“I wanted to engage with the archetypes and iconography of ghost films and haunted house movies, without ever crossing over into actually being a horror film,” says writer-director David Lowery, who made A Ghost Story with the proceeds of his previous movie, a remake of Disney’s Pete’s Dragon. “Look at any horror film and you can trace it back to a particular social or personal anxiety, and this film is no different in that regard: I was having a big-picture existential crisis about my place in the universe, and at the same time I was having a very personal conflict with my wife about where we were going to move to. And wrapped up in all of that was my longstanding desire to make a movie with a guy in a sheet.”
Finally got around to watching this. Was worth it.
“There are few more frightening monsters to conjure than racism, after all. It’s a topic the genre has brushed up against—with the black protagonist of Night of the Living Dead, a rare sight in 1968, or in Bernard Rose’s 1992 classic Candyman, in which the titular figure in part represented America’s history of slavery and repression. But racism is still a surprisingly uncommon subject matter, and Peele addresses a more insidious fear—of the fallacy of America being a post-racial society, and of the nightmares one can imagine under that benign surface.” [Via]
“I wanted to engage with the archetypes and iconography of ghost films and haunted house movies, without ever crossing over into actually being a horror film,” says writer-director David Lowery, who made A Ghost Story with the proceeds of his previous movie, a remake of Disney’s Pete’s Dragon. “Look at any horror film and you can trace it back to a particular social or personal anxiety, and this film is no different in that regard: I was having a big-picture existential crisis about my place in the universe, and at the same time I was having a very personal conflict with my wife about where we were going to move to. And wrapped up in all of that was my longstanding desire to make a movie with a guy in a sheet.”