They All Went Away Film Analysis

The haunting and vivid double exposure scene at 19 minutes highlights the idea of two independent worlds, in which there is no direct influence on one another. The scene is an example of Death collecting dead people’s souls. At first, a transparent carriage stops in front of a house. In this house, a man just committed suicide. Death, a transparent figure, slowly climbs down his carriage and walks past the closed door. This depiction of a phantom walking directly through a physical image suggests that ghosts face no obstacles in the physical world. After death sees the dead body, he picks it up and puts it on the carriage. The interesting part is that the ‘body’ that he picks up is also transparent. The dead man’s biological body is still there. In other words, death takes the dead man’s soul from his body. In this process, nothing changes in the physical world; only in the spirit world is the person’s soul taken by Death. This vividly shows that in this film, soul and body are separate, and there exists
The supernatural world also cannot have control over the natural world. When phantom David sees his wife trying to kill herself and their two children. David knows this is happening, but he can do nothing to save her, and his wife can’t see or hear David. He then begs Death to help. Death says that he has “no power over the living!” (Sjöström, The Phantom Carriage). The transparent men or phantoms created by double exposure are in one world, and the living are in another parallel world, so they have no control over the other and cannot even impact one another. This idea of uncontrollable death and the supernatural exerts a sense of horror. Therefore, the director uses double exposure to depict the dead men as phantoms, which creates the atmosphere of horror and illustrates the supernatural