Love and death

A GHOST WAITS I Get ready to enter the haunted-house movie with soul…

There’s this webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, that had a man and woman talking about what is the most American movie,” grins writer/director Adam Stovall. “She says, ‘Ghostbusters – here’s a movie where you have demonstrable proof of an afterlife and the whole thing is about growing a small business and navigating government bureaucracy.’ I thought, ‘That’s hilarious. I want to see that movie.’”

So, it turns out, will you, for Stovall’s black-and-white debut, made in 12 days for $45,000, makes up for its miniscule budget with big ideas. Set in a suburban rental home, it sees handyman Jack (MacLeod Andrews) carrying out minor repairs after the previous tenants left in a hurry. Jack sleeps where he works – he’s currently homeless, and his ‘friends’ aren’t returning his calls

– so he’s not about to leave when things start to go bump in the night.

But after a pleasingly creepy first act, A Ghost Waits rebuilds the hauntedhouse movie from the ground up, playfully stripping the sub-genre to its foundations and then refurnishing the space with tropes of the romantic comedy and with psychological and philosophical preoccupations. There are elements of The Ghost And Mrs.

Muir, Beetlejuice and David Lowery’s

A Ghost Story, and yet this is a fresh, personal movie that’s eerie, funny and profoundly moving.

“It’s a cliché answer to say, ‘Life is these things,’ but life is these things,” says Stovall, who hails from the northern Kentucky part of Cincinnati. “You have a day when you wake up and something’s funny, and then you find out that you lost your job, but then somebody buys you a drink… And the reason it works in life is because it’s always you: stuff happens, but you are consistent. So if you’re going to go through these tonal fluctuations, your characters have to be consistent. Jack’s a funny guy, but he’s also a sad guy, and soulful.”

When A Ghost Waits premiered at FrightFest in Glasgow before the pandemic, the theatre was chocka – a film about an invisible guy encountering a ghost made many feel seen as it grappled with existential despair.

“As somebody who struggles with suicidal ideation, I wanted to basically make a hug for people like me,” says Stovall. “So yeah, I’ve struggled with depression my whole life. The movies that try to talk about depression often default to manic depression and bipolar disorder because they’re the most dramatic. Depression, as I experience it, is not dramatic. It’s just this throbbing sense that I don’t deserve existence. I’ve never seen that dealt with. And I thought, ‘That’s the thing I can say. I can’t be the only person.’”

A Ghost Waits – be sure to let it in. JG

ETA | 5 FEBRUARY / A GHOST WAITS IS AVAILABLE ON THE ARROW VIDEO CHANNEL. IT WILL RELEASE ON BD AND DIGITAL HD IN MAY.