List of ghost films

Ghost movies and shows can fall into a wide range of genres, including romance, comedy, horror, juvenile interest, and drama. Depictions of ghosts are as diverse as Casper the Friendly Ghost, Beetlejuice, Hamlet's father, Jacob Marley, Freddy Krueger, and Moaning Myrtle, as well as the traditional spectral spirits and other bumps in the night.

With the advent of motion pictures and television, screen depictions of ghosts became common and spanned a variety of genres; the works of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde have all been made into cinematic versions. Novel-length tales have sometimes been difficult to adapt to cinema, although that of The Haunting of Hill House to The Haunting in 1963 is an exception.

Children’s benevolent ghost stories became popular, such as Casper the Friendly Ghost, created in the 1930s and appearing in comics, animated cartoons, and eventually the 1995 feature film Casper. Noël Coward's play Blithe Spirit, later made into a film, places a more humorous slant on the phenomenon of haunting of individuals and specific locations, and The Ghost Goes West, a comedy in which a Scottish castle and its ghost are moved to Florida, was voted the best British film of 1935.

Sentimental depictions were more popular in early cinema than horror, and include the 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which was later adapted to television with a successful 1968–70 TV series. Genuine psychological horror films from this period include 1944's The Uninvited and 1945's Dead of Night.

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