Gerald’s Game and the Shackles of The Past: Chainsawnukah 2019

Gerald’s Game (2017) and the Shackles of The Past

Dir. Mike Flanagan

Written by Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard, based on the 1992 novel by Stephen King

Starring Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Carel Struycken, Henry Thomas, Chiara Aurelia

GERALD’S GAME may well boast the simplest premise of Stephen King’s entire career (and that’s saying a lot for a guy who once made a movie about killer big rig trucks*). Basically, the entire thing can be summarized in a single sentence: A woman named Jessie (Carla Gugino, SPY KIDS) finds her sanity unravelling after her husband Gerald’s (Bruce Greenwood, DISTURBING BEHAVIOR) sudden death during a sex game that leaves her handcuffed to the bed in an isolated house with no means of escape. OK I guess that’s kind of a wordy, meandering sentence that would be better served as two shorter sentences, but I said it could be done and now I’ve done it. I’ve now described the entire movie. That’s it, that’s essentially all that happens. There are a few wrinkles, and a winding flashback subplot, but for most of the 103 minute runtime, the action stays in a single bedroom, with only two people. It’s not entirely uneventful, but it’s not really a film which is motivated by events, either. It’s a film entirely about the mind of the protagonist, as she gradually drifts from shock to horror to despair to something more complicated, as she begins to consider the life that brought her to this sorry state of affairs.

It is, then, a simple premise which results in anything but a simple movie. Obviously, the hook here is the squirm-inducing basic conceit of being trapped in a vulnerable position with a dead body. That was how the book was described to me by some asshole kid on the bus when I was in middle school, and that premise alone was enough to remain vivid in my mind all these years later. In fact, I went into this assuming that was all there was to it, and consequently assumed it was based on a King short story. But no, it was a full 332-page novel; not an especially lengthy one, by Stephen King standards, but rich with psychological possibility, and, especially, rich with potential for King to impart his particular array of artistic idiosyncrasies upon it.

Indeed, it has to be about as distinctively and recognizably Stephen King as you can get. No other writer would ever have written this story this way (if they wrote this story at all!), and although I’ve only read a tiny percentage of King’s vast output, it feels to me like this is surely one of the most densely distilled versions of his particular artistic ethos. I’ve often quoted his line from Danse Macabre on this site: “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out.” His phrasing suggests those goals are mutually exclusive, but here, rather handily, they’re actually interwoven with surprising effectiveness. In fact, it almost seems like he worked backwards with the intent of building each layer in: the scenario itself is so inherently lurid and nauseating that “the gross-out” is never far from the surface, but on top of that, he adds two sharp jabs of quintessentially Stephen King “horror”: a very bad dog who wanders in and starts eating Gerald’s corpse (they even refer to him as “Cujo,” so no points if you were thinking the same thing) and a mysterious ghoul who may or may not be imaginary (muthafuckin’ Carel Struycken, aka “hey, it’s the Giant from Twin Peaks!” wearing prosthetics to amplify his already unusual frame) who –this being Stephen King— of course comes with his own goofy nickname (“The Moonlight Man”**), distinct MO (he collects bones and trinkets from his victims, which he carries in a tackle bag) and vaguely mythological backstory (he may be the physical personification of death, checking in to see if Jessie is ready to give up yet).

That handily takes care of the “gross-out” and “horror” camps, but the movie’s real heart lies with King’s highest category –he calls it “terror,” though I think “horror” would be a better word choice—something more ineffable, something that haunts, formless and therefore all-consuming. In this case, something which has been with Jessie, haunting her, since she was a child. A memory which she has, if not repressed, at least actively avoided confronting. I guess it’s maybe a kind of SPOILER to tell you what it is, but aw hell, you’ve already guessed it, or at least you will when the movie flashes back to an idyllic day with a 12-year-old Jessie (Chiara Aurelia, BIG SKY, BACK ROADS) and her father (Henry Thomas, LEGENDS OF THE FALL, DEAD BIRDS), alone in an isolated lakeside house very much like the one she’s now trapped in. And just in case you otherwise couldn’t relate to having your childhood tainted due to an unforgivable betrayal by someone you trusted, please note that the creepy dad is played by Henry Thomas – that’s right, Elliot from E.T.

