Steven Soderbergh’s new film Presence this week heralds the return of a cinematic technique familiar to many fans of scary movies: the point-of-view shot. Viewing a scene through the eyes of an antagonist – such as the extended opening of John Carpenter’s Halloween – can be a chilling way of drawing viewers into the action, making us feel like we are both the watcher and being watched. When combined with sustained shots without an edit, we become eavesdroppers and voyeurs, lingering long past when the scene should have moved on. From Hitchcock’s Rear Window to Haneke’s Hidden, a camera that holds it gaze can fill us with a creeping sense of dread.

Presence uses both tricks, telling us a familiar story (a family with baggage move into a haunted house) in an unfamiliar way. Told from the perspective of a ghostly presence, we witness every scene via the point-of-view shot, sweeping between rooms to hear intimate conversations and hovering over characters as they sleep. As the ghost we watch through upstairs windows, peer round closet doors, and recede into corners while scenes unfold.

Presence feeds on our cultural intuitions and beliefs about ghostly entities (which are still, many suggest, more prevalent than many people might realise). But Soderbergh is also tapping into the mechanics of real-life experiences of “felt presence”, or the sensation that someone is close by without clear evidence. Far from just ghost stories, presences are a regular occurrence in sleep paralysis, bereavement and certain mental health and neurological conditions (such as schizophrenia, or Parkinson’s). Like other unusual experiences – such as seeing or hearing things that others do not – presences can occur frequently for many people without need for psychiatric care.

An obvious part of this is the feeling of being watched, and our fears of that happening. Despite viewing the story through the eyes of the ghost, we are thrown into the perspective of the family, as if we are the ones are under scrutiny and threat. In psychosis, feelings of presence are often difficult to disentangle from a wider paranoia that people are close by and surveilling you. In Parkinson’s this can occur as “Phantom Boarder” syndrome, in which people have a distinct feeling that someone is upstairs, or in another room. The fact that this occurs almost solely in homes and intimate spaces shows how entwined presences are with perceived spaces of safety. Here a feeling of presence is our most basic kind of burglar alarm, a signal of psychic boundaries that have somehow been transgressed.

The science of presence is quickly evolving, but one common theme in many experiences is the role of the body. Without always being fully aware, we all experience a “bodily” self via the combination of our senses. This includes proprioception, or our sense of where our body is in space. It has been known for some time that we can change these processes experimentally, tricking the brain into thinking rubber hands or even whole other bodies belong to us. Presences are no different: by disrupting how the brain combines its sensory information, scientists in Switzerland have successfully evoked the uncanny feeling of a presence in otherwise healthy people.

Ordinarily the sense of our own bodies remains undisturbed, but every night and every morning the transitions between sleeping and waking force our brains to renegotiate the bodily self. This is thought to be one reason why so many people with sleep paralysis experience unwanted, phantom intruders, although you don’t need full paralysis for uncanny things to happen around the boundaries of sleep. In Presence it is probably no accident that one of the first encounters with the ghost is when a character is sleeping. The story also emphasises the role of trauma in these experiences, which is described by one character as “opening a door” to a world beyond. Whether this happens via changes to our own bodies isn’t clear, but people who are exposed to adversity are much more likely to experience presences and other unusual phenomena.

Film-goers expecting jump scares and malevolent spirits from Presence may be disappointed, though. As the story progresses it becomes clear that the entity has a deep relation to all of the family, and its own tale to tell. This is a story of malevolence, but from unexpected quarters, and presence occurs alongside absence and distance: between husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister. In this way the film offers something much closer to David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, in which we follow the spirit of a dead husband and the impact his death has on his wife. In situations of bereavement, endurance and survival, these experiences can bring comfort and fortitude; a sense of protection. Because ultimately presences are not simply about fear, and what might be watching us from the dark. Instead, they embody the complex emotions and relationships that we all carry with us, all of the time.

• Prof Ben Alderson-Day is the author of Presence (Manchester University Press), available in paperback in March.

• Presence is released in UK and US cinemas on 24 January