"Ghosts can inhabit love stories, horror films, slapstick comedies, immersive psychological studies, and many other locales. Again, you don't have to believe in ghosts to imagine these things, to be transfixed by a human being who has to walk down a dark hallway. We've walked down those hallways. We were the kid who had to cross through the empty parking lot at night. We had to go into the basement, as much as we didn't want to.
Even now, most of us can tap into those memories, into those often-unreasonable fears. That certainly helps to explain the continued popularity of ghost stories in film. At the same time, we can use the idea of ghosts, or of what ghosts represent, to tell a wide range of ghost stories."