 So yeah, I’m afraid there’s no way around it, this charming little slice of imaginative situational sadism is also saddled with some pretty heavy shit. I’ve never read the book, so I can’t speak to the sensitivity with which 1992 Stephen King treated this difficult subject, but the film’s screenplay, by Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard, does an almost unbelievably graceful job of threading this potentially ruinous material into the pulpy whole. And they do this in a way which is superficially simple, but devilishly tricky to pull off: they simply take the character and her emotions seriously. Despite the luridness of the scenario, the film’s focus says firmly on Jessie’s inner life, and trusts that this close psychological examination under high stress is in itself a sufficient raison d'être for a horror movie.

Caring that much about character psychology is an unusual trait for a horror director –maybe even a genre director in general, since genre films tend to be motivated by incident rather than character. But it’s a trait that Flanagan has demonstrated since his first film, the terrific ABSENTIA, and it’s one he shares with King, who must surely be the most sentimental and soft-hearted horror author of all time. Flanagan –following King’s lead, I imagine, as the synopses of the two GERALD’S GAMEs look virtually identical—is able to handle the weight of Jessie’s backstory because his movie doesn’t just view her as a piece of meat to be tormented for our genre amusement, but as a distinct and complicated character, full of contradictions and surprises. Her trauma could easily be a mechanically expository plot point, but the movie pushes beyond simply asserting that she’s intrinsically fucked-up because she was abused, probing, in its most emotionally harrowing scene, specifically what was so insidious and disempowering about what happened to her. This helps us to not only understand the source of her pain, but also the complex system of coping mechanisms she has created to combat the pain. It shows us both wound and –maybe even more importantly-- scar tissue. Her childhood abuse is part of her, but it’s not all of her. It is not, as movie flashbacks so frequently are, a pat, simplistic missing puzzle piece that explains all her subsequent behavior. But once we understand it –and once she begins to confront it for the first time in her adult life—we can also see how it has lingered in the background, a huge unseen black hole quietly warping the orbit of her life in ways not always immediately obvious.

It certainly has something to do with her anxiety over Gerald’s S&M game, with its uncomfortably skewed power dynamic… but did it also have something to do with why she married Gerald in the first place? Did she subconsciously marry another man who would selfishly hurt her for his own sexual gratification, because her father so thoroughly twisted her idea of relationships in general? Or is that just reading trauma into something more mundane, projecting false meaning on a perfectly common dysfunctional relationship with poor sexual communication? And for that matter, who was the now-deceased Gerald, anyway? How well does anyone really know their partner? Was the S&M game a rare glimpse of Gerald’s monstrous true self, or was it just a normal bit of kink that he thought might add spice to their very normal lackluster sex life?

The fact that the movie is willing to let the character ask these questions, and treat them every bit as seriously as it treats its more genre-friendly ghoul, is at the heart of its strength. And the fact that it isn’t willing to produce pat, neatly-resolved answers gives the actors a real chance to shine. And it is actors, plural, because Gerald quickly shows up again after his death, not as a ghost, but as an avatar for Jessie’s inner doubts and anxieties, goading her to give up, and engaged in a constant debate with a stronger, more confident side of herself (portrayed by Gugino) who urges her to find a strength and canniness she also knows, on some level, that she’s capable of. Greenwood and Gugino, then, are both playing aspects of the captive Jessie’s psyche, with the poor woman on the bed torn between them. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Limiting the conversation to only these two actors keeps the feeling deeply intimate (King’s novel has Jessie keeping court with a larger group of other characters who never appear in the film), and both do splendid work. Greenwood (who looks fucking great at 61, by the way, and spends virtually the entire film in his underwear***) makes a very tricky performance --portraying a character who could be read a number of different ways, and then a slippery, shifting memory of that character, and also even sometimes a straight-up projection of a different character-- look easy and intuitive, offering an abundance of, wonderful subtle character work for the audience to chew on. But as good as he is, it’s Gugino’s movie, and she is hardly short of spectacular as the movie’s narrative and emotional anchor. She crafts a character who is genuinely complicated, capable of many contradictions: both fragile and resilient, canny and obtuse, disturbed and rational. She’s likeable enough to comfortably command our sympathy, but also not afraid to occasionally come across as a little prickly and abrasive, never allowing her complicating victimhood to transform into dull sainthood. It’s a performance which paints a deeply specific character, and, impressively, it’s matched by an equally vivid physical performance, which does a magnificent job of letting us feel the mounting discomfort of being confined in such a position as the hours stretch into days.

