Best Ghost Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of ghost cinema — measured across 5,739 indexed frames from 74 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Ghost films over-index on girl, boy and stone wall — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
Chris ColumbusDP John SealeIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →
This is the tale of Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), an ordinary eleven-year-old boy serving as a sort of slave for his aunt and uncle who learns that he is actually a wizard and has been invited to attend the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry is snatched away from his mundane existence by Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), the groundskeeper for Hogwarts, and quickly thrown into a world completely foreign to both him and the viewer. Famous for an incident that happened at his birth, Harry makes friends easily at his new school. He soon finds, however, that the wizarding world is far more dangerous for him than he would have imagined, and he quickly learns that not all wizards are ones to be trusted.
- 2
The Sixth Sense (1999)
M. Night ShyamalanDP Tak FujimotoIMDb 8.2TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →
Malcom Crowe (Bruce Willis) is a child psychologist who receives an award on the same night that he is visited by a very unhappy ex-patient. After this encounter, Crowe takes on the task of curing a young boy with the same ills as the ex-patient (Donnie Wahlberg) . This boy "sees dead people". Crowe spends a lot of time with the boy much to the dismay of his wife (Olivia Williams). Cole's mom (Toni Collette) is at her wit's end with what to do about her son's increasing problems. Crowe is the boy's only hope.
- 3
Mama (2013)
Andy MuschiettiDP Antonio RiestraIMDb 6.2TMDB 6.3See in full on FrameThrower →
Jeffrey Desange, senior partner of an investment brokerage, has a breakdown after a financial collapse and kills several co-workers and his estranged wife and kidnaps his two young daughters, Victoria and Lily. When they're found five years later, they're taken in by their uncle (their father's twin brother) and his girlfriend. Macabre events soon make the new guardians suspect that a supernatural evil force named Mama has attached itself to the girls.
- 4
The Conjuring 2 (2016)
James WanDP Don BurgessIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →
In 1977 Enfield, the paranormal investigators, Lorraine and Ed Warren, travel to London to help the Hodgsons. After sensing her daughter to be possessed, and her four children haunted by supernatural happenings, Peggy Hodgson asks for help when a malicious entity takes possession of the second eldest child, Janet. However, there's something more threatening, not only for the inhabitants but also for the investigator-couple; something that they couldn't even imagine.
- 5
Lights Out (2016)
David F. SandbergDP Marc SpicerIMDb 6.3TMDB 6.4See in full on FrameThrower →
A man called Paul is working after hours and is murdered by a supernatural entity in the shadow. When his son, the boy Martin, is frightened by the same creature, he sees his mother Sophie talking to an imaginary friend called Diana in the shadow of her room. Martin does not sleep anymore during the night. His older step sister Rebecca who lives alone is summoned by the social assistant. She brings Martin home and recalls her own experience with Diana years ago when she was young. Rebecca and her boyfriend Bret investigate the connection of Sophie with Diana and come up to a scary revelation about their past.
- 6
The Ring (2002)
Gore VerbinskiDP Bojan BazelliIMDb 7.1TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →
Rachel Keller is a journalist investigating a videotape that may have killed four teenagers. There is an urban legend about this tape: the viewer will die seven days after watching it. Rachel tracks down the video... and watches it. Now she has just seven days to unravel the mystery of the Ring so she can save herself and her son.
