We’ve documented a fair share of hauntings over the years of this blog’s existence. Once the reality of the ghost phenomenon has been established, the question becomes, if a movie theater can be haunted, why not a movie?
Director Alex Monty Canawati may have answered that question with his 2013 retro romp Return to Babylon.
From Wikipedia:
Photographed with a hand-cranked camera and scored with music of the roaring twenties, this silent film strings together the lives of the most famous and infamous stars of the 1920s, including Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow, Lupe Vélez, Fatty Arbuckle, and William Desmond Taylor.
If you’re a paranormal or Hollywood lore aficionado, I don’t have to tell you about the longstanding reports of ghostly activity surrounding pretty much all of those golden age stars.
And shooting the film in their houses may have caused some of that activity to bleed over into the movie.
Nor did it probably help that Canawati shot the movie on 19 rolls of 16mm film he found lying abandoned on Hollywood Boulevard.
The director assembled a modern-day cast and filmed them on a hand-cranked camera loaded with the found film stock. While shooting on location at some of the haunted homes, certain cast members, most vocally Jennifer Tilly, reported a feeling of being watched – and even touched – by persons unseen.
Canawati laughed these complaints off as products of actors’ overactive imaginations.
Until he and his editor watched the movie frame-by-frame and found … irregularities.
Throughout the film the characters appear to briefly morph into ghost-like images and other unexplained, unnerving phenomena. Some are quite monstrous. Canawati said there are also Christ-like images. “I was really quite stunned … This sends shivers down the spines of all who watch it.”
“But surely,” you say, “those are just double exposures, warps in the film stock, or even special effects trickery.”
Not according to the director – and technicians who examined the film.
On seeing the ghostly imagery on his print, Canawati thought there may have been some technical problem/explanation. He said no special effects were present or introduced. The film was sent to the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., and examined by experts in the field. “There was no reasonable explanation.” The movie had been shot on new “factory sealed” black-and-white film, he said.
Asked if some skeptics might explain the matter by calling it all a hoax, Canawati replied, “I don’t know what to say. I can only explain the story the best way I can. I’m gonna stand my ground that it’s not a hoax. We had the film examined.”
Which is all the more disturbing when you consider that the anomalies weren’t limited to facial distortions.
In some scenes, characters seem to grow elongated, webbed hands.
Then there are the full-body apparitions not visible on set that turned up in the finished film.
Watch this quick video on the high strangeness in Return to Babylon:
We’re left to wonder … If movies can be haunted, why not books?
My acclaimed horror-adventure novel may not be haunted, but it will give you hours of thrills and chills.