Flanagan, for his part, frames the film entirely from Jessie’s perspective, literalizing her mental projections because that’s simply how she’s perceiving things (Greenwood and Gugino don’t appear as blue ghosts or anything, though the editing engages in some thrilling continuity-breaking to illustrate their inherent subjectivity). Meanwhile, the traumatic flashbacks (our only escape from the bedroom) have a vivid, slightly unreal quality which blooms into full surreality during the worst moments of abuse, and follows her back to the present in the personification of “The Moonlight Man,” whose eyes mimic the blood-red eclipse she associates with that abuse. Like most of Flanagan’s films, it’s handsomely constructed in a mostly unshowy way, with clean, crisp photography (maybe a little too clean and crisp; it sometimes has an unpleasant digital sheen that makes one long for the days of genuine film stock) and bedrock-solid staging and editing which expertly lays out the precise geography of the bedroom-prison where every minute detail may offer some new challenge or aid.  

The result of the excellent acting and fine filmmaking is a 103-minute essentially single-location psychological study that just flies by, packing in terror, horror, gross-out, and a bruising human sympathy, and doing it so neatly and pervasively that it frankly left me exhausted, albeit in the most wonderfully satisfying cinematic way. I’m pleased to see, too, that this appears to be the general consensus, which is never a sure thing for a somewhat unusual film like this. The ending seems to be a little more divisive, and that’s understandable; apparently faithful to the book, the film concludes with a surprisingly lengthy epilogue which chronicles the aftermath of these events. This strikes me as characteristic of King again; he can end up loving his characters so much that he can’t part with them until he’s resolved all their concerns, even at the cost of efficient storytelling. Still, this is a rare case where we’ve been so intimate with the protagonist, and she’s suffered so much, that a victory lap feels earned and meaningful, if not strictly necessary. Besides, it’s worth suffering through for the final shot, where a tangent that seemed rather clumsily on-the-nose and unnecessary suddenly takes an odd dreamlike bent, running into the credits with a sort of triumphant mysteriousness that feels very appropriate for this material. Like the movie, it’s a strange, maybe even unique, note… but a satisfying and resonant one.

END OF PART I. Keep scrolling past the checklist for the thrilling second half!

*Quipped one local card, “Cocaine had long been Stephen King’s co-writer, and MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE was its attempt at a solo career.”

** In the novel, the even goofier “Space Cowboy.” Guess the filmmakers figured movie audiences aren’t that familiar with Steve Miller Band? Or possibly they just decided that “Space Cowboy” is a little much, even for Stephen King.

*** Ladies, never say ol’ Mike Flanagan never did nothin’ for ya.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	Some Games You Play. Some You Survive.
TITLE ACCURACY	Accurate.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from the 1993 novel by Stephen King
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Survival horror? Psychological horror?
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, but it’s nice they could get Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood for this.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stephen King, and I’m about ready to anoint Mike Flanagan as well
NUDITY?	No actual nudity, but a lot of underwear.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yup
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Yes
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Oh yeah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Don’t marry anyone named “Gerald,” for God’s sake.

******************************

If the ending of GERALD'S GAME feels arguably overfaithful to the book, perhaps to its detriment, it's appropriate for the movie to be somewhat constrained by its source material, because of course that’s exactly the subject of the movie: the way that the past informs and, to a certain degree, controls the present. GERALD’S GAME is, if nothing else, a surprisingly in-depth and nuanced examination of that rather disquieting fact, allowing its protagonist to both face the pernicious –yet obscure—influence of past trauma manifesting in the present, and to question the degree of that influence. I think you could legitimately read Jessie’s ultimate understanding of her life as either a chronicle of inevitability (ie, she wound up handcuffed to this bed as the direct and inevitable result of events set in motion in her childhood) or as a repudiation of this kind of simplistic fatalism (ie, it’s her anxiety and self-doubt, not her rationality, which links two mostly-unrelated events into a false narrative of eternal victimhood), whichever interpretation you were most philosophically inclined towards (for the record, the movie seems to posit something closer to a middle ground).

