Modern Ghost Melodramas: 'What Lies Beneath' 9789048529346

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Three Major Predecessors
3. The Fallow Years: An Assortment of Ghosts
Seminal Films
4. Ghosts in the City
5. Ghosts in the Machine
6. Schoolgirl Angst
7. Childhood Abuse
Evolution of the cycle
8. Generic Developments 1: Messages from the Dead
9. Spain and History 1: Politics and War
10. Hollywood Reinflections
11. Asian Variations
12. Generic Developments 2: Ghosts in the Woman’s Film
13. Ghosts and Institutions 1: South Korea
14. Ghosts and Institutions 2: The West
15. National Variations
16. Anatomy of the Ghost Melodrama
17. Spain and History 2: The Franco Legacy and the Catholic Church
18. The Return of the British Ghost Film
19. Recent US developments and conclusion
Filmography
Illustrations
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Modern Ghost Melodramas

Modern Ghost Melodramas ‘What Lies Beneath’

Michael Walker

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustrations: (front) Daniel Radcliffe in The Woman In Black (2011). Still from the Kobal Collection; (back) frame of Riona Hazuki in Sakebi (2006). Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 94 6298 016 7 e-isbn 978 90 4852 934 6 doi 10.5117/9789462980167 nur 670 © M. Walker / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Contents Acknowledgments 9 1. Introduction The Gothic Tradition Freud and Motifs

11 21 26

2. Three Major Predecessors The Haunted House The Changeling (Peter Medak, Canada, 1979) The Malevolent Hotel The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, GB, 1980) The Avenging Ghost Ghost Story (John Irvin, US, 1981)

37

3. The Fallow Years: An Assortment of Ghosts Bringing Back the Past Lady in White (Frank LaLoggia, US, 1988) and Ijintachi tono natsu/The Discarnates (Nobuhiko Obayashi, Japan, 1988) Lady in White The Discarnates Benevolent Ghosts Ghost (Jerry Zucker, US, 1990) Always (Steven Spielberg, US, 1989) The Seductive Revenant Haunted (Lewis Gilbert, UK/ US, 1995)

37 43 43 54 54 65 65 65 66 71 78 78 81 84 84

Seminal Films 4. Ghosts in the City A Ghost World The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, US, 1999) Working-class Tensions Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, US, 1999)

95 95 104 104

5. Ghosts in the Machine Ringu/Ring (Hideo Nakata, Japan, 1998) and Ringu 2/Ring 2 (Nakata, Japan, 1999) Ringu 2 6. Schoolgirl Angst Kokkuri-san/Kokkuri (Takahisa Zeze, Japan, 1997) Memento Mori (Kim Tae-yong & Min Kyu-dong, South Korea, 1999) 7. Childhood Abuse In Dreams (Neil Jordan, US, 1998) and The Dark (John Fawcett, UK/Germany, 2005) The Haunting (Jan de Bont, US, 1999)

111 111 121 131 131 138 149 149 164

Evolution of the cycle 8. Generic Developments 1: Messages from the Dead A Ghost Movie Thriller What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, US, 2000) Southern Gothic The Gift (Sam Raimi, US, 2000) Bereaved Husband Dragonfly (Tom Shadyac, US/Germany, 2002)

169 169 169 177 177 181 181

9. Spain and History 1: Politics and War 187 El espinazo del diablo/ The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, Spain/Mexico, 2001) 187 The Others/Los otros (Alejandro Amenábar, Spain/ US, 2001) 193 10. Hollywood Reinflections The Ring (Gore Verbinski 2002) and The Ring Two (Hideo Nakata 2005) The Ring Two Male Melodrama Below (David Twohy, 2002)

203

11. Asian Variations Pon/Phone (Ahn Byung-ki, South Korea, 2002)

221 221

203 213 217 217

Ju-on (Takashi Shimizu, Japan, 2002) and The Grudge (Takashi 229 Shimizu, US, 2004) The Grudge 232 Chakushin ari/One Missed Call (Takashi Miike, Japan, 2004)235

12. Generic Developments 2: Ghosts in the Woman’s Film Honogurai mizu no soko kara/Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, Japan, 2002) Dark Water (Walter Salles, US, 2005) Half Light (Craig Rosenberg, Germany/US, 2006) The Marsh (Jordan Barker, Canada/ US, 2006) 13. Ghosts and Institutions 1: South Korea The School The Yeogo goedam films Whispering Corridors (Park Ki-hyeong 1998) Voice (Choi Equan 2005) A Blood Pledge (Lee Jong-yong 2009) The Department Store Geoul sokeru/Into the Mirror (Kim Sung-ho 2003) 14. Ghosts and Institutions 2: The West The Hospital Riget/The Kingdom (4-part TV series) (Lars von Trier & Morten Arnfred, Denmark, 1994) Fragile/Frágiles (Jaume Balagueró, Spain/UK, 2005) The Prison Gothika (Mathieu Kassovitz, US, 2003)

247 247 254 255 257 261 261 263 268 275 277 277 287 288 292 299 299

15. National Variations 309 Hong Kong Inner Senses (Lo Chi-leung 2002) 309 India 316 Bhoot/Ghost (Ram Gopal Varma, 2003) 316 France 322 Histoire de Marie et Julien (Jacques Rivette 2003) 322 Italy: Three Films 328 Non ti muovere/ Don’t Move (Sergio Castellitto, Italy/Spain/ UK, 2004) 328

L’a more ritorna (Sergio Rubini 2004) Ovunque sei (Michele Placido 2004)

329 330

16. Anatomy of the Ghost Melodrama Themes and Motifs Ryeong/The Ghost/Dead Friend (Kim Tae-kyoung, South Korea, 2004) Narrative structure Sakebi/Retribution (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2006)

337 348 348

17. Spain and History 2: The Franco Legacy and the Catholic Church Lost Children El orfanato/The Orphanage (J.A. Bayona 2006) Unwilling Martyrs No-Do/ The Haunting/ The Beckoning (Elio Quiroga 2009).

363 363 363 375 375

18. The Return of the British Ghost Film The Disappeared (Johnny Kevorkian, UK, 2008) Genova (Michael Winterbottom, UK/Cayman Islands, 2008) The Awakening (Nick Murphy, UK/France, 2011) The Woman in Black The Woman in Black (Herbert Wise, TVM, 1989) The Woman in Black (James Watkins, UK/US/Canada/ Sweden, 2011) The Secret of Crickley Hall (Joe Ahearne 2012, 3-part BBC TV mini-series)

383 383 384 386 395 396

337 337

398 405

19. Recent US developments and conclusion 415 Return to Haunted-house Horror 415 Broken Families and Mourning 418 Conclusion 425 Filmography 439 Illustrations 445 Bibliography 447 Index 453



Acknowledgments

The ideas in this book initially took shape in an essay for a monograph. The monograph was not published, but I would like first to thank its editors at the time, Douglas Pye and John Gibbs, for their helpful and creative feedback. During the long process of expanding the material into a book, I was grateful for a range of specialist assistance. John Oliver suggested many film titles that I might otherwise have overlooked and answered a number of my more esoteric questions on film production. Daniel Chan and David Chan provided useful cultural and historical background on Hong Kong. Ju Wujung was particularly helpful in answering my questions about the South Korean education system and in elucidating that country’s cultural background. He also advised me on the tricky issue of transliterating Korean names into English. I would like to thank Alex Jacoby in particular for help with the Japanese films. We watched many of the films together, and he not only provided stimulating feedback on my drafts, but also clarified linguistic and cultural nuances. Sawako Ogawa, too, answered questions about Japanese culture. John Pattison advised me about epidemiology; I have made use of Keith Withall’s thoughts on serial killer movies. Both Bob Quaif and the late Derek Owen assisted me with musical queries; I am also grateful for research assistance from Sheldon Hall, Peter Evans and James Bell. As readers for Amsterdam University Press, Edward Gallafent and Roger Luckhurst proved exceptionally helpful, making suggestions that enabled me to improve the book markedly at a late stage. Finally, I am again grateful above all to Leighton Grist. As with Hitchcock’s Motifs, he read and made thoughtful suggestions on just about everything I wrote, in many cases helping substantially to improve the original drafts. I would like to dedicate this book to him.

1.

Introduction

Since the late twentieth century, the scary ghost film has experienced a major revival, with films from a number of different countries collectively creating a rich international cycle of ghost movies. This book looks at the cycle generically, but within a different framework from that usually adopted towards such films. Traditionally, ghost movies have been placed within two broad categories, depending on the nature of the ghost. In one group are films featuring benevolent or comedy ghosts, e.g. Ghost (Jerry Zucker 1990) or High Spirits (Neil Jordan 1988); in the other, those with scary ghosts, e.g. The Changeling (Peter Medak 1979) and The Shining (Stanley Kubrick 1980). English-language films in the first category have already been discussed, in Katherine A. Fowkes’s Giving up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films (1998). This book concentrates on the second category, which is now the dominant form of the ghost movie. My argument is that within this category there are again different types of ghost, and different types of movie. I believe that the common tendency to place all scary ghost movies in the horror genre is misguided, and the contemporary cycle can be used to demonstrate this. Indeed, I would maintain that key works in the cycle – e.g. The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan 1999), The Others (Alejandro Amenábar 2001) and El orfanato/ The Orphanage (J.A. Bayona 2006) – are not really horror f ilms at all. They are more productively viewed as ghost melodramas. This is not to suggest that no recent ghost movies are horror films; Ringu (Hideo Nakata 1998), Ringu 2 (Nakata 1999) and their spin-offs fit readily into the horror genre. That is because Sadako, the ghost girl in these films, is in effect a monster, with a supernatural ability to kill, and a similar power is found in her successors. But this is not the case with the ghosts in most of the films discussed in this book. The ghosts may well be aggressive and demanding, and some indeed seek to kill, but they are rarely monstrous. The distinction between a ghost melodrama and a ghost horror film is nevertheless not clear-cut, and is perhaps best seen as a question of tendencies within a given work. As will be argued in detail in the chapters discussing these films, even in the horror strand, melodrama is still relevant to the structure of the films. For example, the film of Ringu has markedly more melodramatic elements than the novel on which it was based. Before elaborating on this, it would be useful to look briefly at the history of the scary ghost film in Japanese and Western cinema.

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Scary or eerie ghost movies have long been popular in Japan. Few from the pre-World-War-II years have been shown in the West, but famous postwar examples include Ugetsu monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi 1953), with its seductive ghost princess, The Ghost of Kasane Swamp (Nobuo Nakagawa 1957), The Mansion of the Ghost Cat (Nakagawa 1958), Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi 1964), Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo 1968) and the numerous versions of The Ghost Story of Yotsuya, filmed around eight times between 1956 and 1981, the most well-known versions directed by Nakagawa in 1959 and Shiro Toyoda in 1965. A number of these period films are considered in some detail by Colette Balmain in Introduction to Japanese Horror Film (2008). Adapted mostly from traditional ghost stories and kabuki plays, the films typically feature the ghosts of women who suffered at the hands of men returning to enact revenge. Although there are some male ghosts – in the ‘Hoichi the Earless’ episode of Kwaidan; in Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima 1976) – they are markedly less common and indeed less compelling than the female ghosts. In The Ghost Story of Yotsuya, the protagonist murders so many people it is not surprising that he is haunted by the ghost of a male victim as well as that of his wife, but it is the latter who makes the more dramatic appearances, befuddling and terrifying the protagonist to the extent that he mistakenly slaughters his second wife on their wedding night. In Kuroneko, a mother and daughter-in-law who were raped and murdered by samurai take revenge by appearing as ghosts and luring samurai to their deaths. Such ghosts may be seen ideologically as expressing male anxieties about the many injustices perpetuated on women. By contrast, until relatively recently, genuinely frightening ghosts were a rarity in Western cinema – at least in Hollywood and Britain. Classical Hollywood seems to have preferred comedy ghost films such as Topper (Norman Z. McLeod 1937) or The Ghost Breakers (George Marshall 1940) to more frightening ones such as The Uninvited (Lewis Allen 1944). Moreover, excellent though The Uninvited is, it ultimately mocks its scary ghost, as if uneasy about taking ghosts too seriously. It was much the same in Britain: the ghosts in The Halfway House (Basil Dearden 1944) are entirely amiable; the ghost woman in A Place of One’s Own (Bernard Knowles 1945) is frightening, but the film limits her power to a possession which is rather too neatly remedied. The first genuinely frightening English-language ghost movies were probably The Innocents (Jack Clayton, GB, 1961), adapted from Henry James’s famous novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Haunting (Robert Wise 1963), adapted from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill

Introduc tion

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House (1960). Although The Haunting was a Hollywood production, both films were made in England. Another relevant film of this era was the US B-movie Carnival of Souls (Heck Harvey 1962) which has a highly effective spooky atmosphere. But this little cluster was not followed by another cluster of scary ghost films until the late 1970s: The Fog (John Carpenter 1979), The Changeling, The Shining and Ghost Story (John Irvin 1981). (For a more complete list, see Newman 2011: 224-230). The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg 1979), is a marginal example – it converts a haunted-house narrative into a story of possession. The detailed discussion of individual films in the chapters that follow begins with this second cluster, but excludes The Fog. This omission may be clarified by reference to horror theory. A useful working definition of horror, which builds on earlier definitions, has been provided by Philip J. Nickel: ‘Horror has two central elements: (1) an appearance of the evil supernatural or of the monstrous (this includes the psychopath who kills monstrously); and (2) the intentional elicitation of dread, visceral disgust, fear or startlement in the spectator or reader’ (2010: 15). I would modify this definition to exclude fear and (the neologism) startlement, which may well occur in any number of thrillers and disaster movies. As Noël Carroll has observed, the monster needs to be both threatening and impure – a threat ‘merely’ generates fear, whereas ‘horror requires evaluation both in terms of threat and disgust’ (1990: 28). Otherwise, Nickel’s definition is a productive starting point. The ghosts in The Fog are of men drowned at sea by wreckers who sought their gold. This occurred a hundred years ago, and the ghosts are now returning to Antonio Bay, the California town where the wreckers lived, to enact revenge. But, embodying both the ‘evil supernatural’ and ‘the monstrous’, the ghosts are no more than supernatural killing machines. By contrast, in The Shining, although we might say that the hotel embodies the evil supernatural and Jack (Jack Nicholson) becomes a monster, the horror elements occur within the context of a family melodrama. Moreover, the ghosts encountered by Jack may also be seen as projections of his inner world. This is a radically different sort of ghost, and a more generically complex type of movie. In ‘Melodrama and the American Cinema’ (Walker 1982a), I argue that melodrama may be seen as a structure that operates across the Hollywood genres. In Beyond Genre, Deborah Thomas makes a similar point, referring to melodrama as a mode (2000: 11). I go on to distinguish between two broad types of melodrama: male-centred action melodramas and ‘melodramas of passion’ (1982a: 16-18). It is the latter which are usually implied when

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critics talk about film melodrama. Encompassing such genres as the family melodrama, the small-town melodrama, the woman’s film and the romantic melodrama, in these films, ‘the concern is not with the external dynamic of action but with internal traumas of passion (the emotions), audience involvement being held and articulated through […] intense personal feelings and relationships’ (17). As has been illustrated in numerous articles on film melodrama, beginning with Thomas Elsaesser’s seminal ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’ (1972), a psychoanalytical approach to such films is particularly productive. It is likewise the approach I shall adopt to the films discussed in this book. It will be apparent that many horror films are also melodramas. However, I am assuming that, in a given work, the ‘melodrama’ elements can be broadly distinguished from the ‘horror’ elements. Tom Gunning has argued that the modern horror film may be seen as an extension of melodrama, a development that began with the Grand Guignol plays of André de Lorde, with their focus on shock and sensational excess (Gunning 1994). I would prefer to keep the two forms, horror and melodrama, separate, even though both may well occur in the same film. As Robin Wood points out in ‘Ideology, Genre, Auteur’ (1977), genres are rarely discrete: there is a constant intermingling. This is particularly true of ghost stories, which have been inserted into a wide range of Hollywood genres. A general distinction may nevertheless be drawn between two broad types of scary ghost movie, a distinction deriving from the nature of the ghost. It is only occasionally that the ghosts are monstrous, as in The Fog, or like Sadako in the Ringu films. There are ghosts who kill, but most are seeking revenge, a familiar motivation in many genres. Others simply want justice. There are even some ghosts that are tragic rather than frightening, in that they wish no-one any harm, but bear testament to a loss, as in Rouge (Stanley Kwan, Hong Kong, 1987). In other examples, such as in The Shining, the ghosts imply the dark side of the protagonist(s). In all the films where the ghosts are not monstrous, melodrama seems the appropriate generic mode. A succinct definition of melodrama has been offered by Steve Neale: ‘the eruption of (hetero)sexual desire into an already firmly established social order’ (1980: 22). For ghost melodramas, this requires amendment. It is only occasionally in these films that sex figures as a disruptive force. More often, sex is replaced by a preoccupation with death. Many of the films are haunted by the death drive. In his excellent monograph, Dark places: the haunted house in film, Barry Curtis has also noted a connection between ghost movies and melodrama:

Introduc tion

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‘Such [haunted house] films are closely related to melodramas. They are often about tragic families and the influence of the past on the present’ (2008: 16). Furthermore, ‘“Haunted” fictions often seek to restore to attention something – such as injustice, neglect, murder or slavery – that is absent from the record. In this respect these films are often on the side of the overlooked and demand that understanding and reparations are their due’ (24). This alludes to a type of melodrama that may be traced through the films of D.W. Griffith back to nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama: stories about those who have been victimised and who seek justice. What is meant by a ghost can vary from culture to culture, and so I would like to note some basic criteria. In general, ghosts are characters who have died and come back to life in a form similar to their appearance before death. I have included one film in which the equivalent figure has not, in fact, died (In Dreams, Neil Jordan 1998), but the film follows the pattern of a ghost melodrama, and so helps clarify key features of the cycle. Equally, I have excluded certain horror films with monsters that have come back from the dead, such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven 1984) and its successors, and Candyman (Bernard Rose 1992) and its successor. Because Freddie Krueger (Robert Englund) and Candyman (Tony Todd), like the ghosts in The Fog, are essentially just monstrous killing machines, they are outside my concerns here. There are further distinctions. In his seminal essay on the American horror film, Robin Wood characterises the monster as ‘the return of the repressed’, the repressed referring to sexual energies which ‘civilisation’ must disavow (Wood 1979: 15). Ghosts may likewise be seen as a manifestation of the return of the repressed, but within a different framework. For the monster, the context is the culture, and the return of the repressed that it embodies is primarily social. By contrast, a ghost usually embodies a personal return of the repressed. As in The Fog, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Candyman, monsters typically threaten the community; ghosts individuals or small groups. Hence the focus in these films on family relationships and small-scale communities. Here, too, Sadako is more like a monster – she threatens the world. In addition, the repressed in scary ghost films is only rarely to do with sexuality. Just as Steve Neale’s formulation for melodrama requires amendment for these films, so does Robin Wood’s formulation for horror – again the anxieties registered are predominantly to do with death. Nevertheless, there is one type of sexuality which is important to a number of the films: lesbianism. In an article published some years before the cycle, Patricia White writes:

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What have been considered the very best of ‘serious’ Hollywood ghost movies – Curse of the Cat People (1944), The Uninvited (1944), The Innocents (1961) and […] The Haunting (1963) […] are also, by some uncanny coincidence, films with eerie lesbian overtones. Masquerading as family romance, these films unleash an excess of female sexuality which cannot be contained without recourse to the supernatural. (1991: 142)

