Cinema has always used the haunted house and the spirit as a powerful tool to generate fear. The collective imagination is marked by works that defined the genre, focusing on immediate effectiveness and scare mechanisms like jump scares for instant catharsis. These stories have become fundamental pillars of terror on the big screen.
But the figure of the ghost is also something deeper. It is an entity that moves in a radically different direction, transforming the theme into fertile ground for psychological terror and philosophical inquiry. The ghost, in this frame, ceases to be a bogeyman to flee from and becomes a powerful symbol of trauma, repressed memories, unresolved grief, and existential angst—an entity we are forced to reckon with rather than defeat.
This guide is a journey across the entire spectrum of the genre. It is a path that unites the great masterpieces that defined supernatural fear with the most profound independent works. From the haunted houses that terrify the viewer to the ghost stories that offer a true intellectual seduction, we will explore how cinema has given form to our most invisible fears.
The Babadook
Directed by Jennifer Kent in 2014, this Australian film redefined the independent horror genre. It follows the life of Amelia Vanek, an exhausted widowed mother who struggles with her difficult son, Samuel. Their already precarious existence is upended by the arrival of a sinister pop-up book that introduces a top hat-wearing monster, the Babadook, which soon seems to come to life in their home, relentlessly haunting them.
More than a simple monster, the Babadook is an allegory for unresolved grief. The film is not built on superficial scare tactics but on its ability to immerse the audience in the protagonist’s profound trauma. Its ineluctable presence reflects the nature of pain: it cannot be destroyed, only confronted and managed. The Babadook’s physical manifestation is nothing more than a constant, oppressive reminder of Amelia’s husband’s death and a harsh reflection on the solitude that often accompanies depression and mental suffering. Kent’s debut feature explicitly pays homage to 1920s German Expressionism, using a creature design that recalls iconic figures from silent cinema. The use of deep shadows, shrill sounds, and a deliberately unsettling aesthetic merges the horror of the past with a profoundly modern analysis of the human psyche, demonstrating that true terror lies in our own frailties.
A Ghost Story
A 2017 film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, this work by David Lowery is an existential meditation on loss, love, and time. After dying in a car accident, a musician returns to his house as a ghost, covered in a simple white sheet with two holes for eyes. Trapped in a single location, he is forced to watch his beloved wife grieve and, eventually, move on with her life, while he remains anchored to that place for centuries, powerless.
The film does not aim to scare in a conventional sense but to generate a profound melancholy. Its minimalist aesthetic, from the choice of a sheeted ghost that initially creates a bold absurdity to the use of a 1.33:1 film format that creates a sense of claustrophobia, serves a precise philosophical purpose. Lowery’s work is an exercise in stillness and patience, using long takes to reflect on the futility of existence and how loss can make time feel as if it has stopped for an individual, even as the world around them continues to flow. Its narrative, which moves backward and forward in time, shows the ephemeral nature of life and the cycle of creation and destruction, asking the question “what does it mean to exist and to remember?” within a context of cosmic terror and loneliness.
A Dark Song
In this 2016 Welsh-Irish film, a grieving woman, Sophia, hires a difficult occultist, Joseph Solomon, to guide her through an exhausting and dangerous magical ritual with the goal of summoning a guardian angel to speak with her dead son. The entire ordeal takes place in an isolated house, which becomes a site of emotional purging and deep suffering for both protagonists.
The film presents occultism not as a path to supernatural power but as a brutal physical and psychological process necessary to process pain. The house transforms into a purgatory for the two characters, a place they cannot escape until the ritual, and the healing journey it represents, is complete. Sophia’s final encounter with the divine entity is not a reward for a magical feat, but the culmination of her inner purification, a moment that reveals the true purpose of the ritual was not revenge, but forgiveness. In this interpretation, the house itself is not just a set, but a metaphor for Sophia’s psyche. As the woman is forced to confront her secrets and her true intentions, the entities and sounds that infest the house become more aggressive, suggesting that the “demon” tormenting them is her own hatred and desire for vengeance, and that the trials she must undergo serve to liberate her.
