The Haunted Screen: Ghosts in Literature and Film

While ghosts often inhabit films and literature devoted to the horror genre, a group of literature-based films from the 1930s and 1940s presents more human and romantic apparitions. These films provide the underpinnings for many of the gentle supernatural films of the 1990s. Tracing the links between specters as diverse as Rex Harrison’s Captain Gregg and Patrick Swazye’s Sam Wheat, the text presents the evolution of the cinematic-literary ghost from classic Gothic to the psychological, sociological, and political ideologies of today. Included are analyses of the literary and film versions of classic ghost stories—Wuthering Heights, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Portrait of Jennie, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Uninvited, Liliom, and Our Town—as well as interpretations of modern films not based on literary works that show the influence of these predecessors—Ghost and Truly, Madly, Deeply. The text includes stills, a bibliography, and an index.