Although it may be stretching a point to include Curse of the Cat People and especially The Innocents (which is of course British, not Hollywood) in this argument, I agree with White about the other two films, and she analyses The Haunting perceptively from a lesbian point of view. As will be noted in the individual discussions, lesbianism is indeed an issue in some of the films, particularly the South Korean girls’ high school films. Here Steve Neale’s formulation does indeed apply – but in a homosexual sense. I also distinguish between ghosts and revenants. Both are ghosts, but revenants appear in a more substantial form: the ghost princess in Ugetsu monogatari and the avenging female ghosts in Kuroneko are really revenants. In an interview with director Jacques Rivette on the British DVD of Histoire de Marie et Julien, he insists that there are no ghosts in the film, only revenants. He defines them as ‘people who, for one reason or another, haven’t managed to cross the […] boundary between the world we live in […] and the world of the dead’ (Rivette 2004). In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Mike Ashley gives a more traditional definition. He emphasises that revenants are ghosts who have a more material form, but also says that they usually reappear close to the place of death and ‘they retain an identity and purpose – possibly vengeance’ (1997: 810). However, the crucial point about a revenant is that it is quite possible to mistake him or her for a normal human being – which is indeed the case in Histoire de Marie et Julien. Despite the cluster of scary ghost movies between 1979 and 1981, it was some time before English-language ghost melodramas really took off. During what I term the fallow years, occasional examples were made, but they were essentially ‘one-offs’. Up to 1998, the most typical ghost movies were those discussed by Fowkes (1998). As well as Ghost and High Spirits, these include Kiss Me Goodbye (Robert Mulligan 1982), Always (Steven Spielberg 1989), Truly, Madly, Deeply (Anthony Minghella, UK, 1990), and Heart and Souls (Ron Underwood 1993). Although these are not all comedies, they are nevertheless connected in that the ghosts in them are not frightening (indeed, many are romantic) and are almost all male. This draws attention to a crucial point about scary ghosts: as in the Japanese

Introduc tion

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films, they are overwhelmingly female. Gender considerations are thus also pertinent to the discussions of the films. The main focus of this book is the cycle of films that was prompted by the renaissance of the ghost movie at the end of the last century. I will look at possible reasons for the emergence of such a cycle at this point in the Conclusion. For now, I would just like to note its provenance. I would trace it to the combined impact of (a) the enormous international box-office success of The Sixth Sense and (b) the equivalent cult success of Ringu and its successors. Collectively, these films transformed the ghost movie market. Relatively high-profile scary ghost movies were now made in a number of different countries, and the ‘genre’ has probably never been so internationally popular as over the last seventeen years or so. In fact, The Sixth Sense was only one of several scary Hollywood ghost movies released in 1999, and most of the other examples show that there were less rewarding directions in which the cycle could have developed. The Haunting (Jan de Bont), another version of Shirley Jackson’s novel, is not unpromising for its first hour or so, but then the atmosphere and power of Wise’s original are destroyed by a barrage of CGI and other special effects. In House on Haunted Hill (William Malone), a remake of a silly William Castle movie of 1958, bloody dismemberment proliferates as in a third-rate splatter movie. Sleepy Hollow (Tim Burton) is a Gothic period film with a mad headless horseman ghost played by Christopher Walken. All these films resort to ramping up the scary ghost elements to excess of one kind or another, and all were commercially successful. Only Stir of Echoes (David Koepp) – which integrates ghostly manifestations into a narrative of psychological trauma within a family and the local community – has something of the nuanced, intense ambience of The Sixth Sense. Although primarily a horror film, Ringu, in its restraint and seriousness, is really closer to The Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes than to these gory, overwrought ghost movies. This distinction has been discussed by Daniel Martin in the context of a consideration of the British critical reception of Ringu. Martin distinguishes between graphic and suggestive/restrained horror, placing Ringu in the second category: Critics who privilege restrained horror clearly present it as psychological and present the thrills of graphic horror as largely concerned with shock and revulsion: the thrill of explicit horror is supposedly visceral, addressing physical, bodily reflexes. Restrained horror is seen as engaging the mind, and activating the imagination (which does much of the work of producing fear), while graphic horror is clearly seen as below conscious

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thought, merely a matter of automatic bodily reflexes. These claimed modes of appreciation run parallel to wider debates about the values of high art and popular culture. (2009: 39)

Martin also includes The Sixth Sense as a horror film, albeit in the restrained category, which I dispute. Nevertheless, the crucial point here is that it was the suggestive rather than the graphic ghost films which provided a template for the international ghost melodrama cycle. However, although The Sixth Sense was by far the most popular of the 1999 US ghost films, Hollywood did not follow it up in the way one might have imagined. Most of the mainstream ghost movies made immediately in its wake are generic hybrids of one kind or another. Thus What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis 2000) is a blend of Hitchcockian thriller and ghost story; The Gift (Sam Raimi 2000) inserts a ghost story into a Southern Gothic small-town melodrama. It seems as though Hollywood likes to hedge its bets with ghost stories, preferring to position them within more commercially established generic or narrative forms. Of the immediate English-language successors to The Sixth Sense, only The Others is a ‘pure’ ghost melodrama, and that was made in Spain on a relatively low budget, i.e. outside the Hollywood mainstream. One predictable response from Hollywood has been to remake the most successful Japanese ghost movies. In fact, most of these remakes – The Ring (Gore Verbinski 2002), The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu 2004), The Ring Two (Hideo Nakata 2005), One Missed Call (Eric Valette 2007) – belong to the more overtly commercial horror sub-group of the cycle, and it will be seen that, in two cases, the Japanese director of the original version was brought in to direct the remake. Dark Water (Walter Salles 2005) is the one Hollywood remake of a Japanese ghost film – Dark Water (Hideo Nakata 2002) – that I would place outside the horror group. One assumes that, in this case, the presence of a spooky ghost girl with long black hair was sufficient to commend the project to Touchstone Pictures. These remakes illustrate another crucial point about the cycle. Although the 1960s’ cluster of scary ghost movies possess female protagonists, almost all those from The Changeling to The Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes have adult male protagonists. The only exceptions are two films which focus on children: The Watcher in the Woods (John Hough 1981) – mentioned in Chapter 2 – and Lady in White (Frank LaLoggia 1988). But after the success of Ringu, most scary ghost films have adult female protagonists – as in these remakes. This introduces a different dynamic between the protagonist and the ghost(s). Frightening ghosts arise mainly from, and thus in a sense speak

Introduc tion

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for, two historically marginalised groups: women and children. Heroines tend to be more sympathetic and/or sensitive to the desires of such ghosts, especially where the latter are victims of male brutality and/or child abuse. The presence of female protagonists also suggests why melodrama should be the dominant generic mode of the films. Outside Hollywood, individual countries contributed their own distinctive brands of ghost melodrama. Japan and South Korea were the earliest and, together with the US, the most prolif ic contributors to the cycle. Chronologically I begin the cycle with the Japanese Kokkuri (Takahisa Zeze 1997), Ringu and the South Korean Yeogo goedam girls’ high-school ghost movies, which date from 1998, the same year as Ringu. I have also included Kokkuri and the South Korean Memento Mori (Kim Tae-yong and Min Kyu-dong 1999) as seminal, in the sense that, like Ringu and The Sixth Sense, they had a major influence on subsequent works. Kokkuri and Memento Mori also introduced a further feature of the East Asian ghost films: the focus on teenage girls. The Watcher in the Woods possesses a teenage heroine, but it did not set a trend; it was the East Asian films that discovered this market. Recommending Ringu and its successors to the readers of Film Comment, Alvin Lu noted that the modern Japanese ghost movie ‘is largely a teenage girl-based phenomenon’ (2002: 38). Likewise the South Korean ghost movies. Teenage girls were identified as a significant target audience for these films, another reason for the shift into melodrama and away from horror. The films may be scary, but they are rarely horrific. In addition, those films that, like Kokkuri and Memento Mori, specifically focus on teenage girls, also include the theme of lesbianism. The structure of the book will be evident from the contents page. Fifty-six films are listed, including one television film and two TV miniseries. Thirty-seven of these works are discussed in some textual detail. The readings are structured by notions of genre and informed by theory but, following the arguments put forward by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (2005) in the Introduction to their anthology Style and Meaning, I focus on interpretations of the individual works. The rationale for such an approach is that this is an unexplored generic area, and close readings are appropriate to tease out the specificities and complexities. However, I have only commented on visual style when it is important to an understanding of the film within the generic framework that I am establishing. And so, although there are quite a few references to montage sequences, which do form a major thread within the films, there are less to mise en scène. Although mise en scène would indeed be pertinent to a full consideration of each of these films, across the cycle as a whole it is used

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primarily to create tension and atmosphere. There are of course recurring stylistic elements and tropes: blue filters for scenes of ghostly activity; claustrophobic interiors; dark, watery depths; half-hidden, shadowy or fleeting figures; bizarre electrical disturbances. But only occasionally are these of sufficient interest to merit discussion in the individual analyses. For example, although I do discuss the colour red in The Sixth Sense because it enables me to make a point about melodrama, I say relatively little about the deployment of colour in the other films. Equally, I have not really commented on the stylistic differences between the films from the different countries. These have been discussed elsewhere, and I am more concerned in seeking out similarities between the films than noting differences. A genre builds by selective appropriation: some elements are found to have particular resonances and are readily recycled, modulated and elaborated upon. At the time of the British video release of his comedy-horror ghost film The Frighteners (New Zealand/ US, 1996), Peter Jackson was quoted as saying: ‘With ghost movies there are no rules. You don’t have to stick to cinematic conventions like you do with vampires or werewolves. You can do anything you want with ghosts because no-one really knows what they are or how they operate’ (Braund 1997: 130). The statement indicates why The Frighteners is such a mess. To direct a genre film and assume you can make up the rules as you go along is simply foolish. Certainly the rules of ghost movies are less well-known than those for vampire movies, but some have long been established in Japanese ghost stories at least, and filmmakers with a feeling for the genre have regularly gravitated to the same sets of elements. These elements include: (1) Narrative structures, which often follow the pattern of a detective story, with the mystery of the ghost equivalent to the ‘whodunnit’. The enigmas posed in ghost movies encompass a range of issues: questions about the source and nature of the haunting; about what the ghost wants; about the back story that gave rise to the ghost; about the relationship of the protagonist to the ghost. But ghosts almost invariably express their concerns obliquely, and the protagonists usually have to spend some time cracking the code. (2) What the ghost wants. In Looking Awry, Slavoj Žižek suggests two reasons why the dead return: ‘because they were not properly buried’ or ‘as collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt’ (1992: 23). There are of course others: some ghosts seek revenge, others justice, some a companion in death: a lover, a mother, someone else in the house (The Haunting 1963; The Shining). But their ruthlessness in pursuing their goals and their supernatural powers frequently place the living at a considerable disadvantage. (3) Tropes, such as the nature of the supernatural

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events associated with the ghost(s) and the rhetoric they bring into play. It is here that the films are often very inventive. As the ghosts manipulate both space and time to communicate their messages, a whole range of eerie effects can come into play. (4) Motifs. Like any developed genre, the ghost melodrama has rapidly built up its own iconography, which includes elements such as music boxes, thunderstorms, baths and mirrors, all of which are used in a variety of ways. In the individual analyses, twists and surprise endings will invariably be revealed; it is not possible to discuss the films properly without doing so. To analyse the films whilst preserving their secrets until the narrative reveals them would require much more discussion; in effect, the films only really make sense when read in the light of usually late revelations, and the analyses take this into account. At the same time, it is appreciated that not every reader will have seen every film, and so, within the discussions, track is kept of the essential narrative developments. Only fourteen of the 56 films are based on either a novel or a short story, and three of these fourteen are remakes, so that there are only eleven original novels/stories. This is predominantly a cinematic genre. Moreover, almost all the source narratives have been significantly modified, a modification that typically builds up the ghost elements and reduces the horror – a shift to melodramatic representation. Nevertheless, the films overall also draw upon both Western literary and Japanese theatrical ghost traditions. In fact, there is a clear overlap of motifs here. Both the kabuki theatre and the ghost stories of M.R. James include such motifs as watery ghosts, long black hair and dank wells. This has led Roger Clarke to conclude that Ringu has taken such motifs from M.R. James, whereas they are common to both traditions (see Clarke 2012: 123). Most of the films are also set at the time they were made. Although a few are set earlier in the twentieth century, none go back to the more distant pasts of, say, Ugetsu monogatari or Kuroneko. This helps focus the area under consideration: these are mainly contemporary ghosts. And, even when the ghosts come from a number of years in the past, they are, with the exception of the ghosts in The Haunting (1999) and the eponymous ghost in The Woman in Black (James Watkins 2011), still twentieth-century ghosts.

The Gothic Tradition Because the vast majority of films discussed are not period films, the question arises as to how much they are nevertheless influenced by the Gothic

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tradition. Ghosts are one element in the founding texts of Gothic literature, which are usually identified as the eighteenth-century novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, but which Nick Groom traces back further – to include Shakespeare, for example (Groom 2012). However, whereas the Gothic tradition has persisted to this day quite strongly in other generic areas – e.g. the vampire film – it has perhaps become rather more attenuated in most modern ghost movies. Groom suggests that the Gothic novel can be characterised in the first instance by ‘seven types of obscurity’. Under a series of headings, he then lists over 70 features found in the novels. I will quote selectively from these, omitting elements – mostly those pertaining to the Christian church – which have no place in the ghost films discussed in this book. Groom’s categories and the more relevant elements are: meteorological (mists, clouds, wind, rain […]); topographical (impenetrable forests, […] the boundless ocean); architectural (towers, prisons, castles covered in gargoyles and crenellations, […] tombs, […] ruins, graveyards, mazes, secret passages, locked doors); material ([…] veils, disguises, billowing curtains […]); textual (riddles, rumours, folklore, unreadable manuscripts and inscriptions, ellipses, broken texts, […] obscure dialect, inserted narratives […]); spiritual ([…] allegory and symbolism, […] mysticism, […] magic and the occult, […] summonings […]); and psychological (dreams, visions, hallucinations, drugs, sleep-walking, madness, split personalities, mistaken identities, doubles, derangement, ghostly presences, forgetfulness, death, hauntings). (2012: 77-78)

But these features ‘merely’ view the early Gothic texts through the prism of ‘obscurity’; other features are equally important. In The Literature of Terror, David Punter adds fear, paranoia, the barbaric, the taboo (incest is a Gothic theme) and sexual violence (1980: 402-411). In a summary of the Gothic that includes a Freudian perspective, Reynold Humphries includes, ‘repressed sexuality finding pathological outlets in a combination of terror, pleasure and the death drive’ (2002: 9). Commenting on the ways in which the Gothic was taken up in the cinema, Groom, too, notes the importance of Freud: Freud helped to lay the groundwork for the mass-intellectualisation of cinema by […] alerting directors and audiences to the psychological possibilities of the medium – and film certainly proved a flexible way of dramatising the spectrum of mental states in visualising dreams and generally living out fantasies. In this context, the Gothic in particular

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appeared to provide access to the dreamworld mapped out by the new science of psychoanalysis: it was the stuff of nightmare, the fantastic, trauma, repression, and perversion. (2012: 132)

In a similar vein, Michelle A. Marré has argued that Freud’s dream theories as outlined in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) were, ‘tailor-made […] for the Gothic, that literary celebration of the dream state. The veils, spectres, dreams, hidden passages and imperfectly understood but foreboding messages that punctuate the text seemed fraught, like actual dreams, with an unknown significance’ (2000: 232). To explore the relevance of the Gothic tradition to scary ghost movies, I would like to look first at The Innocents and The Haunting (1963). These two films are closer to the tradition than most of the later films, yet at the same time they are also crucial predecessors to the ghost melodrama cycle. Indeed, they could be seen as mediating the Gothic tradition for the ghost melodramas to come. The films include one standard shift from historical Gothic: they are set in large isolated country mansions rather than castles. The only castle I have encountered in a modern ghost movie is in High Spirits, where the comedy plot highlights its anachronism. Nevertheless, the mansion in The Haunting is impressively Gothic in style, and the buildings in both films carry familiar Gothic connotations concerning the sinister weight of the past. Set, like James’s novella, in the mid-Victorian era (Frayling 2013: 48), and following the novella quite closely, The Innocents is a period film. Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) is hired as a governess to two preadolescent children, Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin), who live in a mansion under the care of the housekeeper Mrs Grose (Megs Jenkins). Shortly after her arrival, Miss Giddens begins to see the ghosts of the valet Quint and the previous governess Miss Jessel, who had been involved, according to Mrs Grose, in a sadomasochistic relationship. Both died about a year ago. Miss Giddens becomes convinced that these ghosts are not just haunting the children, but are possessing them in order to exercise their diabolical wills over them. She determines to ‘exorcise’ these figures from the children. In James’s novella, it is strongly intimated that the ‘ghosts’ are hallucinations, the product of the unnamed governess’s repressed: ‘it is the governess herself who haunts the children’ (Edel 1969: 205). In The Innocents, matters are more ambiguous, and it is possible that the ghosts really are present, even though the children and Mrs Grose cannot see them. We are

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now familiar with the idea that someone can be psychic and see ghosts invisible to others. Nevertheless, Miss Giddens’s overwrought reaction to the ghosts is just as damaging for the children, and results in Miles’s death. The Innocents is a highly effective ghost movie, in which the sinister and uncanny ghostly manifestations fuel the feverish fantasies of the governess. The period setting; the nature and architecture of the house, which includes a tower with crenellations on which Miss Giddens ‘sees’ Quint; the uncertainty over the status of the ghosts; the sexual pathology of the governess; the sense of creeping dread; the movement towards death – all these suggest the Gothic. And The Innocents in turn influenced a number of subsequent ghost films: Haunted (Lewis Gilbert, 1995), The Others, The Woman in Black (2011) and The Secret of Crickley Hall (Joe Ahearne, 2012). I will look at the links with Haunted in the discussion of that film; the other three films show the influence of The Innocents in that they all concern children, and anxieties around what might happen to them as a consequence of ghostly activities in and around a large Gothic mansion. The Haunting is not a period film, but the mansion in which the hauntings occur has a formidable array of Gothic trappings: a history of violent deaths; labyrinthine corridors in which it is quite possible to get lost; doors that open and close on their own; a sinister nursery in which there seems to be a malevolent presence, to say nothing of the hauntings themselves, which take the form of terrifying supernatural disturbances involving thumps, murmuring voices and powerful forces bending doors. Four people enter the house, initially as part of an investigation into the paranormal, but the house itself rapidly takes control. In particular, it addresses itself to Eleanor (Julie Harris): the message ‘Help Eleanor come home’ appears on a wall; the history of the house includes an incident that parallels Eleanor’s own recent behaviour – and attendant guilt – concerning the death of her mother. This is an early example of a character entering a haunted house after a bereavement: it is as though the house ‘knows’ Eleanor, and eventually she succumbs to its power – in effect, surrendering to the death drive. Described as ‘an evil house from the beginning’, as ‘watch[ing] every movement we make’, the house is characterised as a sentient malevolent presence, an anticipation in particular of the hotel in The Shining. There, too, the building seems to ‘know’ the protagonist and ultimately claims him. These two films and the novels from which they were derived have in fact already been considered within the Gothic tradition by Charlene Bunnell (1984: 79-100). The influence of The Haunting may also been seen in other hauntedhouse movies, such as The Changeling, where again the character moving in is recently bereaved, and the ghost haunting the house has such power it

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causes a whole range of supernatural disturbances. I will explore the links further in the discussion of that film. However, in the 1999 remake of The Haunting, the Gothic aspects and rhetoric are intensified, as carvings and statues become animated, chains rattle, curtains billow to such an extent that ghost children use them to travel along their fabric, bloody footprints appear, the heroine’s pregnant double is shown in a mirror, and the whole house undergoes a comprehensive architectural upheaval. Such heightening of the Gothic elements in fact diminishes the effectiveness of the film: it seems overwrought. This helps clarify the role of the Gothic in the modern ghost melodrama. Gothic elements persist, but only rarely do they dominate. Such a shift was in fact noted by Julia Briggs in the ghost stories of M.R. James, published between 1904 and 1925: James’s view that the element of the supernatural should erupt within the familiar marks [a] significant point of difference from the Gothic, which more often follows romance in locating its events in exotic or bizarre settings, whereas the ghost story often takes place in a very mundane and often urban context. (2000: 127)

The shift was then enhanced in the modern cycle of ghost melodramas, as concerns about contemporary mores and modern technology took over. Nevertheless, Gothic elements remain in the fabric of the films. Indeed, spooky ghosts could perhaps be seen as an inherently Gothic motif, and the two Ringu films contain an intriguing number of Groom’s more esoteric motifs, such as the boundless ocean, riddles, folklore, an unreadable inscription and an obscure dialect. As in the Gothic, these films’ initiating curse also comes from the ‘backwoods’. In addition, some of Groom’s motifs turn up in a significant number of the ghost melodramas. Rain and doubles will be discussed shortly, but the most significant is dreams. Groom places a particular emphasis on dreams: Dreams were supernatural, sublime and dangerous. By using dreams Walpole was able to give voice and shape to the barely acknowledged suppression of history that hung behind the Gothic myth like a nightmare. The Gothic, far from being an antiquarian knot of history and politics, culture and society, could instead be a metaphor for the less tangible anxieties and traumas of the human condition. (2012: 72)

The vast majority of the modern ghost melodramas have dream sequences, many of which are ghost-induced. And as these dreams trace the anxieties

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of the characters and the resentments of the ghosts, so a pattern emerges in which the ghosts seem to be speaking repeatedly for the disadvantaged and the abused in society. The Gothic tradition can thus be seen to survive in just a few elements of the modern cycle of ghost melodramas, but all these elements are crucial, and frequently they occur in the films with great intensity. In addition, as the ghosts erupt into the present speaking of the injustices of the past, they continue the Gothic concern of bringing to light those areas which ‘civilisation’ has repressed and disavowed.

