For our main October podcast episode, we focused on films featuring ghosts that, contrary to tradition, aren’t supposed to be scary – except, perhaps, to the kind of side characters you get in 1930s screwball comedies or to estate agents worried they’ll never manage to get rid of that haunted seaside cottage. But where does that leave us for Halloween, without a single genuine scare to curdle our blood? Thus, Sam and Matt get together for this month’s espresso podcast to remedy this and talk about two movies about ghostly goings-on that are clearly designed to frighten their viewers. First of these is The Changeling (1980), directed by Peter Medak, in which George C. Scott faces up against a haunted mansion and the kind of crime that tends to raise the spirits of the dead to bring about justice, or, barring that, vengeance. How well do its very traditional scares hold up almost 50 years later? Then, changing both century and continent, Sam and Matt talk about Pulse (2001, also known as Kairo) by expert frightener Kiyoshi Kurosawa, in which the dead begin to spill out into our world through the conduit of a still relatively new technology: the internet. Is this the kind of ghostly horror to dedicate your bandwidth to this Halloween? And, in general, what makes for an effective ghost story, and what tends to dampen the spirits in more ways than one?
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