When the Spirits Met Expectation: The Journey of Surrounded by Spirits
Horror enthusiasts were super excited to discuss the trailer for Surrounded by Spirits online. The tagline offered “true hauntings in a real town” which was enough to get the attention of the global paranormal communities. It had all the elements to become a modern cult hit — a chilling suggestion, a pseudo-documentary element, and the “based on true events” mystique.
What happened after the release, however, was not the glorious product the marketing promised. Somewhere in the gap between anticipation and delivery, Surrounded by Spirits became its own ghost story. Surrounded by Spirits was fascinating, flawed, and strangely human, a ghost story behind all its supernatural assertions.
The Tease Before the Terror
Before Surrounded by Spirits hit the screens, the marketing campaign insisted on the uniqueness of this horror-documentary hybrid. Audiences were helped to envision six paranormal investigators who were to try to uncover the truth behind a series of unexplained phenomena in a town steeped in tragedy and horror. The promise was not just about ghosts, but their ghosts too.
Fans expected it to combine emotional sensitivity with realistic horror — a combination of The Conjuring and The Blair Witch Project but with elements of a docu-drama. The pre-release hype was based on the stories that the investigators had all suffered personal loss or had gone through experiences that were puzzling and inexplicable. The production smartly hinted that the border between “spiritual presence” and “human trauma” would become indistinct.
For months, horror channels on YouTube dissected every frame of every trailer. Why was one investigator crying in an empty hallway? Who were the shadowy figures glimpsed in the distance? Fans built extensive Reddit threads that were filled with speculation. The general consensus was that they were about to witness the next great paranormal experiment.
When the Lights Went Out
The film opens quietly, and with an almost tender tone. We meet six investigators driving into a rural town shrouded in mist and memory. The houses look half-abandoned; the locals whisper half-truths. Soon, we understand that Surrounded by Spirits isn’t interested in the big scares. It is about atmosphere. It is about the psychology of fear.
Every investigator carries a different persona. One is a skeptic, another is a true believer, overshadowed by a personal family tragedy, and a third appears to be in search of a different kind of redemption. This emotional range creates a strangely soulful rhythm to the film. The haunted town serves as a metaphorical mirror — what they uncover is not the dead, but what the living choose to ignore.
The story captures the emotional experience of the film using “evidence” in a playful manner — voices recorded, eerie silences, and a crying sound coming from an empty church. Even for the silences, the audience is emotionally engaged. In one extended sequence, a team member listens in silence to the recording of a supposed spirit whispering to the audience. The team member’s tears welling up come not from fright, but from recognition and the emotional power of the moment.
In the final act, the film foretells what the audience assumes. There are no ghostly apparitions. The film very clearly suggests the true hauntings are the ones we carry — guilt, memory and loss. It’s deeply unsettling, but in a profoundly philosophical way.
What Worked — And What Didn’t
With limited resources, most low-budget horror flicks are unable to capture an atmosphere, but Surrounded by Spirits pulls it off. The lighting, the exaggerated creaking of wooden floors, the air thick with ominous dread — everything gets under the audience’s skin. A choice was made, and the audience was split: lengthy periods of quiet discomfort to the point of tedium, and a cinema that forgoes predictable jump scares.
For a portion of them, the ritual boredom of dragging, slow cinema that allowed characters to walk about, hallways and corridors, and discuss the absence of malfunctioning tools was simply drag. The kind of horror that simply seeps under the skin and gets to you, and the kind that simply screams in your ear, are worlds apart. From a pacing standpoint, the film simply has a brutal drag.
The writers-turned-directors undoubtedly had an interesting and sensitive focus, and an emotional thread that the film simply lost, but they clearly had to abandon a piece of it and let it float the rest of the film. The film works most, and most interestingly, when its emotional focal point is most pronounced. It remains the most eerie and sincere in capturing the most visceral form of fear.
The People Behind the Fear
Surrounded by Spirits stands out from the bulk of horror films since it has real paranormal investigators as opposed to professional actors. They also happen to be the people typically on the other side of the camera. The challenges of incorporating real paranormal investigators into the narratives were a part of the filming locations.
Chris Ruppert and Tyler Transue, the director and producer, respectively, planned to create a film that would be a “true” paranormal movie. To such horror films, “true” implies the absence of artificial studio-created sound effects and over-the-top visuals. This approach suggested capturing the movie during the night at real locations that paranormal investigators were known to investigate. To such an ambitious, and ultimately, unsuccessful approach, there will always be ruined takes.
The filming crew would later say that during such all night shoots, it would be common to go beyond 4 am, resulting in a drop in temperature and an uncooperative crew. As such horror films, the actors were supposed to be in control, and that was especially the case during a scene in which a door was supposed to slam, which was instead left to happen spontaneously. The crew later explained the broken door and gust of wind as the reason for the “horrific” results.
Emotional challenges affect some cast members more than others. At least one investigator after filming admitted to having nightmares that replayed certain scenarios. Another cast member stated that the project re-opened measurable grief that had drawn them to paranormal work, a loss that had long since faded into the background. In that way, the film took on the quality of a self-exorcism.
When the film was released, expectations met a wall of mixed reviews. Some early viewers commented on the film’s eerie realism and emotional restraint. More mainstream audiences, however, had built up expectations based on lowbrow, high budget ghost stories, and accordingly dismissed the film as ‘too slow’ or ‘too quiet. ‘ The film’s IMDb score was low, but a cult following built around the film praised it as a poetic meditation on human loneliness, rather than a failed horror film.
The filmmakers took the feedback personally but in a constructive way. In interviews, the filmmakers referred to Surrounded by Spirits as learning curve and noted that it was a work of sincerity over spectacle. Some described it as brave, others as naive. Yet all critics, no matter how harsh, agreed on one aspect: it was unapologetically genuine.
Local controversies attached to the movie are also interesting. People from the community thought their background was leveraged for thrills. Some scenes were filmed without full knowledge of their haunted reputation, and this was left unaddressed. While the hostility was not part of formal interviews, there are hints about conflicts regarding location permissions and changes made in the editing suite.
The discrepancy in opinions regarding the “ghost evidence” hold back the narrative in other instances. Some “evidence” and scenes were intended to frame the narrative towards mystery, while others sought more drama. That may explain the disjointed feeling of the edited scenes.
The Aftertaste That Lingers
Surrounded by Spirits, at the end of the day, is a quirky touch in the world of horror and documentary not for one reason or another. It is a story not just about the haunted houses, but about the haunted people as well.
It was a pivotal moment for the cast and crew. Some abandoned the supernatural genre after this, while others embraced it, attending conventions and discussing ‘truth in ghost stories’.
It is ironic that, in the way of the spectral subjects, Surrounded by Spirits was never really gone. It remains, and in some ways it does so more strongly, in the streaming service corners and late-night conversations — a quiet, sorrowful, and ultimately disappointing film that claimed to induce terror.