Freud and Motifs The standard theoretical text invoked in discussions of ghosts and ghost narratives is Freud’s 1919 essay ‘Das Unheimlich’. Although Unheimlich literally means unhomely, in this essay it has been translated as Uncanny. (Freud [1919] 1985: 336-376). Encountering a ghost is usually frightening and always eerie, and Freud’s essay is an attempt to explain the nature and source of these feelings. Freud begins by noting that the uncanny, ‘is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror’ but also, ‘it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general’ (339). He then refines the term through a discussion of various manifestations of the notion of the uncanny, including ghosts, before concluding: ‘an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed’ (372). In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Rosemary Jackson glosses Freud’s ideas: [Freud reads] the uncanny as the effect of projecting unconscious desires and fears into the environment and on to other people. Frightening scenes of uncanny literature are produced by hidden anxieties concealed within the subject, who then interprets the world in terms of his or her apprehensions. (1981: 64-65)

The experience of the uncanny applies not just to the reader (or viewer) but also to ‘the subject’ within the narrative. It is when there is also some sort of connection between the ghost and the person who sees it that the narratives are particularly compelling.

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In The Pleasures of Horror, Matt Hills devotes a chapter to unpacking Freud’s concept of the uncanny in the context of horror movies (2005: 46-59). Hills draws a distinction between models which gravitate to the first part of Freud’s formulation and use repression as the governing principle, e.g. the theories of Robin Wood, and those which gravitate to the second part, the ‘reconfirmation of surmounted beliefs’, e.g. the writings of Steven J. Schneider. I have already indicated my modification of Robin Wood’s model for ghost melodramas, but with that adopted by Schneider (elaborated, for example, in Schneider 2000), there is really no need. Because a belief in ghosts was once commonplace but is now dismissed by science, ghosts invite interpretation in terms of this sense of the uncanny. Moreover, the idea that the dead can return in some form necessarily brings with it anxieties: ghosts carry with them the charge of having come from the world of the dead. There is, however, a further point that Hills makes about Freud and the uncanny in relation to horror that I would like to reformulate for ghost melodramas. He notes: [B]oth Carol J. Clover (1992: 48) and Barbara Creed (1993: 53-4) […] quote the same section from Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ when discussing horror texts’ diegetically dark, damp, dank, terrible places as symbolically ‘intra-uterine’. Fear of such bad places is, for each critic, a type of womb fantasy. (2005: 47)

I would argue that there is an important distinction to be drawn between the way such a fantasy functions in horror movies and in ghost melodramas. For Clover: ‘Decidedly “intrauterine” is the Terrible Place, dark and often damp, in which the killer lives or lurks and whence he stages his most terrifying attacks’ (1992: 48). Creed makes a similar point, but also adds: ‘In other horror films the monstrous womb belongs to a woman or female creature who is usually about to give birth to an alien being or terrifying creatures’ (1993: 53). Now, in horror movies the monstrous killer, or indeed the monstrous mother – Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock 1960); Carrie (Brian De Palma 1976); Aliens (James Cameron 1986) – may well lurk in such a terrible place, but with ghosts, it is different. In examples from The Changeling to both versions of Dark Water, there is an equivalent place, but here it is dark and watery, and it is not so much terrible as unheimlich (both unhomely and uncanny). Moreover, it has become so in the absence of the mother. Examples such as the well in the Ringu and Ring films (see Fig. 27), the bath in Kokkuri (see Fig. 16), and the cistern in The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001) (see Fig. 23) – all of which are sites from which

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the ghost emerges – also suggest negative symbolisations of the womb: man-made, degraded, decaying. This furthers the sense of the unheimlich (unhomely). A different fantasy is thus in play. In particular, the absence of the mother means that, either implicitly or explicitly, the ghost is of an abandoned child. Although this can be subverted by malevolence, as in Ringu, the appeal is usually more poignant. These examples also point to the major recurring motif of ghost melodramas: water. Those who return as ghosts in these movies were very often either drowned, or killed and their bodies dumped in water. Indeed, the association of ghosts and water occurs collectively in Carnival of Souls, where the dead emerge at night from the lagoon to cavort in the deserted pavilion. Roger Clarke has written: The first time we see the dead governess in The Innocents and the ghost in The Woman in Black they seem to be creatures of the marshes and the lake. This is her natural home. These beings emerge from wells, water-tanks, cisterns, baths, lakes […] She’s the witch from the water – seen in Ghost Story, What Lies Beneath and most recently Mama [Andy Muschietti 2013]. She’s the old lady in the bath in Room 237 in The Shining. In Asian cinema we find her in Dark Water (2002) and Ringu, though M.R. James had at least two ghost stories with entities that live down wells. (2013: 92)

In particular, there are a remarkable number of bath scenes. The early examples of ghosts appearing in a bath in The Changeling and The Shining are repeated in a whole range of different contexts: almost half of the films have bath or bathroom ghost scenes. Three films from 2005 will serve to summarise the range. In Dark Water (2005) and The Ring Two, the bath becomes a battleground, and the heroine is overwhelmed by the ghost’s powers with water (see Fig. 28). By contrast, in The Dark (John Fawcett 2005), the ghost girl, a revenant, is shown apparently sleeping in a bath, like a vampire in its coffin. This suggests that water is for ghosts the equivalent of earth for vampires – the element from which they derive psychic sustenance. In Freudian dream symbolism, water has two dominant associations: emerging from water is birth imagery; depths of water suggest the unconscious. Both associations are relevant to these ghosts. A ghost’s return from water into the world of the living is a form of rebirth: an uncanny rebirth. But I would also like to suggest that the world of the dead from which the scary ghosts come is like the unconscious, and that this is reflected in their behaviour.

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In his 1915 essay ‘The Unconscious’, Freud summarises the characteristics of the concept (1984: 190-191); a number of these characteristics find a parallel in ghosts and the ghost world. First, like the unconscious, ghosts do not sleep and are ‘timeless’ – they do not age. (Revenants, however, may sleep – as in The Dark.) Second, ghosts function rather like drives: implacable, unrelenting, indifferent to the ‘reality principle’, i.e. the outside world. Slavoj Žižek makes a similar point about the ghost of Hamlet’s father (1992: 22). Ghosts can seem to have tunnel vision, seeing matters from an extremely narrow point of view. By contrast, they can also seem omniscient: like the unconscious, they ‘know’. The combination of these two features is shown vividly with the ghost woman in Sakebi (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2006), who somehow knows which people saw her from the ferry fifteen years ago, but whose assumptions about what they should have done about this does indeed suggest a tunnel-vision view of the world. Third, ghosts can be cunning. Stephen Frosch quotes Ernst Gellner as characterising the unconscious ‘as a cunning adversary, something which is always disruptive and always interfering with evidence’ (2002: 12). This could serve as an excellent summary of the behaviour of many of these ghosts, as they ruthlessly manipulate their victims to their own ends. Finally, again like the unconscious, a ghost experiences no sense of contradiction: it is monolithic, unwavering. The relentless, pitiless drive of the ghosts in these movies is revealed in a protest which echoes through a fair number of them, from The Changeling through The Ring to No-Do (Elio Quiroga 2009): the protagonist, driven to despair by the ghost’s activities, crying out, ‘What do you want from me?’ This both personalises the activities of the ghost – it is an individual who is being subjected to their insistent attentions – and highlights the sense of paranoia that runs so insistently through most of the films. Dreams also fit in with the rhetoric of ghost communications: they, too, come from the unconscious and are highly coded; they, too, may be read in Freudian terms. And dreams are a crucial mechanism whereby ghosts make their presence felt and their desires known. As Colette Balmain points out, however, water in horror movies may well be polluted, and this applies, too, to ghost movies. In Japanese horror, polluted water is stressed as early as Gojira/Godzilla (Ishiro Honda 1954), where the fish are annihilated and poisoned by a nuclear explosion. Anxieties in Japan about such pollution were also exacerbated by the notorious real-life industrial pollution of Minamata Bay (Balmain 2008: 39). In the ghost movies, the water from which the ghost emerges is nearly always dirty, in some cases polluted by the corpse itself, as in Ringu, The Devil’s Backbone and Dark Water (both versions). This adds unhealthiness to

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the connotations of the ghosts. A recurring motif which draws attention to the pollution in the Japanese films is the appearance, in the water, of the black hair of the corpse: ‘Hair as a source of pollution and fear is a constant trope in Japanese horror’ (Balmain 2008: 67). The trope is also found in the South Korean films Phone (Ahn Byung-ki 2002) and Ryeong (Kim Tae-kyoung 2004). In three of the East Asian films, the black hair emerges in the drinking water of a dwelling, where it is a disturbing sign of both the proximity and the threat of the ghost. As in Alfred Hitchcock’s films (see Walker 2005a: 388-400), rain in ghost melodramas introduces a quite distinct set of associations from water on the ground or in containers such as baths. They are, in effect, two separate motifs. In the ghost movies, rain and thunderstorms are a standard signifier of (imminent) ghostly activity, and on occasions may be more specifically associated with the tempestuousness of female ghosts. As early as A Place of One’s Own, the ghost woman makes her displeasure felt by conjuring up a thunderstorm. The storm during the climax of The Discarnates (Nobuhiko Obayashi 1988) seems produced by the ghost woman’s emotional frenzy (see Fig. 7). Of course, a thunderstorm is a standard way of heightening the ‘melodramatic impact’ of a scene. However, rain accompanies these ghosts everywhere, and opens up a range of symbolic associations. Specific inflections of the rain and thunderstorm motif are looked at in the discussions of the individual films, notably Kokkuri, Phone and Dark Water (2002). A familiar horror movie motif that the ghost melodrama largely eschews is blood. Indeed, I would maintain that where a ghost melodrama does stress blood, this is a horror motif within the movie. For example, in The Shining, the recurring image of the hotel corridor flooding with blood is an expressionist motif that may be integrated with other horror elements in the film. Mirrors are another ghost movie motif. The belief that spirits, including ghosts, may be glimpsed in a mirror was so much a part of Japanese culture that one finds mirrors in Japanese films made or set in the past are often covered when not being used. This is, of course, the opposite of the folkloric belief about the vampire, which becomes invisible when viewed in a mirror. But occasionally a film will go further and suggest that the mirror space can actually be the place where ghosts come from – like the Princess (Maria Casares) coming through the mirror from the underworld in Orphée (Jean Cocteau, France, 1950). A good example is Into the Mirror (Kim Sung-ho 2003). A mirror may also serve to reveal the truth beneath the surface appearance. For example, that in The Shining Jack is not embracing a beautiful

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naked young woman but an old hag whose flesh is rotting (see Fig. 2); that the hero in The Discarnates is mysteriously ageing. At the climax of Chakushin ari/One Missed Call (Takashi Miike 2004), the hero is both baffled and horrified when, as he embraces the heroine, she stabs him. He then sees her mirror reflection, which reveals that she is possessed by the malevolent ghost girl (see Fig. 31). The mirror leads in turn to the notion of the double or doppelgänger, so that the ghost seems like a dark double of the protagonist, enacting ‘repressed’ impulses. This is a common feature of a number of the films, and it may be intimated with (e.g. Gothika, Mathieu Kassovitz 2003) or without (e.g. Kokkuri; What Lies Beneath) the use of mirrors. The presence of a ghost necessarily signals the existence of a past trauma. I refer to the death that produced the ghost as the primary traumatic event. This is to distinguish it from a wider feature of melodrama, the past traumatic event, which is usually personal, relating to an individual. A past traumatic event affecting the protagonist – usually bereavement, but occasionally other types of psychological trauma involving loss – is particularly relevant in these films because it tends to make the protagonist vulnerable to the activities of a ghost. It’s as though a side of him/her has been ‘opened up’ by the trauma, which allows the ghost to get a purchase. For example, Dark Water (2005) puts more emphasis than the original on the heroine Dahlia’s abandonment by her mother when she was a little girl, thus making her vulnerable to the demands of the ghost girl. The film reinforces this by casting the same actress as the young Dahlia and the ghost girl. A trope of the ghost melodramas is to show or allude to one or the other of these traumas in an opening sequence, typically either pre-credits or during the credits. The Changeling and Haunted, for example, open with the protagonist’s personal traumatic event. Beginnings referring to the primary traumatic event go back to The Haunting (1963), which has a striking opening sequence detailing the history of Hill House and the deaths of the four women who now seemingly haunt the house. None of the modern ghost melodramas, however, has such a detailed exposition. Here any opening/ credits sequence that refers to the primary traumatic event does so elliptically, thereby setting up an enigma that hangs over the narrative, as in The Devil’s Backbone, Ju-on (Takashi Shimizu 2002) and Into the Mirror. The pre-credits sequence of Ghost Story offers another variation. The old men of the Chowder Society are suffering from nightmares, nightmares which we later realise relate to the primary traumatic event. In this case, the men witnessed the death that produced the ghost, so that the primary

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traumatic event and their own collective past traumatic event coincided. Anxieties concerning the event are now returning in their dreams. Rosemary Jackson also refers to the ideas of Hélène Cixous on the uncanny: Cixous presents [the] unfamiliarity [of the uncanny] not merely as displaced sexual anxiety but as a rehearsal of an encounter with death […] This is materialised as a ghost: ‘the immediate figure of strangeness is the ghost. The ghost is the fiction of our relation to death made concrete’. (1981: 68)

Ghosts in these movies are often harbingers of death: from Ghost Story to The Woman in Black (2011), many of those who encounter a scary ghost die. Also relevant here is the master narrative for fiction that Peter Brooks develops in Reading for the Plot (1984). I have already discussed Brooks’ model in relation to Hitchcock’s films (Walker 2006-07); ghost melodramas offer another inflection. Brooks develops his model from Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), which he describes as, ‘Freud’s own masterplot, the essay where he lays out most fully a total scheme of how life proceeds from beginning to end’ (1984: 96). The basic structural opposition in Freud’s ‘masterplot’ is between the life and death instincts, Eros and Thanatos. For Brooks, ‘Narratives both tell of desire […] and make use of desire as a dynamic of signification. Desire in this view is like Freud’s notion of Eros, a force including sexual desire but larger and more polymorphous’ (37). Furthermore, ‘Desire is always there at the start of a narrative, often in a state of initial arousal, often having reached a state of intensity such that movement must be created, action undertaken, change begun’ (38). In ghost melodramas, there are two initiating desires: that of the protagonist and that of the ghost. But it is the latter which is usually primary: this is the desire that generates and shapes the narrative. And the desire of the ghost – which is, as noted, very like a drive – is almost always charged with intimations of death. The types of revenge ghosts seek, or their attempts to lure the living into their own worlds, typically involve death. There are some ghosts who merely want a proper burial, and there are a few benevolent ghosts, but they are significantly outnumbered by the ghosts who seek to do harm. In developing his model, Brooks focuses in particular on repetition, which – in the form of the ‘compulsion to repeat’ – was what first prompted Freud to elaborate his theory of the death instincts/death drive. Moreover, Brooks notes that this is in particular a feature of the ‘literature of the uncanny’:

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‘The compulsion to repeat […] can indeed suggest pursuit by a demonic power. We know from Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919) that this feeling of the demonic, arising from involuntary repetition, is a particular attribute of the literature of the uncanny, of texts of compulsive recurrence’ (99). Here, Brooks, too, stresses the sense of paranoia that drives these texts. He then generalises: [Narrative] must make use of specific, perceptible repetitions in order to create plot, that is, to show us a significant interconnection of events. An event gains meaning by its repetition, which is both the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it […] Repetition creates a return in the text, a doubling back. We cannot say whether this is a return to or a return of: for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed. (1984: 99-100)

If we take the ‘return to origins’ as referring in ghost melodramas to the primary traumatic event – the origin of the ghost – then the ambiguity Brooks notes features rather differently. In these films (elements of) this event may well echo, like the return of the repressed, throughout the narrative. In other words, here we often have both a return to and a return of. Finally, ‘[w]hat operates through the text is the death instinct, the drive towards the end. Beyond and under the domination of the pleasure principle is this baseline of plot, its basic “pulsation”, sensible or audible through the repetitions that take us back in the text’ (102). In fact, for many narratives, Brooks employs the notion of the death instinct purely metaphorically, as is shown in his phrase, ‘the terminal quiescence at the end [of the story]’ (103). But there are certain narratives which fit his model more closely, in that they seem haunted by the death drive. I have argued that this may be said of a substantial number of Hitchcock’s films; I believe it may equally be said of certain genres, such as film noir, the horror movie and ghost melodramas. In the latter two genres especially, the compulsion to repeat – the horror events; the ghost’s interventions – is extremely insistent, and the narratives frequently depict a drive towards death. Some of the ghosts can also be seen to embody the return of a character’s own repressed death drive. It is Norman O. Brown’s contention in Life Against Death that, in the struggle between the life and death instincts, man typically represses the latter, thereby generating neurosis. But again, what is repressed will always strive to return ([1959] 1968: 102). In a number of the films, the protagonist has suffered a trauma which has released – consciously or otherwise – suicidal impulses. But s/he represses such

