It's easy to forget just how big of a deal Ghost was in 1990.
The genre-defying film—romance? drama? comedy? supernatural thriller? erotic pottery lesson?—floated into theaters 30 years ago, a modestly budgeted summer movie starring almost none of the actors the filmmakers originally envisioned.
And it was a raging success, one that made an Oscar winner out of Whoopi Goldberg, a huge star out of Demi Moore and a legend out of Patrick Swayze.
Not that Swayze wasn't a legend already due to several other perfectly cast roles, but it kept his streak alive.
We could go on, and probably star laughing and crying simultaneously while we're at it, but just as Ghost gets to the heart of the matter early on in its eventful two hours and seven minutes, we're going to jump right into connecting you with the beyond:
"Ghost was about living your life for the moment, because that's all you've got," Swayze later reflected, per Wendy Leigh's One Last Dance. "If you don't communicate with the people you love, you set yourself up for the incredible pain if you lose them. The reason I did Ghost was that it gave me a chance to believe that maybe I will get to tell my daddy I love him again."
No one on this earthly plane for sure can say whether that happened or not, but the legacy of Ghost is the lasting lesson that love—for a person, a place, a movie—sticks with us as long as we're around. Wherever we are.