Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by Kevin Murphy, Staff Writer

The rise of Spiritualism in the mid-19th century saw with it an increase in the popularity of seances. The belief system and its practices offered something more present and tangible than the clear fiction of the Romantic and Gothic literature of prior years, a push for supernatural belief during a period of technological and scientific innovation, and a way to contact loved ones who had been killed in the wars that enveloped much of the western world.

These otherworldly endeavors took various forms. Sometimes, these would be stage performances where a medium would communicate with spirits related to members of the audience–for those in my particular age group, this would be like Crossing Over with John Edwards. Oftentimes they would have a small group in a single dark room, and the medium leading the seance would fall into a trance that allows spirits to communicate with the other participants vocally or through methods like automatic writing; or they would guide the spirits into performing acts like rapping on the walls or ground to communicate, or levitation of objects. And then there’s the looser seances, where there is no specific medium but groups use Ouija boards and similar methods to communicate, and have become more popular since the Victorian era.

This interest in communicating with the dead reached even to the White House, with Mary Todd Lincoln organizing Spiritualist seances after the death of her son WIlliam at age 11. Among the most famous mediums of the era were the Fox sisters, who claimed to be able to communicate with spirits who would apparently knock on the floor or wall in response. They enjoyed fame for decades before confessing in the late 1880s that it was a hoax, and the sounds were created by cracking toe or hip joints. (As a side note, their full story is a tragic one rife with manipulation and alcoholism, and worth exploring in more detail than I have space for here.) Such was a common trend, where those who would practice seances and other forms of Spiritualism would be disgraced after getting exposed.

The practice spread throughout society, and was ultimately struck a severe blow when a group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania did a study and declared in its preliminary report that “Spiritualism […] presents the melancholy spectacle of gross fraud” and went on to detail a number of seances where these deceptions were investigated. (This report can be read in full over at Project Gutenberg, and it gives good insight into how mediums worked in the late 1800’s.)

Although it is the time for horror and there is little more horrifying than an unwanted history lesson, I will cut short this deep dive into the practice and shift over to how it is depicted on screen–a juicier topic that offers examples of many of the aspects of historic seances, as well as modernized versions of them. There’s such a variety of methods for the seance, and those are amplified and made even more compelling either due to the narrative stakes provided by these films or the style in which they’re done. I’d like to briefly explore some great examples of seances on screen–from the traditional to the modern, the fraudulent to the unguided nightmare scenarios. 

Traditional

There’s no lack of traditional versions of seances on screen. Some of them come from older films–one of these examples is only a few decades removed from a Spiritualist boom in the wake of World War I–but even the more recent examples show the persistence of these scenes where one person directly connects with spirits. Notably, The Uninvited (1944) is a bit homespun in its communication methods, but is an effective scene in a classic and overlooked ghost story. The Others (2001) offers a fantastic twist on the concept that I won’t spoil for anyone who still hasn’t seen it (it’s a brilliant movie, and if you haven’t seen it then fix that as soon as possible). On the smaller screen, Penny Dreadful (2014) has a memorable seance in its second episode that even works out of context to chill thanks in large part to a mighty performance from Eva Green.

Of all of these, my favorite is from The Changeling (1980), as it’s one of the scenes in a horror film that puts me on edge every single time I watch it. The seance uses the droning sound of the medium’s automatic writing and monotone questioning as its background noise. It builds a sense of tension and dread until that noise abruptly becomes the scraping of heavy handwriting, a scrawled Y E S that sets up the sitting that comes after, culminating in shattering glass and an unsettling revelation. George C. Scott puts a lot into this performance in this movie, and the scene that follows has his character listening to the recording of the seance; watching his remaining skepticism crumble as he falls into the obsession that is solving the mystery just seals the deal on this one. 

