AEWCH 305: JUSTIN DECLOUX & WILL SLOAN (IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB) on GHOSTS IN MOVIES
Against Everyone with Conner Habib
Against Everyone With Conner Habib
4.8 • 699 Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2025
⏱️ 99 minutes
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Summary
Friends,
Is there any ghost lore in your town or where you grew up?
Have you ever seen a ghost?
What are ghosts, anyway?
Three questions, three different ways to approach (or be approached by ghosts).
Ghosts are at the heart of our folktales, our fears, and our fiction. And belief in them is almost universal. Unlike aliens, UFOs, cryptids, and other strange entities, belief in ghosts cuts across all demographics and borders. We're afraid of ghosts and fascinated by them.
As you probably know from listening to this show, or if you’ve read my novel Hawk Mountain, horror is deeply important to me: in forming my imagination, my way of thinking, and even my lens on spirituality. To that end, this is one of two podcasts on the topic.
This time, I just wanted to be personal, to have fun, to explore the pleasure of horror and the many springboards it gives us for conversation. To that end, I invited the hosts of my favorite movie podcast (maybe favorite podcast ever) THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB onto the show, JUSTIN DECLOUX and WILL SLOAN.
This marks the second crossover between our shows, as I appeared on episode 422 of The Important Cinema Club to talk about working with director Joe Gage.
We ask the three questions up top, and explore three completely different representations of ghosts in movies:
A Chinese Ghost Story (1987 dir. Tony Ching Siu-Tung)
The Eclipse (2009, dir. Conor McPherson)
I Am A Ghost (2012, dir. H.P. Mendoza)
We summarize each movie, and then go in... tons of directions. I loved recording this episode, and I hope you do too. Next time, onto the more theoretical-serious kind of fun.
Aside from The Important Cinema Club, Justin and Will have many projects.
Justin is the author Radioactive Dreams: The Cinema of Albert Pyun, and has a Blu-Ray distribution company, Gold Ninja Video. He's also the director of films including Impossible Horror , which Will is in, and Teddy Bomb. Will's new book is Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA, and he has a great substack here.
An episode that ties into this one, and that has more of my ghost stories in it than this one is AEWCH 138 with Edward Parnell, talking about ghosts embedded in the landscape.
And I mention a great book towards the end, Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks. This is from the Eclipse. |
| 0:07.5 | When you see a ghost, something very interesting happens. |
| 0:11.3 | Your brain splits in two. One side of you is rejecting what you're seeing because it doesn't |
| 0:16.3 | tally with our ordinary idea of reality. And the other side is screaming, but this is real. And in that |
| 0:22.3 | moment, reality itself is collapsed and reconfigured in a way that changes you profoundly, |
| 0:27.8 | although at the time you're not aware of it. When Mary felt someone sitting on the bed, a tiny |
| 0:34.3 | depression, she assumed that her daughter had come back to ask her about the fortune teller. |
| 0:39.6 | Half asleep, she reached out to reassure her, not feeling anything. |
| 0:44.9 | She opened her eyes and looked up. |
| 0:48.6 | What she saw was so casual she hardly thought about it for a moment. |
| 0:54.7 | Seeing the dead woman's face, she thought, |
| 0:57.7 | Oh, I must be dreaming. |
| 1:00.1 | Hello, friends. This is against everyone with Connor Habib. |
| 1:03.9 | That excerpt was from The Eclipse from 2009, |
| 1:07.4 | directed by the great Irish playwright Connor McPherson. |
| 1:11.7 | Is there any ghost lore in your town or where you grew up? |
| 1:17.2 | Have you ever seen a ghost? What are ghosts anyway? |
| 1:21.1 | Three questions, three different ways to approach or be approached by ghosts. |
| 1:27.2 | Ghosts are at the heart of our folk tales, our fears, |
| 1:31.3 | and our fiction, and belief in them is almost universal. Unlike aliens, UFOs, cryptids, |
| 1:38.0 | other strange entities, belief in ghosts cuts across all demographics and borders. We're afraid of |
| 1:44.0 | ghosts and we're fascinated by them. |
... |
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