The Stylistic Descent: Infestations Between the Liminal and Nostalgia
This section focuses on films that use unconventional styles and formats to create their atmosphere, subverting expectations and paying homage to past subgenres.
Lake Mungo
This 2008 Australian mockumentary follows a family trying to come to terms with the loss of their daughter Alice, who drowned in a lake. After her death, the family begins to experience strange phenomena that seem linked to her presence. The truth that emerges from this domestic investigation will, however, prove to be far more chilling than simple supernatural occurrences.
The film uses the visual and narrative language of true-crime documentaries for a destabilizing effect, but unlike them, it subverts their conventions. It offers no easy answers or a culprit to blame; the tragedy is fragmented, and the horror is tied to the unresolved. The story becomes a warning about how media can create “palatable ghosts” of victims, telling a simple and sensationalized story while ignoring the complexity and pain of their real lives. The film creates a powerful distinction between the “false ghost” that the brother creates to make sense of the grief—a mere representation of the memory the family wants to have of Alice—and the “real ghost” that is revealed in a final, terrifying moment. This second ghost is the horrific vision of how Alice died and what she was hiding in life, suggesting that our deepest suffering can create our own ghost story, and that the true horror lies in the reality we cannot face.
Skinamarink
This 2022 Canadian experimental film generated heated debate among critics and audiences, dividing viewers. Shot with a deliberately grainy video quality and a nightmarish aesthetic, the film follows two children who wake up in the middle of the night to discover that the windows and doors of their house have disappeared and their father is mysteriously gone.
The terror in this film comes not from what you see, but from what you don’t. Its narrative is deliberately fragmented and disorienting, recreating the unsettling and liminal atmosphere of night terrors, where the rules of reality do not apply. The house, a place that should embody comfort and safety, is transformed into an alien and menacing entity that feeds on childish disorientation. The director, Kyle Edward Ball, didn’t make a film; he filmed a nightmare. It is based on a universal archetype of childhood fear: waking up at night and not finding your parents. The camera is often pointed in strange directions, capturing only fragments and details, forcing the viewer to surrender to the sensory experience. The film demonstrates how independent horror can transcend narrative to become a pure state of mind.
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The House of the Devil
This 2009 film by Ti West is a visual and stylistic homage to the slow, atmospheric horror of the 1980s. It follows a cash-strapped college student who accepts a babysitting job in an isolated house. She discovers too late that she has been lured into a satanic ritual tied to a rare lunar eclipse.
The film not only recreates the aesthetic of that decade—with its grainy cinematography, minimalist score, and use of Walkmans and rotary phones—but also captures the cultural paranoia, particularly that related to the “Satanic Panic.” The satanists here are not fantastical or exaggerated figures but an apparently normal family living their ordinary lives behind closed doors. The terror lies precisely in their familiarity and the protagonist’s sense of powerlessness in the face of an evil that slowly insinuates itself. Unlike a typical slasher, West subverts expectations: there is no masked assailant jumping out of nowhere. The threat is silent, slow, and inexorable, built on a tension that only explodes in the finale. The film rewards the viewer’s patience, demonstrating that true fear lies in the waiting and not knowing.
Ghosts and Memories: The Past That Returns
In this section, the ghost is no longer an entity that reflects an inner anguish, but an echo of the past, a guardian of history who returns to correct an injustice or reveal a forgotten trauma.
1st Bite
Horror, romantic, by Hunt Hoe, Canada, 2006.
Gus is a charming man who works as a cook in an oriental restaurant in Montreal. His boss sends him to a remote island in Thailand to meet a master of Zen cuisine and improve the quality of his dishes. There he meets a mysterious woman named Lake who lives in a cave and informs him that the Zen cooking master is dead. Gus goes to live in the cave and begins a love affair with Lake. But the cook's psychological balance rapidly worsens, including hallucinations, alcohol and malaise. Lake doesn't want Gus to leave, but Gus feels that he needs to escape the island and that his life is in danger.
