31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 28 (Ghost Story)

Yeah okay, that's another weird one to try and explain. You know me, though. As long as I can squeeze three paragraphs out of it, I've got a post. Believe me, I've been rambling like a verbose idiot for 22 years. I got this shit on lockdown. So. Let us talk about Ghost Story. I admit to some fascination with the movie, considering I'd read the book first. I've only read the book once, however. Shall we talk about how I remember the book? It's by Peter Straub, an author I only found out about because of my own Stephen King kick. The pair collaborated for a novel called The Talisman, which is quite the evocative little book. But we are talking about Ghost Story instead, and Ghost Story was quite haunting. You know, a macabre tale of loss and grief and dark secrets and... yes, ghosts. I remembered the basic beats of the plot, just enough to keep me from being lost going into the movie. I thought the book was pretty neat, which is why I was intrigued by the movie. Was the movie as neat? Well.

I don't think so, but that doesn't mean it didn't still hit a particular mood. The mood it hits oddly makes me think of David Cronenberg's Dead Zone adaptation. That movie was set in winter, and the atmosphere combined with the subject matter and the score to create this very cold and haunting movie. That's the vibe that Ghost Story gives me. It's arguably the best part of it, but we'll poke some more. The actual scares are limited to OH GOD SHE'S GOT A FUCKING MONSTER FACE AAAAAH, but I gotta give them props. They are very good goopy monster faces. There's also the cast, primarily made up of film alumni at the twilight of their careers. Fred Astaire is in this. The dancer from the 40's, but he's a haunted old man regretting the dark secrets of his life. Same with all the other old guys who get together and tell scary stories, but then their sins come back to haunt them. Their sins being the ghost of a lady they killed back in the late 20's. A terrible and tragic accident we see full well at the end of the second act, when the survivors confess their tale to their dead friend's son. A flirty woman they were all sweet on got her head banged in a moment of anger from one of them, they thought she was dead and tried to hide her body by putting her in a car they pushed into a pond, but oops she was only knocked out and you drowned her. Her spirit haunts the sons of one of her killers, starting romantic relationships as some form of revenge. As she memorably says, she'll take them to places they never could have imagined and also drain the life from them.

So what doesn't work? I don't really know how to quantify it. It's a long movie at 110 minutes, and it feels like it needs to be shorter and longer. Longer because the opening bits had me, who had read the book but years ago, a little lost and confused. Shorter because the flashbacks do take up quite a bit of time. There's also a subplot with escaped asylum patients doing the will of the ghost woman that I legitimately do not understand the point of, because I don't remember what they were up to in the book. It's not even that it's an unfaithful adaptation. It hits all the beats. There is just some intangible quality about it that does not quite make it hit. Maybe it's the adaptation decay, maybe I'm just misremembering the quality of the book itself. Either way, this is just fine. Maybe worth a watch, but the best part about it is that cold atmosphere and that score. They're really good, especially here at the end of October. It snowed in parts of my home island this week, you know. The cold's a-coming. The dark oppressive months ahead. That's the real spooky stuff. Three days remain...