Fraudulent

As much as the traditional seances are represented, there’s also those that are more illustrative of the phony nature of these practices. Hercule Poirot unravels the mystery surrounding a staged seance in A Haunting in Venice (2023), which also boasts a strong ensemble cast and some great cinematography–and the seance scene itself is fun even knowing it’s going to be dismantled. Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) explores various methods for this kind of fraud as the fake medium’s daughters. Even I Love Lucy, in its seventh episode, has fun with the idea of spiritualist fakery with its typical sitcom hijinks.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) stands out. The seance that functions as the climax of the movie brings to a boiling point the conflicts that have been simmering for the duration of the film and provides an inevitable end to a tense drama. It’s a tragedy of delusion and manipulation where the pall set over the film of Myra and Billy’s dead child renders everything in shades of pity, especially in its finale. Being a crime thriller rather than anything supernatural, it’s the acting that brings this to life. Kim Stanley is magnetic, her character deservedly at the center of the scenes where she leads spiritual readings about the child her husband kidnapped as part of their ransom plot. There are no effects, no levitation or clever tricks; just the skill of an actress amplifying a scenario that sets up its dread with little time wasted and uses the dramatic irony of providing information that the characters aren’t aware of to run the audience’s nerves through the wringer.

Modern

The traditional method is still commonly seen, but there are some significant modern versions of the seance that take advantage of updated methods. Some of this has echoes of ghost hunting technology, like cameras and audio recording throughout the house. The Orphanage (2007) is a perfect example of this, where the medium undergoes a kind of regression and wanders the haunted halls in perhaps the tensest scene in the film. The seance in Insidious (2010) is a combination of high and low tech, with handheld camcorders capturing video, and still cameras with flash bulbs going off based on sensors, all accompanying more classical spiritual communication.

When it comes to current technology, though, my favorite modern seance has to be Host. An independent work produced during the summer of 2020, it uses the lockdown setting to give a new virtual spin to the traditional kinds of seances previously discussed here. The whole movie turns the “seance scene” (which typically lasts around five minutes) into a fair chunk of its 57-minute runtime, and the things that go wrong are just as modern as the technology involved: internet outages, webcam filters acting up, and a memorable scene exploiting the custom backgrounds on Zoom. The isolation makes so much of the movie more tense because there isn’t any help coming from friends–something that I think many can relate to from that time period–and it lets its participants unwisely act like fools when the medium is momentarily absent, something that wouldn’t be possible at an in-person gathering. More than being an enjoyable horror movie, it shows how sometimes changing one part of the formula can make the whole thing feel new.

Do-it-yourself (Don’t)

When the seance is performed without a medium to guide it, movies give us some of the best examples of the worst outcomes. Using spirit boards and other physical conduits, these might not qualify in a traditional sense but aren’t not seances. There's so many of these to choose from, because the idea of “do it yourself” when it comes to contacting the other side opens up so many opportunities for disaster. For example, in Paranormal Activity (2007), the entity is more than happy to communicate using an Ouija board left on its own to become an unexpected fire hazard. Talk to Me (2022) treats its spiritual connection like a narcotic high, with all the risks involved there and the peer pressure that pushes teenagers beyond their comfort zone. The Exorcist (1973), of course, has Regan speaking to “Captain Howdy” via Ouija board to disastrous effect, and the only reason I’m not focusing on that one is because of its high profile–it’s one of the greatest horror movies of all time.

Out of all of the scenes that fall into this category, the 2017 Spanish film Verónica is the one I want to highlight. It has one of the scariest instances of things going completely wrong, not just for the scene itself but as a catalyst for everything that follows. In an attempt to speak to her dead father, Verónica and her friends sneak away from their class to use a spirit board during an eclipse. It cuts back and forth between the school’s roof, crowded with children, and the dark basement where three young women are seeking contact with the other side. It starts off unassuming and calm and escalates as the eclipse’s totality approaches, culminating in a chilling scream. And this possession is just the first part of the movie–there’s still ninety minutes of nightmare to follow as Verónica has a new shadow looming over the difficulties she already faces.

Honorable Mentions

Drag Me to Hell has a seance that goes sideways in bonkers Sam Raimi splatstick fashion complete with a goat bleating out swears and a possessed assistant dancing in mid-air. It’s wild.

Ed Wood’s Night of the Ghouls has a delightful and campy seance, complete with floating trumpet, ghosts in white sheets, and fake skeletons at the table.

And I can’t forget the musical accompaniment I used while writing this piece–the 1983 album Seance by The Church, an Australian rock band. “One Day” and “Electric Lash” are some standout tracks here.

I know that there’s a lot that I’m missing, and entire subcategories that were overlooked here, like the communing with spirits that gives another perspective on the crime in Kurosawa’s Rashomon. I’d best stop before I get too lost in it, though–it’s always important to know when to end things and move that planchette to say GOODBYE.