Actor Joshua Jackson loves horror movies; otherwise he wouldn't have put himself in front of the lens for "Shutter." But in doing so, he wanted it to be in a slice of the subgenre that gets under your skin, rather than something that's in your face with guts and gore.

"Most of the time when you walk out of the theater after one of those movies, you leave it in the theater. But a movie like 'Shutter,' which is more creepy than gory, it makes that walk to the car really uncomfortable," Jackson said with an almost diabolical laugh in a recent @ The Movies interview.

In "Shutter," which opens in theaters Friday, Jackson and Rachael Taylor star as Ben and Jane Shaw, a newly married couple who move to Japan seeking job opportunities in fashion photography. But when Ben and Jane discover ghostly images following a tragic accident and begin to investigate the phenomena of spirit photography, they soon learn that some mysteries are better left unsolved.

While not every audience member has had a ghostly encounter, Jackson expects the material in "Shutter" to resonate nonetheless.

"When you deal with the supernatural, you have a chance to really connect with people, because everybody has that one experience in their life that's not quite explainable," Jackson said. "The supernatural is creepy and it's universal, and for us in the film, you put in an extra hook, which is spirit photography.

"Some people in the Western world know about it, but it's very much a part of the Eastern culture as I found out filming in Tokyo," added the former "Dawson's Creek" star. "The great hook makes you go, 'What if there are spirits and energy around us that are trying to communicate with us, for better or worse?'"

But filming in Japan didn't just give Jackson a chance to travel and live abroad for a couple months. It afforded him the unique opportunity to see horror movies through the lenses of Japanese horror filmmakers, who bring a decidedly different tone to the genre -- a tone that he believes is rooted in the cultural history of the country.

"The Japanese culture in particular is still very regimented. There are rules to engage in their society that we in the last 150 years in the West have spent breaking down," Jackson observed. "It's to the point now where you can show up to work in sweat pants and say, 'Yo' to your boss. That doesn't fly there. So, it's interesting to see the approach from a storytelling standpoint of a Japanese director and crew, and where they think the weight in the story lies -- as opposed to where we would assume it lies."

As a result, Jackson said, the story told through the lens of a director like "Shutter's" Masayuki Ochiai is more drawn out and has a "textural way of freaking people out, as opposed to the more gung-ho Western way of just blowing everybody up."

Ultimately, Jackson said, approaching the story from Ochiai's unique perspective was his "greatest difficulty," yet his "greatest joy."

"We had many conversations on the set where you're trying to parse out what something means," enthused the 29-year-old actor. "With movies like this, the fun of performing them is that you get to lay out false tracks for audiences and red herrings that aren't supposed to pay off: Halfway through the film you think you have it all figured out, three-quarters of the way it changes again, and at the end you find out that it was something entirely different."

Of course, doing a film like "Shutter" gives Jackson the exposure to an area of the supernatural that he normally might not get in real life. And while the actor considers himself a skeptic of publicized instances of spirit phenomena where he feels other motivations are at work, he said working on the film reaffirms his feelings that there is something more out there than we know about.

What that something is, exactly, is the question that continues to fascinate him.

"I find it just as foolish for somebody to say that something absolutely does exist as to say that it absolutely doesn't exist," Jackson pondered. "The reality is that we don't know and we live in a world of incomplete knowledge -- the 'what if?' question is so interesting to me. I'm totally open to the idea that the phenomena can and probably does exist."

In fact, Jackson believes that there are "many things outside the realm of our understanding taking place around us all the time."

"If we only had the eyes to see it, then it'll be there," Jackson said. "That's what 'Shutter' shows us, that the eyes to see it are there, and they're communicating to us through film."

And while he's never personally had a ghostly image show up in photographs, Jackson said that he's seen orbs in photographs "all over the place." And for others who see the same, there is the opportunity to examine just what those orbs mean, if your mind allows you to go there.

"Frankly, most of our brains refuse to accept the information, so we just sort of push it off to the side because it's uncomfortable to have to think about," Jackson said. "But it's happening around us all of the time. If we want to interpret it on the other side, then it's just as reasonable for me to think that there are energies beyond our comprehension as there are dust motes in every single lens on the face of the planet."

Just as he hasn't seen any images of spirits in his photographs, Jackson hasn't had any ghostly encounters in person, either. But that's not to say that he hasn't had the feeling that maybe there was some sort of presence around him.

"I've instances in my personal life where I've had moments of jeopardy, like being on a camping trip and doing something stupid, yet come out relatively unscathed," Jackson said. "I've had near drowning experiences and things like that, where it's just as possible that the phenomena was taking place inside of my brain. But the feeling certainly was of somebody else looking out for me. That being said, I'll never know. There's no way for me to say whether it was one or the other."