While the movie delves into the supernatural, it certainly didn’t make believers out of all those involved. Ford, for one, keeps his feet planted firmly in reality. “I don’t believe in ghosts or any of the rest of the paranormal,” he says. “I think we know so little about the power and capacity of the human mind and how it works and what the stimuli are that it is reacting to. The brain is not completely understood, so the power of suggestion, the power of the mind, are enough to cause people to manifest things that help them understand and explain what is going on around them.”

In What Lies Beneath, Ford plays a somewhat less admirable character than usual. With the exception of Regarding Henry, the 58-year-old star has steered clear of flawed characters. But, like Robert Redford in Indecent Proposal, Ford relished the opportunity to take the risk here. “I read the script and thought that it was great entertainment that had an interesting role for me to play that was different from people’s expectations of me,” he says. “I’m not worried whether or not people will accept me in this role because I think that the construction is so solid and successful that they will have to.”

Pfeiffer, meanwhile, is a little more open to the concept of the paranormal, claiming she has no reason not to be a believer even though she has had no first-hand experience. “I haven’t seen a ghost,” she declares, “but I would like to.”

She also claims that, although she has never made anything approaching a horror film before, she is an unabashed fan of the genre. “I was obsessed as a child with any Frankenstein or Dracula movies,” she says. “I loved vampire films and then, later on, The Birds, The Exorcist and the first Alien. I have always liked scary films.”

For those who have followed Pfeiffer’s career, this might seem like a contradiction, considering that she turned down the lead in The Silence of the Lambs, reportedly because of the horror nature of the script. “Untrue,” she counters. “I didn’t turn it down because it was scary. It was because, ultimately, Hannibal Lecter was the smartest person in it, the evilest person in the script, and I had a problem with that. At least Clarice could have won in the end. I didn’t like evil winning out.”