5 excellent horror movies that reimagined the ghost story

Modern Hollywood’s foremost experimenter, Steven Soderbergh, has a new movie out this week, and it’s all about ghosts. Presence, his excellent new film and his first real foray into the horror genre, is shot entirely from the perspective of a ghost who inhabits a house where a new family has moved in. In the hands of nearly any other director, this kind of formal experiment could feel like a gimmick at best — or, at worst, a movie-ruining annoyance — but instead Soderbergh integrates it so effectively and smoothly that it feels like the most natural way to tell this story. Soderbergh carefully allows the camera-ghost to become a character at exactly the right times; otherwise, he lets the concept rest and relies on the movie’s fantastic script and family drama.

So, in honor of Soderbergh’s achievement in ghostly innovation, it got us thinking about ghosts as a subgenre of horror, and all of the fascinating and inventive cinematic storytelling filmmakers have used to tell evocative ghost stories. You can probably think of a few movies that fit the bill off the top of your head: There’s The Sixth Sense and Paranormal Activity, even Field of Dreams if you’re willing to stretch a little. But the well runs much deeper than those few movies. Here are some of our favorite unique ghost movies, each of which does something a little different with the genre.

Director: Herk Harvey
Cast: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger
Where watch: Prime Video

This film follows Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), a young woman who survives a tragic car accident only to find herself pursued by a ghostly spirit with haunting eyes and a stark white face. Aside from just the spirit, Mary’s also inexplicably drawn to an abandoned carnival, which she finds herself constantly drifting toward for seemingly no reason at all.

Carnival of Souls is an utterly strange and inescapably haunting classic, but the reason it belongs on this list is how quietly and effectively it slips ghostliness into the film. The ghosts in Carnival of Souls aren’t just haunting, they’re watchful and almost unnoticed, slipping eerily through crowds before doing something tangible, like reaching out and touching Mary before she’s even seen them. Watching it now, over 62 years after its release, Carnival of Souls feels both recognizable, in how deeply it influenced not just ghost movies but the horror genre as a whole, and also still somehow surprisingly unique. While its inspirations are felt throughout the genre, it’s not quite like any movie that’s come since.

Director: Joel Anderson
Cast: Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe
Where to watch: Prime Video

Lake Mungo is a found-footage film that tells the story of the Palmer family, whose 16-year-old daughter Alice drowns in the Australian lake that gives the movie its title. A few days after Alice’s funeral, the family begins hearing strange noises and waking up to bizarre occurrences in their house each morning. Alice’s older brother Matthew sets up a video camera to see what’s going on, and the family realizes Alice seems to have returned to their home as a ghost — they just can’t figure out how or why.

There’s no shortage of found-footage ghost movies, but few of them engage as meaningfully or interestingly with either concept as Lake Mungo does. What makes it unique is how actively it engages with both the faults of memory and the faults of film itself. It’s constantly grappling with the ways that footage could be doctored or altered, and what it might mean for the supernatural to interact with digital manipulation. For the viewer, it also means a constant questioning of what we’re seeing in this pseudo-documentary is real and what isn’t. The result is a film, much like Presence, that uses its ghostly subgenre to tell a deeply moving story about families and the secrets that pull them together and apart.

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Rentarō Mikuni, Tetsurō Tamba
Where to watch: Max

Kwaidan is unique on this list in that it doesn’t tell a single narrative story, but rather is made up of four different ghostly short stories. One short story tells the tale of an unfaithful swordsman, another of a man who makes a promise to a spirit, another of a musician who plays songs for the court of a long-dead emperor, and another of a man who sees someone else’s face in a teacup.

Kwaidan is both the easiest and hardest movie on this list to recommend. This isn’t due to the movie’s quality — it’s outstanding — but rather due to the amorphousness of its influence and uniqueness. It’s not just hard to imagine what this subgenre of horror might look like without Kwaidan, it’s downright impossible. The movie’s haunting tone and camerawork and the distinctive style with which each of its tales is told have seeped down into the very foundation of horror films and become inextricable from the films we love today — which is reason enough to include it here.

Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Fernando Tielve, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi
Where to watch: Rentable on Apple TV or Amazon Prime Video

The Devil’s Backbone is about an orphanage in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. One day, an orphan named Carlos arrives and begins to meet the other residents of the orphanage and explore its secrets. While most people might think the orphanage’s most interesting treasure is the cache of loyalist gold hidden somewhere on the grounds, Carlos finds himself more fascinated with (and terrified of) the ghostly boy who lurks the building’s halls at night.

Many movies include ghosts as something other than malevolent spirits, enough that it’s a category that absolutely necessitates a place on this list, but what makes del Toro’s version of this narrative so compelling in The Devil’s Backbone is how elegantly he weaves them into the story and tone of the movie. The Spain of this movie feels constantly haunted by the recent past, and troubled by the wounds of its violence — a literal bomb sits in the orphanage’s courtyard, unexploded but always threatening. Del Toro makes a ghostly presence in this place feel natural, like you couldn’t imagine somewhere this terrifying not having a ghost in it. It’s at once a more hopeful and haunting kind of ghost story than anything else on this list.

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cast: Kumiko Asō, Haruhiko Kato, Koyuki
Where to watch: Max

This 2001 masterpiece from Japanese horror legend Kiyoshi Kurosawa is perhaps the scariest movie on this list. Pulse follows several people in Japan whose dealings with computers, and time spent on the burgeoning internet, allow them to watch the slow tumble of ghosts into the real world. These ghosts take the place of the once-living humans and seem to be in constant, but passive, search for more victims.

Despite the fact that it’s now nearly 25 years old, Pulse remains the definitive ghost story for the internet age. Its concept of ghosts who slip into our world through the internet feels as hauntingly plausible as it did when the technology was still mysterious — and perhaps even more metaphorically sound than anyone in 2001 could have imagined. What’s more, the film’s signature images — of lonely people on webcams, desperate for connection, fading into black spots on the wall only to return as haunting specters waiting to turn the rest of the world into something just as alone as they are — is the most affecting, insightful, and tragic addition to ghostly cinema since the subgenre’s earliest films.