Califone came to Cornell Cinema Friday night with a new kind of ghost story. The Chicago-area band, headed by Tim Rutili, has been enjoying critical acclaim since their self-titled release in 1998. Their music combines folk, rock and pop with a distinctively experimental edge that can suck you in with the different angles and approaches to sound and song. For this performance, however, Califone was equally concerned with both their instruments and the screen behind them. Rutili wrote and directed the just-finished All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, a film following fortuneteller Zell (Angela Bettis) and her housemates, a collection of ghosts who date, play music and play charades together while waiting for passage into the next realm. While rosy at first, the living arrangement hits some snags when the Great Beyond starts beckoning the white-suited lodgers.

What set the performance apart from a normal screening, however, was Califone’s role in the movie. The band accompanies the film on what has become a tour, providing the movie’s soundtrack as it plays. The result is a beautiful presentation of both a concert and a movie, two stories and performances playing out simultaneously for one end. The theater was enthusiastic and brought a decent crowd, with plenty of fedoras and skinny jeans dappling the audience. The crowd knew how to prepare — furtive swigs of JB escaped the eyes of authority while a faint musty green cloud seemed to hang around the room.

Zell seems happy enough in the always-scintillating psychic business. She considers the ghosts her family, living in relative harmony with their musical ventures and mopey shufflings around the house. Tensions rise, however, when the nosy ghosts continually interrupt Zell’s limited attempts at romance and a normal life (they like to watch). When a divine light starts drawing the ghosts away, however, they find themselves trapped in the house as they try to leave. Needless to say, the spirits are pissed and start pulling all sorts of silly ghost pranks on Zell and destroying her house. Dramaaaa.

While advertised as a horror film, Funeral Singers could just as easily be marketed as melodrama or dark comedy. Rutili’s direction defies genre stereotypes. The camera is constantly moving and finding new angles, framing the characters, living and dead, from behind staircases, through cracked doors and from the foot of the bed. The method is used equally well to both artistic and emotional ends. Rutili knows how to scare us, but plays with the idea of fear by never defining the ghosts as good or bad instead of relying on basic thriller tactics. While Bettis steals the screen as Zell, most of the parts are ably acted. The ghosts, notably Moe (Wesley Walker) and Camille (Karol Kent), take full advantage of their time on camera, creating characters that we remember much more clearly than their importance to the plot would suggest.

The music, in turn, is so well synchronized with the film that it’s easy to forget the band is there. Thankfully, Califone was set up in front of and below the screen, allowing for a full dose of musical comprehension. These boys can pluck their doodads. Their sound was, of course, an extension of the movie — haunting, melodic harmonies and heavy authoritative drums made the spirits onscreen seem to sway in time with the sound. Like their film, the band ignored conventional labels and tags when creating the soundtrack. Their sound moved across a number of musical genres for the film, echoing the images onscreen and creating an artistic duality that was honestly pretty breathtaking. What few holes there were in the film (it was by no means a perfect movie) was compensated for by Califone’s stage presence and output. The band finished the night by playing a short half-hour set after the screening, providing the audience with a more barefaced look into their music. The album, released Oct. 6 and of the same name, has already gotten rave reviews on Pitchfork and AllMusic, with reviewers lauding the new, more “accessible” direction that Califone has taken.

But again, what really sets this album apart is the statement the band makes by releasing it with a film. This is a band that knows no musical limits and has survived — thrived — with a style devoid of gimmicks or Internet marketing. The film will be submitted to festivals for the 2010 season, but the CD is available now. Check out Califone’s All My Friends Are Funeral Singers and enjoy the next step in an already classic collection.