[suspenseful music]
I see dead people.
♪♪
The one monster that's in every culture,
no matter how sophisticated or primitive
all around the world, and that's ghosts.
Do you believe in ghosts?
[roaring, groans]
With "Poltergeist," what you get is,
you get the most thoughtful,
most thought-out,
most fun haunted house movie that's ever been made.
♪♪
"The Shining."
I mean, that is the ultimate ghost story, is "The Shining."
- Here's Johnny. - [gasps]
I was struck most viscerally
by the performance of Jack Nicholson.
I'm not gonna hurt you.
I'm just gonna bash your brains.
♪♪
Ah!
"The Sixth Sense" is masterful
in that it really plays with the ghost story
- in a very new way. - Ah!
He sees ghosts and spirits.
Stop looking at me.
People walking around in their day-to-day life.
[crashing]
What "Insidious" has brought to the genre is a humanity
which I'm not sure has been in many
of the spooky movies we've seen.
♪♪
"The Ring" was one of those movies
that had so many disturbing images...
♪♪
...that I could not sleep
for days after I saw that movie.
[gunshot]
Ghost stories are always about the way
the past casts its long shadow on the present.
[shrieks]
They make us question, is there something else?
Am I gonna wind up in limbo? Am I gonna wind up in heaven?
Or hell?
♪♪
Totally getting goose bumps talking about this.
[screams]
[spooky music]
♪♪
[chainsaw revs]
♪♪
[ominous music]
It's coming toward us.
Vampires, werewolves, zombies.
People don't really believe that stuff is real.
But ghosts, you ask 99% of the people,
they're like 100% certain that they have seen a ghost.
[screams]
That there are ghosts, that they experienced ghosts.
There are ghosts in the house.
Oh!
I mean, the ghost subgenre... I mean, I think that's why
it just... it literally never dies.
♪♪
Ghost movies have been with us
since the dawn of cinema.
The first horror film, "La Manoir du Diable,"
from 1896, was a ghost story.
But until the 1980s, spirits were rarely seen onscreen.
And if they were, they were rarely convincing.
That all changed with "Poltergeist."
They're here.
Well, "Poltergeist" was one of the first scary movies
that I can remember seeing as a kid.
I was truly terrified by that movie
and I... I'm still to this day terrified of ghosts.
I was still a child when I saw it.
I really connected to that story,
the magical of uncertainty
of the afterlife and... and spirits.
♪♪
"Poltergeist" is a haunted house movie
that took place in the suburbs,
that was in the least scary place possible.
- I'm out of here. - Bye.
The family lives in the San Fernando Valley,
that gets plagued by spirits
because of the area where they live was built on a graveyard
that is getting back at 'em.
Don't worry about it. After all,
it's not ancient tribal burial ground,
it's just... people.
"Poltergeist" is a really fascinating one for me.
It's like taking sort of, almost like,
decades of horror filmmaking,
and constructing it into, like, this pure rollercoaster.
- No [screams]. - [roars]
[screams]
Took the director of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre,"
Tobe Hooper, and you took Steven Spielberg,
the director of "Jaws," "Raiders of the Lost Ark,"
that was the biggest horror event
of my childhood, that movie.
And this stuff all works as long as the audience
can find some logic for it.
Steven just brings this enthusiasm and this energy
to the thing.
And then Tobe is, like, figuring out the logistics
and... and how the shot's gonna look and all of that.
What happens to that family is so Tobe.
But that family is definitely more Spielbergian.
Before, after, before, after, before.
[laughing] Let me see your tuck position.
The important thing was the kinetic family,
and the cohesiveness, and keeping it light,
until it starts getting heavy.
[ominous music]
"Poltergeist" is a movie about
the tremendous guilt and shame we feel
about leaving our children in front of the TV,
letting the TV be the babysitter.
We know it's wrong. We do it anyway.
That scene where the little girl is standing in front
of the, uh... the television,
and it reaches out to molest her.
♪♪
Kind of a dawning realization that we might be
sacrificing our... our children
in front of, uh, this glowing screen.
♪♪
I think what Steven and his collaborators predicted
with "Poltergeist" is... is true.
We've all fallen into our television.
- [yelps] - Mommy.
I can't see you, Mommy.
Where are you?
Their young daughter gets trapped
between this world and the next.
