Director's Statement

Growing up in a small town, there was no shortage of urban legends and tales of things that go bump in the night. Naturally we had the old, abandoned house at the end of the street that (according to us) harboured a tragic secret. At school there were whispered accounts of people who had vanished into thin air, and stories of haunted classrooms where vengeful spirits preyed on misbehaving children. It made life interesting, to say the least, and allowed my imagination to run wild in a place that was otherwise stifling and uneventful.

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When I look back at my time spent there, I’m struck by how empty everything felt. My memory has even embellished a few lonely tumbleweeds blowing across desolate streets. But of course there weren’t any tumbleweeds, that’s only my recollection: The way it felt as opposed to the way it really was.

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With this film I wanted to capture the boredom that adolescents experience when stuck in an environment of this kind - the feeling that nothing ever happens here, or the way a small town can feel like a kind of limbo that one feels perpetually trapped in. I wanted to examine our need to invent stories as a way to make life more interesting, but more importantly how these made-up stories can be used to make sense of things we don’t understand, like life or death, or even (gasp) adulthood.

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Being frightened can sometimes be exhilarating, we like the novelty of something that departs from our everyday experience, and some of the attraction to being afraid comes from experiencing things outside of our comfort zone. The transition into adulthood is an interesting phase of life in which people are figuring out who they are by trying to test themselves, to see what scares them.

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My goal was to write a ghost story about growing up, where the paranormal acts as a metaphor for coming-of-age. The haunted house at the end of the street represents “the great unknown” and the fear we experience when we blindly venture into it. Of course, the ghost is only a red herring. At its core, the story is about a friendship between two girls, of being uncertain about the future and not quite being ready to fulfil the role of “adult” yet. It’s about finding reassurance in the fact that that not having the answers to life’s big questions is okay. At the end of the day it’s not about finding concrete answers that satisfy, but rather about experiencing something as a result of seeking those answers, and discovering meaning, mystery and magic in the mundane.

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In a way, the characters in this film are like ghosts themselves, both are in the midst of a transition, stuck in a place where they don’t feel like they belong and caught between two worlds: the one of childhood and the one of adulthood. Much like adolescents, ghosts are the ultimate outsiders, unable to fully partake in life in a way that feels truly meaningful yet.

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I’ve often contemplated the fascination some of us have with the paranormal, and I’ve been accused of being morbid on several occasions. But I think this fascination stems from our desire to make sense of things that we don’t understand (after all, many life lessons lurk in ghost and monster tales). But isn’t believing in ghosts its own kind of strange optimism? The belief that there’s something more out there, that we don’t simply cease to exist once we’re gone, and that life will always be interesting because we don’t have all the answers. There’s something hopeful about that, and it sure beats the alternative.