Supernatural Horror Brooklyn 45 Wrestles With Good People Committing Terrible Sins

Ted Geoghegan conjures the ghosts of World War II

By Richard Whittaker, Fri., March 10, 2023

If there was a simple descriptor for Ted Geoghegan, it might be "period horror director." His first film, SXSW 2015 selection We Are Still Here, was an homage to late Seventies ghost stories; his second, Mohawk, was a gory wilderness thriller set in 1814. Now his third feature, SXSW Midnighter Brooklyn 45, is a chilling chamber piece set as the last echoes of World War II start to die away.

“War is hell, and it really does destroy people.” – Ted Geoghegan

So what about historical movies appeals to Geoghegan? Is it the cultural details? The set dressing? "I hate the present," he laughed. "I really just want to make movies that are not set in the present – not just because it makes it easier to avoid cellphones, but because I'm not a fan of the world that we're currently living in. I often hop back in time, not because I feel these times were any better than now, but they do offer some form of escapism."

In his story of five lifelong friends and war buddies (Anne Ramsay, Ron E. Rains, Jeremy Holm, Larry Fessenden, and Ezra Buzzington) caught up in a séance, Geoghegan was able to explore the fascination with the supernatural that was so common in the era – and to remind audiences that we are not that far removed from those superstitions. The spiritualism practiced in the film may have first exploded in 19th-century America, but it remained a powerful force throughout the 20th century. Aleister Crowley, the famous occultist, lived right through World War II, "but if you brought his name up with casual people, they'd think he was from the 1600s. Even his name evokes the sense of this Rasputinesque figure – and then Rasputin, he was barely a hundred years ago."

Yet he also wanted to tackle the cultural misapprehension so common today that postwar America "was this saccharine, beautiful sort of thing. They think of the sailor kissing the girl in Times Square. They don't think how, end of 1945 and all the way through 1946, it was record-high suicides in the United States and most of the world, because you had all of these soldiers coming back from the war, and had no ability to fit back into society."

This becomes part of Brooklyn 45's underlying theme of how good people contend with having done terrible things. That's part of what makes Brooklyn 45 his most personal film yet. His father, who worked with Ted on the script, was a U.S. Air Force veteran who was paralyzed in 1971 after a car accident and found himself in a Veterans Affairs hospital. "Everyone around him were paralyzed guys from the war," Geoghegan said, "and he would lay there at night surrounded by these men who were sobbing themselves to sleep." Without even being able to turn to see them, he became a confessor to these men who had done terrible things and saw themselves as monsters, and are buried in remorse, knowing that what they did was unforgivable. "I wanted to make a film that liberal pacifists like myself could watch and go, ‘Fuck, war is hell, and it really does destroy people.' But I also wanted people who are veterans, like my father and other people that I respect and admire, I want them to watch this film and go, ‘This is a nuanced look at what it's like returning from the front.'"