Between this and
The Fog, I need John Houseman to just sit around and tell me Ghost Stories every night in October.
Based on a contemporary novel by Peter Straub, Ghost Story is the tale of The Chowder Society, four small-town-well-to-do old men who gather each week to eat and drink and tell ghost stories... but this time, they are in one themselves. In New York, a young man has thrown himself out of his high-rise window to his death and his twin brother returns to the town of Milburn, home of The Chowder Society, for the funeral. Because the twin brothers are the sons of one of those four men. And the surviving one has a ghost story of his own to tell them, one in which his brother's death was not suicide but ghostly murder, and one that has now come to Milburn to reach its vengeful conclusion.
So, I don’t care what anybody says about Ghost Story, I like it. I know it didn’t make a lotta money and it didn’t get a lot of acclaim, and honestly, it's no great shake and a bit too long, but it’s a real ghost story, like The Fog. And I like ghost stories and I like The Fog and I like this one. It has ghostly charms. A tale of love and jealousy gone wrong and an unjust death covered up and turned into murder. And therefore the tale of a vengeful ghost back to right old wrongs or at least even the score. It has a proper haunted house...
... (just look at that beauty!) and a more than proper ghost. A ghost with a great backstory and a mean streak that in both human and ghoulish forms, is aces.
I show that without fear of spoilers because that is from the first 15 minutes or so of the movie. The pacing here is interesting where they start slow, give you a shock, tell you some story for a while, give you another shock, tell you some more story, etc. I will admit that the movie drags a bit in the late-middle of the film when the old men finally tell their story. The son’s tale had, earlier, gone on just long enough that you needed the movie to pick up the pace, which it does, but then it slows down to a bit of a drag when they get into theirs. Although it's a story which becomes increasingly cringey and awful, in a way that the movie is aware of, and then just as bad as it can be. Like how could something so seemingly innocent have ended so ******* badly? Badly enough to bring that ghost back for revenge on all of them. (I don't want to go on too long but there is really some great meta-commentary here about what men think women promise them by their behavior and whatnot.)
There is also a side-plot about a squatter who may or may not be involved somehow that detracts from the narrative in that it either needed to be explained more or excised completely and, with respect to Peter Straub, I expect that for a
movie, it should have been the latter. I did really like this, again, but lord, I do wish it was about 5-10 minutes shorter.
That said, I think
Ghost Story makes a fine October viewing in a quainter spot on your calendar. Don't expect to be terrified, don't expect to be dazzled, just expect a long, slow ghost story that's worth hearing.