First Bite is a very original Canadian independent film that crosses different film genres in its narration, suddenly passing from romanticism to suspense to horror. Direction and editing that is never banal, supported by shots with wide-angle lenses that increase the tension and by a cast of actors in excellent shape that offer very intense and realistic interpretations. Between mysticism, black magic, love stories and tropical islands, Primo bite is the odyssey of a man who remains prisoner in a trap from which he can no longer escape, lost between passions and exotic foods. An escape from evil energies in search of spiritual meanings set between wild nature and metropolis.
LANGUAGE: English
SUBTITLES: Spanish. French, German, Portuguese
The Changeling
Considered a Canadian classic from 1980, Peter Medak’s film is based on events believed to have happened to its screenwriter. A grieving musician, after losing his wife and daughter in a tragic accident, moves into a mansion that hides the ghost of a child, who died as a result of a murder and a conspiracy perpetrated by a wealthy senator.
In this film, the ghost is not a threat but an entity seeking justice. The film inextricably links horror to psychological drama and mystery, demonstrating that the spirit is, in the final analysis, a character seeking redemption and help to shed light on a forgotten past. The approach is innovative for its time: the protagonist’s pain from the loss of his family merges and resonates with the pain of the child ghost, creating an empathetic bond that transcends life and death. The haunting becomes the stage where the protagonist’s memory meets and overlaps with that of the ghost, transforming terror into a profoundly human experience.
The Innkeepers
Another work by Ti West, this 2011 film focuses on Claire and Luke, two employees of a historic hotel about to close for good. Obsessed with the idea of recording proof of a haunting, they find themselves confronting the true spectral past of the building. The hotel, once grand, mirrors the characters themselves, who are stuck in a state of waiting and failure.
The haunting in The Innkeepers is a metaphor for the fear of stagnation and oblivion. The hotel is doomed to die, and so its employees seem to be, taking refuge in the search for ghosts to give meaning to their lives and their insignificant work. The story is a subtle and intelligent commentary on a generation’s anxiety in the face of an uncertain future and a lack of purpose in their jobs. The ghost is not an entity that kills out of malice but a reflection of what the characters fear becoming: trapped souls, condemned to repeat the same story of failure in an infinite loop.
The New Spectrology: The Ghost Itself and Its Stories
This section explores films that subvert the very concept of the ghost and the haunted house, offering radically new perspectives on the genre.
Presence
Premiered at Sundance in 2024, this film by Steven Soderbergh is shot entirely from the point of view of a supernatural entity that observes a dysfunctional family move into a new house.
The terror in this film arises from the fact that the viewer is forced to become an involuntary accomplice to the ghost. We are compelled to watch the family’s intimate life, their lies and feuds, from a fixed point of view, one that cannot intervene. The fear is not based on traditional scares but on the profound disquiet of being a powerless and omniscient presence in a life that does not belong to us. Soderbergh, known for his audacious forays and his mastery, used this film as a radical experiment that challenges narrative conventions and audience perception, demonstrating that creativity can also flourish within severe restrictions.
Good Boy
Premiered at SXSW in 2025, this film stands out for a unique premise: a haunted house seen through the eyes of the family dog, Indy, who is the only one able to see and perceive the spectral presences.
The film subverts the traditional role of protector, often given to the human protagonist, to entrust it to animal innocence and instinct. The story is based on the viewer’s empathy for the dog, who must fight to save his master, who is completely unaware of the danger looming over them. The horror is no longer a mystery to be solved or a force to be fought, but an invisible reality that a human cannot perceive, while an animal can. By filtering terror through an innocent and primordial perspective, the film explores the idea that there are forces beyond our comprehension that are only perceptible to those who have an instinctive connection with the invisible world.
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In this video I explain our vision