Your daughter is alive and in this house.
During the course of the film,
the mother literally goes to hell
to rescue her daughter from the beast.
[roars]
[screams]
[whooshing]
[suspenseful music]
♪♪
Pull.
- Phew! Great. - Real nice.
The good fortune of "Poltergeist" was that
it did have the budget to allow
the filmmakers to express their imagination on film.
A spirit coming down the stairs for the first time.
Feeling of the... of the body and the arms coming up.
Just when we begin to see the fingers,
it goes whoosh,
breaks up like blowing a smoke ring apart in the air.
Anything that Tobe and Steven could think of
that belonged in the movie was in the movie.
♪♪
both: [screaming]
But there's no CGI in "Poltergeist."
[whimpering]
[grunts]
God. The face-tearing scene,
that whole sequence you can see the three pieces.
There's me with the little scratches.
[ominous music]
Then there's me with this giant prosthetic on my face
that I pull off and pull strips of it off,
and then there's this really cool dummy
that looks like me, which is actually
this dummy with Steven Spielberg's hands underneath
pulling all this gunk off.
♪♪
When they showed it to me the first time,
I just burst out laughing, and the... the...
one of the sound designers said, "What's so funny?"
And I said, "Everyone's gonna remember this scene.
"I just pulled my face off and it fell in the sink."
[whooshing]
[laughs]
All sorts of different effects.
Opticals, forced perspective sets,
contrazoom when JoBeth Williams is running down the corridor,
and also, brilliant practical effects.
[lighting roars]
Oh, yeah, boy, that tree.
♪♪
Steven had this image, 'cause when he was a kid,
there was a tree outside his bedroom window
that scared the crap out of him,
and so that tree had to be there.
It was a rubber tree. For some reason,
they put these, like, knobs in there.
These little prickly things.
Well, obviously, the tree, kind of climb up,
and kind of, um, like,
scratching you and pouring rain
and you got the wind machines and the lightning
and... [snorts]
things are going off, and I'm going, Jeez.
- Look out. - My leg!
For me, the tree coming alive,
uh, was very vivid and visceral,
and so every time I sort of looked out the window,
and the moonlight was just so,
I would constantly picture that tree.
[whooshing]
I'm still pissed off about the tree.
That tree was the hardest thing to deal with
in the whole movie.
Except for the pool.
My God. [breathes heavily]
The swimming pool.
Be careful, honey.
Craig Raiche, the prop guy,
stashed all these skeletons all over the place.
[dramatic musical flourish]
[screams]
We did a take and went to Craig and I says,
"Hey, Craig," I s... you know,
"you don't need to make them smell like this."
You know, they... they smelled.
And he says, "Well, they're real."
[whimpering, panting]
I mean, it's a joke now,
of something was on an Indian burial ground
and so you know it's gonna be haunted.
And in "Poltergeist," the great line at the end of the movie
is when Craig T. Nelson grabs James Karen
and shakes him and says...
You son of a bitch, you moved the cemetery
but you left the bodies, didn't you?
You son of the bitch, you left the bodies
and you only moved the headstones!
You only moved the headstones.
And I think, in a way, that says a lot about America,
that we, uh... we moved the headstones.
But the bodies are still there.
[whooshing]
The spirit of "Poltergeist"
lives on in the "Insidious" series,
which shows us an afterlife filled with restless souls.
Some friendly.
Some deadly.
[thump, rattling]
Slow down.
James Wan's film "Insidious" is a ghost story
for the 21st century.
It delivers shocks, suspense,
and genuine emotion to audiences
that may think they've seen it all.
[whispering] Give it, give me.
I want it. I want it
[screaming] now!
[baby crying]
[suspenseful music]
It's a fun thing to mess with,
that suburban domestic bliss that's supposed to exist.
Can you go wake up Dalton?
It's a fun thing to get in there
and rip that domestic bliss away from a family.
Dalton, Dalton.
Dalton.
There is no brain damage.
"Insidious" is about a, uh, mother and a father
who lose their child
to a place called "The Further."
[ominous music]
What does that mean?
The Further is a world far beyond our own.
It's a dark realm filled with the tortured souls
of the dead.
A place not meant for the living.
And all these ghosts that are crowding
in this family's house are trying to get into his body.
It's an empty vessel.
And they do everything in their power
to try and get their child back.