I’ve always been fascinated by the delicate dance between past and present – you’ll notice my posts, especially about older movies, often devolve into history lessons—but it never really occurred to me until I watched GERALD’S GAME and IT: CHAPTER 2 back-to-back how intrinsically relevant to the horror genre this relationship is. Which in turn made me think OH SHIT MUTHAFUCKA IT’S OCTOBER AND THAT MEANS IT’S GODDAM CHAINSAWNUKAH SEASON AGAIN and as per usual, I like to take the opening shot as an opportunity to ruminate a bit on one specific aspect of the horror genre. Previously, we’ve looked at the psychological necessity of horror, and the role of transformation, voyeurism, repression, childhood, and paranoia. Now, though, we must confront the past.

And that word “confront” seems especially apt here, because the more I think about it, the more I see horror as a perfect means to examine our fraught relationship with the past. At the most basic level, a huge percentage of horror, maybe even the majority, is about literally doing just that: modern humans in the present coming into violent conflict with the angry echos of their forebearers, in the form of ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, and more or less any “undead” antagonist you can dream up.

The idea of our ancestors as active, influential parts of daily life appears to be about as ancient as any single element of human culture except perhaps veneration of fertility. Ancestor veneration, with the specific goal of producing positive intervention from the dead on behalf of the living, has roots in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania that go back at least to the stone age (the Ancient Egyptians notably practiced it, and evidence of the practice in China dates back to at least 6000 BCE). Of course, if forebearers can intercede in our lives to our advantage if properly appeased, it stands to reason they could also act more malignly if they so chose. This does not mean, however, that all spirits of the undead are intrinsically or symbolically linked to the past; although traditions of ancestor-worship revolve around the dead, they don’t necessarily revolve around the past per se; if anything, ancestor veneration has more to do with calling on supernatural personalities to help shape the present, virtually indistinguishable from any kind of supernatural prayer belief. Likewise, many ghosts in folklore have motives and desires not necessarily linked to their past lives, and might appear to have more in common with other supernatural figures than with undead human intelligence.*

Nevertheless, at least in modern times, ghost stories tend to be intrinsically linked to history. The Headless Horseman in Washington Irving’s 1820 The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, for example, is portrayed as the ghost of a human tied inexorably to the circumstances of his death, forever seeking his lost head and consequently unable to “pass on.” Charles Dickens’ 1843 A Christmas Carol, as well as his 1865 A Trial For Murder and several other stories, also prominently feature ghosts who are trapped by the circumstances of their life or death, and intervene in human affairs in order to address some injustice related to their lives.** And those are just three examples plucked from the beginning of the late modern period. Today, we almost take for granted that modern ghost stories are, essentially, mysteries; the troublesome spirit had “unfinished business” on Earth that the human protagonist must uncover and resolve before the ghost can “pass on.” THE UNINVITED, THE CHANGELING, THE LADY IN WHITE, GHOST, THE SIXTH SENSE, THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE, THE RING, the recent WINCHESTER, even fucking CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST, are just a handful of textbook-perfect examples of this trope that immediately spring to mind.

The language we use here is very telling of how deeply rooted in metaphor this is; after all, what living person doesn’t harbor some psychological trauma: regrets about things done or left undone, the unhealed scars of emotional pain, nostalgic ache for comforts left behind. “Unfinished business” trapped in the amber of the past, just as thoroughly outside our ability to change as it would be for the dead. Just like the dead, we have moved on to another place, beyond the original setting of our pain, and yet we are unable to let go, to “pass on” into the future. We remain trapped in the past, desperate for some way out of the cycle of our pain, guilt, and regret.

