Ghost movies: horror cinema began in 1896 with a haunted castle

A ghost film is a movie in which the dead, or the spirit of someone dead, comes back to the living, as a haunting or a visit with unfinished business. It is one of the oldest ideas in cinema. Guinness World Records names Le Manoir du diable, a silent short by the French film pioneer Georges Méliès, as the first horror movie. It runs a little over three minutes, was first shown in Paris on 24 December 1896, and has a demon summoning skeletons, ghosts and monsters to torment a young man. In English it is usually called The Haunted Castle.

The only known surviving copy turned up in a collection in Christchurch, New Zealand. The archive that holds it, Ngā Taonga, notes that Méliès made the film to amuse as much as to frighten. That mix of fun and fear is still how most ghost stories work.

Ghosts last because they can stand for whatever a period dreads. The Russian writer Alexander Pushkin's short story The Queen of Spades became a Tchaikovsky opera that premiered in St. Petersburg in 1890, with an old countess's ghost in its last scenes, and the same figure is a teenage urban legend on screen today. The films below use the dead to stand for a war secret, a pandemic, a night shift and a boy's guilt. That reading is ours, not a rule of the genre.

Relay carries 776 films tagged paranormal, ghost hunt or haunting. The eight below are in release order, and each one shows a different way to bring someone back.

What makes a ghost film

• Someone who should be gone. The ghost wants something: revenge, attention, an answer, a living body.
• A place that holds on. A lighthouse, a military base, an old asylum, a kitchen. The location keeps the dead close.
• A rule for calling or stopping it. A ritual, a séance, a medium. Many ghost films are about someone breaking the rule.

8 ghost movies to watch

Tormented (1960)

Bert I. Gordon, known as Mr. BIG for his films about giant creatures and people, made this one without a giant in sight. A jazz pianist, Tom Stewart, played by Richard Carlson, is about to marry when the ghost of his former girlfriend Vi Mason, who fell from a lighthouse, returns for revenge.

Gordon's daughter, Susan Gordon, plays a child in it, and he directed her in four films. Joe Turkel, who plays a blackmailing beatnik, later appeared in The Shining and Blade Runner. One reviewer is blunt about the effects: they started rather badly and never got any better. Mystery Science Theater 3000, the TV show that mocks bad films, featured it in its fourth season.

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Hallowed Ground (2007)

This American horror film was co-directed by David Benullo and Agung Bagus, went straight to video and was first shown on the Sci-Fi Channel. Its ghost is a preacher. The town of Hope once sacrificed people by nailing them to crosses in its cornfields as living scarecrows, until a young girl alerted the nearby town of Liberty. His spirit can move from body to body, and it has come back.

Reviews were poor. One called it competently made but bland, and noted that the killer scarecrow is not the main focus. Chloë Grace Moretz is in the cast, with Jaimie Alexander and Hudson Leick.

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Stormhouse (2012)

The ghost here is a military prisoner. Set shortly before the 2003 Iraq war, the film has the US Army capture a supernatural entity and hold it at a British base. Hayley, a paranormal investigator played by Katie Flynn, is called in to confirm it is secure. It is not.

Dan Turner directed and Jason Arnopp wrote it, and it was shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2011. Critics split. Ross Miller called it one of the biggest disappointments of the festival, while Eye for Film found plenty of atmosphere and imagination in it. The premise, a ghost treated as a captured asset, is its best idea.

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Devoured (2012)

Greg Olliver made his first feature with this one, written by Marc Landau. Lourdes, played by Marta Milans, is a woman from El Salvador working in the kitchen of an upscale New York restaurant. She is mistreated at work and trying to earn money for her sick son. After a late night of cleaning, she starts seeing shadowy figures.

It premiered at the Bilbao Fantasy Film Festival on 6 May 2012 and won Best Director and Best Actress at the New York City Horror Film Festival that year. Fangoria's Michael Gingold called it a character study of a woman struggling against a world where the odds, and other people, seem stacked against her, rather than a schlocky horror film.

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7 Nights of Darkness (2015)

Six strangers compete on a game show by spending seven nights in a haunted, abandoned asylum for a million-dollar prize. The show never aired. What remains is found footage: handheld cameras, interviews and a séance that goes badly, with sightings of a little girl.

Allen Kellogg directed and co-wrote it and plays one of the contestants. A reviewer at No-Budget Nightmares called it derivative but effective, and praised the cast and the tense last stretch. It was followed by a sequel, The Devil's Toy Box, set five years later and shot in an Ohio building constructed during the Civil War.

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Sweet Sweet Lonely Girl (2016)

A.D. Calvo wrote and directed this slow, quiet ghost story and shot it in Vernon, Connecticut, in late 2015. Adele, played by Erin Wilhelmi, moves in with her aging aunt Dora and meets Beth, a seductive and mysterious friend played by Quinn Shephard. From there the house starts to feel unstable.

It had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin on 22 September 2016 and was released on the horror streaming service Shudder. Critics read it as a classical gothic tale of ghosts and secrets in a dark old house. IndieWire's Eric Kohn called it Bergmanesque. Bloody Disgusting thought the ending was sudden but called the film a melancholy exploration of loneliness.

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The Lockdown Hauntings (2021)

Howard J. Ford, who made the zombie film The Dead in 2010, shot this during the first UK COVID-19 lockdown, and the film says so on screen: shot "by one man". Ford said nobody could be with him on set. He asked on social media whether people would let him film in their homes, and the actors stayed two metres away.

The cast includes Tony Todd, the actor best known as the ghost in the Candyman films, whom Ford cast after a chance meeting on a flight. The story fits the way it was made: women living alone hear voices and watch objects break, and an occult investigator's videos claim that pandemic isolation can create the conditions for ghosts. The producer said it was shot without COVID-19 insurance.

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Queen of Spades (2021)

Patrick White's Canadian horror film is a remake of the 2015 Russian film Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite. Teenagers in Ottawa watch a boy jump from a roof who mutters the Queen of Spades with his last breath. They research the legend and perform the ritual. They draw a door and a staircase on a mirror and say her name three times.

Dread Central calls the legend an age-old Russian one and a sister tale to Bloody Mary. The figure itself comes from Pushkin's story and Tchaikovsky's opera, in which the old countess's ghost appears. Reviews were mixed: Movie Waffler called it lacklustre low-budget horror.

Horror

Where to go next

Every film above is on Relay. For more of the genre's neighbours, try these.

• Found footage horror movies
• Folk horror movies