I guess that makes sense in a way. I saw it more as "you are playing with death and upsetting the natural course of things, so you are being punished by these hauntings."

I don't know, but the theory kind of falls apart when it's not only the dead who appear in the hauntings (for Kevin Bacon's character & Will Baldwin's).

All of the hallucinations were compelled by unresolved feelings of guilt.

Joe’s ‘atonement’ was slightly different. He felt guilty for cheating on his fiancée with a creepy fetish involving secretly filming himself pumping multiple women.

In the busy chaos of normal life, it’s very easy to hurtle past uncomfortable emotions and keep them repressed. In the NDE all of that falls away, and suppressed guilt comes to the fore, haunting the Flatliners in their daily lives until they confront the source of their guilt.

Joe’s atonement is slightly different in that he doesn’t volunteer to come clean to his fiancée, but instead he gets caught out. Either way he DOES confront her, and loses her, at which point there is no longer any need for the visions.

It would have been funny is he was like ‘what the hell’ and tried it on with the hallucinations, but when he watched the video tapes back it was just him thrusting into thin air.