And that's really about what you would do as a parent
if you... if you lost your child,
or if your child got sick.
[baby crying] [dramatic musical flourish]
[screams] Josh, Josh, Josh, please, come...
Twenty minutes into the movie,
when just as the audience is saying,
Why on Earth would you not get out of this house,
the, uh... Patrick Wilson says to Rose Byrne's character...
We're going.
And they move houses.
[foreboding music]
And the haunting follows them to their next house.
- [doors slam] - [gasps]
[giggling]
It's not the house that's haunted.
♪♪
It's your son.
♪♪
So it doesn't matter where they move,
they're gonna be... they're gonna be haunted
no matter where they are.
♪♪
[dramatic thump]
♪♪
So they call upon my character, Elise Rainier,
who is a known ghost hunter, so to speak.
I think Elise is distinct and unusual in the sense
that, um, I'm not a typical heroine.
♪♪
[dramatic musical flourish]
[suspenseful music]
[wheezing]
This is how you die.
Not today it isn't.
[thump] [grunts]
[whooshing]
♪♪
Come on, bitch.
♪♪
What I tried to do was find the places in myself
of empathy, of reception.
Elise is a really good receiver.
She's got a good radio.
We have some help.
Who?
Someone else is here with us.
Mom.
You know, she's tuned in. And I believe all people
have that ability.
I don't think it... it's just, uh, assigned to a few.
But we're ful... so full of static
that I think we don't hear very often at all.
We don't hear each other, let alone another world.
[whooshing]
♪♪
The first "Insidious" score was a really great experience
beca... it was... it was... it's a very pure,
very raw filmmaking experience all around.
[whooshing]
both: [grunting]
My friend found this rusted out piano,
and you flick a string, and just this... just...
eons of just crud come flying off of it.
It had been abandoned in the alley behind his studio
for some time and they dragged it in there
and I got to go in and record on it.
[rusted piano crash]
So that made up a big part of the sound of that film.
♪♪
We were so thankful when "Insidious" was a hit film
- and people really took to it. - [screams]
Death is the one inevitable thing.
It's coming for all of us.
There's a human need to answer that question
of like after death, and I think
ghost films feed into that.
There's very little we really know
about the spirit world, if there...
whether you believe in it or not.
I tend to believe in everything
because I think we know so little about so much.
all: [screaming, groaning]
[whimpering]
[sheet ripping]
[gasps]
The "Insidious" series and "Poltergeist"
showed us normal families bonded by a love
strong enough to survive a supernatural attack.
But one of the greatest film directors of all time,
painted a much darker picture of parenthood
and the afterlife.
The haunted house is a staple of horror films.
It's usually a sinister mansion
where murders have been committed.
Or about to be committed.
This house,
it knows we're here.
Two haunted house movies loom above the rest.
[suspenseful music]
Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining,"
and Robert Wise's "The Haunting."
♪♪
Usually ghost stories work when it's about
what you don't see.
And so that's, in a way, why I probably separated out
what is my absolute favorite horror movie of all time,
um, which is "The Haunting."
No one who rented Hill House
ever stayed for more than a few days.
I just think that's the ultimate horror movie.
The dead are not quiet in Hill House.
♪♪
"The Haunting" is about a group of people
who are brought together in this old, dark house
to try to find out what's at the root
of supernatural spirits.
The house is calling you.
It's also about a woman
who has had a very troubled relationship with her mother,
and who goes away to be a part of this experience.
Don't let me go. Stay with me.
♪♪
"The Haunting" works so well because we don't see anything.
[indistinct speech]
We don't see the ghosts at work.
We sense, we hear them.
- [indistinct speech] - Are you awake?
Don't say a word, Theo, not a word.
Don't let it know you're in my room.
We are given complete freedom in our minds
to wander through the house.
[gasps]
And it is one of the most terrifying films
because of Wise's instinct
to focus on the faces of those being terrified,
because that is what you're relating to
and that is what is informing your emotion,
not the ghosts.
Oh, God, no.
The first movie that terrified me to the point
where I could barely look at it was "The Haunting."
I was probably 11 years old,
and you never really see anything
- until that woman... - When that door is pounding.
[door pounding]
The door kind of bulges.
♪♪
And finally, she's going up this rattly,
unsteady spiral staircase,
and the trap door opens and it's the professor's wife,
and she goes, "Ah!"
