The Blackwell Ghost 4

The Blackwell Ghost 4 is here, and this  ->  

was my expression going in, cause I remembered absolutely nothing...

Which was, in a way, exciting! 

Almost like watching a new sequel.

 

Firstly some merry news: homeboy is having a kid, and he looks elated.

 

that's his face while building the crib

He’s equally elated about Greg gifting him a painting from the Blackwell House, before finalising the sell. Apparently, he keeps staring deep into the art piece, hoping that it will:

“bring back a feeling that I can’t describe 

…. I hope I get it back”

this is unironically a 1:1 recreation 

I’m not sure what he’s referring to during this speech, is he talking about the feeling of kinship he (somehow) developed with Miss Blackwell? Has this new investigation failed to recreate that spark? 

Is he into gilfs? 

so.... clearly, the m o o d  issues homeboy was displaying during the last instalment haven't been getting better...  

What is actually going on with him tho: was it the stress caused by the impending life change of fatherhood all along? Was it the skepticism that met his documentaries? 

Talking of the devil, apparently people have been leaving insinuating comments on homeboy’s social media pages, noting a lack of information online regarding the Lightfoot murders, which causes him to go on a little (but much needed) tangent, on the sheer amount of cold cases that exist out there with absolutely no internet trail: that is a perfectly viable explanation, let’s move on.

It's finally time to delve back into the documenting and, looking for new material to fuel his investigation, homeboy has become buddies with a member of the local police force: the unforgettable Officer Ramey, who’s going to be with us for episodes and episodes to come.

This is very much a Jessica Fletcher/Sheriff Tupper dynamic, a “professional found dead in a ditch while amateur investigator finds the zodiac killer” situation.

Thanks to O. Ramey, homeboy gets ahold of the confession letter left by the killer, before committing suicide. 

“what authorities initially assumed to be a crossword puzzle” 

….  Authorities, please, it's clearly a cypher (very zodiac adjecent too).

After a questionable start, the authorities went on to give up and toss the note into an evidence box, cause who even cares about finding Susan anyway.   

C r i m i n a l l y, this puzzle has remained unsolved for the past 40 years... can you believe it.  

But now, there is a new Jessica in town: it’s time for homeboy to step in and crack the code  ask the internet to crack the code.

I mean that’s his super power, isn’t it. His incredible reach as a successful documentarian.

Okay but, I wish I was there on Facebook in 2019 to take part in the code cracking, so much fun.

 

While the community's chewing on the puzzle, homeboy’s starting his second trip to Florida. 

During the ride through the woods that preceed the Lightfoot house, he ponders on where the missing bodies could be, stating that:

"maybe, considering that those three bodies that they did find where in such a close proximity to the house, realistically I might be driving past somebody’s remains right now.

I take Lightfoot is kind of a lazy person, so I don’t think that he’d go too far out of his way to get rid of these bodies."

To which I say…… yeah those bodies where quite close to the house, but also: one was hanging from an overpass and another was tied to a buoy light in the lake (is that a lake?), so… I don’t think this guy is necessarily going to be lazy with his body disposal…

Like, I personally don’t think it’d be too far-fetched, to pose that he transported 10 bodies to an island deep inside a lake, for example, just throwing ideas out there.

Homeboy's current goal is to better the communication with the ghosts, and what's going to help with that, is the Ghost Whisperer Machine ᵀᴹ , aka the children’s toy he pimped-up.

I absolutely did not remember the logistics behind the contraption, apparently the buttons are activated not through pressure, but with temperature changes: taking advantage of the fact that ghosts, allegedly, induce a drastic lowering in T° around them.

On top of that, he's also setting up a bunch of new equipment: motion sensors, radios, windchimes...

This investigation is starting to look a bit expensive... how expensive you ask? 

Well, homeboy has actually dried up the shared savings account that held his and Terry’s vacation money… 7.000 dollars…   o o o o f

I’m sure that’s going to go down well with his unknowing, pregnant wife.   

The ghosts must've really missed their buddy, cause the activity starts really soon and they are very  aggressive and intense about it.  

The banging in the corridor is particularly incessant and, in a shocking twist, during the first night we actually get to see one of the ghosts for the first time. 

Really good sequence this one.

Since a ghostly appearance has finally been caught on camera, homeboy can reveal that he’s actually seen shady figures around the house before, but never mentioned them cause it would've been a baseless claim. 

Interestingly, glass is always involved when these spirits appear: could it be, that ghosts can be seen thanks to the refraction of transparent materials? 

Yes, yes it could.   

Needing a little breether from the house's atmosphere, the next day homeboy and pays a visit to the local cemetery, where he finds the graves of victims we've discussed so far and James Lightfoot’s, shoved at the far edge of the plot cause no one wants to be next to him.

When he comes back... he finds a shocking scene.

Front door: wide open 

Power: out  

Table: flipped

and, as the one camera that survived the power outage reveals: during the activity spike, a ghost’s finally tested the Ghost Whisperer Machine ᵀᴹ  .

Btw I love the detail of the wind chime moving cause the ghost is, theoretically, standing right underneath it.

 

Those are definitely letters

Since the message doesn’t make any sense, homeboy makes up his mind that the instrument must be faulty, which upsets him because:

“I built this thing to highlight my intelligence… It just makes me look like a fucking idiot” 

(no it doesn't don't you  e v e r  think that)

 

but is this   a c t u a l l y  a glitch tho? We’ll come back to that.