Ghost stories are the most symbolically telling horror trope which explores the subtle (or sometimes not-so-subtle) threads of the past which remain tied to the present, but they are hardly the only one. We see more direct psychological portraits too, most obviously in slasher movies, which often explicitly root their antagonists’ behavior in past (often childhood) psychological trauma (often of a sexual nature). Look, for example, to any of the endless number of slasher films which eventually reveal that the killer’s psychosis is the result of watching his mom have sex with a sailor or something (most stereotypically, perhaps, in 1980’s MANIAC). The killer's particular murderous gimmick is often directly related to that original psychic trauma, essentially dooming them to perpetually re-enact the circumstances which have left them so broken, externalizing the way they are trapped by their past. We certainly see the seeds for this kind of "mad killer" sewn during the 1940’s and 50s, as Freudian ideas about the subconscious and emotional repression percolated through the culture; Hitchcock, with SPELLBOUND, MARNIE, and –especially—PSYCHO to his name is an inescapable touchstone here, though I would argue the disturbed protagonist from PEEPING TOM, sitting alone in the dark, endlessly re-watching the literal images of his traumatic childhood on film, makes for the most iconic model. Like the ghost of folklore and fiction, the titular Peeping Tom is no longer physically affected by his past, but he has not “passed on” from it, as the endlessly repeating film loops demonstrate.

And of course, slashers are hardly the only horror genre to find their protagonists doomed to relive past traumas; IT PART 2, THE BABADOOK, THE RITUAL, DREAM HOUSE, THE INVITATION, and about a million other horror movies all deal with protagonists who are equally scarred by the past, and who, even if they do not go on to become masked gimmick slashers, can find themselves trapped in cycles of horror. Their past continues to manifest itself, as in the intermittent visions of a previous traumatic episode that the protagonist of THE RITUAL envisions as he is subjected to an entirely unrelated stress, or in the full-scale fantasy world which the protagonist of DREAM HOUSE retreats to. These characters escaped from their trauma, only to find it somehow in front of them again, to be endlessly re-lived. This is even literalized in the slew of time-loop horror films which were, for some reason, fucking inescapable for the last fifteen years or so, including (SPOILERS for most of these films, since it’s usually a twist ending) DEAD END and MINE GAMES and THE REEDS and THE ABANDONED, TRIANGLE, LET’S BE EVIL, THE HOUSE AT THE END OF TIME, YELLOWBRICKROAD, TIME CRIMES, SALVAGE, DARK COUNTRY, THE DEVIL’S PASS, THE DIABOLICAL, BLOOD PUNCH, BASKIN, HAPPY DEATH DAY and arguably to a certain extent THE SHINING. There’s a queasy fatalism to these movies which rescinds even the faint bit of hope most horror characters –even the undead ones!—have at escaping their endless cycle of torment and “passing on.” In a time loop, you never had a chance, never had a choice; past and future are an unbroken circle that feed inevitably into one another.

Of course, there is also a strand of horror fiction wherein the focus on the past is less personal and more universal, or at least on a vast scale. Consider, for example, the Lovecraftian branch of horror, where danger bubbles up from the unimaginably distant past, and learning ancient truths which are best forgotten is liable to drive one mad (The Whisperer In Darkness, At The Mountains Of Madness, or see the "little people" stories of Arthur Machen which greatly influenced Lovecraft, for example The Shining Pyramid and The Novel Of The Black Seal). Even if we have forgotten the past, it has not forgotten us, and by the time it comes for us, learning the things we have forgotten will not necessarily save us. This too can be personal (NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, where the sins of the parents are personified and visited upon their children), or universal (one might read THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS or the recent US as metaphors for the cost of long-term bigotry, willfully forgotten but still seething under the surface, or look to almost any given Mummy film for a anxious sense of the inevitable penance that must come from centuries of colonial arrogance). Or, most potently and most elusively, see THESHINING, with it’s inscrutable implication that Jack has always been the caretaker of the Overlook hotel, itself a symbol of genocidal colonialist psychosis so blatant that we’re told it was built on an actual Indian Burial ground. There are, it seems, some things we are all guilty of, and however uncomfortable it might make us, however much we might want to forget, it was the past that gave birth to the present, and we will never be entirely free of it.

