A number of ghosts in the films thus far have been children, especially children who have been murdered. But in some of these films, the child was also subjected to physical abuse before the murder: Joseph in THE CHANGELING, KYRA in THE SIXTH SENSE and Mary in Riget (1994) (discussed later). RINGU offers an extreme example: Sadako remained trapped in the well for thirty years before dying. The notion that childhood abuse could influence a ghost's agenda is crucial to the three films in this chapter.

In Dreams (Neil Jordan, US, 1998) and The Dark (John Fawcett, UK/Germany, 2005)

Both Bari Wood's Doll's Eyes, from which Neil Jordan and Bruce Robinson adapted In Dreams, and Simon Maginn's Sheep, from which Stephen Massicotte adapted THE DARK, were published in 1994. Respectively a serial-killer story and a horror story, both novels are highly effective psychological thrillers, but they bear only a minimal relationship to the films. In that it has a psychic heroine who becomes aware of the actions of a serial killer, IN DREAMS takes part of its narrative from Doll's Eyes, but in the novel the heroine is childless and the killer murders women, not children. In addition, he has no supernatural powers. Sheep and THE DARK are even more dissimilar: the novel has the same Welsh farmhouse setting, but the horror is located at the heart of the family that moves to live there. The supernatural/ ghost elements that have led me to these two films play no part in the source novels. However, I will return to the novels at the end of this section, and look at the implications of the ways in which they have been transformed.

My contention that IN DREAMS may be seen as a seminal ghost film requires explanation. Although the film ends with the heroine becoming a ghost, there have been no ghosts up to this point. ‘Supernatural horror’ and ‘serial-killer movie’ are the terms typically used to categorise the film. Nevertheless, although IN DREAMS is not in itself a ghost movie, it has the structure and themes of one, and this was confirmed when THE DARK was released. THE DARK is a ghost melodrama, but it was as if it had followed the template of IN DREAMS. The films are strikingly similar. About twenty minutes into each, a girl is killed, and the rest of the narrative focuses primarily on her mother's increasingly overwrought reaction.