DAVID CRONENBERG: If you have a story that features ghosts, that’s a religious story because it suggests that there is a life after death that is recognizably individualistic. That this ghost is the ghost of your dead whatever—father, son, child, mother. And metaphorically I understand it completely because I’m haunted by my parents who died relatively young. I hear them, I see them. But I know where that comes from. And I understand my desire to have them still be alive. The way they are alive in my head. So if a movie or any art was clear that this was what a ghost was, as opposed to an actual thing floating around, then I wouldn’t mind. But it usually isn’t. It’s just usually some very primitive structure, which at basis is religion, saying there’s life after death.