Still, even if the scars of the past persist, life does --usually-- manage to go on, unless you encounter masked gimmick slashers, mummies, dummies, mutants, vampires, sexy vampires, metaphorical vampires, space vampires, cyborg vampires, mutant vampires, daywalkers, nightwalkers, slow zombies, fast zombies, voodoo zombies, Rob Zombies, critters, ghoulies, CHUDS, Chuckys, Klaus Kinskis, extra-dimensional intelligences, Xtros, Bigfoots, or what have you. And that means that just like poor Jessie way back up there in what was once a review of GERALD’S GAME, all we can do is take stock of the past, own it, and try to work our way out of the mess we’ve made, into a better future. Lord knows, I’ve been trying to do that for a lot of years now. It’s a hard road, and even as we try to escape the past, it can be frightening to never really know what the future holds. But at least one thing is certain: it’s another year, and that means another CHAINSAWNUKAH! Join me, friends, as I plunge once again into the endless depths of B-or-lower-grade horror movies, and let us all welcome

CHAINSAWNUKAH VIII:

2019: FOR RICHER OR HORROR

* Belief in ghosts, though culturally ubiquitous, seems to have historically been more focused on the continued existence of consciousness than “unfinished business” from the past; ancestor veneration typically consists of offerings of material comfort to a spirit currently residing in another form of existence, rather than action specific to the life and actions of the departed. Consequently, the dead appear in, for example, The Odyssey, as residents of an underworld, sometimes visible or perceptible to living humans, but in general merely continuing a sentient existence in another world. They are not, generally, tethered to the living world by any particular element of their past lives, they simply continue on existing in another state, one which brings a new set of concerns that do not necessarily have anything to do with their history as flesh-and-blood beings. Long traditions of ghosts summoned by mediums, or as harbingers of prophetic wisdom, are similarly yoked to the future, rather than the past.

Still, the idea of a ghost with “unfinished business” is not of exclusively recent vintage. A striking early example in Western literature is the ghost of Hamlet’s father, whose purpose in appearing, unbidden, to his son, is more specific and rooted in the past: he wants Hamlet to address the injustice of his murder. Notably, while some scholars consider Hamlet’s father to be drawn from the template of a 12^th-century Jutish chieftain whose unjust death at the hands of his brother is chronicled in two medieval Danish histories, neither story mentions his return as a vengeful ghost, tying that particular element of folklore to a later period. In fact, a fairly lengthy online survey of medieval ghost stories and legends finds no shortage of subjects, but few which utilizes a ghost in the same way Hamlet does. Instead, ghosts are portrayed more in the manner we would associate with supernatural spirits; sentient creatures with their own supernatural motivations and desires relating to their current state of life, rather than their past, mortal existence (the exception, of course, is found in the large number of spirits who require religious absolution they did not receive in life, a slightly different though arguably linked phenomenon more rooted in contemporary religious belief in purgatory than the ghost’s specific sins). M.R. James, the great font of Victorian ghost stories, and himself a scholar of medieval spirit tales (he wrote a 1922 paper entitled 12 Medieval Ghost Stories, which drew from a series of 15^th-century accounts chronicled by an English monk) followed suit; the vast majority of his tales feature “ghosts” of a decidedly inhuman character, who, if they were ever “alive” in the traditional sense to begin with, have little interest in revisiting their Earthly existence.  

Consequently, I think it’s fair to say that while ghost tales have been part of human culture since time immemorial, the idea of the ghost with “unfinished business,” often of a revengeful nature, has become ubiquitous only in modern times.

** The ghost I refer to in A Christmas Carol is, of course, Scrooge’s former partner, Jacob Marley, who returns bearing heavy chains representing the weight of his sins in life. The other “ghosts” in the story, though, also have a curious relationship to time: though not human spirits, they represent and apparently embody time itself, as the past, present, and future. Ghosts as prophets of the future were, I think, a much more common trope in the past than they are now (see, for example, the doom prophesied by the grouchy ghost of Samuel in the Old Testament), but it is in a certain sense a logical extension of the basic metaphor that ghosts –representing our past— have a better vantage point to see the future than us simpletons trapped in the present.