Things that go Clunk in the Night

Why are there so many supernatural fantasies in amateur movie competitions?

The ghost story as a tale, told by the fireside or in the pages of an anthology, relies for most of its impact on the imagination of the audience.  A mere hint of ectoplasm, chill winds and poltergeist activity sets our nerves twanging.  It is as if they pluck strings of narrative which resonate within.  The truth is that as listeners and readers, we scare ourselves.

So why try to transfer such tales to film: the medium whose stock-in-trade is "show and tell"?

By their very nature movies have to present prosaic images of reality.  There have certainly been experiments in showing distorted scenery from The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari onwards to today's computer-generated special effects.  The fact, however, is that the eye needs to relate to something on the screen it can recognise.  Very few people will stay the length of the occasional film which tries to bend that reality too far.  It hurts.  It gives the audience a collective headache.

The ear will accept slightly less specific input - which is why The Blair Witch Project and others put an emphasis on weird sounds.

Special Effects

Part of the answer is that we can use the trickery of movies to present the impossible.  We can have near-transparent ghosts wandering round a castle, we can make furniture move apparently of its own volition.  It is tempting to enjoy the challenge of creating such effects without paying sufficient attention to the end result.

For a film to make an impact its audience has to surrender to it.  They enter into an unspoken agreement to suspend their own disbelief, their critical faculties, for the period of the screening.  Ghost effects usually present too great a challenge to that agreement.  Viewers are reminded that they are watching an artificial construction.  (They always did know it but with the best films they suppress the knowledge.)  There are a couple of exceptions.  The romance and comedy in Ghost nearly overcomes the barriers.  The sheer nastiness of The Exorcist creates its own appalling impact which swamps the rational senses.

The Truth?

I suspect the truth is, sad to say, that ghost stories seem to offer an escape from the usual demands of a narrative plot.  They come pretty close to "it was all a dream"!  The writer neglects the internal logic which compels viewers to follow the plot.  And that is almost always fatal.

Audiences need plots, character development and some sense of achievement.  You might please them with twenty minutes of beautiful pictures in a travelogue, or half an hour of fascinating information in a documentary.  But to expect them to sit still through ten minutes of fiction you had better have a good story.

Perhaps I should create a story about ghost writers damned to hit the word-processor keys for eternity ...  might make a good ghost movie, I wouldn't have to explain why they were there, what their purpose was ...

- Dave Watterson

Page updated on 21 March 2008

Authors' views are not necessarily those of The Institute of Amateur Cinematographers

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