- 7
Fanny and Alexander (1982)
Ingmar BergmanDP Sven NykvistIMDb 8.1TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →
It's the early twentieth century Sweden. Adolescent siblings Alexander and Fanny Ekdahl lead a relatively joyous and exuberant life with their well-off extended paternal family, led by the family matriarch, their grandmother, Helena Ekdahl. The openness of the family culture is exemplified by Helena's now deceased husband ending up becoming best friends with one of her lovers, a Jewish puppet maker named Isak Jacobi, and their Uncle Gustav Adolf's open liaison with one of the family maids, Maj, who everyone in the family adores, even Gustav Adolf's wife, Alma. Between the siblings, Alexander in particular has inherited the family's love of storytelling, his parents and his grandmother who are actors and who manage their own theater. Things change for Alexander and Fanny when their father, Oscar, dies shortly after Christmas 1907. Although she truly does believe she loves him, the children's mother, Emilie, decides to marry Bishop Edvard Vergérus, who she first met as the officiate at Oscar's funeral. She also wants a father figure for the children. Going into the marriage, Emilie has inclinations that it will be a much different life than she had with the Ekdahls, but is not prepared for the harsh, austere and strict life Edvard rules with an iron fist. Emilie, Alexander and Fanny end up being prisoners in the bishop's stark and humorless house. As Alexander butts head with his stepfather and tries to learn how to keep to his own principles while obeying Edvard, Emilie tries to figure out a way to regain her and her children's own destiny, as Edvard will not consent to divorce, and her "desertion" in the eyes of the law means that Alexander and Fanny would become his wards.
- 8
Annabelle: Creation (2017)
David F. SandbergDP Maxime AlexandreIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.6See in full on FrameThrower →
Doll manufacturer Samuel Mullins is a happy family man with his wife Esther and their daughter Bee--until she dies after being hit by a car. Twelve years later, Samuel and Esther welcomes a nun and six orphaned girls to his home. He tells them that only a locked room (that belonged to Bee) and Esther's room would be off-limits for the girls. The crippled girl, Janice, manages to sneak into Bee's room during the night and finds a doll locked inside a closet. After she plays in the room, she is haunted by an evil force. What has Janice unleashed in Bee's room?
- 9
The Devils Backbone (2001)
Guillermo del ToroDP Guillermo NavarroIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →
It is 1939, the end of three years of bloody civil war in Spain, and General Franco's right-wing Nationalists are poised to defeat the left-wing Republican forces. A ten-year-old boy named Carlos, the son of a fallen Republican war hero, is left by his tutor in an orphanage in the middle of nowhere. The orphanage is run by a curt but considerate headmistress named Carmen and a kindly Professor Casares, both of whom are sympathetic to the doomed Republican cause. Despite their concern for him, and his gradual triumph over the usual schoolhouse bully, Carlos never feels completely comfortable in his new environment. First of all, there was that initial encounter with the orphanage's nasty caretaker, Jacinto, who reacts even more violently when anyone is caught looking around a particular storage room the one with the deep well. Second, and more inexplicable, is the presence of a ghost, one of the former occupants of the orphanage named Santi. Not long after Carlos' arrival, Santi latches onto Carlos, badgering him incessantly at night and gloomily intoning, "Many of you will die." As if that wasn't enough to keep the orphanage's occupants in an unrelenting state of terror, there's the un-exploded bomb that dominates the orphanage's courtyard, still ticking away; With the orphanage left defenseless by its isolation, and the swift progression of Franco's troops, the ghost's prediction seems depressingly accurate. Nevertheless, with every step of the plot, it becomes apparent that the ghost's predictions as to who (or what) will die, the real source of danger and even the definition of death itself may be more ambiguous than first thought.
- 10
Gregory PlotkinDP John W. RutlandIMDb 4.6TMDB 5.3See in full on FrameThrower →
The Ghost Dimension, follows a new family, The Fleeges - father Ryan (Chris J. Murray), mother Emily (Brit Shaw) and their young daughter Leila (Ivy George) - Who move into a house and discover a video camera and a box of tapes in the garage. When they look through the camera's lens, they begin to see the paranormal activity happening around them - including the re-emergence of young Kristi and Katie.
What ghost films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a ghost frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — girl is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- girl2.4×
- boy2.3×
- stone wall1.9×
- child1.9×
- doorway1.8×
- door1.6×
- snow1.5×
- glasses1.5×
How ghost films are shot
Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate ghost from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 56%low keyvs 40% baseline
- 32%naturalvs 43% baseline
- 32%dayvs 42% baseline
- 57%nightvs 43% baseline
What breaks the pattern
Throne of Blood (1957) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.
Method
Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 5,739 frames from 74 films carrying the ghost label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.
Machine-readable: /api/list/ghost
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