#1: Ghost Hunters

Ghost Hunters
Altoona, PA (pts 1 & 2)

Premise: A documentary following a volunteer group called TAPS as they investigate paranormal activity in buildings that are claimed to be haunted.

I’ll kick off by saying that I don’t believe in ghosts or the supernatural or bullshit like that. Now that’s out of the way, I will only use the word ‘bullshit’ to refer to the quality of the show. It will be used a lot.

About six minutes into the entire thing, I realised the three main crutches of the show: creepy music, dramatic editing and forced conflict. Notice that none of the main crutches are “ghost hunting”? That’s because there was basically none of that, but I’ll get to that later.

The whole thing opens with an opening sequence described by my notes as “flashy”, “bombastic” and “shitty”. It includes some glimpses of upcoming scenes, shot in a hilariously overdramatic fashion, and throws in some ‘creepy’ shots, such as cameras whipping round in a dark room and a night-vision close-up of a doll with unnaturally dark eyes. This opening sequence is without a doubt one of the spookiest parts of the show which, with a title like Ghost Hunters, is bitterly disappointing.

This montage also introduces the characters: Jason and Grant, best-friends-cum-plumbers-cum-ghost-hunters and the two main protagonists; Brian, the keen-but-dumb enthusiast; The Woman, the interviewer whose name I failed to write down but it doesn’t really matter because she does fuck all; and another man, who apparently barely registered with me at all because I didn’t write down anything about him. I think he was the ‘demonologist’ (I refuse to write that word without quote marks because that is NOT a job or a hobby or a thing; although, horrifically, my spell check recognises it). I called them ‘characters’ rather than ‘people’ for a reason; they are not simply a vessel for the premise of the show, they are the show. As I said before, there is very little ghost hunting going on, so the interest has to come from the relationships and conflicts within the team.

Jason is probably the most interesting one of the group, simply because he has a problem with EVERYTHING. The weirdest (and funniest) example of this is that he claims to have a “passion” for ghost hunting, but seems to absolutely resent it every time they have to go check out a supposedly haunted building. Because of this, he is the main source of conflict.

Grant, despite being one of the two main protagonists, and supposedly the yin to Jason’s yang (they are literally described as “opposite ends of the spectrum”), is one of the least interesting of the gang. His only contributions seem to be banal observations and occasional friction for Jason. He is such a non-entity that it took me three tries to get his name right in my notes: first it was ‘thingy’, then ‘Brian’, and finally ‘Grant’ - he’s referred to as ‘thingy’ for 6 out of 9 pages.

Speaking of Brian, I may have done him a disservice by describing him as ‘dumb’ earlier. He’s certainly not smart, but it’s common sense he’s lacking more than formal education. His love of hunting ghosts has slightly infected his life to the point that he’s lost his job because of it, and his excitement at the prospect of finding something paranormal usually overrides his sense of proportion, leading him to draw wild conclusions from non-events. He is definitely the butt of the majority of Jason’s anguish, due to his scatter-brained nature and the fact that he secures most of those pesky ghost hunting jobs that Jason fucking HATES!

The others don’t provide much conflict or interest. They’re just, sort of...there. Padding out TAPS.

Anyway, on to the actual plot of the show, and I’ve made the horrifying realisation that I’ve only just turned over to page two of my notes (where the phrase ‘HYPOCRITE ALERT!’ has been scrawled no less than four times). The first several minutes of the show focus on the personal and professional lives of Jason and Grant. This exposes the weakness of the bullshit premise immediately, as it takes ten-fifteen minutes to illustrate something that I can condense into a sentence: they’re both plumbers with young families, and they’re into ghosts. There is a whole segment devoted to watching them at work while they talk about plumbing. I predicted foreshadowing in my notes (“Will they used plumbing skills in ghost hunting?”), but my prediction was wrong. It was just to show that they really were plumbers, because look! They’re plumbing! I can only assume that it was to play up the fact that they are normal, every day guys who have this unusual hobby, but that’s just pointless. Side note: this segment was set to ‘Mustang Sally’, which I found really, really odd.

