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 Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

The dead don’t feel emotions. Not generally, anyway. Once the brain and heart shut down, they are gone. The emotions we associate with grief–the missing, gnawing hole where our feelings for that person lived within us–are only felt by the living. For a long time, I envied the dead in this regard. Not just for grief but for all kinds of feelings. I had convinced myself that it was better not to feel, to the point that I sometimes thought I wasn’t capable of the depth of feelings that other people seemed to experience. I imagined myself like Mr. Spock. Half-human but analytical above all. Why mourn the dead? People die all the time? I’d just be feeling sorry for myself. Truly, I was missing the point entirely. 

Thankfully, I have since learned better. With therapy, introspection, and mediation, I have come to realize that I was not actually cutting off my emotions. Rather, the primary emotions I was feeling were anxiety and fear. And tangled all up within that was a fear of how strong my emotions were and that I wouldn’t be able to handle them. Being a person doesn’t come with a handbook, unlike being recently deceased. I don’t know if ghosts are real or not–and my belief might be correlated to how “ghost” is defined–but I know that those of us left behind are haunted, regardless. But what would it mean if we could receive messages through the veil? Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) and Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016) both approach grieving from this angle but with different tones. 

The way I described myself above–trying to “solve” the non-rational problem of emotions with logic–applies to John Baxter (Donald Sutherland), the protagonist of Don’t Look Now. The film opens with a heart-wrenching sequence that concludes with Baxter holding the body of his young daughter after pulling her drowned body from the pond behind their home. From there, it jumps forward some amount of time later to when John and his wife, Laura (Julie Christie) are in Venice while John works on restoring an old church. While there, they meet two sisters who claim to see their daughter and that she is fine. Laura faints but soon attends a seance with the two sisters, who tell her that John’s life is in danger. John, for his part, remains skeptical despite odd occurrences and visions of a figure wearing the same raincoat as their daughter when she died. 

Personal Shopper also takes a look at grief through the lens of the supernatural. Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is mourning her twin, Lewis, who suddenly passed away from a genetic heart condition they both share. Both twins are also practicing mediums and made a pact with each other to send back a sign across the veil if one of them died first. Maureen’s experience of grief is mainly one of waiting. She waits for a sign from her brother’s spirit just as she waits to feel okay again. Grief is a feeling you know will lessen in intensity over time, but sometimes the feelings are so intense, you want to wait for them to pass before you can pick up and move on–but waiting will also prevent moving on. 

Both films directly engage with the nonlinear aspect of emotions and use this dissociative approach to make the living characters feel like ghosts. In Don’t Look Now, this is represented not just by John’s premonitions but also by director Nicolas Roeg’s non-linear editing choices. While they occur throughout the film, they are most prominent during a sequence depicting the couple having passionate sex intercut with them getting ready to go out and have a date. This is where John’s visions begin to intensify, and his relationship with reality begins to worsen. In Personal Shopper, this same idea is conveyed by the nature of Maureen’s work. As a personal shopper for a supermodel, she exists in her own sort of liminal space. She is often at her boss’ apartment when no one else is there, she buys clothes for a person she never sees actually wear them, and while she struggles to identify a sign from her brother, it feels as though her boss is haunting her. And that is before she starts getting anonymous text messages from someone who claims to know her well. Additionally, both films underline this feeling with their editing. Scenes in both films often end abruptly, often sooner than expected, which helps show that John and Maureen are both passing through their own lives in a way that barely feels corporeal. Despite going to work and seemingly living their lives, they are in holding patterns, haunting their own lives.

Communication also plays a key role in both films. In Don’t Look Now, John and Laura’s marriage has been deeply affected by their daughter’s death. And as Laura begins to embrace the world of spirits as a reprieve, John holds on so tightly to his “rational” worldview that he begins pushing his wife away. Personal Shopper is one of the best movies about texting as a primary communication method. The messages between Maureen and the anonymous person texting her–which she suspects could be her deceased twin, Lewis, communicating from beyond the grave–are shown in parallel with some information Maureen is researching about seances. Both are ways to communicate with people who are not physically present, and the difference between three little dots appearing and a rapping table during a ghostly summoning is smaller than we think. Just ask Arthur C. Clarke.

My own experiences with grief–for deaths both literal and metaphorical–have changed me significantly. Grief has made me recontextualize and even question my memories, made me look for someone who isn’t there, and even has me holding onto the last voicemail I have from my dad, stored in my phone, my own little lifeline to the afterlife.