Stir of Echoes

• Based on Richard Matheson's 1958 novel A Stir of Echoes; David Koepp adapted the screenplay himself, relocating the story from Los Angeles to Chicago and changing the protagonist's job from an aircraft-plant worker (in the book) to a telephone lineman.
• Released September 10, 1999 by Artisan Entertainment on a roughly $12 million budget, about five weeks after The Sixth Sense (August 6, 1999) — whose runaway success overshadowed it at the box office despite strong reviews.
• The hypnosis sequence follows real techniques used by professional hypnotists, and Koepp built Tom's vision (a movie theater slowly swallowed in black paint) with practical effects rather than CGI because he wanted audiences to actually see the hypnosis instead of cutting past it.
• The scene where a safety pin is pushed through Tom's hand during a hypnotic flashback isn't a visual effect — a stunt performer was paid to have the pin actually pushed through his hand on camera.
• Jennifer Morrison, later known for House, plays Samantha Kozac, the vanished teenage neighbor whose ghost haunts Tom and Jake — one of her earliest film roles.
• Filming took place on location in Chicago neighborhoods including Wicker Park, Brighton Park, and the Polish Village area, using a real house on Chicago's northwest side for the Witzky residence.

Hypnosis didn't create Tom's sensitivity. It stripped a block he'd carried since childhood, which explains why Jake is already receptive. The film quietly suggests the ability is hereditary and Tom's mind had been walling it off for decades.

The ghost of Samantha Kozac isn't haunting Tom so much as recruiting him. She needs a living instrument who can dig where she can't, and the film's logic implies she chose him specifically because his obsessive personality made him the perfect vessel for unfinished business.

The neighborhood itself functions as a collective guilt mechanism. The film confirms this isn't paranoid reading: multiple fathers on the block quietly helped cover up their sons' crime against Samantha for years, making the supernatural element less about one ghost and more about a community whose buried secret is literally demanding exhumation.

Blue-collar Chicago telephone lineman Tom Witzky gets hypnotized at a neighborhood party and wakes up with a shattered perception of reality. His kid Jake already talks to dead people, but now Dad's hearing the static too. A missing girl starts pushing Tom toward her buried truth, and the film treats working-class domesticity like a pressure cooker with a blown seal. Koepp shoots the supernatural as something that was always there, waiting for permission. The ghosts don't haunt the house. They haunt the guy who can suddenly perceive them.