Sunday, February 9, 2025

 



I just finished the first season of School Spirits and I am floored by both the plot twists and the emotions. The show is way, way, way better than I could ever capture here.

There are so many things about the show I could write about if I had the right words, but one thing I want to talk about briefly is how I see ghosts as being deeply connected to the theme of closure and the heartbreak of not finding it for decades, if ever.

One of the ghost characters deeply regrets how things ended up with the boy he loved in high school. 28 years later, he finds himself writing a letter to “the love of his life” and hopes that he can both forgive and be forgiven for things that transpired when they were students in the mid-1990s. It’s a credit to both the actors and the writing and the atmospheric feel of the scene that it is touching and heartbreaking instead of creepy.

Boy, did this hit hard, both personally and because the show is just so good at pulling on your heart strings. My own situation is completely different and obviously I’m not a ghost. But I see the theme of being haunted (by something you did years and years ago) as something that can happen to a person who is alive or not alive. It’s one reason I think having ghosts and high school connected works so well and beautifully in School Spirits.

Whether we’re invisible in high school or we’re an adult years later and are stuck on things that happened to us as teenagers, we don’t need to be an actual ghost to be haunted or haunting.


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