The Shakespeare comment was quite a flub. Not only did Shakespeare use ghosts in work (most famously in Hamlet), but so did Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ivan Turgenev, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allen Poe, etc. These guys just happened to do it very well.

You do know, of course, that Shakespeare used ghosts as a plot device in a number of his plays, including “Hamlet,” “Julius Caesar” and “Richard III,” to name three. They also involve the assassination of a leader in order to usurp their position of power. I guess Shakespeare can be considered guilty of a “lot of redunancy” in his plays too.

Does any of that make sense? Feel free to say no

I think, in spite of himself, Castle’s films had more layers than he’s given credit for.

If you’d like a couple recommendations that would further your ghosts-as-allegory subject, try the Haunting (original) and The Devil’s Backbone. You’ll have a field day with them…

I don’t expect sophisticated discussion of the paranormal on a friendly neighborhood film blog, but the confusion of the Willis character is much closer to how mediums and witnesses describe earthbound spirits across hundreds of years of paranormal research. One way it is often expressed is that they are “The psychotics of the spirit world”. Their state is akin to mental illness.

This is not a plot hole in the movie, however, as Cole’s explanation is perfectly sufficient in terms of the story. “They don’t know they’re dead. They see want they want to see.”

The “plot hole” is nothing more than someone projecting his expectation of how ghosts should perceive (probably gleaned from other movies) rather than any internal inconsistencies in the story itself.