Finally they actually get called upon for a ghost hunting opportunity, and there is a painfully staged scene in which Jason has to tell his wife he’s going to be gone for a few days. She does her best shocked-and-pissed-off acting, which is understandably shit because she has a camera right in her face and it’s completely obvious what he was going to tell her, because why else would there be a camera in her face? There’s a bit of whinging from Jason, complaining about his “passion” because it takes him away from his job and his home and his family. This attitude pissed me off at first, but I grew to really like it simply because it sets him apart, not only from everyone else on the show but from everyone else in any other show like this. Where they’re always so determined to get out there and do a good job, Jason just doesn’t give a shit! Good man.

The job itself is a supposed haunting of a suburban house in Altoona, Pennsylvania. A three-year-old girl has witnessed a ghostly image of another child in her room, who has become her friend and playmate. Apparently they play tug-of-war together and have conversations deep into the night. A three-year-old with a friend that only she can see!? HOLY SHIT! But in this case, it’s more than just a kid with an imaginary friends; it’s a kid with an imaginary friend and parents that not only satisfy her imagination, but feed it. They take it in turns to sleep in her room with her, and they listen to (and believe) all her bullshit stories - and I know from experience that the only thing better than having people listen to your pathetic lies is having them fall for it! This is all about a three-year-old’s natural desire for attention, there, case closed.

Except it’s not. It’s haunted. Obviously. So after a stupid but heated argument between Jason and Brian about tapes or something dull like that, they finally start their investigation. I don’t have a lot of notes about this, it was very uneventful and boring the whole way through. They played a lot of tense, creepy music to fit the dark, night-vision footage, but the lack of anything visually interesting coupled with the team’s inane, jocular chatter downgraded the drama from ‘scary’ to ‘neutral’. This also went on for a very long time, which didn’t help.

The next morning, the team analyses the video and audio footage they have (and also the readouts from their bullshit ‘demon detector’ thing - that’s probably not its technical name). All they’ve got is a couple of blatantly doctored audio samples of children whispering. I forgot to put down what they supposedly said, but if I remember rightly, one of them was “Can I come in?” and another was “They don’t want us here”. I’ll admit right now that I was a little bit freaked out whenever I heard the children’s voices, even though I knew it was fake, but then I realised that children who are not in control of themselves are a common horror/thriller convention, especially children ghosts, especially disembodied children ghosts, ESPECIALLY disembodied children ghosts who are whispering! Of course I was freaked out!

For some reason, they put in some more footage of them doing some plumbing here. In case you’d forgotten, I guess.

Back to the ‘haunted’ house, and the mother has the audio samples played for her. She is asked to clarify if any of the voices sound like her daughter, in a startling display of rationality. This was something I was not expecting from Ghost Hunters; the team really do look for logical answers first (well, most of them do) before making up a load of shite when they can’t explain something. Anyway, she decides that none of the voices sound like her daughter (forgive me if I’m being ageist, but don’t all children sound exactly the same? Especially when they’re whispering), and it’s unanimously decided that they must be the voices of ghosts. The mother reacts very strongly to these voice clips, particularly to “they don’t want us here”, to which she sobs “It’s not that we don’t want them here!”. This was a strangely moving part of the show. It really was nice to see someone care about a deceased stranger so strongly, though she did later admit that, actually, it was that she didn’t want them there. It’s simultaneously a shame and a delight that someone can be so touched by something borne out of delusion; I really did feel for her, and wanted to reach in the screen and give her a hug. This part of the show is, far and away, the most interesting part, albeit for sadistic reasons. It’s such a shame that it was over far too quickly, and it took so much bullshit to get to that point. As I said in my notes, “the team are tedious, the investigations are boring and the analysis is fake”. If there was more human interest in this show, I think it would be immensely more enjoyable.

Oh, by the way, the three-year-old was in the background that whole time, complaining because she wasn’t getting any attention. Surprise, surprise. Anyway, they bless the house to cleanse it, or some such bullshit, and move on.

