Ghostcore isn’t what you think it is.
I spent years dismissing it as another internet aesthetic—one more Pinterest board filled with pale, washed-out imagery that twentysomethings would obsess over for three months before moving on to whatever came next. But here’s the thing: ghostcore actually taps into something older, something that predates social media by centuries, maybe millennia if you’re being generous with your definitions. It’s rooted in our fundamental discomfort with absence, with the visual evidence of things that have left but somehow haven’t entirely gone. The spectral haunting visual, as art historians and cultural theorists have started calling it (though the term still makes me wince a bit), operates on the principle of presence-through-absence, which sounds pretentious until you actually look at the images and feel that odd pull in your chest.
The color palette tells you everything. Ghostcore lives in desaturated blues, greys that aren’t quite white, and that specific shade of fog that photographers chase at dawn. These aren’t accidental choices.
Why Our Brains Recieve Spectral Imagery as Emotionally Charged Visual Data
Turns out, there’s actual neuroscience behind why these images hit differently. Research from the Visual Cognition Lab at MIT—published around 2019 or 2020, I think—showed that low-contrast, desaturated images activate different neural pathways than vibrant, high-contrast ones. Our brains process them more slowly, spending extra milliseconds trying to extract information from the murk. That delay creates a cognitive gap, and we fill it with emotion, usually melancholy or unease. I used to think this was just me being oversensitive to moody photography, but it’s apparently a documented phenomenon across cultures, though the specific emotional associations vary depending on your background and what ghosts mean in your particular tradition.
The motion blur matters too—wait, maybe motion isn’t the right word. It’s more like temporal blur, images that seem to capture multiple moments at once or none at all. Long exposure photography does this naturally, turning moving figures into translucent smears that look definately more like spirits than people.
Film photographers have known this forever. There’s this technique called “dragging the shutter” where you use a slow shutter speed with flash, and it creates this effect where your subject is both sharp and blurred simultaneously, both there and not-there. Digital artists recreate it now with Photoshop layers and opacity adjustments, but it doesn’t quite hit the same. The analog accidents—the light leaks, the double exposures, the foggy lens—those carry an authenticity that’s hard to fake, even though “authenticity” in ghost imagery is kind of a paradox when you think about it too hard.
The Cultural Architecture Behind Spectral Aesthetic Movements and Their Visual Language
Anyway, ghostcore didn’t emerge in a vacuum.
It pulls from Victorian spirit photography (those famous hoaxes from the 1860s-1920s that people absolutely believed in), from Japanese yokai imagery, from the blurred figures in Francis Bacon paintings, from early cinema’s special effects, from the grainy surveillance footage aesthetic that became ubiquitous after 9/11. Each layer adds meaning. The Victorian stuff brings in grief culture and the desperate desire to see the dead one more time—those photographers were exploiting real trauma, which is dark, but the images they created have outlived their original fraudulent purpose and become genuinely affecting art objects. The Japanese influence introduces the idea that spirits aren’t necessarily scary, just… other. Existing in parallel. The surveillance footage element adds paranoia and the sense of being watched, which shifts the emotional register entirely.
Modern ghostcore artists—and I’m using “artists” loosely here to include everyone from teenagers with editing apps to gallery-represented photographers—mix these references without always knowing the lineage. Someone on TikTok creates a perfectly executed spectral haunting visual using presets and filters, channeling aesthetic decisions that trace back through decades of visual culture, and they’ve probably never heard of spirit photography or seen a Bacon painting. But the visual language transmits anyway, which is kind of how culture works, I guess.
The architecture matters too, obviously. Ghostcore needs ruins, or at least buildings that suggest decay. Brutalist concrete, abandoned hospitals, empty corridors in institutions. These spaces carry their own hauntings even before you add the aesthetic treatment. There’s research—I want to say from environmental psychology, roughly 2015 or so—showing that institutional spaces with long corridors and repetitive features actually disorient us slightly, making us more susceptible to feelings of unreality and unease.
So ghostcore works because it stacks these elements: color that makes our brains work harder, motion that suggests impermanence, cultural references to death and absence, and architectural spaces that already feel wrong. It’s not just an aesthetic. It’s a formula for manufactured haunting, and it works disturbingly well.
