Only time will tell, but historically speaking, gothic art has been around for about 300 years to date, and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t continue to innovate the way we look at horror and romance for years to come.
The Forest Hill Cemetery describes itself as “an unfinished landscape that welcomes all,” the private, non-profit brainchild of a 1857 collab between some University of Michigan profs and “a group of leading Ann Arbor businessmen.” Synergy, baby. She buries the dead.
“Hey there, demons. It’s me, ya boy,” Shane declares in a bar.
I was surprised, conducting all of these interviews, to learn the extent to which pockets all around Ann Arbor are considered haunted by their residents. Maybe this is true of every city. But after living here four years, even I didn’t know beyond a general feeling that dark and strange histories are continually existing here.
While perhaps abstract-sounding at first, it is not hard to think of examples of experiences you’ve had where the power of the moment comes from what didn’t happen as opposed to what did.
Many popular movie directors got their start in horror films: J.J. Abrams, Guillermo del Toro and James Cameron to name a few. In the film industry, horror is where many directors and producers begin to make a name for themselves.
Horoscopes and natal charts become a powerful means of expressing identity in a world that pounds the masses with information, treating the individual as little more than an object of influence and transaction potential under the guise of connection and belonging.
Death seems to be moving slowly; it does not seem like it had planned to burst into the room and follow with a quick escape. Instead, it is almost as if death had knocked prior to entering the room.
If you see the transparent child in a nightgown in the upstairs hallway, it isn’t fun anymore. Because you don’t have to believe, you just know.
The aspect that differentiates film ghosts from the supernatural phenomena that we recall around campfires and during thunderstorm blackouts is this: The ghosts in movies need no explanation. They can be make-believe because film itself is an escape from reality.