Season of the ghosts

It’s a funny thing how ghosts have seasons… like all pop culture phenomena (to say nothing of paranormal phenomena). Let me explain.

As always, the most visible expression of what’s trendy in the world is in entertainment. Go back 25 or so years and aliens and UFOs were very hot news. The 90s were full of pop culture artifacts that put visitations from outer space and the government cover-ups that swirled around them front and centre in our minds.

TV shows like The X Files made believing in the fantastical cool, movies like Independence Day made alien invasions the new blockbuster, and mistrust of governments and power structures reached a zenith in the WTO and anti-globalisation protests and movement and intellectual figureheads like Naomi Klein.

Fiction and reality cross pollinated, as they always do. You couldn’t open a website in your Netscape Navigator browser without reading about another scientist claiming to have worked on alien technology at Area 51 or having a piece of the crashed Roswell spaceship in their garage, and names like Stanton Friedman and Bob Lazar achieved a very particular kind of celebrity.

It all formed a perfect storm and it provided the backing track of the last half of the decade.

As trends do, it eventually petered out to nothing. Maybe it had to do with 9/11, when we suddenly wanted to give governments all our trust and invest in their power hoping they’d protect us.

It came full circle and ended up with governments failing to protect us but using the political mood to launch an even even deeper surveillance state than ever, engendering even more mistrust of them, but suddenly threats came from very terrestrial sources, not aliens jealous of our beautiful blue-green world.

In fact, UFOs, aliens, Area 51 conspiracies and government contact with greys was almost completely absent until 2021, when the term ‘UFO’ was semi-officially retired and the UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) era began with the US AIr Force releasing videos of strange flying objects it admitted it couldn’t explain.

Other icons, characters and myths from culture have gone through similar waves of popularity. Back in the early aughts you couldn’t walk into a bookstore or movie theatre and swing a cat without hitting a paranormal YA romance about vampires, all of it kicked off by the juggernaut of Twilight.

A documentary about the fortunes of the Star Wars franchise I watched recently did a great job of charting the cultural stock of the brand across time, and one detail I’ve never forgotten is that interest in the movies, toys and merch reached its lowest point in the mid to late 80s. Before that we’d had Return of the Jedi and a few years later we’d start hearing rumours of a second trilogy.

Ghosts and the paranormal are no different. Back in the late 19th and early 20th century the spiritualist movement was everywhere. Madame Blavatsky-style spirit mediums were levitating scissors, dribbling ectoplasm out of their nostrils and letting people talk to dead relatives from beyond the grave all over the parlours of the US and Europe.

The supernatural enjoyed brief periods of cultural awareness here and there throughout the 20th century. The iconic Universal horror films of the 30s and 40s gave us some of our most memorable monsters. The new arts of special effects that conquered Hollywood in the 1980s meant plenty of spectacular visions of ghosts and ghouls that ruled the box office (Poltergeist, Ghostbusters,Beetlejuice).

The YouTube era gave us the found footage movie, introduced in spectacular fashion with The Blair Witch Project and – even though the idea was flogged to death over the subsequent 20 years – giving us some very effective ghost stories on screens.

The studio system also readily jumped on board because of the horror genre’s infamously low cost and high return, endlessly rehashing and rebooting slasher-era classics like Halloween and spawning new connected universe franchises like that of The Conjuring.

Now, ghosts and the paranormal haven’t really captured the imagination of the world like the other folkloric devices described above, not in the all-encompassing way vampire or aliens have.

As a subject it’s a perennial favourite and you can pick a creatively successful ghost story from any era (The Others, Talk To Me, The Ring, The Sixth Sense), but you could argue it’s never really captured or changed the tone of a cultural institution.

Not like Star Wars, changing science fiction from a cerebral niche of social comment and hippy-era style to romantic swashbuckling and spectacle overnight, or Pulp Fiction, giving the contents of the dusty, forgotten corners of the video store shelves a new prestige.

And so, as I often find myself wondering, when will it finally be the season for ghosts? History is replete with stories in books or on screens that (re)introduce a mythology to a new generation, remix and redux it slightly, and make that mythology so popular it seems like we’ve never talked about it in films or literature before.

What will do that for ghosts and hauntings?