Ah!
And I'm thinking, I'm dead. [chuckles]
I had a heart attack, I'm never gonna grow up.
♪♪
Of course, Stephen King did grow up.
And 17 years later, his second novel
"The Shining" was adapted for the screen
by the legendary director Stanley Kubrick.
Like "The Haunting," "The Shining" is about
- a bad place. - [screams]
And the terrible effect it has
on the people who stay there.
Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrance,
an unstable writer who takes the job of winter caretaker
at the secluded Overlook Hotel.
[heart beating]
Is there something bad here?
Well...
you know, Doc, when something happens,
it can leave a trace of itself behind.
Things that people who "shine" can see.
Jack and his son Danny have a psychic gift.
A shining that lets them see the ghosts
of the murdered people at the Overlook.
Those ghosts terrorize Danny,
while they slowly drive Jack insane.
[guffaws]
Jack Torrance, he's an alcoholic.
He doesn't know how to control it.
And he blames his son and his wife
for his artistic impotence.
Whenever you come in here and interrupt me
you're breaking my concentration.
You're distracting me. And it will then take me time
to get back to where I was.
There's something about this hotel that just wants
the people who go there to murder each other.
Come and play with us, Danny.
[ominous music]
Forever.
And ever.
"The Shining" is filled with the kind of iconic scenes
you'd expect from one of history's greatest directors.
But Kubrick made many changes to King's story
that didn't sit well with its author.
I can enjoy it on the same level that you could enjoy
a beautifully restored Cadillac without a motor in it.
- [laughs] - You know?
My rap about it is there's no character arc.
In the book, Jack Torrance goes from a nice guy
who's trying to get better for his family and for himself.
And I felt like Jack Nicholson
played Jack Torrance as though he were crazy from the...
Crazy from minute one.
That is, uh, quite a story.
Talking with Mr. Ullman in the office,
and Ullman saying this and that and Jack's going,
- "Yes." - [laughs]
"Absolutely, Mr. Ullman."
Well, you can rest assured, Mr. Ullman,
that's not gonna happen with me.
And I also thought that Kubrick had taken
a pretty strong, scary,
suspense, horror novel
and turned it into an art film.
I think Kubrick was doing...
was trying to make an anti-horror movie.
He was intentionally going against the grain
of the horror tropes.
You think you know how horror is made,
well, I'm showing you how I do it.
Counter to convention in "The Shining"
is the brightness of the lighting style.
And he's almost always on really wide lenses.
'Cause he doesn't do that kind of horror,
people don't pop out, you know,
and stab you or whatever.
It's much more psychological,
so it works for what he's doing.
It's even creepier.
[dramatic musical flourish]
So much of the movie is from the perspective
of whatever character you're with,
so for Danny, it's one thing,
for Jack Nicholson's character it's this sort of unseen menace
that sort of takes him over, and Shelley Duvall,
so she's a... a ghost story freak,
and it's like, so in her mind
the horror takes on this cheesier form.
And it's like, Oh... it's just, everybo... it's all from
subjective perspective, which just makes it all the creepier.
[tense music]
Family is a great source
for horror storytelling
because family is very intimate,
family is very close to us,
and family is very dangerous, if you're in the wrong family.
- Here's Johnny. - [gasps]
The Overlook Hotel and this trauma-filled family,
they just go together so well.
It's a perfect location for them to fall apart.
Danny!
And that's often the case in... in haunted house movies,
in movies about ghosts. People who are traumatized
end up there for one reason or another,
and the house is just like, Yes.
This is a person that's ready to be affected and impacted
by unspoken darkness.
"The Shining" featured a boy who could see
the malevolent spirits of the dead.
Two decades later, "The Sixth Sense"
told the story of another haunted child.
This time by ghosts who were desperate for help.
[dramatic musical flourish]
[gagging]
[whispering] I see dead people.
Dead people, like, in graves? In coffins?
[tense music]
Walking around like regular people.
There are many different ways that you can tell a story
within the context of a horror movie.
And there's high-brow and low-brow, like, you know,
there are many colors to the spectrum of horror.
Cole, you're scaring me.
They scare me too sometimes.
They?
[suspenseful music]
♪♪
Ghosts.
Supernatural thriller.
That was what they called "The Sixth Sense."
