Hollywood’s Best ‘I See Dead People’ Movies
In Clint Eastwood’s "Hereafter," Matt Damon plays a psychic who communicates with ghosts, continuing the trend of sensitive treatment of spectral beings. Things were better in the days when Hollywood made really scary movies about those who came back from the grave.
imdb.com (left); youtube.com
Spiritual actors: The Sixth Sense (with Haley Joel Osment) and Hereafter (with Matt Damon).
If you’re a lover of horror movies, like me, then Aug. 6 should be a day of mourning for you. It was that Friday in 1999 when The Sixth Sense was released. And, thanks to the $293,506,292 it grossed in the next few months, ghost movies were never the same. Before Sixth Sense, people ran from ghosts, rather than try to strike up a conversation with them. After that huge hit, ghosts were treated sensitively—they needed mediums (as on Medium, or even The Ghost Whisperer) to bring them peace and gently shuffle them off to the afterlife. What a complete waste of an apparition. You know what? If I wanted peace and understanding, I’d watch a different kind of movie—like a biopic or Eat Pray Love. And now, with Hereafter starring Matt Damon as a psychic cursed by images of what happens after we die—and the movie’s many rapturous reviews—ghosts will never be able to lay a spectral hand on us again. What a terrible shame. Meanwhile, here are my choices for the best “I see dead people” movies.
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