MORE THAN JUST GHOST LORE IN A B A D P L A C E 59
When Mike Enslin envisions the appearance of his daughter Katie walking
through the incinerated room towards him (scene 17, 01:23:02-01:28:32),
seeking the everlasting love of her father, he is free of any fear. The imagined
existence of his daughter returning from the dead is symbolic for Enslin’s still
extreme emotional attachment to the loved but lost object. It visualizes that
Enslin turns away from reality and clings more than ever “to the object through
the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis” (Freud, Mourning 244). It is
not surprising that Hafstrom uses Katie as the fifth ghost, as the number 5 results
automatically by adding up the first three numbers of the room (1 + 4 + 0 = 5).
Moreover, number 5 entails the two most dominant feelings in Mike Enslin’s
life: love and pain. With the emotional highs and lows associated with the
notions of love and pain, number 5 carries yet another connotation that also
applies to Mike Enslin’s state of mind: It comprises “instability and
unpredictability, and radical changes” (Venefica 2009). The ghostly apparition
of the deceased daughter is, at first, a source of extreme pleasure. When Katie
“dies again” and when the imaginary dissolves and becomes an empty reality,
his source of pleasure transforms, however, into one of extreme unpleasure. Left
behind in complete darkness, Enslin’s horror is too strong to endure, leading to
his emotional outburst: “No. No no no. You can’t take her twice. Not again,
please God. You can’t. Please. No!” (01.26:38-01:27:00).
DISINTEGRATION OF THE PAST AND PRESENT
We can argue that enclosed in the hotel room, Mike Enslin’s almost
forgotten past overwhelms him to the extent that it becomes the present reality
allowing him to “assess the value of past relationships and [to] comprehend
what he [...] lost in losing the other” (Clewell 44) as well as when losing his
own self. It is in this room that his so far successfully repressed emotional pain
returns in connection with “instantaneous wish-fulfillments, [the] secret power
to do harm, and the return of the dead” (Freud, Uncanny 401). The return of the
repressed overpowers him to the extent that he is incapable of differentiating
between imagination and reality. Lifeless objects and paintings become
animated, ghosts appear, and the radio and the TV turn on and off by
themselves. As a result, Enslin enters a world that produces a new melody “of
disestablishment and disintegration” (King, Danse 13) of the dead and the
living, leading to a repetitious visualization of destruction, madness, de
realization, self-alienation, culminating in self-dissolution.
Taking these individual elements of Hafstrom’s film into consideration, it is
obvious that his ghost story differs from a traditional ghost story relying on the
reader’s belief in demonic intervention and the frisson by ghouls disturbing the
nightly rest of the living. Even though the film, in accordance with the
psychological ghost story, desires the apparitions “to be regarded as
symptomatic of mental disturbance” (Briggs 143), Hafstrom’s tale diverges from
the psychological ghost story in the way that Mike Enslin’s mental disturbance
is neither caused by misdirected passion, sexual repression, nor by