejuice to Beloved, is a selection of reputable and disreputable ghosts on film.  

When the Scooby gang solved supernatural mysteries in Scooby Doo, the ghost usually turned out to be a crabby human shaking their fist and spouting some version of the famous line, “I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you pesky kids!” In 1985 though, they shook things up with a season called The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo, where Daphne, Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy go on a quest to recapture thirteen actual ghosts that Scooby and Scrappy released from a Chest of Demons, because of course they did. They get guidance via crystal ball from Vincent Van Ghoul, a sorcerous cartoon incarnation of the incomparable Vincent Price, whose campiness makes up for the absence of Velma’s nerdy sarcasm. The 13^th ghost escapes them until 2019, when the whole gang catches up to it in the sadly Vincent Price-less but still relatively entertaining tv movie, Scooby-Doo! and the Curse of the 13th Ghost.

Speaking of 13 Ghosts, the original 1960 William Castle movie is campy fun with a ghost-splitting “Basileus Machine” and big, riveted metal “ghost-viewer” glasses that allow the family to see spirits, including a ghost lion in the basement to scare the littlest kid and a killer cook ghost that appears as a floating bottle maliciously spilling milk all over the kitchen. Audiences were given their very own Ghost Viewers with red and blue cellophane lenses that made the ghosts appear or disappear. It was remade in 2001 with the visually stylish but narratively questionable Thir13en Ghosts, which seems to have gained enough retro popularity that Dark Castle Entertainment is planning to bring the concept back again as a tv series with episodes different directors focusing on ghosts from a range of cultures and an AR component as a modern analog for the original Ghost Viewers.

Possibly the most disreputable ghost of all is Betelgeuse from Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988). He is summoned in all his scruffy, sleazy, bug-eating glory by a recently deceased and totally clueless couple who hire him to scare the living out of their house based on his sketchy supernatural advertising as a “bio-exorcist.” They do it by repeating his name three times, like Bloody Mary, but he’s all snake oil and clown pants. He’s uncomfortably sleazy and I’m curious how much his character will change with the times in the upcoming follow up Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024). Even if it still stars Burton’s usual cast of all white actors at least it will be less likely to offend than the cancelled sequel scripted in the 90s, which was “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian.”

Ghostbusters has more than its fair share of disreputable ghosts, most notably the extremely gooey Slimer, but another film that is chock full of them is Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners (1996), co-written with Fran Walsh and produced by Robert Zemekis (director of Back to the Future and producer on Thir13en Ghosts). It stars Michael J. Fox as Frank Bannister, an architect who develops psychic ghost-talking abilities after his wife is murdered. He sets up a ghostbusting scam with his newfound ghost friends where they go haunt people who then pay him the big bucks to do an “exorcism” to get rid of them. It’s all running like clockwork until a serial killer spirit shows up and Frank has to bust a ghost for real. Michael J. Fox is charming as usual and it’s ridiculous 90’s fun, complete with carpets that chase people up the stairs, revolving door hijinks, ghosts making babies fly around the room in their Jolly Jumpers, and a car chase with the Grim Reaper.

Tipping over into the somewhat more reputable range of ghosts righting personal wrongs, director Takeshi Shimizu’s original Japanese horror film Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) and US remake, The Grudge (2004), produced by Sam Raimi (Evil Dead) revolve around a curse that starts when Kayako Saeki and her son are brutally murdered and hidden in their house by her husband. She returns as an onryō, an enraged and vengeful ghost woman who haunts and kills everyone who encounters her. She seems to be beyond the logic of wanting any specific kind of retribution to be put to rest so it reads more as violence begets violence than actual revenge. IT fits into a long tradition of Japanese stories about righteously angry ghost ladies extracting vengeance for violence committed against them by men. For an example that involves samurais, ghosts, and cat-demon ladies, check out the Gutter’s own Carol Borden’s article on Kaneto Shindō’s Kuroneko at Teleport City.

The ghosts raised in Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners (1990) are much more focused on retribution and reconciliation. When a group of medical students set out to discover what exists beyond death by intentionally flatlining for a short time before their friends resuscitate them, they end up bringing supernatural manifestations of people they hurt in the past back with them. The hauntings push them to find ways to face up to their guilt and act on it. One of them is able to exorcise his ghost by finding and apologizing to the girl he bullied in school, but another was responsible for the death of a boy he bullied as a kid and is only able to survive the haunting by demonstrating that he is willing to die himself as penance.

Ghosts taken from classic literature are inherently reputable by association, but their role frequently seems to be to inform the living of something vital from beyond the grave, for instance Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who comes back to tell his son who murdered him, or the Marley brothers in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, who appear to warn Ebeneezer Scrooge of the hideous fate that awaits him if he keeps being an utter bastard. The vision I have in my head of the Marleys is much less reputable, though. It’s from The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) with Statler and Waldorf singing their “We’re Marley and Marley” song as they rattle their muppety chains and “oooooo” at Michael Caine.

In the realm of ghosts as metaphors for vaster historical wrongs, Under the Shadow (2016) by Iranian writer/director Babak Anvar is about Shideh, a medical student trying to survive with her daughter, Dorsa, in 1980s post-revolutionary Tehran after being barred from her studies for participating in left wing organizing. Dorsa is given a charm associated with the Djinn and they both begin having nightmares, including of a chador that floats on its own like a ghost and ultimately attacks them. Their building is struck by a missile and all of the ghostly visions and threats merge with the PTSD and terror of living in a war zone, reinforced with alternately stressfully slow and stressfully fast pacing, unsettling camera angles, and emotionally raw acting.      

His House (2020) by UK writer/director Remi Weekes follows a refugee couple, Bol and Rial, who are fleeing from South Sudan to the UK with their daughter, who dies while they are illegally crossing the English Channel in a small boat during a storm. In addition to the hardships and racism they experience in Britain, they are also haunted by an apeth or “night witch,” a spirit that followed them from Sudan to torment them, and by visions of their dead daughter. Those traumas would be more than enough to conjure ghosts, but the story takes a turn at the end with flashbacks of what they did to escape a massacre in Sudan that complicates everything. There is no way to deal with ghosts like those that doesn’t exact a terrible price.

And for the final B of the reputable ghost scale, Beloved (1998) starring Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, and Thandiwe Newton is the only movie adaptation Toni Morrison agreed to for any of her novels. Sethe’s house is haunted by an angry poltergeist who is the spirit of the child Sethe killed rather than letting her be returned to slavery on a plantation. One day her spirit manifests physically as a young woman named Beloved, her body unsettlingly at odds with the young age she appears to be emotionally. The book is a masterpiece and director Jonathan Demme uses some interesting techniques to address the challenges of bringing it to the screen. The film winds it’s way through a labyrinth of memories, visions, and events, using elements and the goriness of supernatural horror to explore the personal and cultural trauma of slavery as Sethe and her family struggle to reconcile with the past and move towards the future, all tied up in the reincarnation of her daughter’s spirit in the form of Beloved.

Whether you like your ghosts scruffy or serious, I hope you found something on this list to haunt your dreams.

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Alex Macfadyen wishes he’d been in the audience for a screening of William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill (1959) to witness the “Emergo effect”, where a glowing plastic skeleton slid out from behind the screen and floated over the audience. Apparently Castle told the screenwriter that he didn’t care what the script was as long as it included a skeleton emerging from a vat of acid. Skeleton got a credit in the film and has his own IMDB page.