And there were orders not to call it a horror film.
One of the scariest, most brilliant films ever made,
and they said, "Don't call it a horror movie."
It was like "horror" was a dirty word.
I'll show you where my dad keeps his gun.
Come on.
♪♪
Cole Sear is a eight-year-old boy
living in Philadelphia, uh, with a young, single mom.
He's a very troubled and disturbed boy.
And he runs into a child psychologist.
Think about what you wanna get out of our time together.
What our goal should be.
Instead of something I want,
can it be something I don't want?
And he tries to treat Cole, and tries to help him,
and he ends up finding out that Cole
believes that he sees ghosts and spirits
of people walking around in day to day life.
And they even come into his home.
Mama.
No, dinner is not ready.
♪♪
What's great is that when somebody like
M. Night Shyamalan comes along with "The Sixth Sense,"
he has the confidence to slow it down
and make it intimate, and make it about the performances,
and make you completely invested in the premise.
♪♪
"The Sixth Sense" was deeply soulful.
The purpose of all the ghosts, it's all about, like,
resolving your human relationships,
which is actually more scary than a ghost.
[laughs]
It was perfectly cast as well. It was, like,
an awesome, different thing for Bruce Willis at the time.
I can't be your doctor anymore.
I haven't paid enough attention to my family.
Poor Haley Joel Osment was fantastic,
who had this most expressive face
and pain and loneliness
that's expressed so well that he feels 40 years old
rather than 10 years old.
You believe me, right?
Haley Joel Osment is from another planet in that movie.
And you're so drawn to... to Haley Joel Osment
that you can't help but... but sympathize for the people
that have died through him.
[dramatic musical flourish]
That shoot was sort of my education
into a lot of horror films,
because we were watching a lot of things to see
good examples of people in frightening situations.
'Cause at like 10 years old, you haven't really had
a whole lot of traumatizing experiences
most of the time.
What is it? What...?
[whispering] Why did you leave me?
[ominous music]
I didn't leave you.
[object clinks, rolls]
I did not see the twist coming in that film.
- I was so scared. - No, and anybody...
by the way, anybody that tells you they guessed it,
- they're so full of it. - I so didn't.
- Nobody gets is. - Did you guess it?
- No... - Oh, good, I was gonna say...
I can't even guess the ending of a "Murder, She Wrote,"
let alone "The Sixth Sense." [laughter]
[whispering] Anna.
[solemn music]
Happy anniversary.
It's a frightening movie,
but the fear doesn't come from ghosts.
It comes from people being afraid that, uh,
they won't be able to communicate with each other.
So the movie is... communication is the real theme of the movie.
[ominous music]
What do you think they want?
Just help.
That's right. That's what I think too.
They just want help, even the scary ones.
[suspenseful music]
Ah! [panting]
♪♪
What sets Cole free from his situation
is when he finally figures out that he has to be a conduit
between people who still need to, uh,
communicate with each other.
Grandma says hi.
And even though Night does some amazing things
that really makes you jump and... and create
some really frightening circumstances,
I think what makes the movie endure
is that anybody can identify with that sort of desire
of saying things to people that you never got to say.
She said
you came to the place where they buried her,
[stirring music]
asked her a question.
♪♪
She said the answer is...
♪♪
every day.
♪♪
The theme of ghosts looking to the living
to solve unfinished business
didn't start with "The Sixth Sense."
Some of the greatest ghost stories of all time,
old and new,
are murder mysteries the dead want us to solve.
[suspenseful music]
[foreboding music]
♪♪
- She's mad. - Ghosts can be terrifying.
- [screeches] - [screams]
But in some films, the spirits of the dead
aren't trying to torment the living.
They're victims of terrible crimes,
looking for justice.
- [screeching] - [screams]
Perhaps the greatest ghost mystery movie of all time
is "The Changeling."
It's not as famous as "The Shining"
or "Poltergeist."
But it deserves to be.
[suspenseful music]
"The Changeling" is one of the best
American ghost stories put on film.
Very powerful. And George C. Scott is terrific.
George C. Scott plays a composer
who is dealing with the death
of his young daughter and wife
in a tragic car accident.
♪♪
George C. Scott winds up moving
to a vast, crumbling mansion
that hasn't been inhabited in years.
And he's trying to shake himself
of his memory of his daughter.
