Spectre, Cinema & Séance

The materiality of the analog film is inherently ghostly. The film medium — a mere reprojection of light and dead material — becomes connected to the supernatural or undead through its ability to resurrect time and movement of the past. Naturally, film is concerned with the past as it is nothing more than a method of embalming its subject(s). This undead ontological identity of the photograph is not a new conception. André Bazin’s “Mummy Complex,” which refers to the innate human need to preserve time and existence through image, accounts for a similar idea to the ghostliness of the analog film reel. Yet, even Bazin and his relentless devotion to realism may have missed the point of his contemporaries — cinema is surreal in its ability to evoke reanimation (or hallucination). The specters of cinema lie within the medium itself, but early incantations of ghostliness can be seen on screen since the birth of photography. Edison’s earliest films captured death by electrocution or hanging. Though, as he immediately reversed the reel to seemingly undo this priorly irreversible action, the medium reorients time to bring life and movement back to the deceased. Early screen iterations of horror and the dead rampantly evolved from this inherent ghostly state to solidify film, which Derrida would define, as a medium of spirits, a repository of ghosts. Below is a list of early (pre-1925) horror, deaths on screen, and cinema as a medium of contacting the dead.