I really can’t be bothered to explain the other cases they had in the same detail, because they were all so boringly similar that they’ve kind of blurred into one in my head. I know they had cases at a theatre, a railway museum and an inn. They all demonstrated how important editing and drama is in this show, because they were all deemed ‘not haunted’ (apart from the inn, because the coverage of that extended into the next episode), and yet were played up in exactly the same way as the house that was deemed ‘haunted’. A very good example of this is a clip of a light-sensitive camera capturing the silhouette of a human figure on the stage of the theatre. This was showing in the ‘coming up next’ montage, before AND after the commercial break, along with shots of everyone pointing at it and freaking out. When the time came in the narrative, it was revealed that the figure was a reflection of one of the team, who was standing just offstage. And that was it. The excitement was quashed in less time than it took for me to say “Are you kidding me!?”

The rest was just more of the same, and not long into part two, the drama of it was completely passing me by. The last couple of pages of my notes are plagued by doodles, stick figures and the phrase “I am soooooo bored”. There was just more creepy music, Cloverfield-style editing and scary-looking but meaningless shots. There was also more strife between Jason and Brian, but this very, very quickly swung away from ‘tense and edgy’ to ‘petty and silly’. The scary tone I was expecting from the show was demeaned at every possible turn by non-events, pointless cutaways to the team’s backstory and good old fashioned idiocy.

I just don’t understand what this show is meant to be, and I think that’s because the show’s producers didn’t understand, either. There were so many points where a small change in editing or a little nudge from the crew would have helped it along nicely. There was actually a point where the team got a call from a woman who claimed her cats were seeing ghosts, AND THEY DIDN’T TAKE IT! Why on earth didn’t the production team step in at that point and say, “Guys, I really think you should take this one. IT’S TV GOLD!”. But no. We got treated to a fucking railway museum where shit all happened, except a chair fell off a table, but no one believed it was a ghost except for dim Brian.

I’m going to finish this off by strongly suggesting that you do not bother watching this show. There’s a possibility they got better at creating drama as the series went on, but I really don’t have the patience to find out. I’ll leave you with a quote from my notes that pretty much sums up my experience with Ghost Hunters: “Considering they called ghost hunting their ‘passion’, I was expecting ca-razayyy. If you’re going to be delusional, be full-on insane, dudes!!!”.


Observations I couldn’t work into my review, quoted directly from my notes:

“8-hour drive for bullshit mission. Waste of petrol.”
“Hope kid keeps taking advantage of her stupid parents’ stupid stupidity.”
“MORE plumbing? I couldn’t give a flying fuck!!!”
“I really do like that [the ghost hunters] don’t just take any old sign or weird happening and warp it into ‘evidence’ - they do offer some vaguely rational ideas first. However, this is BORING!”
“Brian is a whiny little tool.”
“Steve’s fear is fairly adorable!” (Only not added because I do not have the faintest recollection of who Steve is.)
“How can you tell if there’s a draft just by looking? Dumb bitch.”
“Wrestling in a bouncy castle? THAT’S what this show is missing! Homoeroticism!”

Introduction

Hello, all!

My name is Sess, and this is a blog about television, specifically my opinion of it. I don’t come from a media background, I’ve never properly studied it, all my broadcast knowledge comes from watching media-related shows, media critics such as Victor Lewis-Smith and Charlie Brooker, directors’ commentaries, and reading literature about it in the university library to avoid doing the work I was actually meant to be doing.

The premise is that I watch the pilot (or first episode, if the pilot isn’t representative of the series) of a programme I’ve never seen before. I draw on the pathetic amount of knowledge I have and give my first impressions of it, being as critical as I can.

I’m open to suggestions of series to watch, and I’m up for watching anything - reality, drama, comedy, documentary.

I’m not just here to rip the piss out of ridiculous shows (although that’s probably what I’ll be doing a lot!), I really would like to discover some new, interesting and entertaining things to watch.