And then over the course of his stay,
he starts to notice something
trying to communicate with him.
At first, it's really subtle things like a piano note
playing itself.
[piano note rings]
It escalates into pounding noises.
[pounding]
♪♪
And so he starts to realize
that there's something in the house
that's trying to connect to him.
"The Changeling" feels very real.
I think that's why I love it so much.
The way it handles the paranormal
is very simple and effective.
[pounding continues]
It's the first movie that, um,
made a bouncing ball absolutely terrifying.
[ball thumping]
So the ball comes thump, thump,
thumping down the stairs,
and George C. Scott is freaked out,
and he says, Enough of that, and he... he takes the ball
to the nearest bridge,
and he drops it 70 feet down into the... the river.
[ominous orchestral music]
And he drives home and he thinks, Phew,
that's over with.
And he walks in through the front door and...
♪♪
You know, it makes my skin crawl just to think about it.
- Love that. - What is your name?
♪♪
[whispering] Joseph.
It's the ghost of a young boy
who was murdered in the house.
What is your name?
[whispering] Joseph.
George C. Scott understands that the specter of this child
has something to communicate,
and he's afraid of it, and he's afraid
of what it will do, but he's also curious
and wants to help it, because of his own loss.
♪♪
There's something about heartbreak and horror
that go hand in hand.
When you've lost a child,
it's something so deep and so painful
that it either closes you off completely,
or it opens you up to other experience.
What is it doing? Why is it trying to reach me?
- John. - Is it because of my daughter?
♪♪
I can't go through all this again.
I think a lot of ghost stories are about wrestling
- with the idea of loss. - [sobbing]
Trying to make sense of the death of loved ones
and... and what that means.
What happens to us when we're gone?
If any of us were forced to linger behind,
uh, on this plane, in the afterlife,
it's probably because there's some unfinished business.
[tense music]
♪♪
And "The Changeling" was the first time I got exposed
to the idea that ghosts didn't just wanna scare
the living [bleep] out of you like they did in "The Shining,"
but that they actually wanted help.
They needed someone on the mortal plane
to actually help them.
What do you want from me?
I've done everything I can do.
"The Changeling" is, not only is it a horror movie,
it's also, uh, a murder mystery.
We wanna know what happened to this little boy.
And it introduces, uh, sort of an element
we've seen in a lot of ghost story movies since then,
where the ghosts are reaching out to us
to solve a mystery to help put their souls at rest.
♪♪
[coughing]
And it's a kind of theme that we've seen
in the films of Guillermo del Toro,
where we really feel the pain of the ghost.
Unlike "The Changeling," and many other ghost movies,
del Toro lets you see his specters.
The ghost of a murdered child in "The Devil's Backbone"
is one of the most disturbing figures ever put on film.
Guillermo has this incredible, like, sense...
uh, visual sense.
[ominous music]
♪♪
Santi, the ghost, empty eyes,
and the crack in... in his forehead.
Blood coming out of his forehead is shooting up.
It's floating.
Its physics abide by the laws of...
of the conditions where he died.
[groans, grunts]
[grunts]
♪♪
Because he's... he's... he's actually drowned.
♪♪
[dramatic musical flourish]
But del Toro's ultimate ghost movie
is 2015's "Crimson Peak."
When the time comes,
- you'll hear of Crimson Peak. - [whimpering]
By blending practical effects
- with powerful new CGI... - [screams]
He took Gothic horror to a level of visual artistry
never seen before.
[screeching, moaning]
♪♪
[crying]
"Crimson Peak" was my fifth
of my six movies with Guillermo del Toro.
When he calls and says, "I want you to be in a film,"
I don't ask questions, I just say yes,
and then I find out later what it's gonna be.
[chuckles] 'Cause I trust him that much.
- [screeching] - [gasps]
[moaning]
And then when I found out you're gonna be playing
two of my... of my five ghost ladies in the movie,
I'm like, "How's that, again?"
"Crimson Peak" is about a young woman whose father dies
early in the story.
[grunts]
[groans]
Edith is met by a gentleman who says,
Ah, I can... I can offer you a better life.
Come with me to England. And so she comes
with her dowry, with her inheritance.
Once she signs the final papers,
I want this over with.
But the house that he takes her to
is haunted by lots of ghost ladies
who might be from a similar past.
