How ghosts got on screen: from Pepper's ghost to found footage

In 1862, on a stage at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, a transparent figure stood among the actors and the actors walked through it. The figure was a reflection in a sheet of glass. That is the short answer to how ghosts got on screen: every era has built its apparitions out of its own recording technology. Angled glass, then a second exposure on a photographic plate, a splice in a strip of film, the static on a television, a videotape, a camcorder, a security camera, and now video that no camera ever recorded. When the medium changes, the ghost changes shape with it, and it tends to arrive through whatever the audience trusts most to show them what is real.

A sheet of glass, 1862

John Henry Pepper demonstrated the illusion at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1862. It was developed from a design by Henry Dircks, but it is Pepper’s name that stayed on it. The arrangement is simple. A large sheet of glass is set at an angle across the stage. Out of the audience’s sight, an actor stands under bright light, and the glass reflects him into the scene, pale and see-through, among the living actors.

Two habits of the screen ghost start here. The apparition is a real person standing somewhere else, made visible by light. And it is transparent, which is how audiences have expected a ghost to look ever since. The same principle is still at work in theme-park attractions and stage shows, a century and a half later.

The second face on the plate

At almost the same moment, in Boston in the early 1860s, William Mumler began making portraits with a pale second figure standing behind the sitter. This was spirit photography, and its method was double exposure: two images on one plate, one of them faint.

Mumler moved the ghost off the stage and into the record. A photograph was understood as something a machine made, without a painter’s hand, and that is where its authority came from. The ghost no longer needed a theater and a crowd. It needed a plate, a sitter, and a viewer willing to accept that the camera had seen something the sitter had not.

Between two frames: Méliès, 1896

Georges Méliès was a stage illusionist before he was a filmmaker, and his Le Manoir du diable (1896), about three minutes long, is often called the first horror film. Méliès used substitution splices: stop the camera, change what stands in front of it, start again. On the screen a figure appears or vanishes between one frame and the next. Multiple exposures laid one image over another, so a figure could be half there.

The ghost had found a new place to live. It was no longer behind the glass or on the plate. It was in the cut, in the gap between frames that the audience could not see.

Taking the haunting seriously: 1944 to 1963

For a long time a ghost in a Hollywood film was usually a joke, or a trick to be exposed before the last reel. The Uninvited (1944), directed by Lewis Allen, is usually cited as the first Hollywood film to treat a haunting as real.

Then two films went in the opposite direction from Méliès and almost stopped showing the ghost at all. The Innocents (1961, Jack Clayton), adapted from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and The Haunting (1963, Robert Wise), adapted from Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, do their work with sound, architecture and doubt. The technology here is the soundtrack and the set: a noise in a corridor at night, a door, a figure seen at a distance by one person and not by another.

Both films, like the books behind them, leave room for the possibility that the ghost is in the one who sees it. That ambiguity is the reason they are still watched in the dark. How the haunted-house film grew out of them is traced in the three kinds of ghost movie.

Static: Poltergeist, 1982

By the early 1980s the television was the brightest object in most living rooms. Poltergeist (1982), directed by Tobe Hooper and produced by Steven Spielberg, sends the ghost in through it. A small child sits in front of a set showing nothing but static after the broadcast day has ended, and talks to it.

The screen the family trusts to bring the world into the house brings something else instead. The ghost no longer has to be recorded to appear on a screen. It uses the screen as a door.

The tape: Ringu, 1998

Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) built its curse on a videotape. The tape is an object: it can sit on a shelf, be lent, be found in a rental cabin, be played in any room that has a player. And Sadako climbs out of the television.

That image put the ghost inside a format. The haunting was no longer tied to a house. It traveled wherever the cassette did, which is how the late-twentieth-century audience already understood images to travel.

From the other side: 1999 and 2001

The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shyamalan) and The Others (2001, Alejandro Amenábar) are the turn-of-the-century ghost stories told from the wrong side. What that means is best found out in the dark, and neither is explained here. What they share with Pepper’s glass is a question about where the audience is standing when it looks.

The camcorder and the tripod: 1999 and 2007

The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez) was not the first film to present itself as recovered footage, but it made found footage a genre. Its actors carried the cameras. The picture shakes, loses focus and runs in the dark, and those faults became the proof: nobody composing a shot would frame it this badly.

Paranormal Activity (2007, Oren Peli) took the same idea indoors and held the camera still. A fixed camera in a suburban bedroom, a time code running in the corner, a couple asleep, and a doorway at the edge of the frame. Nothing about the picture is dramatic, and that is the point. The camera records all night whether anyone watches or not.

After that, the tripod in the bedroom and the security camera in the hallway became the ghost story’s most trusted witnesses, on screen and off. The clips people post from their own cameras borrow that grammar, and the ones that claim to show a real haunting are examined frame by frame in the footage section. The cases behind the films that say they are true are in ghost movies based on true stories.

Video no camera recorded

Now text-to-video models such as Sora, Veo, Kling and Runway make clips that no camera recorded. A figure in a hallway, a door moving on its own, night-vision grain and a time code in the corner: the whole grammar of the found-footage haunting can be produced from a sentence of text.

Every ghost before this one had something physical behind it. An actor under a lamp, a sitter in a chair, a splice in a strip of celluloid, a family with a camera on the dresser. The rest of the films section follows those physical things back to the rooms and people they came from, and the hauntings section goes to the houses themselves.

Pepper’s audience could, in principle, have walked backstage and found the actor standing under the light. There is no backstage to a generated clip. There are only the frames.