In director David Lowery’s brilliant 2017 film A Ghost Story, a specter in a Charlie Brown-style bedsheet ghost costume lingers in the dim, quiet moments unfolding in the home it shared with its wife. Despite the film’s thick and heartbreakingly mournful tone – this is a spirit longing a wife he can never again touch – there is something almost cozy about its central haunting, something deeply comforting in the intimately personal tragedy that befalls the bereaved. The lost are still present, the film informs the viewer, they still matter. As the film progresses, however, the wife is forced to move on, to overcome her grief and to leave the house she shared with her husband (and his ghost). He is left in that space for all that comes after.
There is a misunderstanding to hauntings.
Fantagraphics
There are two short pieces in Laura Pérez’ Ocultos, out this week from Fantagraphics, that echo the sort of tragic coziness found in A Ghost Story. In “Play”, a young pregnant woman begins to feel that she is not alone in her home. She finds small objects out of place, she feels a presence, she thinks she hears voices. Doing dishes at the kitchen sink, her hair is playfully (perhaps intimately) swept aside; she turns and finds herself alone in the room. The spirit quiets, she believes, upon the birth of her son; instead, he inherits the playful ghost. With no partner in the picture – no second parent sharing the woman’s bed – there’s a strong possibility that the boy’s ghost is a presence he would otherwise be denied.
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In “Pation 19”, an older woman, likewise alone, feels a similar presence. “At first I was frightened,” a caption box reads, and shortly thereafter, “it made me feel oddly comforted.” She becomes accustomed to the unseen, becomes somehow reliant upon it; when it departs, she finds its absence much more haunting than its presence.
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Ocultos is filled with other supernatural and occult occurrences – surreal and sublime dream visitations, owl-led vision quests, and even a trio of UFO lights seen only by a lone young boy. The pages of the book are haunted by a great deal more than comforting presences, and yet the book never broaches the concept of horror. It never views the unknown and the unknowable as malign, malevolent. As with the haunting in A Ghost Story, the uncanny feels necessary, if not transformative than awakening. These brief experiences seem to have greater depth.
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The comic book equivalent of literary flash fiction or prose poems, Ocultos is a book best taken in small, reflective bits rather than one big binge – the reader is best served by ruminating on each four or five page spectral short before cluttering it with another. Each piece begs to awaken the reader themselves – to be, if not transformative, than necessary.
Ocultos doesn’t seek to aid the reader in understanding its haunting, but it will remain present with them. These hauntings matter.
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