Many Varieties of ghosts !
Horror is my favorite genre. I hate psychological horror. It is very stressful for me to read. I love pure horror. They help me sometimes to escape the real life horror.
Lets talk about ghosts today.
When I was a kid the only picture of ghost that I could imagine was the one which was always white in color . Though it looked like Casper , it never had any facial features.
Then later as I started watching Tamil movies, I noticed that the ghosts almost always had a certain dress code. They would always wear a flowing super white saree with long dark hair which is always left open even in hot humid weather and they would always wear jasmine flowers.
Oh! And it was always a woman. Yeah!
Slowly the ghosts started evolving. They became more colorful, more gore and more creative !!
In my opinion , we can divide ghosts into 3 major categories.
- The vengeful ghosts: These are the most exploited type of ghosts in movies. They would have been brutally killed by some villain and their gang. Then they become ghost , come back and seek revenge.
Now these type of ghosts will have a better success rate if they just come, do their revenge stuff , kill only the bad people and go back. But No! They always need a medium.And that medium would always be a very good, kind, honest person with a brother. This choice of “medium” make things very complicated. Since they use this “good” person as their vehicle, they see a lot of interruptions and road blocks from the brother and their work gets delayed. They are a bit boring.
- The Territorial ghosts : These are very simple ghosts. They may have some background story but they generally are introverts. They stay at their place minding their own business thinking of all the good and bad times. It is us who go and provoke them. They could be residing in an old bungalow or a tree or a toy or a door for centuries. One fine day, we just go there, claim their property as ours and get beaten up.
These ghosts actually give us a lot of warnings. Like they make some eerie sounds , throw some stuff here and there, some smart ones even go to the extent of writing on the walls
“ DANGER ! GO AWAY OR YOU ARE DEAD “ in blood!
But do we ever listen ! We human beings being human continue to stay there and disrupt their lifestyle. And end up getting beaten black and blue.
We should learn to leave them alone in their territory. We do this to ghosts, to tigers , to elephants and all other wild animals. And when they come back to claim their home , we cry and play a victim ! How is it fair!
3. The No-Life-No-Purpose ghosts: These are kind of my favorite type. They have no goals. They just get stuck here for some reason. They simply play pranks. Have a “hearty” laugh. No destruction.
All they want in “life” is some fun. There is a sub category in this. These are the good ghosts. I have heard some stories of this kind. There is one ghost which helps vehicles to cross a very busy train track , like if there is some train coming, it would just stop the car it seems . How thoughtful!
We need more movies/books with such ghosts. These are very rare and people should know that good ghosts exist too.
There was one movie though where a ghost would help our “hero” to get out of his alcohol addiction. Every time he tries to drink alcohol, it would hide the bottle opener. Smarty! It also saves the hero’s mom from burglars. Such a nice ghost and a nice movie too.
We need more such ghosts. Like it will be nice to have some programmer ghosts . They could just disable the commit button when they sense that we are about to introduce a huge production bug, disrupting almost the entire air traffic. Where are all the programmer ghosts ?
Where are all the good fun loving ghosts? The world needs them!