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impulses (this is quite explicit in What Lies Beneath); the ghost can then be seen to represent the return of the repressed impulses. Since a ghost is by definition dead, that it should be the vehicle for this ‘return’ is peculiarly apt. I have also used the ideas of Carl Jung in some of the discussions. Ghosts may be seen as mobilising archetypal material around death and rebirth in particular, and seductive revenants, as in Ghost Story and Haunted, can be excellent illustrations of the anima. In ‘The anima in film’, John Beebe enumerates nine characteristics of this figure. Three in particular are relevant here: that an anima figure lives for connection; that she comes from ‘another world’ and that she has an unusual capacity for life. It is no accident that the men who become victims of these figures tend to be repressed, or in denial, so that the anima enchants and seduces because she represents ‘the status of the man’s unconscious eros’ (2001: 210). Furthermore, in his memoirs, Jung connects the anima, the unconscious, and ‘the land of the dead’: ‘the soul, the anima, establishes the relationship to the unconscious. In a certain sense this is also a relationship to the collectivity of the dead; for the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors’ (Jung [1963] 1977: 216). Here, too, ghosts are linked conceptually to the unconscious. Aside from the special case of revenants, ghosts appear in a variety of forms. Only a few are transparent; some are fleetingly glimpsed spooky apparitions; others make more substantial appearances. They may be confined to a certain area, and although within that area they may seem able to make themselves visible at will, they also often seem elusive. They are frequently only visible to specific figures, such as children, psychics or the dying, but even when they can be seen by others, they tend to be very selective in whom they appear to – again emphasising the personal nature of the appearances. Only rarely do they speak, and then, as in Sakebi, what they say is usually cryptic. All, however, will signal their spookiness in some way eventually. In general, the ghosts in these films refer to what is wrong in an individual, a marriage, a group, or even a community: a hidden crime, family tensions, ideological fault lines. They tend, however, to refer to the problem obliquely, and melodramatic incidents ensue partly because the character subjected to the ghost’s attentions becomes fraught with frustration at what is going on. Hitherto sensible figures may indeed find themselves behaving so irrationally that they have to be restrained by their colleagues: a male doctor in Dragonfly (Tom Shadyac 2002); a female psychiatrist in Gothika. Ghosts use a different language from the rest of us. Because most do not speak, in a displacement typical of melodrama, they use signs, actions, technology,

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to do their talking for them. The language of the unconscious emerges in unexpected ways. A note about phraseology. I have tried to be consistent in the use of the terms ‘ghost zone’ and ‘ghost world’. A ghost zone is an area in the real world where the ghosts particularly manifest themselves; in houses, ghost zones are typically the attic and the basement. A ghost world, by contrast, refers to the other worlds that ghosts either frequent or can conjure up. In these worlds, different rules pertain as to the nature of space and time. A powerful sinister example is Annwyn, the land of the dead, in The Dark. A benevolent example is the apartment in The Discarnates where the hero finds the ghosts of his parents living in modern-day Tokyo (see Fig. 6). Sometimes, however, films depict ghost worlds in a rather different sense: they seem to be set in the real world, but we discover that they are not, as in The Sixth Sense. In these cases, the differences between the ghost world and the real world may be quite subtle. I occasionally use the term ‘spirit’. I am aware that the term is used to refer to all sorts of disembodied entity, but I use it purely to indicate that the entity being referenced is not a ghost. Thus in Kokkuri, Kokkuri-san is an ancient spirit, a spirit, moreover, of indeterminate gender. In Ringu 2, when the boy Yoichi uses his psychic ability to project himself in a spectral form which the heroine, who is also psychic, can see, I call his manifestation a spirit. Yoichi is not dead, and so is not a ghost. When I refer to the acts of a film, I am using the model proposed by Kristin Thompson in Storytelling in the New Hollywood (1999). Thompson challenges the traditional view that films typically have three acts, divided in a 1:2:1 ratio. She argues, rather, that most Hollywood features may be divided into acts of roughly equal length, and that the number – usually between three and five – depends on the length of the film. There may also be a prologue and an epilogue, but otherwise, ‘throughout the history of the Hollywood feature, large-scale portions [the acts] have remained roughly constant, averaging between 20 and 30 minutes in length’ (1999: 36). The model may also be applied to many non-Hollywood genre films. In discussing a film’s ending, I may make a distinction between the resolution and the epilogue. In most genre films, the resolution sorts out the problems the film has set up; the epilogue shows the final stability that has then been achieved. The modern horror film usually makes a point of undermining this stability, by suggesting that the nightmare is not over, or the monster will return. Although ghost films tend to be more flexible in their endings, most nevertheless have an epilogue. A famous example is

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the track in to the photograph at the end of The Shining. In this case the epilogue sets up an enigma, which reflects back on the film. For films other than the fifty-six listed in the Contents, countries as well as directors are noted when the film is first mentioned in the text. If no country is specified, the country is the US. The Filmography lists all the ghost films, including those with ghost elements, mentioned in the book. The illustrations. The 48 images are all frames from the films. They are designed to illustrate ghost melodrama motifs and themes across the films – altogether they cover some 28 motifs, including a few themes, such as lesbianism. They add an additional thread to the book.

2.

Three Major Predecessors

The Haunted House The Changeling (Peter Medak, Canada, 1979) The Changeling is the first in the trilogy of films whose characteristics may be seen to anticipate those of the ghost melodrama cycle. The script – story by Russell Hunter; screenplay by William Gray and Diana Maddox – takes the basic material of The Haunting (1963), the major haunted-house film to date, and develops it in new directions. First, it provides the house with a backstory that resonates in the present. The ghost here strives to communicate because it wants something. Second, this communication results in an investigation into a past injustice. In The Haunting, the haunted house is deadly, but there is nothing that can be done about this, and Eleanor is killed by its power. The Changeling has a different dynamic: here the haunting generates a quest, and this is the pattern in most of the subsequent ghost melodramas. Third, The Changeling introduces a number of elements not in The Haunting that would become common in ghost melodramas: water (the boy who became a ghost was drowned); a well (where the body was buried); an attic ghost zone. Finally, the film includes an excellent – and indeed seminal – séance. The Changeling interrupts its opening credits to show the hero’s personal traumatic event. Phoning for help after his car has broken down, John Russell (George C. Scott) is a helpless witness to a freak traffic accident in which both his wife and young daughter are killed. To help cope with his loss, John, a music composer, moves to a new teaching post at Seattle University. With the assistance of Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere) of the local Historical Preservation Society, he leases Chessman Park House, a 19th-century mansion. But the house turns out to be haunted. Loud thumps resound through it each day at 6 a.m. One evening John finds bath water running and glimpses the figure of a ghost boy under the water. Glass is broken in an attic window, which leads John to discover, at the back of a closet, a sealed-off staircase leading to an attic room. In the room, John finds a child’s wheelchair and a music box; the latter plays a tune which John himself had recently ‘composed’ at the piano – he now realises he had somehow picked the tune up from (forces within) the house. In Dark places, Barry Curtis discusses closets in haunted houses: ‘These spaces within walls constituted one element in a “secret” architecture of

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maintenance and storage [...] Inevitably, the space is both claustrophobic and a potential portal into other subliminal realms’ (2008: 38). A famous example in the modern horror film is in Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski 1968), where Rosemary (Mia Farrow) discovers that the hitherto ‘blockedoff’ closet in her apartment is in fact a secret route to the sinister witches’ apartment next door. In The Changeling, the motif enters the modern ghost melodrama, where it will find perhaps its most complete elaboration in El orfanato. During the first act of The Changeling, John has a flashback memory of the opening traffic accident, and then sobs in bed. Immediately, the 6 a.m. thumps are heard. This emphasises that the shattering experience of his own traumatic event has opened John up psychically to the attentions of the ghost – a point also made by the medium during the séance. The ghost even seems to play on this. As John looks at a family photograph album, his daughter’s red ball comes bouncing down the stairs. He takes it to a river and throws it in. When he returns home, the ball, now wet, comes bouncing down the stairs again. It is as a caring, sensitive father that John is being appealed to by the ghost, and it is refusing to let him rest. Seeking reasons for the supernatural phenomena, John asks a medium to conduct a séance. This is attended by John, Claire and her mother, Mrs Norman (Madeleine Thornton-Sherwood), as well as the medium Leah (Helen Burns) and her husband Albert (Eric Christmas). In a trance, Leah asks a series of questions whilst simultaneously producing ‘automatic writing’. As she is speaking, the attic door opens, and the camera steadily descends downstairs. Eventually Leah begins to write answers to her questions, which Albert reads out. These reveal that the ghost of a boy called Joseph is striving to communicate with John. It’s a gripping scene, building tension through a tightly edited combination of elements: Leah’s trance-like questions; her feverish scribbling; Albert’s rapid gestures as he supplies her with fresh paper; reaction shots of John, impassive, and Claire, nervous; close-ups of the paper as Leah ferociously starts to write words; Albert’s voice reading the words out; and Mrs Norman arching back from the table as she recoils from the source of tension. The editing becomes more rapid towards the end of the scene, as Leah repeatedly writes ‘John’ and ‘Help’ before casting the writing paper aside and coming out of her trance. The séance is edited to suggest a focusing of psychic energy, and this serves to draw Joseph downstairs. The trope of a moving camera ‘standing in for’ the point of view of an unseen figure was made famous in Halloween (John Carpenter 1978), just a year before The Changeling. Known now as the ‘I-camera’, the trope was adopted by the slasher movie in particular, with

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the camera, as in Halloween, representing the view of the psychotic killer (see Clover 1992: 185-187). As such, the trope, ‘conveys a sense of preternatural threat’ (Grist 2013: 138). In The Changeling, where the moving camera represents the invisible ghost, it carries a different set of connotations. Although unsteady, the camera seems to float through the air, and it is accompanied by haunting music and a strange sighing noise. It seems spooky rather than threatening. The séance does not seem productive, but when John plays back a recording of the session, he can hear a child’s faint voice giving far more answers to Leah’s questions than she wrote down. These responses provide a whole series of cryptic clues to Joseph’s past. Moreover, when John gets to the question, ‘How did you die?’, the camera sweeps up to the attic room to provide him with a ‘flashback vision’ of Joseph’s murder. A sickly child, Joseph was drowned by his father in his bath in the room. The 6 a.m. thumps are magnified echoes of him striking the metal bath as he died. Knocked to the floor, the music box played throughout the murder. (See Fig. 1.) The music box is a recurring motif of ghost movies, dating back at least to The Innocents, where a music box found in the attic includes a miniature of Quint, and its tune later ‘conjures up’ Miss Jessel. A number of ghost films since have included a music box, partly no doubt because of the uncanny ambience of its tinkled tune. Although the brief image of Joseph in the bath is his sole appearance thus far as a ghost, the I-camera movements tell us he is also moving around invisibly. In addition, haunting the mansion for seventy years, he seems to have infiltrated the very structure of the building, which gives him the ability to effect such dramatic paranormal disturbances as the thumps. In The Haunting, although there are ghostly voices and activities, the dominant impression is that the house itself is doing the haunting. Here there is no doubt that the supernatural phenomena all derive from Joseph. John and Claire investigate the information provided by Joseph’s recorded responses. John deduces that, in order to secure a huge inheritance, six-yearold Joseph was murdered in 1906 by his father, and a healthy orphan given his name. The changeling Joseph Carmichael (Melvyn Douglas) is now a wealthy and powerful senator. John’s investigation also uncovers a buried well, hidden under the house of a Mrs Grey (Frances Hyland). Since the evening of the séance, her daughter has been terrified with visions of a boy floating in water under her bedroom floor. The well is now dry, but in it John finds what the police identify as the skeleton of a child, buried many years ago.

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Joseph’s two appearances as a ghost under water are early references to the unheimlich ‘home’ of the ghost, noted in the Introduction. As in Ringu, the well, hidden under a building, is also an excellent symbolisation for the repressed. When John returns to the well to look for the baptism medal Joseph was wearing when he was murdered, the medal itself comes up through the soil, intimating the return of the repressed. Bearing the name Joseph Carmichael, the baptism medal dated 1900 provides the evidence John needs to prove Senator Carmichael is a changeling. However, his first attempt to approach Carmichael is blundering, and he is bundled away by the Senator’s minders. When he returns home, all the doors in the house slam shut: Joseph is showing his displeasure. It is here John utters the cry of frustration which echoes through many subsequent ghost melodramas: ‘What do you want from me? I’ve done everything I can!’ As so often in melodrama, a powerful figure of authority readily resorts to repressive behaviour. Senator Carmichael has been keeping himself informed about John and Claire’s investigations into the history of the house, and he now turns ruthless, getting Claire sacked from her job and sending a policeman, Captain DeWitt (John Colicos), to threaten John. DeWitt accuses John of wanting to blackmail the Senator, and demands that he surrender the baptism medal. Since Carmichael wears an identical medal, it seems highly likely he is aware of the implications of there being another. DeWitt’s threats prompt the intervention of the supernatural. After both he and Claire have left the house, the camera descends the attic stairs, signalling that Joseph is once again on the move. Wondering where to hide the medal, John absent-mindedly looks in the hall mirror. Suddenly the mirror smashes, and there is a shock cut to a bloody close-up of DeWitt, dead. Cut back to John, recoiling from the shards of glass; then back to DeWitt, now seen through a hole in his shattered windscreen that echoes the hole in the mirror. The camera starts to revolve. The cross-cutting continues as the camera on DeWitt turns through a 180°. John’s phone rings. Claire is calling from a phone booth to say DeWitt’s car is inexplicably upside down in the road and he’s dead. This is an echo of John’s past traumatic event that projects the trauma away from him on to his enemy. Here it is DeWitt who is the victim of a fatal traffic accident. It’s as if, through the mirror, John’s unconscious has summoned the supernatural power of the ghost. Even Claire’s phone call links to the opening scene, where John, too, was in a phone booth. Cross-cutting between two or more events in order to emphasise the intervention of the supernatural would become one of the standard ways

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in which the ghost melodramas generate narrative energy. Again, The Changeling shows a mature understanding of the generic possibilities. In the introduction to their anthology Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, Peter Buse and Andrew Stott make a rather reckless claim: ‘where there are disputes over property, we find ghosts, or […] where we find ghosts, there are bound to be anxieties about property’ (1999: 9). But although only a minority of ghost stories concern themselves with property, haunted-house films most certainly do, and The Changeling is an excellent example. Moreover, property has become an issue because of the conduct of the dead patriarch, and it is this that becomes the main point of contention when John finally meets Carmichael at his home. Although John provides Carmichael with evidence, including the baptism medal, the latter rejects John’s story because he cannot accept that his father could have resorted to murder. The ghost has brought a past injustice to light, but the figure who benefited remains in denial. Carmichael’s reaction is clearly that of a man warding off a truth he has long suspected but refused to admit. From John leaving Carmichael, the film cuts back to the house, where Joseph lures Claire up to the attic room and then uses the wheelchair to chase her downstairs. Kevin G. Shinnick comments that this is probably the film’s most famous scene, but criticises it: ‘The chair has no reason to attack Claire for she, like Russell, is trying to help’ (1996: 41-42). Ghosts, however, see things in their own way. Earlier, when John is beginning to work out the backstory, his calm narrative of Joseph’s murder upsets Claire, and she protests: ‘Stop it, John!’ She is cut short by an eerie sight: Joseph’s wheelchair at the top of the first flight of stairs. It is as though here, too, Joseph is showing his displeasure: he doesn’t want John to stop. Using the wheelchair to chase Claire could be seen as an extension of this – from Joseph’s narrow point of view, Claire might well be viewed as not doing enough. In The Haunting (1963), the house repels the visitors with a familiar repertoire of ghostly effects: loud noises; attacks on doors; cold; whispering voices. The supernatural disturbances in The Changeling are far more violent. After John has rescued a sobbing Claire from the house, a powerful wind blows through the building, scattering John’s music papers and knocking him off the landing and into the hall. Flames travel from the top of the house down the banisters. Dissolve to the baptism medal John gave Carmichael in Carmichael’s right hand. This initiates another sequence implying the spatial transfer of supernatural forces. In Carmichael’s left hand is an identical medal. Casting aside the first, he hangs the second on a desk portrait of his father. As the camera executes a series of zooms – to the portrait, to Carmichael and to the medal – we hear Joseph’s voice faintly

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say, ‘Father!’ and ‘My medal’. The medal and the desk on which Carmichael is leaning both begin to shake. Gold light reflected from the medal plays across Carmichael’s face, and he stares vacantly. The supernatural forces unleashed within the house are now threatening Carmichael himself. The medal he places on the portrait is a duplicate made to conceal the fact that he is an impostor. The faint echoes of Joseph’s voice seem to come from within Carmichael, like his conscience, which he has repressed in pursuit of a glittering political career. The gold light on his face could be seen as an allusion to his fortune as the son ‘blessed’ by the father, but the light also seems to mock him. Cut to the house: John watches as, amidst the flames, Carmichael’s spirit walks up the stairs. As John escapes from the house, Carmichael’s spirit goes up to the attic, where it witnesses the primary traumatic event: the killing of the real Joseph Carmichael. The events in the attic room are now cross-cut with Carmichael in a trance at his study desk. The shaking of the medal on the portrait is linked to the shaking of the medal round Joseph’s neck as he drowns. As Carmichael has a heart attack at his desk, his spirit collapses on the attic floor. The attic reverts to its present state; flames engulf the house. The cross-cutting ends with Carmichael dead beside his desk. Arriving at Carmichael’s house, John and Claire see his body taken away by ambulance. The next day, all that survives in the ruins of the house are the wheelchair and the music box. The latter springs open, and we hear the tinkled tune. The ghost here is typically ruthless. It is concerned only with satisfying its own wishes: that Carmichael accept he is an impostor, contemplate the monstrosity of his father’s crime, and die. Carmichael has a heart attack because he has now seen the terrible crime that defined his life, and psychically he dies in the attic room where the crime occurred. But the ghost’s fury is such that John is also a victim. Having lost his whole family, he now loses all his possessions, consumed in the fire. Like many subsequent ghost melodramas, The Changeling stresses just how dangerous it can be to come into contact with ghosts. Melodrama is inscribed into the film in a number of different ways. First, The Changeling is about bereavement, a type of story that lends itself to melodramatic representation because of the acute distress suffered by the bereaved character – John is having to overcome an emotional crisis. Second, John’s investigation uncovers a certain sort of family melodrama, one which involves the past murder of a son by his father, the issue of birthright, the founding of an empire, and the suppression of the father’s past crime – evidence of which is literally buried. The plot device of a patriarchal figure deciding to murder a relative in order to secure a huge inheritance occurs

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in a number of major Victorian novels, e.g. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860); J.S. LeFanu’s Uncle Silas (1864) – although the villain rarely succeeds. Another 19th-century melodramatic motif is the unwanted relative shut away in a hidden room, most famously Bertha Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). It is in this narrative thread that the ghost story comes into play and animates the melodrama. Moreover, as the details of this plot are uncovered, another family – Mrs Grey and her daughter – is traumatised. Third, the climactic conflagration caused by the ghost boy in the attic evokes the burning of Thornfield by Bertha Rochester – a seminal melodramatic incident that has been echoed in many novels and films. Fourth, the baptism medal is the equivalent of the locket given to a female child in traditional melodrama so that, years later, she can be identified as a long-lost heir, as in Orphans of the Storm (D.W. Griffith 1922). Here there are two such medals, but the melodramatic principle still holds: the medal in the well does indeed identify Joseph as the true heir. Finally, The Changeling ends with two motifs – the wheelchair and the music box – which speak to the poignancy of the melodramatic focus of the film: the disabled boy locked away in the attic; the tune he heard playing as he was murdered. The status of The Changeling has grown over the years. It is now quoted in other ghost films: a red ball bouncing down some stairs in Kokkuri and The Awakening; ghosts in baths and wells in many films and, above all, a tribute to its séance in The Others. Its opening is explicitly cited in the opening of Yogen/Premonition (Norio Tsuruta, Japan, 2004) – the father who witnesses the terrible crash that kills his daughter is even in a phone booth at the time. Although Premonition is another sort of supernatural story, its narrative gives similar emphasis to this opening scene, locating it as the father’s (and the film’s) traumatic event, obsessively returned to in the narrative. As its influence spreads, The Changeling now seems a seminal film of the modern ghost melodrama.

