Step Into the Haunted Town
Curiosity was piqued for the film Surrounded by Spirits when it began attending festivals. The one-sheet was enough to garner curiosity — a photograph of a figure traversing a foggy town with a flashlight. The tagline read, “The dead never left.” There was a promise of something deeper than conventional genre filmweakly documentary. The film was an immersive experience chronicle on belief, fear, and memory.
The film was an immersive experience chronicle on belief, fear, and memory. For Surrounded by Spirits, the noise around the film was created by its focus on improvised realism. Unlike mainstream ghost-hunting shows, the film achieved a sense of ghostly realism and atmosphere. Early offers to the audience included flickering lanterns, an empty school, and a ghostly interview with a local who spoke of whispers and shadows.
More Than a Ghost Story
The simplicity of the script recounts a film crew doing a doc on the ghost of a miner and the presumed haunted town, left abandoned after a tragedy. What is Surrounded by Spirits trying to say? At the most sublime level, it is a narrative on chasing the ghosts to capture on film.
Every investigator arrives in town experiencing different emotions- sorrow, remorse, and skepticism. The film slowly transforms into a study on the fragility of the human condition as the investigators probe the abandoned churches and dilapidated houses. The specters they seek, become substitutes for the ghosts of the past they refuse to reconcile.
Almost as if the town itself is a sentient organism, it watches and judges the characters. The town breaths through the wind, sighs through the rustling of the decaying window panes and shutters, and apathetically observes the interlopers. The genius of the direction is in making silence a character, and the audience senses the pulse of the town.
In the final act, you sense the ghosts are no longer in the town, but haunt the weary investigators. The irrational fears of the characters bleeding into the narrative, and the disordered grief overwhelming their rationality suggests a merging of the psychological with the paranormal as they try to probe the specters in the town. The silence is psychological, and the audience is left with the unending shadow of a haunting- memory.
The People Behind the Paranormal
The investigators and filmmakers themselves, the people on camera, contribute to the film’s authenticity. Unlike fictional actors, these unscreened paranormal documentarians have real, oftentimes gritty, heartfelt experience and belief in the paranormal. Several of them have lost family members and/or spent years pursuing ultimate evidence of the afterlife, thus turning their performances unscripted and sincere.
An investigator described in an interview how the death of a sibling when he was a teen sparked his intrigue with the paranormal. You can feel that connection in the way he addresses the air in conversation, asking questions in a near whisper as if willing an answer. Emotion clouds the film at times, and a different, former skeptic, is the one who rationally challenges the group’s experiences.
Director and producer insiders explained how the real-life stories influenced the shoot. The team was not merely capturing a haunting; they were one themselves. The convergence of reality and emotion is what gives Surrounded by Spirits its spine. It is less about ghost hunting and much more about the search for the self.
The Meaning of Symbols
Each visual element of Surrounded by Spirits is imbued with significance. The mirrors and reflections imagery is repeated and serves to illustrate fractured truth; how each person perceives little pieces of what is real. The wide, lingering shots of the camera trained on the desolate surroundings evoke not terror, but rather, loneliness.
Light, in the form of flashlights, candles, and distant glows serves, once again, to illustrate the theme of hope, albeit, fragile hope amid the uncertainty. The investigator sets his light down to record EVP and the darkness that surrounds him signifies surrender to the inexplicable.
The town epitomizes a forgotten history and is a community that largely represents the untold, erased, and hidden stories of grief. The spirits represent an echo of emotion rather than a ghost that lingers as a remnant of a human possessing unresolved and unprocessed emotions.
Observing the film through the lens of these symbols conveys the idea that it is, in fact, a story beyond the summonable paranormal; it is a reflection on memory. Each creak, camera glitch and wind gust becomes a crucial element of the highly evocative language of the unseen.
The Conversations That Followed
Upon its release, Surrounded by Spirits quietly cultivated a slight cult following within the paranormal community. Participants in the community speculated whether the town in the film was based on a real place, and whether the film team had captured something paranormal or whether the disturbances were of their own making.
Some viewers of the film proposed that the investigators had become “part of the haunting,” being drawn to the town because of their own haunting mental and spiritual distress. Others proposed that the film was a commentary on the pervasive human fascination with documenting tragedy and the pain and proof that serves as evidence of an event.
What makes these discussions particularly compelling is that the filmmakers never resolved these questions. They intentionally left moments — the shadows that crossed the hallway and the voices that faintly echoed on the recorders — unaddressed. That ambiguity was the film’s greatest asset. It invited audiences to participate in the haunting.
What Happened When the Cameras Stopped
One can find real challenges behind the film’s eerie calmness. The crew filmed on unsafe abandoned buildings. There were reports of hazardous flooring, unexpected coldness, and blackouts during night shoots. One producer later proclaimed that some of the most unsettling footage, like a flashlight turning off during a scene, was spontaneous and unscripted.
Unforeseen weather changes added to the challenges. A week of filming was scheduled, and due to rain and flooding, the crew lost access to the location for nearly three weeks. On one of those nights, law enforcement asked the crew to stop filming due to dangerous weather. To avoid wasting time planning, the director filmed handheld, capturing the rain-covered roads that became the symbolic inserts of the film to convey a sense of being ‘surrounded’ by ‘demonic’ forces.
Even editing was unconventional. Instead of a linear construction based on time, the director arranged segments based on emotional peaks in the film, hitting the audience with feelings of hope, exhaustion, and fear in a rhythm that was jarring, yet, remarkably, created a sense of coaxing.
Echoes That Linger
By the time the documentary Surrounded by Spirits was uploaded to streaming services, it had also transformed into something beyond a ghost documentary. It was also a meditation on the search for truth, for connection, and the meaning to a life that has been lost. It is not as if the film was successful by shocking its audience, it was successful by unsettling its audience.
Many viewers ‘haunted’ comments were not comments after a jump scare, they were comments after the chilling rawness of the humanity of the film. The film proposes that each of us carries a ‘haunted’ space, as in, the memories, the regrets, and the unspoken apologies, and perhaps it takes entering a ‘ghost’ town to confront them.
The film’s title, Surrounded by Spirits, offers a new perspective by the credits. It is the living that also carry ‘spirits’ and ‘spirits’ in the forms of ghosts of guilt, ghosts of grief, and ghosts of unfulfilled desire.
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