Not interested in seeing dead people. No thank you.

I know how you feel, kid.

I don't know why ghost movies freak me out so much more than any other kind of horror movie. Slashers, zombies, vampires, any kind of glopola you can imagine, and I'm first in line. But ghosts just mess my shit up.

In particular, it's the modern ghosts. The pale, transparent, floaty spectres of ages past don't tax my nerves so much -- Jacob Marley used to be a little creepy, but now they all seem kind of quaint. And monster-ghosts, which come back looking and acting very little like real humans -- Freddy Kruger, or Slimer -- also don't bother me.

But the dead girls in The Shining? Good old-fashioned nightmare fodder. Any and all of the ghosts in The Sixth Sense -- though especially that first one, the woman in the kitchen, and later Mischa Barton, the puking one -- kept me awake for weeks, literally, and I was a college student at that point. (Please note that there are no pictures from The Sixth Sense in this post, except for that classic Haley Joel Osment shot. Because having seen it once, almost ten years ago, I still can't bring myself to look at stills from the movie.) I can't even think about watching those Japanese horror movies with the long-haired ladies -- the commercials for the U.S. version of The Ring scared me shitless.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.

It's not the essential concept of a dead thing that comes back -- as I said, zombies and vampires don't bother me at all. I think maybe part of it is that they come back just the same, but not; changed, in some way, they have seen what should not be seen, they are not who and what they appear to be, and cannot be trusted, or even truly known.

Another thing is that ghosts are apparitions, by nature, and so cannot be bound by rules. They have no physical form; one could be standing behind you right now.* You can't lock them out, you can't fight them, you can't hide from them. There are no talismans to ward them off, and nothing can protect you.

Possibly standing behind you right now.

And that lack of physicality is behind another reason they wig me out: they could, effectively, be real. Sure, you may not ever have to deal with an actual angry spirit living in your television (or whatever), but with a tiny (and terrifyingly possible) tweak of your brain chemistry, you might see Samara climb out of it just the same. Vampires present a kind of danger never encountered in the real world, while ghosts are basically just the manifestation of madness.

And why the modern ghosts particularly? This is harder to pinpoint, beyond "they're just really freaking scary" (as many important film historians have said). Maybe part of it is the tendency to embody them in that moment of death, making the threat they represent -- not decay, like a zombie, or afterlife, like a vampire, but the actual, painful experience of death -- all the more real.

This is the part where I ought to come up with some pithy conclusion, but I don't really have one. I do want to point out that my house is both generic and only about 30 years old, and has very little in the way of supernatural vibes.** Which is, frankly, one of the reasons I like it so much.

*Actually, though there may not be talismans, I'm fairly sure there isn't one standing behind me right now. One, because I checked before I typed that, but also, two, I have a snoring cat in my lap. That makes an apparition of the malevolent dead seem somehow far less likely. People who've seen The Grudge, please to shut up now (I know there's a cat, but I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALA).

**Also, people who've seen The Grudge, please also to keep to yourselves how new-ish and generic that house is too, kthnx.