Incident In A Ghost Land — __exclusive__

Crystal Reed (Adult Beth), Anastasia Phillips (Adult Vera), Emilia Jones (Young Beth), Taylor Hickson (Young Vera), and Mylène Farmer (Pauline). Plot Summary

When the fantasy finally cracks, the film descends into a raw, terrifying final act. Beth must wake up, accept the monstrous reality (she is a helpless child), and find a way to outsmart her captors not with adult strength, but with childish imagination.

On their first night, two psychopathic intruders—a "Candy Truck Woman" and a "Fat Man"—break in and brutally attack the family.

Incident in a Ghost Land, directed by Pascal Laugier, is a polarizing masterpiece of modern horror that challenges the boundaries of the home invasion genre. Released in 2018, the film serves as a spiritual and thematic successor to Laugier’s previous cult classic, Martyrs. It is a grueling, visceral experience that blends brutal realism with a surreal, fractured narrative structure. Incident in a Ghost Land

Hickson sued the production company, and the case settled out of court. The incident cast a long shadow over the film’s release. Laugier was criticized for dangerous set conditions, echoing the industry’s historical negligence toward stunt safety.

The brilliance of the script lies in the rug pull. We eventually learn that Beth never actually left the house. The "successful life" she was living was a dissociative fantasy—a detailed defense mechanism her mind constructed to protect her from the horrific reality that she and her sister had been held captive and tortured for years by the intruders.

The story follows a mother, Pauline, and her two daughters, Beth and Vera, who inherit a house filled with antique dolls from a deceased aunt. On their first night in the home, they are brutally attacked by two intruders. The film then jumps forward sixteen years, showing Beth as a successful horror author who has processed the trauma through her writing, while Vera remains trapped in a state of perpetual psychosis at the scene of the crime. However, as the narrative unfolds, the audience is forced to question what is reality and what is a defensive hallucination born from extreme trauma. Crystal Reed (Adult Beth), Anastasia Phillips (Adult Vera),

The film offers one of the most harrowing depictions of dissociative identity disorder (DID) in horror cinema. Beth’s fantasy is not a plot device; it is a clinically accurate portrayal of how a child’s mind fragments to contain unspeakable trauma. Laugier forces the viewer to live inside that fantasy, only to rip the rug out and make us feel the vertigo of her betrayal by her own mind.

The story leaps forward 16 years. Beth has become a wildly successful horror author, turning her traumatic past into hit novels. Vera, on the other hand, never recovered and remains trapped in the old house with their mother, suffering from extreme, violent psychosis.

The film opens with a deceptive warmth. A widowed mother, Pauline (Mylène Farmer), arrives at a sprawling, isolated Victorian house she has inherited from her recently deceased aunt. With her are her two daughters: the rebellious, punk-rock teenager Beth (Emilia Jones), and the younger, more fragile and imaginative Vera (Taylor Hickson). On their first night, two psychopathic intruders—a "Candy

In it, I saw two versions of myself: one cowering, one grinning. The grinning one pressed her palm against the glass. "You remember," she said, "what Mother made us do to survive."

We're not locked in with the ghost.

Incident in a Ghostland (also known as ) is a 2018 psychological horror film directed by Pascal Laugier, known for his work on the extreme horror film

Art imitated life in the most tragic way during the filming of Incident in a Ghost Land . On the very first day of shooting a key scene involving a struggle with a window, actress Taylor Hickson (the young Vera) was asked to perform a stunt involving punching a glass pane. According to reports and a subsequent lawsuit, safety glass was not properly used, and the pane shattered, causing a deep laceration to Hickson’s face that required over 70 stitches and left permanent scarring.