I'm LOL at everyone proclaiming this being such a brilliant film. There's nothing original about this movie. It's Carnival of Souls with some Angel Heart thrown in. That's all.
It's not even a good twist. You don't create twists by flat out lying to the audience. You set them up by allowing audiences to assume what happened. This entire movie lies to you until the last scene when it tells you what really happened.
Carnival of Souls was influenced by previous movies with the idea of the protagonist not realizing that they were dead.
Btw, Carnival of Souls lies to the audience in the beginning as it shows us an alternative reality where the girl survives the car crash and then her subsequent Alt-life in Salt Lake City. The same plot device is used in Jacob's Ladder where we are first led to believe that he's living the life of a newly divorced Vietnam Vet postal worker, then there are hints of another life but we're led to believe that they're flashbacks of his wartime experience.
Angel Heart is a completely different story as it actually utilizes a supernatural premise of robbing someone else's soul to preserve a mortal body.
Both Jacob's Ladder and Carnival of Souls lend their story to older horror stories like that of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce.
You’re dumb and wrong. Yes, Jacob’s Ladder uses the death-dream motif that has appeared before but it has its own unique focus on the pain of denial, which transcends the purgatorial horror show. More about this here: https://moviechat.org/tt0099871/Jacobs-Ladder/639025b8d4a1f875ba38dac2/Why-Jacobss-Ladder-resonates
Secondly, the film doesn’t ‘lie’, it just doesn’t show all its cards from the start which creates mystery. The fact that you made the wrong assumptions is your fault, not the filmmakers’.
You are the reason that Hollywood only makes shit films now.