Mike Flanagan really gave it all to us in The Haunting anthology. What is a haunting? Are we haunted by things we hate or things we love? What is a ghost? It is love persevering? Is it guilt persevering? Sometimes it’s irrevocable loss, grief for the things you never did or for the things you did do. Sometimes it’s one last return of those you didn’t get enough time with, so you can have a last farewell. What is possession? Is it desire? Is it selfishness? How can you hold someone close to you without destroying yourself or that someone? How can you hold the memory of someone close to you without destroying yourself or that someone? By staying with them. By letting them go. By forgiving them. By forgiving yourself. Can those who were hurt ever recover? Yes. No. Can those who hurt others ever be redeemed? Yes. No. Whose fault is it? Nobody’s? Everybodys? Where does your past end and where do your choices begin? How do you avoid a ghost without also avoiding everyone, including yourself? The solution to most things is love, the opposite of posession. And absolution is forgiveness, warm like a tear on a cheek. Everything, everyone, is fleeting so savour it. It’s all confetti. Find your family and hold them for as long as you are able. Because no matter the ghosts and the lingering pain, if we loved each other a little more and forgave a little more we could be okay in the future. Nothing will ever be perfect, horror acknowledges that. But we get kindness, we get peace. We rest in peace. Dead but not gone. Our loved ones keep us closer to their heart than we think. And we are not forgotten, gone, so long as we are loved. His work (especially the end scene with Flora and Jamie) reminds me of these words on the nature of time love and death by Joanna Newsom:
“When cruel death debases, we believe it erases all the rest that precedes. But stand brave life liver, bleeding out your days in the river of time. Stand brave: time moves both ways. In the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating joy of life. The moment of your greatest joy sustains: not axe nor hammer, tumor, tremor can take it away, and it remains. It remains. And it pains me to say, I was wrong. Love is not a symptom of time. Time is just a symptom of love.”
Do we find love because of time spent with someone, something? Is time such a greater power than love that it shapes it? But then where do ghosts, where does a haunting come from? How does love persevere long after your time with someone is ended, their time is ended? Isn’t it then that we perceive time and space, they are occupied, because there is love to fill them? Love colours and saturates life and is the greater power. Love damns. Love exhalts. Love is the haunting and the exorcism.
