Many movies ask you to suspend your disbelief. Whether it's a story of superheroes or wizards or just science fiction that's a bit more fiction than science, the best films are able to absorb you in their story enough to keep you from asking too many questions about whether or not the story actually works. Such is the case for Blithe Spirit, the new film with Beauty and Beast star Dan Stevens, which hopefully will not have audiences asking how sex with ghosts actually works, because the actor admits he doesn't really know.
The film, based on the play by Noël Coward, tells the story of a man dealing with writer's block who enlists the help of a séance, and ends up bringing back the ghost of his dead first wife, who had been his muse. This is an issue for the man's current love. There is a scene where man and ghost get it on, at least as much as man and ghost can do so. Stevens recently spoke with Digital Spy and admitted that the story doesn't put a great deal of thought into exactly how that would work, and hopefully viewers won't worry about it too much either. Stevens explains...
The rules of paranormal rumpy-pumpy have yet to be defined, I think. I think it was the more in love they felt, the more corporeal she became. But yes, with any sort of genre like ghosts or time-travel, there's inevitably strange holes and loops. Hopefully that doesn't detract too much from the main, mad triangle of it all.
I think, first off, we can all agree that "paranormal rumpy-pumpy" should be a phrase that enters into normal usage. And honestly, the topic of sex with ghosts is something that comes up around here far more often than you'd probably guess. It's something that actually happens if you believe the right people. Like, a lot. Apparently being engaged to ghosts you have sex with is also a thing. Even celebrities have done it.
Of course, at the end of the day Blithe Spirit is a comedy and so it tends to get away with a little bit more for that reason alone. When you're intentionally not taking too many things seriously from the outset, it's a bit easier for audiences to let things go, so there probably won't be too many people too worried about the mechanics of ghost sex if the movie is funny enough. And one can certainly see a scene of a person having sex with a ghost played for laughs. Just what exactly would that look like as a third party observer?
Blithe Spirit is set to release in the U.K. this Friday, but domestic fans of ghost sex will have to wait until February.