[growls softly]
[gasps]
And he might've done this before.
What I love about "Crimson Peak" was
that the ghosts weren't to be feared.
The imagery might be a little off-putting at first,
but they were there to heed warning
and to help this... this woman who was still alive
not to become one of them.
[breathing heavily]
His blood
will be on your hands.
[gasps, pants]
Well, ghost stories are always about the way
the past casts its long shadow on the present.
[grunts, groans]
[grunts]
Faulkner famously said, The past isn't over.
It isn't even past.
The big bloodstain of the past
lying across the present.
"Crimson Peaks" ghosts were victims
of cold-blooded murder.
[suspenseful music]
So is the ghost in "The Ring."
But this ghost doesn't wanna help you.
[television buzzes, screeches]
It's a serial killer from beyond the grave.
Have you heard about this videotape that kills you
when you watch it?
- What kind of tape? - A tape. A regular tape.
[suspenseful music]
♪♪
"The Ring" is about a videotape,
and if you watch it, within seven days you die.
[television ringing]
♪♪
Naomi Watts plays a news reporter.
And she's reporting on this story.
Essentially, she comes across the film
when doing her journalistic research.
[phone rings]
♪♪
Seven days.
And just brings a tape home
and her... her son watches the tape.
[television static whooshes]
No!
♪♪
And so now it becomes also a story of...
of not just a journalist trying to dig into the story
and find its roots. It's a mother
trying to save her son's life.
♪♪
And it has this natural time bomb structure.
You see the video, you know you have seven days
before you're gonna die.
Your life is gonna decay around you,
and steadily becoming more and more like a nightmare.
♪♪
[coughing]
♪♪
[coughs]
And there's nothing you can do to stop it.
You don't wanna hurt anyone.
But I do, and I'm sorry.
As Naomi Watts' character is digging in and digging in,
you realize that this child
is what you have to be worried about.
She's the one that will haunt you,
and she's the one that will come after you.
♪♪
Samara...
"The Ring" is a remake
of the haunting Japanese film "Ringu."
[gasps]
Though the plot is the same,
you can see how differently Eastern and Western cultures
tell ghost stories.
There's a very specific approach to fear.
The Japanese films,
all you need is a pale face and long, black hair.
It's iconic in a way that has been for years.
There are icons that, uh, immediately induce
shudders and goose bumps to a Japanese audience
that would not necessarily to an American audience.
♪♪
[grunts]
[horse groans]
The U.S. version of "The Ring"
grossed $249,000,000,
ushering in a wave of Japanese ghost film remakes.
- [screeches] - Ah!
- [softly screeching] - [whimpering]
[tense music]
♪♪
The dark, brooding Japanese horror style
made its way into Hollywood films,
like Andrew Douglas' 2005 remake
of "The Amityville Horror."
♪♪
We're seeing a lot of Asian horror films
- for the first time. - [whimpering]
We're kind of influence by this new imagery.
We hadn't seen it.
[screams]
The child twisted up, stuck to the roof
is very much a kind of Asian horror image.
♪♪
But "The Ring" remains the most successful
Japanese horror-inspired classic.
Oh. [screams]
Rachel!
"The Ring" was, uh, one of those movies
that had so many disturbing images.
I just... I could not
sleep for days
after I saw that movie.
And I watched a lot of TV, so whenever there would be
static white noise kind of screen,
I would... I just... I couldn't deal.
Ah!
It changed that whole image for me
for the rest of my life, like, to this day, you know,
I... I would probably still get a twinge of, like,
Oh, [bleep].
Ah!
This is about the fear of our own mortality, you know.
About getting the diagnosis that you only have so long,
and not being able to put the brakes on,
not being able to bargain for more time.
[suspenseful music]
Ghosts mean different things in different religions
and different cultures. Some ghosts are benevolent,
some ghosts are malicious.
But there's always that struggle.
'Cause what... when someone dies, where do they go?
♪♪
I have a friend who says that
the people she knows don't die.
They just are on vacation.
Where's Larry?
Oh, he's in Rio de Janeiro on the beach.
Because they just are here, and then they're not here.
And that's why we create rituals,
funerals, memorial services, to help us deal
with the grief.
And part of the grief is, Where the hell did they go?
♪♪
Movies help you. They're therapeutic.
They deal with "where did they go"?
♪♪