What’s scarier than a ghost in a haunted house? David Koepp would say a dysfunctional family.
What’s scarier than a ghost in a haunted house? David Koepp would say a dysfunctional family.
By Nell Geraets
February 11, 2025 — 1.41pm
By now, it’s safe to say the haunted house trope has been well and truly covered. From Le Manoir du Diable (1896) to Oddity (2024), mysterious entities have been spooking unexpecting home-dwellers for so long it veers more towards predictable than scary.
This didn’t sit well with David Koepp, the prolific screenwriter behind major blockbusters such as Jurassic Park (1993) and Mission: Impossible (1996). So, along with long-time friend and collaborator, director Steven Soderbergh, Koepp decided to turn the well-worn genre on its head.
What they ended up with was Presence, a haunted house film in which the ghost is the only thing you shouldn’t be scared of.
“I feel like you have to make some sort of contribution to the ghost story canon when you’re doing a new one. So we’re riffing on the haunted house idea,” Koepp says. “It’s not a scary movie, yet it’s deeply unsettling and distressing.”
This distress doesn’t come from things going bump in the night. It comes from the people the presence is “haunting”. The film begins with a family of four moving into a suburban house. It quickly becomes apparent each member is embroiled in conflict: the mother (Lucy Liu) is in some kind of legal trouble, the son is bullying schoolmates, the daughter is grieving the death of her best friend, and the father (Chris Sullivan) is desperately trying to hold everyone together.
We watch these conflicts unfold through the lens of the presence itself, an invisible fly on the wall that observes the family as it descends into deeper dysfunction.
“While writing the film, I realised it isn’t a four-character story. It’s a five-character piece with the fifth character being the camera – the ghost,” Koepp says. “It gives you this feeling of voyeurism. You’re watching things at a distance, so you’re not moving into the perfectly timed close-up. You end up feeling like what you’re watching might really be unfolding.”
Instead of acting simply as a vehicle for jump-scares and terror, Koepp says the ghost in Presence is the vehicle through which we gradually understand the family’s trauma, and in some ways, our own.
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“There’s a psychic character in the film who says one of the reasons someone may become able to feel a presence is because of trauma in their own life,” Koepp says.
The family in Presence is therefore not “haunted”, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. It’s their own trauma and anxieties that haunt them, Koepp says, opening them up to things that may have been hiding in plain sight.
“I read that some left this film feeling a profound sense of melancholy,” Koepp says. “I want the audience to come away not feeling scared of ghosts, but moved by the experiences of the characters who sense them.”
Presence is in cinemas now.
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Nell Geraets is a Culture and Lifestyle reporter at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via Twitter or email.
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