Labyrinthian Queer Horror: on the anniversary of I AM A GHOST
By S.L Void / Bornfilmbear
I Am a Ghost opens up with the start of the poem “One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted” by Emily Dickinson, utilizing a device that is near and dear to my heart, where the filmmaker tells us what the story is about before we’ve seen it at all. Even though this opening tells us so much of where the film is headed, the quote shown to us only tells the tale of what is on the very surface. H.P only includes the very beginning of the poem, but later on in the same work Dickinson writes:
“Ourself—behind Ourself—Concealed—
Should startle—most—
Assassin—hid in Our Apartment—
Be Horror’s least—
The Prudent—carries a Revolver—
He bolts the Door,
O’erlooking a Superior Spectre
More near—”
This is the heart of what I have come to love about I Am a Ghost, it’s slow burning horror of the highest caliber, a truly labyrinthian depiction of the danger in a life buried within a life manifesting as a body buried in a house, and a knife buried in a belly. This metaphor is one that stretches beyond any one kind of deviance a human being can suppress within themselves, and thus, into the hearts of many for hundreds of different, special reasons. “Ourself behind Ourself”, Dickinson writes. She personifies the hiding of a true self as being as dangerous as guns, as real life ghost encounters, as intruders or even religious stoning, knowing the real threat is the pieces of our soul and consciousness that we cannot accept, that we suppress and we hide and effectively kill, in service of keeping the unknown, unknown.
I Am a Ghost centers Emily, who has trapped herself in that very situation Dickinson so beautifully describes. Not only did dissociation from the foreign parts of her soul cause her to ignore the pieces of her being that she has been taught to suppress, but a monster has been created of that self she has hidden, not of her own volition, but through force, through conditioning and through punishment. I Am a Ghost is an immaculately written horror movie from the perspective of a ghost, and even more, it is a story about the pain of suppressing a trans identity and particularly about the ways that society and white supremacist cishet nuclear family structure teaches and reinforces in us that to be masculine, to be a man, is to be a hammer, is to be the monster – and how this results in so many transmasculine people suppressing their trans identity for long periods of time, often dying as abandoned, troubled “women”, while the man inside of them dies seen as a monster, and never a victim. One beautiful part of this film is that while it expresses this theme both subtly and very overtly throughout it’s runtime, it can very easily be seen as a metaphor for the way that the closet suffocates and kills various kinds of marginalized people who are seen as undesirable, especially within family units that opt to bury troubled members as opposed to supporting them through adversity. I Am a Ghost can touch the soul of anyone who has struggled with finding a place to sincerely belong. The entire house serves as the closet, as does the routine that Emily is trapped within, as do her limited memories and ever slipping sense of time. I Am a GhostT is one of the most sincerely horrific depictions of how severely agonizing a seemingly mundane and uninteresting existence can really be when you have an entire world buried inside of yourself, aching to get out by any means necessary.
(still from Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow)
It feels somewhat kismet that this years anniversary of I Am a Ghost is the same year I Saw the TV Glow, a film where the main character finds their buried (trans) self through a nostalgic TV show and we watch them slowly suffocate as the person they are not meant to be, was released and swept the nation in a frenzy. There is so much horror to be found in the corridors of the mind, in the potential of what a hidden self can create when sadness turns to rage, when the yearning to break through manifests as a screech, as a knife, as a spiral staircase that never seems to end, with plants that never seem to die, and days that are always sunny. H.P utilizes many different tactics to increase the sense of dread and monotony within the film, creating a perfect metaphor for the sincere horror of being trapped in a life that has hardly ever felt like our own.
(still from Alexandre Aja’s High Tension)
Last year I wrote an essay about the 2003 French horror film High Tension [major spoilers for the film ahead] titled “Our Desire is a Weapon” – the essay corroborates my reading of the film as a trans metaphor of a similar type. In High Tension, a girl in love with her best friend terrorizes and tortures her, imagining the entire time that the person terrorizing her is a scary perverted cis male killer with grimy fingernails, drool caked lips and nothing but malintent in his heart. This twist comes during the last third of the movie, and is extremely divisive in many film circles. The very first time I watched the film, I understood it. Maybe I didn’t understand it as it was truly written to be, but I understood the mechanism at play, and I appreciated it, largely because I had witnessed I Am a Ghost first. I read High Tension as a trans metaphor, I saw the main character manifesting this cis male killer in their head as a projection of their desire. Just like how I see Emily, taught that if you desire proximity to manhood or masculinity or masculine sexuality, you are the monster, the perpetrator, and your desire, your being itself – becomes a weapon. Emily experiences this, too. A fractured self, manifested as a man – a monster. I was blown away when H.P quote retweeted my quick 110 word letterboxd review I typed out on my phone after my first viewing, showing me that someone had made this connection almost 10 years ago. That confirmation along with the way that I Am a Ghost was written, filmed, edited and presented to me turned into increased confidence in the way that I analyze and perceive every little bit of what a filmmaker presents to me, and I value every bit of meaning I interpret, even if it’s just a hunch – you just might be correct. It gave me so much confidence in the way that I write about films, the way that I examine metaphors through my own experiences.
When I first wrote about I Am a Ghost a couple years ago, I was still closeted in a big part of my life, and this intimately connected me to Emily. Since then, I have come out of the closet in all areas of my life, openly trans and intersex in every space I inhabit. However, this has not suffocated the repetitive nature of my days, frequently fighting the feeling of waking up from dreams where I am alive. As I have written this essay, I’ve thought about how profound this film has been for my development as a Black intersex trans person, and I have uncovered repetitively how common these experiences really are, why I Am a Ghost is sincerely such a marvel of horror filmmaking, and a film underrated in queer horror cinema cannon. Officially released in 2012, and perceived as a trans metaphor in 2014, I Am a Ghost continues to resonate with queer, gender diverse and trans audiences everywhere. As I reflect on the legacy of this film, I am reminded that true horror lies not in the things we know, but in the fear of accessing what we do not. This anniversary serves not only as a celebration of an iconic work that means so much to me, but as a testament to the resilience and creativity of queer, particularly queer Asian voices in cinema that have endured and expanded despite constant societal roadblocks. As we honor I Am a Ghost, I hope that we also champion the narratives that continue to defy convention and carve spaces for complex, layered, horrifying queer tales of grief, unbecoming and transformation.