ABSTRACT
Anti-Spiritualist forces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were quick to embrace cinema, with the notion that showing audiences avowedly fake ghosts would make them more sceptical about presentations of putatively real ones. Mirrors play roles in a shocking volume of ghost films. In Motion Picture Education, Ernest Alfred Dench offers a story of another attempt to depict ghosts on screen. Cinema has occasionally been claimed to document “real” spectres. Even anti-Spiritualist films attest to the fascination of the cinematic supernatural. Certain ghost films play on the fantasy of mediated ghost-seeing and the paradox of cinema’s paradoxical relationship to presence. While the Fantastic is a literary mode, various scholars have explored how it can be adapted to film form. Naturalistic and supernatural explanations are both possible in principle for the duration of the Fantastic, which either endures through the totality of a work or eventually moves into the Uncanny or Strange mode or the Marvellous mode.
