Searching for ghosts can be an attempt to reconstruct what is lost. Laqueur writes, are “a representation of the unrepresentable: the dead who were somewhere.” In a world where nearly every moment of our lives is photographed, recorded, and documented, the gaps in the past still beckon us. “Our country’s ghost stories,” Dickey writes, “are themselves the dreams (or nightmares) of a nation, the Freudian slips of whole communities.” That’s the thesis of Ghostland, Colin Dickey’s road trip through America’s most famous haunted places, from the Winchester Mystery House to New Orleans’s French Quarter. These films are the modern incarnation of the ghost stories that we have told ourselves for generations-and often, the most candid expression of the anxieties we’re too afraid to admit to as a society. As Halloween approaches, movie theaters across the country are projecting our collective fears on screen: horrific spirits, evil rich people, New England witches, wicked surrogate mothers.
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