The Malevolent Hotel The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, GB, 1980) Adapted by Kubrick and Diane Johnson from Stephen King’s horror novel, The Shining is by far the most famous of the three early predecessors to the cycle, and it has prompted many discussions: for a good summary of the different critical interpretations, see Ruffles 2004: 180-190. The basic story

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is simple: Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), employed as winter caretaker at the snowbound Overlook Hotel in Colorado, goes insane and tries to murder his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their young son Danny (Danny Lloyd). His violence is anticipated in the story of a previous winter caretaker, Grady, who in 1970 slaughtered his wife and two young daughters with an axe and then shot himself. It is the hotel itself which somehow prompts this violence: it is a supernatural malevolent entity, capable of manipulating those within it. It was built on ancient Native American burial grounds, and some critics have suggested it may be seen as a metaphor for the US (Ruffles: 182-183). Although The Shining remains primarily a horror movie, the novel’s ghost elements have nevertheless been developed. The hotel in the movie is now a particular sort of ghost world: one in which the ghost elements are related to those who experience them, here mainly Jack and Danny. In the early scenes we learn Jack lost his job as a teacher, that he has a propensity to violence, especially when drunk – he dislocated Danny’s shoulder, which prompted him to go on the wagon – and that he hopes to use the forced isolation at the hotel to write a novel. In his case, it is as though the hotel can read his weaknesses and exploit them. Danny, by contrast, is psychic. Before moving to the hotel, he looks at his mirror reflection and asks Tony – his imaginary friend who represents his psychic side – why he doesn’t want to go there. We then see a montage of five shots: three of a red liquid (we read blood) pouring out of a hotel elevator and covering the floor, and two punctuating shots: flashes of two young girls and of Danny’s screaming face. Danny blacks out. There are distinct psychic manifestations here. In the hotel, Danny sees the girls several times: they are the ghosts of the murdered sisters. But the images of the flooding blood are more expressionistic – as though the hotel itself were haemorrhaging. Here the images are cryptic: only when they are repeated later can we associate them with specific violent undercurrents. Nevertheless, it is apparent Tony is making Danny see images that constitute a warning about the hotel. When the family arrives at the hotel on closing day (30 October), two psychic events occur. First, Danny sees the ghost sisters, who silently appear, as though introducing themselves. Then, when the head chef Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) shows Wendy and Danny around the hotel’s enormous kitchen, Kubrick effects a spatial shift so subtle it is like a sleight of hand. As Hallorann opens a meat freezer, there is a perfectly matched cut to the interior of another meat freezer whose door opens the opposite way. When the three leave this freezer, they have shifted to the other side

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of the corridor. The Overlook has demonstrated its disorientating power, but no-one at the time noticed. Not until the release of the documentary Room 237 (Rodney Ascher 2012) did I encounter a reference to this moment. In addition, sharing Danny’s psychic gift, Hallorann talks to him about it, calling it ‘shining’. Danny in turn explains how Tony ‘shows him things’: it’s as though he ‘sees’ whilst asleep, and afterwards he cannot remember everything – a clear parallel with dreams. Hallorann warns him that the Overlook Hotel, too, can ‘shine’ and show people with their ability incidents from both the past and the future, some of which will be bad. In particular, he tells Danny not to enter Room 237. Hallorann and the other members of staff then leave, and only Jack, Wendy and Danny remain. The film is punctuated with headings which from this point mark the passage of time. (I am referring to the 144-minute US version, not the cut British print. For a list of the cuts, see Combs 1980: 228.) After the first narrative jump – signalled as ‘One Month Later’ – the headings note the passing days: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Monday, Wednesday. The eight days implied up to the start of the Wednesday cover the arrival of snow, which isolates the hotel, and the early stages of Jack’s breakdown. At this point, we are just under an hour into the movie. But events now develop more rapidly, and forty minutes pass before the next heading, 8 a.m. (the next day). The rest of the film – apart from the epilogue – takes place on that Thursday. After a month in the hotel, Jack’s writing seems to be blocked. As Danny explores the labyrinthine corridors on his tricycle, Jack is woken by Wendy bringing him breakfast in bed at 11.30 a.m. The first half of this scene is filmed in a long take with Jack shown in the dressing-table mirror. During this, Jack says he ought to try and write, but he lacks good ideas. The second half is filmed with no mirror shots and using conventional shot/reverse shot editing; Jack now tells Wendy how much he likes the hotel, and mentions his sense of déjà vu when he came for his interview: ‘It was almost as though I knew what was round every corner’. This is a pivotal scene. In many ghost melodramas, mirrors are a link to the ghost world – in particular, it is in the mirror where ghosts are (first) seen. Here the implication is slightly different. Whilst writing the script, Kubrick and Johnson read both Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ and Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1975) (see Wilson 1980: 54). It is the significance of the latter I wish to focus on here. In his monograph on The Shining, Roger Luckhurst applies Bettelheim’s ideas to a number of the specific fairy-tale references in the film: ‘Hansel and Gretel’; ‘The Three Little Pigs’; ‘Bluebeard’ (2013: 50). But

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there is also a more general point. When first seen in the mirror in this scene, Jack is asleep. Within a fairy-tale framework, it’s as though he has been put under a spell. Jack in the mirror hints at the hotel’s power: he is split, and a part of him is being held in a parallel mirror world, a world of stasis. That he is blocked is then emphasised when he goes to the ‘Colorado Lounge’, a huge reception area, to write – all he does is throw a ball around. The spell is also infantilising him: he’s like a child, playing. In fact, fairy-tale worlds and ghost worlds share crucial common features. On Northrop Frye’s five modes of literary fiction, both belong in the second category, romance, where ‘the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended’ (Frye 1957: 33). The spell under which the hotel is placing Jack is taking him into its own specific ghost world(s). The hotel’s negative effect on Jack becomes apparent on the Tuesday. He is now typing, but when Wendy interrupts, he becomes extremely aggressive. From this point on, their scenes together are all thrown off-kilter by Jack’s unpredictable mood swings. Meanwhile, Danny has more sightings of the ghost sisters. On the Saturday, standing at the end of a corridor, they address him by name, and invite him to ‘come and play’ with them. He then has a brief vision of them on the floor, slaughtered, an axe nearby. As the girls invite Danny to play, ‘for ever – and ever – and ever’, for each two-word utterance, the film cuts closer to them, and then cuts to show their bloody bodies. The montage not only informs Danny what happened to the girls, but also emphasises what is meant by such an invitation from ghosts: Danny will have to die. He covers his eyes, then peeks through his fingers; they disappear. (This ‘magical’ gesture is re-used in both Ju-On and Histoire de Marie et Julien). Danny does not see the sisters again. They have served their function: to warn him. Jack and Danny are experiencing the forces within the hotel differently. Whereas for Jack, the hotel seems to be bringing out both his laziness and his nastiness, for Danny the threats are external, and take the form of visions only he can see. Jack also seems more overtly under a spell. On the Monday, Danny finds Jack sitting on his bed, listless. At the start of the scene, Danny is framed between Jack and his image in the dressing-table mirror – another shot linking Jack’s stasis with his mirror image. (William Paul makes a similar point about this scene: 1994: 349). Jack even says he can’t sleep (‘too much to do’), an anticipation of his projected ghost status. Yet he tells Danny, too, how much he likes the hotel: ‘I wish we could stay here for ever and ever and ever’. This echoing of the ghost sisters disturbs Danny, who now asks, ‘You would never hurt Mommy or me, would you?’ Jack reassures Danny, but follows this with a distinctly unnerving grin.

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It is implied that Danny somehow knows it was the girl’s father who slaughtered them, and he is concerned that Jack, too, could turn violent. On the Wednesday, events move closer to realising Danny’s fears. Lured by a ball rolling up to him out of nowhere, Danny goes to Room 237, finds the door open and enters. Jack has a nightmare at his desk, and his cries summon Wendy. He dreamt he slaughtered her and Danny with an axe; it is apparent that this occurred whilst Danny was in Room 237. Here it’s as though the hotel is reacting to this intrusion into the ‘forbidden room’ by insinuating murderous thoughts into Jack. As Wendy comforts Jack, Danny arrives, traumatised by what happened to him in the room: his neck is bruised and clothing torn. Wendy assumes Jack did this and angrily takes Danny away. The family breakdown shifts the film further into ghost territory. Enraged at Wendy’s accusations, Jack goes to the Gold Room, a huge lounge, and sits at the empty bar. He declares he would give his soul for a glass of beer. This conjures up a sinister barman, Lloyd (Joe Turkel), and a well-stocked bar. Now, it is possible that Jack is hallucinating. Whereas Danny found the ghost sisters uncanny, Jack greets the barman by name, and gossips about Wendy in the mocking, misogynistic terms familiar in all-male bar-room discourse. Equally, it is possible that the hotel has taken Jack at his word: it has taken possession of his soul and it rewards him with free alcohol. On this occasion, Lloyd gives him bourbon ‘on credit’, but when Jack returns later, Lloyd pointedly refuses his money: ‘Orders from the house’. ‘The house’ could well refer to the hotel. Read as a hallucination, the scene also suggests Jack’s developing psychosis. In ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’, Freud discusses an ‘acute hallucinatory confusion’: The ego creates, autocratically, a new external and internal world […] in accordance with the id’s wishful impulses, and […] the motive of this disassociation from the external world is some very serious frustration by reality of a wish – a frustration which seems intolerable. The close affinity of this psychosis to normal dreams is unmistakable. ([1924] 1979: 215)

Jack is deeply frustrated in his current life and, showing no interest in his role as caretaker – Wendy does all the chores – pours everything into writing. However, as will be made clear, he is ‘blocked’ by his psychosis. At some level aware of this, he conjures up a compensatory world with the solace of drink and the satisfaction of petty gossip. Equally, this new world is like a dream, an association cued by the narrative linkage of Jack’s

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murderous dream – his repressed wish to slaughter his family – and the encounter with Lloyd, where he disavows such violence in himself. When Wendy arrives, the bar has returned to its empty state and Lloyd has vanished. She now tells Jack that Danny was assaulted in Room 237 by a crazy woman in the bath. As an incredulous Jack goes to investigate, The Shining, like The Changeling, uses cross-cutting to suggest the transmission of supernatural forces. This begins with a cut to Hallorann’s apartment in Miami: he reacts to an unseen force. Cut to the door to Room 237 ajar. Cut to Danny ‘shining’ to communicate with Hallorann – in effect sending a distress signal. Cut to Room 237; the camera pans round it and moves forward. The use of the I-camera here creates ambiguity: this could be a flashback showing Danny’s incursion into the room; equally, the camera movement could stand in for Jack exploring the suite. Although, when the camera reaches the bathroom, it is Jack who is revealed as the figure behind its movement, in the events that now occur, the experiences of both father and son are registered. Also as in The Changeling, the bath becomes the site of ghostly activity. But in Jack’s case, the woman in the bath is young, attractive and naked. Stepping out of the bath, she walks forward invitingly; they kiss. Jack then looks in a mirror and sees he is embracing a rotting old hag (see Fig. 2). He recoils; cackling laughter begins and continues over the rest of the sequence. Cut to Danny shining. Cut to what he saw in 237: the old hag in the bath. Cut to Jack, horrified, backing out of the room, then to his vision: the naked cackling hag pursuing him. The montage of four shots is repeated: Danny shining/the hag now rising up in the bath/Jack still backing out of the suite/the hag still pursuing him. The montage begins a third time, but is interrupted when Jack escapes into the corridor, locks the door and flees. Although we know Danny is shining to communicate with Hallorann – and could indeed be shining the whole scene in Room 237 to him (Mayersberg 1980/1981: 56) – the effect of this cross-cutting is to suggest that both Danny’s and Jack’s experiences of the room are being shown at the same time. These experiences reveal their contrasting inner worlds. When Danny (off-screen) entered the forbidden room, he was punished for his transgression by a grotesque grandparent figure, a trace perhaps of Wendy’s unseen but by all accounts monstrous mother in the novel. Jack, a disbelieving adult, is by contrast teased. The suite has a vivid purple and green carpet pattern, and as the I-camera moves forward it is as though rows of purple phalluses are pointing the way to the bathroom – where Jack conjures up a sexually enticing young woman. He is then confronted with the woman’s repulsive opposite. Both ghosts may be seen as Jack’s projections: his most alluring

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sexual fantasy and his greatest sexual horror. Here the mirror is used to reveal the horror masked by the fantasy – a moment which anticipates the use of mirrors in many subsequent films to reveal the ghost world itself. In another fairy-tale reference, the ghosts also mockingly reverse the key moment of Beauty and the Beast: here the hero kisses Beauty and she turns into the Beast. In High Spirits, a ghost comedy, the proper fairy-tale outcome pertains: Jack (Steve Guttenberg) steels himself to kiss the two-hundredyear-old hag Mary (Daryl Hannah) has turned into, and is rewarded with her transforming back into her youthful self. When Jack returns to Wendy, he says he saw nothing in Room 237. Unable to admit to such an inexplicable and humiliating experience, he blames Danny himself for the bruises. We now see that Danny in his bedroom can psychically hear his parents’ conversation. When Wendy suggests he should be taken away from the hotel, Danny has a vision of the word REDRUM written on a door. Then, when Jack becomes enraged at the idea of leaving the hotel, this prompts another vision of the corridor of blood Danny ‘saw’ early in the film. He screams silently. Already, the warning of murder (redrum) and the corridor of blood are being associated with Jack’s aggression towards Wendy. The aggression derives from his refusal to leave the hotel – a mark of the power it now has over him, or alternatively, the grip of his psychosis. In the oneiric, coded imagery typical of communications from ghosts and the ghost world, Danny is being warned of some sort of impending slaughter. Jack is pulled further into the hotel’s seductive and dangerous ghost world. He returns to the Gold Room, where a 1920s party is in full swing. He is greeted at the door by name, and obtains another drink from Lloyd. He then collides with a waiter, Grady (Philip Stone), who takes him to the men’s room to remove a resulting drinks’ stain. Jack tells Grady he knows who he is: the previous caretaker who murdered his wife and daughters and shot himself. He recognises him from newspaper articles (we saw a scrapbook of clippings beside Jack as he typed). Grady says he has no memory of such an event, and he was never the caretaker, since Jack has always been the caretaker. The logic suggests that of a dream, and the whole film is indeed becoming more oneiric. The décor of the men’s room – a glaring red and white – is completely at odds with the relatively tasteful mix of old-fashioned and modern elsewhere. The scene shifts in a new direction: Grady tells Jack that Danny has been attempting to bring in an outside party, a ‘nigger cook’. Grady thinks Jack should do something about this, mentioning that he himself had been obliged to ‘correct’ his daughters and wife when

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they ‘misbehaved’. Whether hallucination or ghost, Grady here seems like another projection of Jack’s inner world, embodying the violence latent in him. Again this fits the earlier intimation: Jack has sold his soul to the hotel, and it is now revealing to him his true, repressed nature. In his class-based analysis of The Shining, Fredric Jameson points out that Grady in this scene cannot be anything like his former self: ‘Even the precursor-figure, […] the forerunner of Nicholson’s own possession and the ominous shape of his own destiny, has himself been rewritten in terms of […] the style of some previous generation’ (1992: 95). Jameson then gets to the heart of his argument: That generation, finally, is the twenties, and it is by the twenties that the hero is haunted and possessed. The twenties were the last moment […] in which an American ruling class projected a class-conscious and unapologetic image of itself and enjoyed its privileges without guilt. (1992: 95).

Jameson promotes the 1920s fantasy into the key ‘ghost event’ of the film – and the world into which Jack as ghost will be absorbed at the end of the film. Repressed behind his resentment and frustration at his miserable life, Jack is a snob, someone who would love to be a member of a social elite, greeted by the doorman by name when he walks into a glamorous party. On the Thursday, responding to Danny’s distress signal, Hallorann makes the long journey from Miami to the hotel. Danny himself has retreated from his own persona into that of Tony – evidently, his psychic defence against the threatening violence. And in the Colorado Lounge, Wendy discovers exactly what Jack has been writing: reams of paper with just one sentence typed over and over: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. This last is a chilling revelation of the extent of Jack’s stasis – and his psychosis. In the grip of the hotel’s power, Jack is like a schoolboy forced to do a million lines, a repetition-compulsion that points to the death drive. Catching Wendy reading his typescript, Jack, by now completely in the hotel’s power, advances on her menacingly. As he backs her across the Colorado Lounge, the scene echoes that in room 237, with Jack now the monster and Wendy the terrified figure retreating. A cut to Danny reveals that again he can psychically hear Jack’s threats. As Jack raises the question of what should be done with him, Danny ‘sees’ two more images of the blood-filled corridor, and another flash of ‘REDRUM’ on the door. In the hotel’s expressionist language, it’s as though the corridor of blood refers not only to the violence Jack intends to inflict on his family, but also to Grady’s

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butchered daughters and the ‘Indians’ that had to be ‘repelled’ when the hotel was built in 1907. Jack insists to Wendy that he cannot leave the hotel because he has a contract to fulf il, and refers repeatedly to his ‘responsibilities’. In a discussion of the monstrous fathers in Stephen King’s work, Robin Wood refers to, ‘patriarchal culture and the appalling demands and stresses it imposes upon men in the name of authority and “masculinity”’ (1985: 39). But Jack’s notion of himself as a dutiful employee is a psychotic fantasy. An emasculated figure, he compensates by resorting to violence, a violence directed at the woman who, through her own competence around the hotel, has highlighted his own inadequacy. In the nature of its critique of male violence, the film – in sharp contrast to the novel – shows a feminist edge, although Kubrick does rather undermine this by keeping Wendy in these later scenes consistently on the verge of hysteria. After Wendy has knocked Jack out, and locked him in a food store, events take a new turn. He is freed by Grady – the point at which it becomes clear that Jack has not (just) been hallucinating these figures: they really are ghosts. But he is also freed for a purpose. The contract Jack has to fulfil is not what he thought: he is in fact being assessed by the hotel management, and what they require is that he murder his family. Danny (as Tony) is aware of these violent undercurrents: whilst Wendy sleeps, he walks around the bedroom clutching a kitchen knife and chanting ‘Redrum’; he then writes REDRUM in lipstick on the bathroom door. This is the image from the future he has been psychically seeing, and we note the language of the hotel is in mirror writing: Danny writes the D and the middle R backwards. His chanting wakes Wendy, who is shocked to see – through the mirror – the word MURDER. Cut to Jack, assaulting the apartment door with an axe. On the one hand, this is the climax of a violent family melodrama, in which the father goes insane and sets out to kill his wife and child. On the other, Kubrick handles it as grotesque comedy: Jack peers through the hole he has smashed in the door, and says, cheerily, ‘Wendy, I’m home’. In the meantime, Wendy has managed to get Danny, who has recovered his own personality, out of the bathroom window. He hides in a cupboard back in the hotel. In keeping with his regression to childishness, Jack at the bathroom door pretends to be the Big Bad Wolf: ‘Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in’. He then starts to attack this door, too, with the axe. It is a measure of Kubrick’s control and Nicholson’s bravura over-the-top performance that this all works – Jack is both funny and terrifying. He has become a fairy-tale bogeyman, just as, later, he becomes an inarticulate

