I argue that this is a comment on how the past affects the present. In one of the final scenes, Alex can speak directly to a single spirit instead of the amalgamation of every soul in doing so, she lets the spirits know that they are remembered and do not need to return. The ghosts’ faulty logic can be exploited if the player collects researcher Maggie Adler’s notes from around the island, which prove that the people of the USS Kanaloa were not forgotten. In fact, if the teenagers are possessed, it is implied that they will be erased and overwritten even more thoroughly than the ghosts, though their bodies will still exist. These beings feel that they deserve to live again because everyone forgot them, and it doesn’t matter to them that possessing the main character, Alex, and her friends will prevent the teenagers from living full lives. Their child-like tendencies emphasize their selfishness. Their sudden disappearance, inability to escape, and direct contact with time itself has both made them angry and caused a mental regression so they function and process information like children instead of the adults they were on the submarine. The ghosts are the spirits that were aboard the submarine USS Kanaloa when it disappeared into an interdimensional pocket in time. In Oxenfree, the possessors take the more traditional form of ghosts. Possession and the use of technology to break free from that possession represent our existential fears of repeating past mistakes and being erased from history.

In both stories, the use of technology creates a record of the present and a connection to past victims that forces the audience to consider our own existence and impact on the world. Chris’s life plans are thrown into chaos when he discovers that his girlfriend and her family replace the minds of Black people with brains of rich white people. Get Out follows a young Black artist as he meets his white girlfriend’s family. Oxenfree is about a group of teenagers who unwittingly open a portal to another dimension using a radio and must face a group of ghosts that want to possess them and get a second chance at life.

Two stories, the video game Oxenfree and the film Get Out, both explore what it means to be possessed by other people. Although the first thought someone has when they hear “possession” might be “demonic,” contemporary horror has expanded the definition of possession to include ghosts and other people.

Oxenfree game pictures