A good love story can transcend genre, and this weekend in movies on Paramount+, you can check out the supernatural romance The In Between. The movie starring Joey King (who's right off of wrapping up The Kissing Booth trilogy) and West Side Story’s Kyle Allen tells a young love affair that becomes stuck between the living and the dead. CinemaBlend spoke to the filmmakers about the influences for the new release, and yes, Ghost is involved.
When speaking with the film’s writer Marc Klein, who previously wrote Serendipity and A Good Year in the early 2000s, he shared how he arrived at creating a coming-of-age romance cross paths with contacting the supernatural. In his words:
When I was a teenager, I loved the movie Ghost. I never stopped thinking about that movie, it made me cry in the theater. I was on a date I think and I was weeping in the theater, which was a little bit embarrassing, but I love weepy kind of movies. So there was always a part of me that wanted to be in that supernatural love story space and try to find a way to bring that to the next generation because they haven’t had anything like that in a while. The other thing was personal. I had lost someone who I was close to in life, they died very tragically and quickly, she was very young and in the days subsequent to her death, I believe she was trying to reach out to me.
When 1990’s Ghost came out, it was a huge success and it remains an iconic part of cinematic history today. I mean, most of us can’t even talk about taking a pottery class or hear the song “Unchained Melody” without referencing it. For Marc Klein, Ghost was important to him upon its initial release and has remained so for many years. The In Between writer continued to CinemaBlend:
I had these very strange, spine-tingling experiences and it started me on a journey about afterlife and how certain cultures believe what the afterlife is, after death communication, all these things and that started the ball rolling in terms of the core idea of what would happen if somebody died and were reaching out to me from beyond. Could I meet with them? Could I reinteract with them in some way? That was the core kernel of the idea that became the book and the movie.
On a personal note, Marc Klein lost someone close to him, and it led him to delving into the world of the supernatural, especially in terms of how people speak to the dead or perceive the afterlife. Amidst his own journey with these big ideas, he conceptualized The In Between. In the movie, Joey King and Kyle Allen’s Tessa and Skylar are teens who fall in love, but unfortunately a car accident ends in tragedy for Tessa and she attempts to reconnect with him from the “in between.”
Given The In Between has deep roots with Ghost, director Arie Posin shared with us the key references to the 1990 classic they put in the movie. He explained:
There’s a Ghost movie poster up at the theater, we wanted to give a little nod in that way. Also, the song. Ghost made famous again that Righteous Brothers song which had been about 30 years before Ghost came out. So that was an idea we wanted to bring forward in our movie, so we were kind of looking for what that song was thirty years ago and how we came to the INXS song.
Ghost became synonymous with The Righteous Brothers’ version of “Unchained Melody,” which was recorded in 1965 by the group after the song was previously written for the 1955 movie Unchained. Ghost popularized the oldie in the ‘90s, so when it came to picking a signature song for The In Between, the filmmakers decided to do a nod to this by picking another older tune. The song they chose was 1988 INXS song “Never Tear Us Apart.”
The In Between reviews are in, and the movie has received mixed ratings from critics. You can check out the movie now with a Paramount+ subscription. Check back here on CinemaBlend for more exclusive interviews about upcoming movies.
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