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monster, howling in the maze. However, he is distracted from his assault on the door by Hallorann’s Snowcat arriving outside. He goes to investigate. Critics have objected to the way Hallorann innocently walks into the hotel and is promptly slaughtered by Jack with an axe: why does Hallorann’s psychic ability desert him just when his own life is at stake? In fact, the novel stresses that the hotel can block psychic activity (King [1977] 1980: 315). Nevertheless, the brutal murder of an entirely sympathetic character is shocking. On Jameson’s reading, perhaps it signals the racism of the era Jack is linked to. As Hallorann is killed, there are three cuts to Danny in the cupboard screaming: he can ‘see’ the violence. This is, in fact, the image of him screaming from the very early montage. Only now, as Jack’s murderousness is finally unleashed, is the full import of Tony’s early warning apparent. It was a warning not simply about the hotel, but about what would happen to Jack as father in the hotel. Hallorann’s murder seems to fuel the hotel’s power. As Jack pursues Danny outside and into the snow-covered hedge maze, Wendy, searching the hotel for Danny, now also sees ghosts. They allude to the hotel’s decadent past. Fellatio is implied in a glimpsed scene of a man in evening dress and a figure wearing an animal costume and a pig’s mask. A man with a bloody gash in his head – another victim of the hotel’s violence – raises his glass to her: ‘Great party, isn’t it?’ Cobwebbed skeletons sit in evening clothes, like a macabre tableau of a past moment frozen in time – as in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ – but then left to decay (see Fig. 3). This image suggests the hotel’s unconscious: what is repressed under the glamour and glitter of the 1920s party that Jack walked into. Wendy’s final vision is of the blood bursting out of the elevator and covering the floor. But whereas the earlier shots of the blood warned Danny of the bloodbath to come, here the film cuts from the image to Danny in the maze successfully evading his murderous father. He escapes the bloody fate of the hotel’s earlier victims. In the novel, the elevator is the site of ghostly activity (277-281). In the film, after closing day, the hotel’s elevators are not used – except for the visions of blood. Roger Luckhurst writes: ‘The maze is the dominant symbol of The Shining’ (2013: 86). Encompassing both the hedge maze and the hotel’s labyrinthine corridors, the maze may be seen as a cerebral symbol, one which Danny solves but which bamboozles Jack. The elevators by contrast are a corporeal symbol – they are like the hotel’s arteries, ‘bleeding’ in Danny and Wendy’s visions to mock the human victims alluded to in the torrents of blood.

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Wendy and Danny reunite and escape in Hallorann’s Snowcat; Jack freezes to death in the maze. In the film’s epilogue, the camera tracks in to a photograph, dated July 4 1921, in which Jack is shown posing in front of the guests at an Independence Day Ball. Predictably, this ending has prompted much discussion. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick himself has said the photograph ‘suggests the reincarnation of Jack’ (Ciment 1984: 194). This is supported by Jack’s comments to Wendy about his sense of déjà vu when he f irst arrived at the hotel. Clearly, however, Jack here is not the caretaker – he stands in front of the guests like the manager or, at least, the M.C. Perhaps, since it now seems the hotel, as in the novel, contains several ghost worlds, Jack is destined to keep returning to play out a bloody Oedipal melodrama in which he either kills or is killed. Or, following Jameson, the photograph shows the f ilm’s dominant ghost world, the one into which Jack will now be inducted – in an elevated role. Jack, in other words, is either like a ghost, doomed to return to the scenes of his past or destined to be a ghost in the hotel’s own past. Most of the ghosts in The Shining may be seen as oneiric projections which ‘speak to’ the tensions and fault lines in the family. Danny is no doubt lonely on his own, and the sisters invite him to play with them. But he is also frightened of the latent violence in his father, and here the girls’ butchered bodies bear bloody testament to parental insanity. Jack hates being on the wagon: Lloyd supplies him with booze and listens sympathetically to his moans about Wendy. We also assume Jack has lost interest sexually in Wendy, and so an attractive young woman appears naked before him – before transforming into an old witch. Jack resents having his authority questioned: Grady advises him how to deal with this. When Wendy discovers his deeper secret – his impotence as a writer – Jack turns murderous. Wendy gets the better of him and locks him up, but Grady reappears to chastise him and make him promise to complete his unfinished business before freeing him. The ghosts seen by Wendy at the climax are more conventional – these are the sort of ghosts found more extensively in the novel – but they nevertheless depict the world into which Jack as ghost will presumably be inducted at the end. In the novel, the hotel blows up; in the film, it survives. The Shining did well at the box office, but it was not the blockbuster success Kubrick had hoped. It is not difficult to see why: the film has the allusiveness of an art movie, and is open to many different readings. However, like The Changeling, the reputation of the film has grown steadily over the years, and it, too, can be seen to have influenced quite a few subsequent

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ghost and horror films, influences that will be noted in a number of the later discussions.

The Avenging Ghost Ghost Story (John Irvin, US, 1981) Ghost Story goes further than either The Changeling or The Shining towards establishing the characteristics of the modern ghost melodrama. This is not to claim that it is a better film, simply that its generic elements have been developed in ways which would prove more fruitful for the future evolution of the scary ghost movie. In particular, Ghost Story possesses a powerful and vengeful female ghost. The film’s premise is that Eva Galli (Alice Krige), accidentally killed f ifty years ago, returns as a revenant, Alma Mobley, in order to enact revenge on the men responsible for her death. Now in their 70s, the men still live in the same New England town, Milburn, and are pillars of the community: Sears James (John Houseman) and Ricky Hawthorne (Fred Astaire) are lawyers, John Jaffrey (Melvyn Douglas) is a doctor and Ned Wanderley (Douglas Fairbanks Jr) is the mayor. Calling themselves the Chowder Society, they meet regularly, dressed in formal evening wear, and tell each other ghost stories. In the pre-credits sequence, their sleep is troubled: Sears cannot sleep; the other three are having nightmares. They are being tormented by anxieties which stem from a past traumatic event, anxieties that have only recently resurfaced. In effect, Eva has already begun to ‘haunt’ them, although it will be some time before they dare admit to this possibility. Linked to the protagonists’ guilt for a past killing, the ghost thus functions as the return of the repressed. The killing of Eva was a drunken accident, but it became horrific when, seeking to conceal their crime, the young men sank her in a car in a deep pond: she was not yet dead, and her face appeared screaming at the car’s back window. The incident remained their secret, but the men’s storytelling may be seen as a displacement of their anxieties. Moreover, when Don Wanderley (Craig Wasson), Ned’s son, hears about the incident, he speculates that the men’s stories, together with their guilt, may well have helped conjure up Eva’s ghost. Don, too, is involved because Eva’s revenge extends to the next generation, and his identical twin David has already become Alma’s victim. (Although I will use ‘Eva’ to refer to the character in the past, and ‘Alma’ to refer to her revenant/ghost, the

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distinction becomes blurred. They are the same person and, to the members of the Chowder Society, she is only ever Eva.) Ghost Story was adapted from Peter Straub’s 1979 novel by Lawrence D. Cohen, the scriptwriter of Carrie (1976). The 500-page novel necessarily required drastic pruning (one member of the Chowder Society, Lewis, is simply deleted), but the film also has a different premise. In the novel, Eva and certain others are supernatural figures who have been around for centuries: Straub calls them ‘shapeshifters’ (1979: 379), a category that also includes vampires and werewolves. Here Eva is malevolent from the start, and when the young men think they have killed her, only to discover she is alive, this is a supernatural phenomenon and not the drunken mistake of youth it seems in the movie. In addition, she comes back repeatedly, but always as a different-looking young woman – even as a girl – and she can assume non-human forms (a lynx; a bird; a wasp) to escape the deaths visited upon her in her various human guises. Her helpers, Gregory and Fenny Bate, who are mortal in the film, are likewise shapeshifters. The film’s sense of a trauma personal to the members of the Chowder Society is thus absent – Eva unleashes her murderousness against the whole town of Milburn. Moreover, she is not finally vanquished, as in the film, by the familiar ghost-appeasing act of recovering her body, but by Don defeating her supernatural powers by killing both her human and animal forms. In fact, despite its title, the novel is not really a ghost story. The only ghosts are the many victims of the shapeshifters, and they play a relatively small role in the plot: their function is to faze and frighten the main human characters. The novel is an excellent example of a supernatural thriller, but it is the ways in which its material has been condensed and reworked that makes the film such a memorable ghost melodrama. After introducing the members of the Chowder Society, the film cuts to David’s apartment in New York. The bath is mysteriously overflowing. Naked apart from a towel, David repeatedly asks a nude woman lying prone on the bed, ‘Who are you?’ When she answers, ‘You know’, he is puzzled, and touches her. She adds, ‘I am you’, but her body is cold, and David reacts with fright. Now asking, ‘What are you?’, he turns her over, to reveal a hideously decomposing face. This so shocks him that he steps backwards through the window and falls to his death, crashing through the glass roof of a swimming pool to land at its side. His death is then presented as though it were Don’s dream: there is a cut to Don waking as the phone rings. A number of points are relevant. First, the suggestion that the scene could be Don’s dream illustrates the way the activities of a ghost can resonate with a character’s unconscious thoughts. David is Eva/Alma’s first victim, but

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it is established later that Don has already had an intense affair with her, which he broke off after witnessing her eerie, sinister side. When he learnt she had moved on to David, he did in fact try to warn his twin. But there are also tensions between the brothers. David and the brothers’ father are the ambitious, successful members of the family; they look down on Don, who is more laid-back, surviving on odd teaching jobs. Don may secretly resent both his father and brother, and David’s death might well satisfy Don’s unconscious wish. Moreover, only a few scenes later, Ned is killed in a similar manner. In an oddly oneiric sequence, he comes out of his house into the snow wearing only a coat over his pyjamas, pursues a figure he thinks is David, and finds himself on a bridge. Eva’s voice addresses him; he turns and is confronted, like David, by the decaying spectre. This so shocks him he falls from the bridge onto the frozen river. He partly breaks the ice as he lands, and so his body, lying on a hard surface next to water, precisely echoes David’s. Second, the overflowing bath introduces the motif of water. Ghost Story uses both water and rain in a manner which would become characteristic of the ghost melodrama. For example, on the evening of Alma’s first date with Don, they arrive in her apartment wet from the rain, and their vigorous love-making is punctuated by thunder and lightning. Here the storm heightens the sexual abandon of the revenant. The overflowing bath itself alludes to another scene we will see during Alma and Don’s affair: as they take a bath together, Don pulls Alma under the water so only her hair is visible – she then emerges screaming. This is an echo of the primary traumatic event: Alma is terrified of being submerged. There are perhaps a dozen further references throughout the film linking water to Eva/Alma. The references culminate with (a) Don perturbed by water seeping out of the crumbling walls of Eva’s now derelict house – the water on this occasion heralding Alma’s final appearance – and (b) the sunken car, containing Eva’s body, hauled up out of the pond. Here we see a spookier link between Eva and water: her body in the car is badly decomposed, but it is still (briefly) animated. Third, Alma’s enigmatic ‘I am you’ – which David, shocked by the coldness of her body, fails to register – alludes to a common feature of female revenants. In Jungian terms, Alma represents David’s anima, a projection of his repressed female side, a tantalising figure whose seductiveness allures but whose mystery eludes. She can destroy David more easily than Don because he is more vulnerable to such a figure: his sensitive, emotional side is more repressed. But her comment also warns David. As a ghost, Alma is dead and her putrefying face is a prophecy: this is how you will look.

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Fourth, Freud’s notion of ‘the uncanny’ is obliquely referred to – but heightened by being made monstrous. Freud writes: ‘It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs’ ([1919] 1985: 368). When David turns Alma over, the immediate horror is his discovery that this is what he’s been making love to. But her badly decaying face could also be seen as a horror film displacement from her genitals: an example of the ‘upward displacement’ Norman O. Brown writes about in his discussion of the works of Jonathan Swift in Life Against Death (1968: 175). The psychoanalytical subtext also suggests the castrating force of the image: Don, naked, crashes through two windows as he falls to his death. The scene of Alma’s first appearance thus condenses a number of elements of the ghost melodrama. The sudden appearance of her putrefying face is here quite effective: in particular, it suggests the horror of female sexuality that so often haunts the unconscious of the horror movie. Repeated throughout the film, however, the decomposing face – although different on each appearance – loses its force, delivering little more than a series of crude visual shocks. It becomes something of a horror film cliché, which is regrettable, because much of the film is intelligently worked out. The scene with David is brief; the sequence of Alma’s relationship with Don is much more developed. Don tells this story (‘I think it’s a ghost story’) to the three surviving members of the Chowder Society after his father’s death. Having realised from an old photograph that Eva and Alma are the same woman, he wants to force the men to face up to what is happening. A flashback shows Don, a teacher at a college in Florida, meeting Alma, the Dean’s secretary – who quickly seduces him. Her accent is English – usually a sinister sign in a Hollywood film – but she remains uncommunicative about her past. After the incident in the bath, Alma begins to behave strangely. She goes into trances, anticipating the trances of another revenant, Marie, in Histoire de Marie et Julien. During a holiday in a beach cabin, Don wakes to find Alma is not in the bed. As he goes through to the main room, there is a striking shot. He walks past a large mirror which shows him from behind in reflection alongside his actual self, but Alma, naked at a window in the background, is visible only in the mirror. This is odd, because in front of Don is a window where we think Alma should be standing, and she isn’t. It is in fact a trompe l’oeil, but, subliminally, it’s as though Alma has slipped into the mirror world. As Alma stands, looking out at the sea, she says, ‘I will take you places where you have never been. I will show you things that you have never seen’.

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But the romantic promise is promptly undermined; turning and walking back past Don, she says, ‘And I will see the life run out of you’. In her trance, she inadvertently reveals her true designs on Don. It is here he decides to break off their relationship. Whereas Don’s relationship with Alma is strongly sexual, the young men of the Chowder Society had a more innocent relationship with Eva. Told in flashback to Don by Sears and Ricky after John’s death, this is the backstory leading up to the primary traumatic event. In the spring of 1930, Eva’s arrival in Milburn excites general interest, and the young men eagerly pursue her. It is Ned (Kurt Johnson) who succeeds in charming her, and the others accept this. However, when the five go to a lakeside cabin – a location pointedly similar to the beach cabin – and Ned attempts to have sex with Eva, he is impotent. Nevertheless, he boasts to the others that the experience was ‘awesome’. Later, very drunk, the four drive to Eva’s house. At first, she indulges them, but when she asks them to leave, Sears (Ken Olin) refuses, and things turn nasty. Tensions rise to the point where Sears calls Eva a slut and she slaps him. She then starts to tell everyone about Ned’s sexual failure; this prompts Ned to hit her, and she strikes her head on the fireplace. To their horror, she seems to be dead: John (Mark Chamberlin) can find no pulse. Sears refuses to go to the police. And so they sink Eva’s body in Dedham Pond. The basic situation is all too familiar: a young woman tries to cope with a group of drunken young men; the men’s fears and insecurities erupt – and the woman becomes the casualty. Eva makes the men uneasy: Ned because she knows his secret, Sears because his bullying manner has a misogynistic edge, and John because he is sexually repressed, recoiling here from Eva’s kiss. Even Ricky (Tim Choate), the least assertive of the group, is embarrassed when Eva kisses him. Eva’s impact on the young men offers a variation on Steve Neale’s observation that melodrama is concerned with the eruption of sexual desire. Although, unlike in most ghost melodramas, there is an eruption of sexual desire, Eva is in fact killed because she threatens to expose the men’s weakness and immaturity. Nevertheless, there are unresolved elements in this scene. In the novel, the scene is where Eva reveals her malevolence to the men: she taunts them, swears, strips naked (Straub: 372-374). She seems ‘like a devil’ (372). Because her powers mean they cannot really harm her, it’s as though she is goading them to assault her. Her line to Ned, ‘I think I’ll take a bite out of you’ (374), is explicitly a vampire threat. However, in the film, delivered to John, the line seems misplaced. Similarly when in the novel she says to John, ‘Dance with me, you little toad’ (372), this fits her nastiness. In the film, delivered

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to Sears, the line is out of character. It’s as though the film has not firmly decided that Eva is not the sort of supernatural figure who is immune to any violence she might provoke. Similarly when Eva’s corpse is briefly animated at the end of the film, this suggests a flicker of the heightened powers she possesses in the novel. At the same time, angry that these drunken young men have imposed themselves on her, Eva is quite possibly reacting to the suppressed homosexuality within the group. Ned’s impotence, John’s aversion to her kiss, and Sears’s misogyny all suggest their fascination with her is also a front, a pretence they’re ‘normal’ heterosexual young men. At one point, all of them attend a costume party, where a man in drag is particularly conspicuous, like a signifier of what is repressed within the group. It’s as though Eva has picked up on the latent homosexuality and is now needling them. Ricky is perhaps exempted from these undercurrents, but he in turn is oddly sexless. When he tells Eva he can’t dance, it’s as if he is obliquely acknowledging this. It is Ricky whom Eva asks to drive her home after Ned’s sexual failure, as though she knows he’s not a threat. The Chowder Society in the present has the same sort of exclusiveness as the group of young men in their early twenties. And now there is a strong sense that the men’s feelings have become frozen, as though their guilt has left them unable to develop emotionally. Much is made of the snow that covers Milburn in the present – a detail from the novel where it is linked, rather, to Eva’s supernatural power. None of the men has been able to leave the town, and the film hints at emotionally unfulfilled lives. Here Sears does indeed seem to be a repressed homosexual, one whose refusal to acknowledge his gayness in part accounts for his overbearing manner. Now the frailest of the four, John, has a housekeeper, Milly (Jacqueline Brooks), who loves him. But, whereas he sleeps with her in the novel (113), he does not in the film. Moreover, after a nightmare in which Eva, whom he has pronounced dead, reaches up to strangle him, he himself starts to strangle Milly, like an expression of his unconscious fears. Ned is a widower, but we learn nothing of his married life. Don refuses to talk about his mother – as though there is an upsetting family history. Ricky does have a wife, Stella (Patricia Neal), and their relationship seems reasonably affectionate. But, again in contrast to the novel, there is no reference to any children. Moreover, Stella complains to Ricky in one scene that she’s no closer to him than the day they married. Nevertheless, Ricky is the hero in the older generation: the one who sees the quest through to the end. After Ned’s death, he begins to investigate, initially by returning to Eva’s now derelict house. There he encounters

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the sinister figures of Gregory (Miguel Fernandes) and Fenny Bate (Lance Holcomb) – young escapees from a mental hospital – whom we later hear in conversation with Alma. The house is a ghost zone, and it is charged with menace. When the Sheriff (Brad Sullivan) goes there to look for the Bate brothers, he is spooked by a crow, which seems to fly at him deliberately. Crows occur in a number of the ghost melodramas through to The Woman in Black (2011), and they are typically used to suggest malevolence. But here there is also just a hint the crow is Eva as shapeshifter – another uneasy trace of the novel. The nature of Eva’s revenge is nevertheless typical of a ghost melodrama: it both refers back to the way the men treated her and focuses on their points of weakness. In seeking to seduce and then kill Ned’s sons, she is attacking his potency, as though in revenge for his impotence with her. The one dream of Ned’s that we see is the church wedding of David and Alma, which culminates with Alma walking over to the members of the Chowder Society and tearing aside her veil. Since Alma had told Don she wanted to be married in this church, here she projects her wish into Ned’s dream. The dream is another striking example of the return of the repressed: Ned is confronted with the terrifying image of the woman he killed fifty years ago marrying his son. In then causing his death by smashing him onto frozen ice, Eva echoes the way he had smashed her head against the fireplace. In John’s recurring nightmare, he relives his terrible mistake that Eva had ‘No pulse’. In his case, Alma prepares to kill him by first removing his heart pills, thereby rendering his medical expertise useless. Standing behind him, she then repeats her last words to him before she died: ‘I think I’ll take a bite out of you’. John turns; Alma lifts her hood to ensure he recognises her; then changes into the decomposing corpse. This shocks John into a fatal heart attack. Sears is killed in a car accident. First, Alma appears in the road in front of him, but Sears drives through her. This common trope of the ghost movie is here rendered uncannier by the fleeting superimposition of a skull over Alma’s face at the point of ‘impact’, an echo of the famous superimposition of Mrs Bates’ skull on a close-up of Norman (Anthony Perkins) at the end of Psycho. Shocked by the apparition, Sears loses control and crashes into a snow bank. He is still alive, but in the rear-view mirror we see Fenny Bate behind him in the car. Eva’s voice repeats her last words to him (‘Dance with me, you little toad’); Fenny leaps forward to attack him. Again this suggests Sears’s repressed homosexuality. A boy of around eleven who is first seen wearing a girl’s nightdress, Fenny is an androgynous figure, and so it’s as if, at the moment of death, Sears has finally found a youth to ‘dance’ with him.