Soon, the banging (you guessed it) in the corridor returns at full force, causing homeboy to lose his temper and yell “WHAT IS THAT?”

I don’t know man, maybe go and check it out? You literally still haven’t investigated it. 

At this rate the ghost’s gonna get calluses on its hands with all that slamming… or on its forehead, cause that’s probably what’s hitting the wall at this point.

This movie is going by quite fast: we are already at the final night, and this one had me  g a g g e d , me and homeboy both ended up sleeping in the car.

And while the sun rising may give the illusion that worst is over… bestie… the real horror is about to come. 

Cause homeboy: calls Terry.  

He asks her to hop on a plane and join him in Florida, cause he’s too scared to be alone *.

To which she answers, by reminding him that the next day is her sister’s wedding…… 

which he  f o r g o t . 

And she is  a l s o  aware that he secretly spent all their vacation savings on his documentary gear.

A n d   she   a l s o  mentions how she's about to go into labor at any moment, and he's hours away. 

The phone call ends with Terry yelling “you are a terrible husband” and hanging up.

Well: this is a big wake up call for homeboy, who decides to cut the trip short and go home to his wife, who is 

“apparently gonna go into labor any day now”

who could've predicted that *. 

He isn’t in that much in a rush tho, so he still stays till night time, managing to capture a picture of a ghost reflected in a window. 

is that Susan or Sarah do you recon?

* (Did he low key forget that his wife was pregnant? Cause: is it a good idea to take a pregnant woman to a haunted house that's gonna scare her to death? Also, he tried to lure her in by telling her that she could go all out on the drinks, while sitting in the plane's first class too.... bro)

After the phonecall, he also expresses to the camera how disheartened he is by this latest Lightfoot escapade. 

He headed to Florida hoping that this time, the ghosts would finally tell him what it is that they want from him, but once again nothing was clearly communicated, causing him to wonder if he even has a role in the house at all.

By the way, I love how he drops tactical pauses all through this speech, basically going “well if you want to prove me wrong, ghosts, this would be the perfect time to do it! OPENLY COMMUNICATE!”.

 

... So, after just a couple of days, homeboy is leaving... 

But it’s not over, is it?

 

While editing the current documentary, homeboy decides to also look through the footage from the last investigation… and what does he find?

 

The Ghost Whisperer Machine ᵀᴹ  was not glitching. The ghosts have been trying to communicate this letter sequence since his last trip.

Why?

Cause it’s the key to solve the puzzle in Lightfoot’s suicide note….  S h i t.

Does this mean that the ghosts were looking at the killer as he was working on the encryption, and they memorised the code to break it? That’s kinda neat.

Does this also mean that, during the last documentary, the spirits already knew that homeboy was going to come by the puzzle? Or maybe they were just throwing anything they deemed useful at him… 

Either way: so what does the solved cypher say?

 

After a hike through the woods, homeboy finally finds what he’s been looking for, and... 

Well, what exactly does he do next, because…

We can see him standing over the “X that marks the spot” and then: cut to a body being dug up and a brush cleaning the dirt off the bones, and I’m like……… is   h e  doing that?

Because we can hear him calling the police in the background, but at no point does he show them arriving, and we know he’s not impartial to digging up human remains solo (*cough* the teeth *cough*), plus, would they allow him to film such invasive close ups of skull, in the midst of them doing their job, inside of what is, essentially, a crime scene?

Like…. I   d o n ‘ t   k n o w , but what I do know is: Susan Forrester has been found. 

That’s one body recovery under homeboy’s belt, 14 more to go!

… wait, 14 more to go tho? 

but I thought 8 victims had already been found, which would put us at 9   

18 – 9 = (lemme count my fingers)  8   

...

Okay, I think I know what happened: homeboy saw how incompetent the local police was and he figured they had miscounted the corpses by like, 6.   

Or maybe, since only 4 families have agreed to be in the documentary, he forgot that the rest of them existed… It happens.

   

 

Either way: there are more bodies to find!  

The search will continue in the next instalment, and there is already a new trace to follow: inside Susan’s burial they found a message in a bottle, and it shows a map! 

 

Well, all well what ends well, not only homeboy managed to connect with the ghosts well enough to finally understand what they needed from him, it would seem that that conversation with Terry was the wake-up call he needed to snap out of his slumber, and step-up in his marriage too….  L o v e l y.

I think the scares of this instalment were   p r o b a b l y   my favourites so far, and I enjoyed feeling like we were finally making progress and getting some resolutions, both in homeboy's personal life and in the investigation. 

That being said... As I mentioned in the beginning, going in I hardly had any memories of this episode, eventually, I started remembering some bits and pieces, but it was right at the end when a core memory hit me like a truck: the very daunting feeling I felt, when the sentence 

"there are allegedly 10 more bodies left to find " 

was uttered.  

I distinctly remember thinking "jesus christ I hope it's not gonna be one body per movie" because, while I was still interested in the storyline as there are, obviously, still a few lose ends that need wrapping (the fucking banging in the corridor), that felt like a concerning level of future commitment to it...  

And while that idea didn't come true, we still made it to at a point where the saga could rightfully switch names to "The Lightfoot Ghosts" (with all due respect to Miss Blackwell) and... well, I  t h i n k  I hope we move on to something else soon.

But for now, i'm still in it, and really looking forward to watching the next one!