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In all these examples, we can discern Freud’s notion of the hidden fears of the characters being projected onto the world, and then returning not just to haunt, but ultimately to kill them. Ricky alone is spared. Although Gregory Bate sets out to kill him, Ricky attacks first, stabbing Gregory as the latter drives them in a car. This causes a crash in which Gregory (we assume) dies, but from which Ricky clambers free. Sears’s car crash in which he is killed; Ricky’s in which Gregory is killed – these could also be seen as echoes of the primary traumatic event. However, because Ricky survives the crash – and he clambers out in an image that suggests rebirth – he is able, belatedly, to make amends. He gets the authorities to winch up the car with Eva’s body from the bottom of Dedham Pond. Ghost Story also includes a motif familiar from Japanese ghost movies such as Kwaidan, and one which, after Ringu, would become something of a cliché: the use of the ghost heroine’s hair to cover her face. The image goes back to Eva in 1930: in a scene in an orchard, she falls on the ground, and Ned brushes her hair back from her face. But he then resists her sexual invitation, and goes off with his friends. Echoing this, Don’s seduction by Alma begins with her drying her hair before an electric fire, the hair hiding her face glowing auburn in the light from the fire (see Fig. 4). In the vigorous love-making that ensues, the sexual son is pointedly contrasted with the impotent father – as though emphasising Ned’s repressed homosexuality. As Alma dries her hair, Don opens her music box (another ghost movie motif): it plays ‘The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi’. This is another link to the past. After Ned’s sexual failure with Eva, the other members of the Chowder Society serenaded them from outside the cabin with that song, and the group also sang it whilst driving, drunk, to Eva’s house on the night she would be killed. The song is a bitter reminder to Alma of the way they treated her. Her hair hiding her face is also a part of Eva/Alma’s mysterious and dangerous allure: Eva’s blurred face in the one surviving photograph from the past; Alma’s wedding veil in Ned’s dream. The images of her hidden face are like a warning: the hair or veil could be pulled aside to reveal the face of the decomposing corpse. This, too, invites a Freudian interpretation, suggesting the pubic hair that ‘conceals’ the ‘hidden horror’. At the climax, the horror behind the veil is once more revealed. The sequence of the car being winched up from the pond is cross-cut with Alma’s final manifestation: she appears in Eva’s derelict house as a ‘ghost bride’ and makes her way through the house to Don, who is incapacitated with a broken leg. Whilst she torments him, the car reaches land. Alma now repeats the phrases Don heard her utter earlier, ending with, ‘And I

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will see the life run out of you’. She lifts her wedding veil, and now Don, too, sees her as a decomposing corpse. At this point, Ricky manages to force open the car door, leading to an unnerving moment: Eva’s rotting body not only moves, but climbs out of the car to collapse on the ground. As well as the spookiness of the effect, there is also the Freudian notion of a long-suppressed secret finally being brought to light. Cut back to Don: Alma has disappeared; it is sunrise. The final shot is of Milburn in the snow at dawn. The curse has been lifted. Although The Changeling and The Shining paved the way, Ghost Story was the first film to establish in detail the themes, narrative and iconography of the modern ghost melodrama. Its evocation of the uncanny; the sense that the ghost relates to the inner worlds of the characters and embodies the return of the repressed; the elaborate use of the water motif; ghost-induced nightmares; the use of oneiric imagery in general (an overflowing bath; an old house ‘bleeding’ water) – all these are crucial to the development of the ghost melodrama cycle. Although it would be some time before a significant number of films began to explore further the sort of concerns that Ghost Story opened up, it is possible, now, to recognise its seminal importance. In fact, there is a fourth film from this period that deserves mention, The Watcher in the Woods. A Disney production, the film had a troubled history: filming began in late 1979, but problems with the ending led to extensive reshooting and re-editing before the final version was released in 1981. The Watcher in the Woods has the setting, tropes and iconography of a ghost melodrama, and only at its climax reveals itself as something rather different. An American family (parents and two daughters) moves into an isolated English mansion that turns out to be haunted. The daughters independently experience supernatural phenomena: teenage Jan (Lynn-Holly Johnson) keeps seeing a blindfolded girl in mirrors; the preadolescent Ellie (Kyle Richards) hears an inner voice talking to her. Eventually we will learn that these are from separate otherworldly sources. There are other typical ghost melodrama features. Whilst in a trance, Ellie writes messages in mirror writing. An I-camera prowls the woods outside, observing the girls. Anticipating Haunted, Jan is knocked by a supernatural force into a pond and almost drowned. Three middle-aged locals (two men; one woman) are troubled by an event, thirty years ago, when a ritual they enacted as teenagers went bizarrely wrong and a girl, Karen, disappeared. We deduce that Karen is the girl Jan is seeing. Her bolting horse takes Jan to the derelict chapel in the woods where the ritual was staged; here she sees what seems

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to be Karen’s ghost in an empty coffin. After Karen’s mother, Mrs Aylwood (Bette Davis), has heard Ellie humming a tune, she produces Karen’s music box which plays the same tune. The supernatural manifestations, which assume the typical cryptic, fragmented form of communications from a ghost world, are in fact guiding the girls in a specific direction. They refer, inter alia, to an imminent solar eclipse – the original ritual took place during such an eclipse. Matters are finally resolved when Jan manages to persuade the three people involved to restage the ritual during the current eclipse, with herself in Karen’s place. By and large, The Watcher in the Woods uses the generic elements confidently: here, too, we can see a film contributing to the emergence of a potentially rich genre. Although the film does come up with an unexpected explanation of its ghost-like events, it has nevertheless mobilised them in much the same way as a ghost melodrama. It should be included as a minor but noteworthy predecessor to the cycle.

3.

The Fallow Years: An Assortment of Ghosts

Between 1982 and 1998, there were relatively few scary Western ghost movies – at least, in films getting a theatrical release. The Changeling, The Shining and Ghost Story did not prompt a cycle of similar movies. Ghost films were still made for mainstream release, but they were mostly either comedies such as Kiss Me Goodbye, High Spirits and Ghost Dad (Sidney Poitier 1990), or films with more romantic ghosts, such as Always, Ghost and Truly, Madly, Deeply. The situation in Japan was very different. Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction Films (Weisser & Weisser 1997) lists over thirty ghost movies between 1982 and 1996, the vast majority featuring scary ghosts. Nevertheless, despite these contrasting traditions, two ghost melodramas from 1988, one American, one Japanese, show similarities as well as differences.

Bringing Back the Past Lady in White (Frank LaLoggia, US, 1988) and Ijintachi tono natsu/The Discarnates (Nobuhiko Obayashi, Japan, 1988) Written as well as directed by LaLoggia, Lady in White, with its wistful ghost girl, is an aberration amongst the other Western ghost films of the era. By contrast, The Discarnates belongs to a tradition of scary Japanese ghost movies, and Obayashi was a specialist in fantasy and horror. Indeed, his very bizarre first feature, Hausu/House (1977), a horror satire in which seven schoolgirls enter a haunted house that proceeds to gobble them up, one by one, has something of a cult reputation. A close adaptation by Shinichi Ichikawa of Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novella, Ijintachi tono natsu (translated into English as Strangers, 2003), The Discarnates is more mainstream. It combines two different ghost narratives, one evoking a familiar Japanese story filmed many times – but in a period setting – and the other an original. It thus looks back to the classical Japanese ghost story, but brings it into a contemporary setting, and combines it with a more personal modern ghost story. Superficially, the two films have little in common. The central character of Lady in White is nine year-old Frankie Scarlatti (Lukas Haas) and the

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film is set in the fictitious small Northeast US town of Willowpoint Falls in the early 1960s; the central character of The Discarnates is forty-year-old Hideo Harada (Morio Kazama) and the film is set in modern-day Tokyo. However, structurally there are some striking links. Harada is a successful writer of TV melodramas; the adult Frankie (LaLoggia) – who narrates, with voice-over, this story of his childhood – is a successful writer of ghost stories, whose latest novel is about to be filmed. Both films include an affectionate portrait of the hero’s family, and his encounter with the ghosts is unexpectedly beneficial. Finally, both films make crucial use of a date or dates in the calendar year which are specific to each culture but which have important parallels: the autumn Halloween in Lady in White; the summer Bon Festival in The Discarnates. Lady in White Lady in White is an unusual hybrid: part small-town melodrama, part serial-killer movie and part ghost story. In Cinematic Hauntings, Robert A. Crick (1996) provides a sympathetic account of the film, and details much of its quite complicated plot. Here I shall concentrate on the ghost elements. Returning to his home town of Willowpoint Falls, the adult Frankie Scarlatti stops to visit two graves in the local cemetery. They belong to a mother and daughter, Ann and Melissa Montgomery; he tells the taxi driver he knew them ‘a long time ago’. He then thinks back to Halloween, 1962: ‘the year she came into my life’. The early scenes in the past introduce, in mainly nostalgic-comic mode, the small-town community, Frankie’s Catholic-Italian family, and his school background; the main plot begins with a shift to melodramatic mode as Frankie is locked in the cloakroom after school as a Halloween prank. As Frankie sits on an upper shelf in the cloakroom, he falls asleep, and dreams of his mother’s funeral. This is shown as a sudden loss: a stylised, warmly lit scene of her alive, saying to him, ‘How could I ever leave you?’, followed by an abrupt transition to her body in a coffin. Frankie wakes, sobbing. His adult voice-over comments: ‘I suddenly felt a wind sweep through the darkness, chilling me to the bone’. In the cloakroom doorway, Frankie now sees a ghost girl, later identified as Melissa Montgomery (Joelle Jacobi), of about his own age. She is talking to an invisible figure, for whom she dances, and sings, ‘Did you ever see a dream walking?’ During this, Melissa notices Frankie. But she becomes frightened, and says she wants to go home. We then see her thrash around – she is re-enacting the assault which led to her murder. As she slumps to the floor, footsteps walk to a floor

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grille – where something fell – but stop. Lifted by invisible hands, Melissa’s body is carried away. The town clock strikes 10 p.m. Melissa as ghost is spectral: we can see through her. Her killer remains invisible presumably because the film is concealing his identity, but he is nevertheless present as a force, as the struggle and the footsteps indicate. This introduces another ghost-associated phenomenon. Not only is the ghost under a ‘compulsion to repeat’ the trauma of her murder, other events that happened at the time are also incorporated. With melodramatic logic, the return of the ghost to the site of her traumatic assault leads to the return of her murderer. The cloakroom door is forced open, and a shadowy figure enters and begins to unscrew the floor grille. Then, noticing Frankie – who hides his face behind his Halloween mask – the man starts to throttle him. At this point Frankie has an out-of-body fantasy in which he flies over the town, sees his father Angelo (Alex Rocco) and older brother Geno (Jay Presson) in the sun, and visits first his own grave and then those of Melissa and her mother. No longer spectral, Melissa is by the graves, and she asks Frankie to help her find her mother – who we will discover committed suicide after Melissa’s murder. It is significant that Melissa’s request concerns her mother, not the killer. It’s as though Frankie’s dream of his own mother’s recent death conjures up Melissa’s ghost, and Melissa’s search for her mother (another ghost) then mirrors Frankie’s psychic wish to come to terms with his own loss. Like The Changeling, Lady in White is also about bereavement, and here, too, it’s as though the loss has opened the hero up to the attentions of a needy ghost. But, like Fleur (Anita Mui) in Rouge, Melissa wishes no one any harm: she is a lost, restless ghost. The ghost elements in the film may seem rather whimsical, but they nevertheless have resonances within a narrative which is, to a large extent, from a child’s point of view. Even Frankie’s out-of-body fantasy could be seen to spring from his imaginative world. His Halloween mask is of Bela Lugosi as Dracula and in the fantasy he flies and visits graves. Equally, in its focus on children, Lady in White shares a perspective with The Watcher in the Woods. In particular, it is the sense that the ‘ghosts’ are seeking help from the young people rather than wishing to do harm that aligns the two films. Frankie is woken from his near-death fantasy by his father giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. As he recuperates in bed we learn, through a newspaper report, that a serial killer has murdered eleven children in the town and the neighbouring city over the last ten years, and Melissa in

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1951 was the first victim. The report links the assault on Frankie to these murders. It is also here the eponymous ‘lady in white’ is first mentioned. Frankie reads that Melissa’s body was found in the sea beneath Widow’s Peak, ‘the haunting ground of the lady in white’. Together with the assault on Frankie, these revelations sour the hitherto nostalgic view of the small town. The film becomes darker; although the majority of the murders took place in the city, we suspect the killer lives in Willowpoint Falls. In addition, other tensions are opened up. The black school janitor Harold Williams (Henry Harris) is arrested for the murders, but for no other reason than he was on the premises, drunk, when Frankie was assaulted. Nevertheless, some of the townspeople immediately assume that he is guilty. As is usually the case in ghost melodramas, the ghost shows an active interest in the protagonist. Melissa begins to visit Frankie at night, but this is a low-key haunting. When Frankie is asleep, Melissa looks through his possessions, but remains invisible, humming, ‘Did you ever see a dream walking?’ At Christmas, Melissa then wakes Frankie by playing Bing Crosby’s version of the song in the living room, but it is only when Frankie actually looks towards her she becomes visible – in her spectral form. Although we do not doubt Melissa is a ghost, not a hallucination, she is still like a projection of Frankie’s inner world. Taking an angel from the Christmas tree, she addresses Frankie: ‘Help me find her’. The film gives great weight to this moment. The camera zooms in on the background, but only tracks in on the superimposed process shot of Melissa, so that, for a few seconds, she seems to hover in a different space. The track ends with a close-up of the porcelain angel in her open hands. Here, too, we have a child’s association: Melissa is likening her mother to an angel. At first, local eccentric Amanda Harper (Katherine Helmond) seems to be the ‘lady in white’. She wanders in a white dress on Widow’s Peak, she enters the derelict cliff-top cottage once occupied by Ann and Melissa, and when Frankie and his friends go into the cottage, they are spooked by her sudden ghost-like appearance. But eventually it emerges that Ann, a genuine ghost, is really the lady in white. Amanda is Ann’s sister, and she is keeping Melissa’s bedroom in the cottage as a sort of shrine to her memory. Melissa continues to be under a compulsion to repeat her murder. One night, after Geno, too, has seen her, she interrupts her visit to Frankie at 10 p.m. and returns to the school. Pursuing her, Frankie and Geno see her limp body float out of the school; following her to the Widow’s Peak clifftop, Frankie is shocked to discover she had been alive when thrown off: she revives and thrashes around, screaming for her mother.

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The intensity of the scene triggers a time-slip. Frankie watches Ann Montgomery (Karen Powell) run out of the cliff-top cottage and, seeing Melissa’s body below, throw herself off the cliffs. As she does this, LaLoggia echoes the shot of the angel in Melissa’s hands. The fabric of Ann’s white nightdress flies up to form what look like wings; this image is then superimposed on a close-up of a huge pair of open hands. This is a very uneasy juxtaposition. The hands suggests ‘the hands of God’ – there are kitsch religious paintings on this theme, e.g. showing the hands releasing a white dove – but, even though mediated through the eyes of a child, such imagery is highly inappropriate here. Ann is after all committing suicide. The choice of Halloween for Melissa’s first appearance fits in with the film’s child’s-eye view of world. On the old Celtic calendar, 31 October was the last day of the year, when it was thought a portal opened up to the other world: witches, ghosts and other supernatural beings might thus be abroad. Children’s Halloween rituals of today explicitly evoke such beliefs. Freud has written: ‘In an analysis … a thing which has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost, it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken’ ([1909] 1977: 280). The unlaid ghost is of course a metaphor; nevertheless, Freud suggests a connection between a neurotic symptom and a compulsive ghost in terms of a resolution of the trauma to which the symptom and the ghost refer. Melissa will continue to re-enact her murder until ‘the mystery has been solved’. In fact, both Frankie and Geno have been seeking to solve the mystery – and identify the serial killer. Frankie has retrieved the objects from under the cloakroom grille; Geno now discovers that one of them – a graduation ring – belongs to Phil Terragrossa (Len Cariou), Angelo’s adopted brother and an uncle to the boys. Phil is at this point giving Frankie archery practice, and he knows Frankie has found his ring. This sets up the film’s climax. Cheek to cheek, Phil shows Frankie how to fire an arrow; now we know he is the killer, his heavy breathing has an undoubted charge. Aroused, Phil begins to whistle, ‘Did you ever see a dream walking?’ – and Frankie realises the implications. As Frankie and Phil exchange looks, the latter realises Frankie now knows who he is. A chase through the woods ends at the cliff-top cottage. Phil catches Frankie and begins to throttle him, but Amanda Harper emerges from the cottage and strikes Phil with a stone. Lady in White makes a number of self-conscious references to Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960): a widowed father with two children, one the retrospective narrator of the story; a sub-plot concerning the trial of an innocent black man; Halloween. Amanda’s surname cues the links,

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and she herself is the film’s Boo Radley figure. Like Boo, to the children Amanda seems scary but, just as Boo ultimately saves Scout and Jem from a killer, so Amanda saves Frankie. Frankie wakes from this second almost fatal throttling in Melissa’s old bed, surrounded by lighted candles. It is here Amanda reveals her relationship to Ann and Melissa. However, Phil is not dead, and he comes up behind Amanda and assaults her. Each near-fatal strangling of Frankie takes him into Melissa’s world (her grave; her bed). In the early scenes, we see his class sweetheart, Mary-Ellen, who is dressed like an angel and dances for him. But she is forgotten once Melissa (the ‘she’ of the early voice-over) appears. The ethereal Melissa entrances Frankie because he sees her suffer and she appeals to him for help. But, like all ghosts, she is also dead. The near-fatal stranglings mark out a specific repetition-compulsion pattern: to help Melissa, Frankie must himself go the edge of death. Again with melodramatic logic, this leads to the threat of murder at the very site where Melissa herself was killed. As Phil kills Amanda, candles are knocked over, and the cottage catches fire. Phil carries Frankie out to the cliff from which he hurled Melissa. But, unlike Melissa, Frankie fights violently and, when thrown, manages to cling to a tree branch. He is saved by Ann Montgomery. On this occasion, the struggle on the clifftop produces her ghost. Accompanied by lightning and thunder that she herself creates (see Fig. 5), she flies down at Phil and scares him off the cliff. Frankie clambers to safety. In this echoing of the primary traumatic event of Melissa’s death, Amanda has reversed the outcome: the killer falls off the cliff; the child is saved. Somehow this enables mother and daughter to re-meet. Ann flies back to the burning cottage, and Melissa flies out. Mother and daughter are reunited, and Melissa mouths ‘thank you’ to Frankie. The two ghosts then turn into Tinker Bell figures, and whirl across the sky before heading, we assume, to a better world. This is another rather whimsical flourish, but again, seen through Frankie’s eyes, the Disneyish overtones are not entirely misplaced. In fact, rather predictably, Phil, too, has clung to the tree branch and is not yet dead. Once more, he seizes hold of Frankie. But Geno has alerted Angelo and the police, and they arrive to save Frankie. Phil then rejects Angelo’s outstretched hand and falls to his death. Although the serial killer plot is underdeveloped, it is nevertheless striking that the murderer turns out to be an (albeit adopted) member of the family. As in other small-town melodramas, there is a sickness at the heart of the community. Sheriff Saunders (Tom Bower) is entirely cynical about Harold’s arrest: ‘This case has been making monkeys out of us for

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the last ten years. Harold Williams is a perfect scapegoat – he’s black’. The film also includes a reference to the wider racism of the era: a TV report about the real-life riots that accompanied the enrolling of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. In fact, the jury free Harold for lack of evidence, but as he leaves the courthouse, he’s shot by the mother of one of the victims. With its echoes of the murders of both Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird and the equally innocent Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford) in The Chase (Arthur Penn 1966), this scene is a powerful indictment of the underlying bigotry and violence of the American small town. The ghosts in the movie (and the ghost-like Amanda) are in general used with some thought. The inner world they are mirroring is that of a child, as is shown in many details. Complementing this aesthetic, there are also moments in which the imagery slips into a heightened, fairy-tale mode, most notably when Frankie is pursued by Phil through the spooky (studio set) woods, and Phil’s malevolence turns the setting from day to night. A more subtle detail is that Phil is first introduced, in the iron works where he and Angelo work, in a shot showing him surrounded by sparks from an oxyacetylene torch. This Devilish image is then echoed and enhanced when Phil is surrounded by flames in the blazing cottage. Likewise as in a fairy tale, parent figures, good and bad, abound. However, the film finally moves towards an all-male family ending: Frankie, Geno and their father huddled together, watching – along with the sheriff and his men – as the Montgomery house, associated with the three dead women of the mirroring family, burns down. It may be ideologically dubious, but it is at least intriguing. Lady in White was a one-off both in its director’s career and in the generic tradition of the ghost movie. It was an entirely personal project for LaLoggia: as well as writing and directing, he co-produced, raised a substantial part of the finance for the film and even composed the score. But it did not lead to a successful career for him as a director, and it did not prompt similar American ghost films. Nevertheless, its ‘child’s-eye view’ of a world with ghosts is often vivid and compelling. The Discarnates As befits its generic distinctiveness, Lady in White makes it clear from the beginning this is a film about ghosts: the narrator writes ghost stories; he visits two graves; his flashback is prompted by the taxi-driver asking, ‘You don’t really believe all that spooky stuff you write about?’; the flashback begins at Halloween. Made in a culture where f ilms about ghosts are commonplace, The Discarnates is more circumspect. In fact, a Japanese

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audience would probably be aware of the film’s subject matter: it was based on a recently published ghost story; the title means something like ‘Summer with outsiders’, and Ijintachi (‘outsiders’) is a word that also suggests ghosts. The early scenes depict Harada’s uneventful, insular lifestyle. Recently divorced, he now lives in his office, in a block where he is alone at night apart from one other tenant. Stressing the drabness of his life, these scenes are drained of colour. But Harada shows no signs of wanting to change. He’s amused when his friend Mamiya (Toshiyuki Nagashima) tells him he wants to date Ayako, Harada’s ex-wife; after Mamiya has left, Harada parodies the formal way his friend had declared his intentions – and then laughs. When the other tenant – an attractive young woman (Yuko Natori) – arrives at his door with a bottle of champagne seeking company, he brusquely rejects her. As in Lady in White, the hero’s encounter with ghosts occurs at the beginning of the second act. Here, however, the encounter is revitalising. On impulse, Harada goes one afternoon to the Asakusa district of Tokyo where he grew up. He enters a vaudeville theatre where a Rakugo (sit-down comic) is performing. The voice of a member of the audience catches his attention, and Harada is astonished to see it is his father Hidekichi (Tsurutaro Kataoka). It is evident from Harada’s reaction and the man’s age he must be a ghost. Hidekichi greets Harada in an undemonstrative way, and then takes him home, where Harada also meets his mother Fusako (Kumiko Akiyoshi). Both were killed when Harada was twelve, but, as revenants, they seem entirely real. They are pleased to see their son, but they treat the reunion as no more than a typical filial visit. However, we experience the reunion through Harada, who is deeply moved by it. The moment when, after an agony of anticipation, he sees his youthful mother for the first time overwhelms him, and his eyes fill with tears. Details such as his parents’ shoes on the threshold have great intensity, and in contrast to his own apartment, the lighting in theirs is warm and welcoming. It really does seem as though Harada has stepped back into a golden past. Throughout the summer, Harada continues to visit his parents, and eventually they reveal they know they are dead. They regret they have not been able to raise Harada to adulthood, but are delighted with his professional success. The scenes with them continue to be filmed in vivid colours and in a warm, golden light, capturing the sense of looking back on childhood summers. Re-meeting his parents reinvigorates Harada, and he begins an affair with his neighbour, Kei Fujino. Kei has seen Harada’s melodramas on TV, remembering one in particular, ‘Last Dance’ – she herself is a dancer. She

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quotes a line from it: ‘They say you can’t bring back what’s passed. But that’s not true. You can because it’s your past’. Here ‘bringing back the past’ is explicitly the theme of the movie. But, although Kei regularly plays the Puccini aria used in the drama – ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Gianni Schicchi (1918) – Harada does not at first remember either the drama or the music. He continues to seem detached from his work. The f ilm contrasts Harada’s meetings with Kei and those with his parents, especially his mother. The scenes with Kei take place in Harada’s apartment, and the lighting continues to be drained of colour, in sharp contrast to the warmth of the family scenes. In addition, whereas Kei is coy about her body, refusing to let Harada see what she calls a burn scar on her chest, Fusako is quite uninhibited about undressing in front of him, at least down to her slip. During one visit, the heat prompts her to insist Harada take off his shirt, and she then rubs him down as one would a child – or a partner. Shortly afterwards, she contrives to fall so she ends up in his arms, with their faces almost touching. Although the film seeks to defuse the Oedipal undercurrents by handling such moments lightly, Harada is evidently disturbed by them. With both Kei and Fusako, the film hints at unresolved tensions. In the vaudeville scene, a magician appears onstage after the Rakugo act. At first, he performs typical magician’s tricks but, as soon as Hidekichi turns and acknowledges Harada, the tricks change. From out of a very large hat, the magician takes a ball and baseball glove; then three ice creams in glass bowls. It is only in retrospect we realise the significance of these two very odd ‘tricks’. They refer to later scenes between Harada and his parents: he and Hidekichi throwing a baseball to each other; the three of them eating Fusako’s home-made ice cream. The film is suggesting that, at the point when Harada makes contact with the ghost of his father, everything changes. Harada is now inside what is, at least in part, a ghost world, in which preechoes of future events can exist within the fabric of the everyday. This can be seen as anticipating the more elaborate ghost world of The Sixth Sense. The time is also during the Bon Festival. Most commonly celebrated from 13 to 16 August, the Bon Festival is when the spirits of ancestors are supposed to visit the household shrines. In other words, this is a time of ghosts; it is not unlike a Japanese equivalent of Halloween, but whereas the roots of Halloween lie in dark beliefs about the supernatural, the Bon Festival is a time for honouring the dead. In Lady in White, Melissa’s ghost returns at Halloween to re-enact her murder; in The Discarnates, the parents’ ghosts return to welcome their son home.

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Equally, however, the Bon Festival can be a time of danger. When the hero of the traditional Japanese ghost story Botan-Doro is seduced during the Bon Festival by the ghost of his beloved, this leads to his own death. And Kei, too, will turn out to be a ghost – of a young woman who committed suicide early in the summer. Japanese audiences, familiar with the Botan-Doro story, which has been filmed many times – e.g. Seidan botan-doro/Hellish Love (Chusei Sone 1972) (see Balmain 2008: 79-82) – may suspect this, but the film conceals the revelation for some time. Even when Harada’s mirror reflection shows him to be rapidly ageing, he accepts Kei’s explanation: this is a consequence of his meetings with his parents’ ghosts. She wants him to stop seeing them. Harada’s inability at first to do this suggests his Oedipal desire. Going to his parents one evening, he stands and watches Fusako from a short distance as she sits on the steps up to the apartment holding a sparkler. The shots of her face in close-up emphasise her wistful beauty, and she looks in Harada’s direction as if aware he is in the shadows, watching her. This unacknowledged shared look between the youthful mother and the middle-aged son is so potent it troubles the film. Although Harada is having sex with Kei, it seems to be Fusako he is falling in love with. The Oedipal undercurrents are no longer so lightweight. With Oedipal logic, the look is interrupted by Hidekichi’s arrival. But as Harada follows him inside, Fusako still finds an excuse to run down the steps into the courtyard, so she can take Harada’s hand as she leads him back up the steps – ambiguously like a child or a lover. In the interior scene that follows, for the first time Obayashi films in the style of Yasujiro Ozu, with his camera close to the floor. It’s as though he felt the need to anchor the scene in such a manner as a way of defusing the Oedipal tensions; as if to say: they’re just like an Ozu family, sitting together and playing cards (see Fig. 6). Nevertheless, Harada’s mirror reflection now shows an increased ageing – as though he is being punished for his suppressed Oedipal desires. He decides he must tell his parents he cannot continue to see them. When he enters their apartment for the last time, he is shown reflected in the glass partition between the kitchen and living room. For a few seconds, he looks like a ghost; a hint that perhaps his parents, too, are contributing to his weakened state. He explains why he feels he has to stop seeing them; they go out for a last meal together. Harada’s last scene with his parents is one of the most moving of all ghost farewells. As they sit together in a sushi restaurant, Harada suddenly becomes aware of the shortage of time, and when his parents praise him,

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he hastens to contradict them: he hasn’t been a good husband or father; they’re much better than he, and if they had lived, he might have been better. He says he’s just a hack writer. When he then sees that they are slowly fading away, he is overcome with grief. Before they finally disappear, he manages to thank them. The afternoon sun has been shining in through a window behind Fusako, casting a warm glow over the scene; as they vanish, it disappears, and Harada is plunged into to a cold, grey world. He notices they haven’t eaten anything. He takes their chopsticks, and then sits slumped, sobbing. This scene suggests The Discarnates, too, is also about bereavement, with the ghosts bringing back the shock of the loss, like the return of the repressed, some twenty-eight years later. Harada’s self-criticism seems fully deserved, and certainly he has been a different person since meeting his parents’ ghosts. Now, as an adult, he can properly mourn them. In addition, he is himself at last capable of feeling the intense emotion he mocked in Mamiya at the beginning of the film. Harada’s posture, hunched and sobbing at the loss of his parents, is almost identical to Frankie’s posture on the cloakroom shelf, hunched and sobbing at the memory of the loss of his mother. In Lady in White, this loss triggers the arrival of the ghost; in The Discarnates, it follows the disappearance of the ghosts. However, the link will turn out to be even closer. The Discarnates cuts to a painting in Kei’s apartment of men in costumes from the Edo period around a naked woman’s body. Identified in the novella as by Seison Maeda (Yamada [2003] 2006: 178), the painting is in fact a reproduction of his 1970 painting Fuwake (‘Autopsy’). But early in the film, we saw it discarded outside the block and then taken away. Its reappearance in Kei’s apartment is a way of preparing us for the revelation that Kei is a ghost and her apartment, like that of the parents, is a ghost world. Harada tells Kei he has said goodbye to his parents; she approves: ‘You belong to me now’. He wants to see the scar of her burn, but she still refuses. Cut to the street outside: Mamiya arrives in the rain and notices the light in Kei’s apartment. But he learns from the manager that Kei killed herself a month ago. Hearing the Puccini aria coming from the apartment, Mamiya races up and bursts in. The Harada he sees in Kei’s arms is a decrepit old man. Very rapidly, the scene becomes a fight between Mamiya, Kei and Harada himself over Harada’s destiny. Mamiya is determined to save his friend; Kei reveals she is a ghost; Harada is torn. As Mamiya seizes Harada and kicks Kei away, Kei levitates, her hair blowing in the wind (see Fig. 7). ‘O mio babbino caro’ continues on the soundtrack; thunder and lightning

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punctuate the action. Harada insists he loves her, but Kei challenges him with what she has suppressed: ‘Do you mind this?’ As she dramatically bares the knife wounds across her breasts, these spurt enormous amounts of blood, drenching the two men. Having ‘died’ a second time, Kei can now move on, and like Harada’s parents, she bids him farewell: ‘Forget about me. Live! You still have time to regain yourself’. As she fades away, Harada returns to his normal self – and the blood vanishes. The room reverts to its empty state. The aria ends. This climax has power, but Obayashi also introduces visual bombast: double and triple exposures, especially of Kei. Together with the spurting blood, this makes the scene seem overwrought. However, the rhetoric also suggests something was disturbing the film, and the excess is functioning like a release of tension. This merits investigation. In this scene, Kei claims to have killed herself on ‘the champagne night’, when Harada turned her away from his door. But it is only in the novella that this is clarified. We learn the burn scar had ruined Kei’s love life and she was very depressed – Harada’s rejection was the last straw (189). So although Harada’s rudeness was the triggering incident for her suicide, he can scarcely be blamed. The novella also makes a point about the Maeda painting: although it shows a dead woman, her breasts, the only part of her body we can see, are beautifully formed, and she is surrounded by attentive men (179). It suggests Kei as she would like to be. Kei stabbed herself across her disfigured breasts; attacking the blemish that so distressed her. But, as we see here, the lacerations make her damaged chest look much worse. It’s as though she has been horribly tortured across her breasts, and their obliteration is like a savage attack on her femininity. In the novella, Kei bleeds in this scene, but the blood does not spurt out (196). In the film, the spurting blood would thus seem to have complex determinants. It suggests Kei’s agony: her life blood bursts out of her a second time. It also confronts Harada both visually and viscerally with this horrible ‘mark of castration’ on the female body. Moreover, he is temporarily blinded by the spurting blood – Mamiya, by contrast, turns away – so the hint of threatened castration (for his Oedipal desires? for having sex with a ghost?) is strong. However, the blood is also therapeutic: it heals him, and then magically vanishes, and Harada returns to his non-decrepit state. In the novella his recovery includes some time in hospital. In the film, there is a brief hospital scene, but it seems more like a convalescence. This suggests Kei’s blood has already substantially cured Harada – as though it was psychically more like the milk it displaced.

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The excess of the spurting blood thus condenses a number of concepts, some of which seem contradictory. In the Introduction, I suggest that excess of blood in a ghost film is always a horror motif, and this is surely the case here. But it is nevertheless a complex horror motif, and not simply an example of gory splatter. Whilst in hospital, Harada is visited by his teenage son. He is still only half talking to his son – he continues to type throughout the scene – but we assume even this is a step in the right direction. In the epilogue, Harada and Mamiya visit the place where Harada’s parents’ house used to be: Mamiya has ascertained the building was in fact demolished in May. On nearby waste ground, they conduct a little ceremony for the parents: they burn the chopsticks and say a prayer. Harada now feels relaxed about Mamiya marrying Ayako, and his final voice-over thanks the ghosts – including Kei – for the way they have changed his life. As the two men walk off, in aural flashbacks we hear the voices of Harada and his parents. The film ends with them shouting to him: ‘Come again’. Harada’s encounters with his parents’ ghosts have facilitated what Jung would call his process of individuation: a reconnecting with his inner self, which is therapeutic and re-energises his life. This is achieved in a process which may be likened partly to role-play therapy, partly to analysis. In the scenes between Harada and his parents, the three of them are in effect ‘catching up’ on a past lost through the parents’ premature deaths. The parents talk to their son as an adult, but they are enjoying activities they would have (liked to have) done with him as a child: throwing a baseball; playing cards; eating ice cream. In this way, they are ‘filling in’ the psychic void he was left with when they died. This helps explain their cathartic effect on him. However, Harada also includes Kei in his thanks, as if this dark anima figure has also given him insight into himself, for example reminding him of the emotional power his dramas could achieve with television viewers. We also note it is Kei who reminds him it is possible to ‘bring back the past’. The ghosts here are like aspects of the hero’s psychic personality, which he has brought to the surface, contemplated, and learned from. In Lady in White, a writer looks back at a ghost incident from his childhood; in The Discarnates, a writer revisits his childhood neighbourhood and meets the ghosts of his parents, killed when he was young. In both films, the encounter is therapeutic. This is explicit in The Discarnates, but is also true of Lady in White: not only did the incident lead to the identification and death of a serial killer, it also sowed the seeds of the young hero’s future career as a writer of ghost stories. At the same time, the pull of the past is

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very strong: in Lady in White we do not come out of the flashback, but remain in what is now 1963; at the end of The Discarnates, Harada walks out of shot, but the voices of his parents continue. The films seem to say these ghosts are not just a part of the hero’s past, they also helped form him.

Benevolent Ghosts The parents in The Discarnates are atypical of the ghosts in this book: they are neither scary, nor threatening, nor even – like Melissa in Lady in White – needy. They are more like the benevolent ghosts in some of the films discussed by Katherine A. Fowkes, such as Always and Ghost. However, there are genre issues here. Fowkes includes these two films in her overall category of ‘ghost comedies’, but also acknowledges that there are melodramatic elements in the films: she specifically discusses ‘the melodramatic too-late’ (1998: 29-30). In fact, the films seem to me to be primarily melodramas, with the comedy elements as secondary. However, because the ghosts in them are indeed benevolent, they are very different from the ghost melodramas that form the basis of this book. It is this distinction I would now like to address: what is the nature of the melodrama in films such as Always and Ghost? Always and Ghost are different because here it is the hero who becomes the ghost, and the focus of the narrative remains primarily with him rather than his bereaved girlfriend. He is our main identification figure and, unlike a scary ghost, he remains visible to us even though the other characters cannot see him. Both movies were filmed in 1989, and their production dates overlapped. Accordingly, since as a ghost movie Ghost is the more central of the two, I will consider it first. Ghost (Jerry Zucker, US, 1990) In Ghost, scripted by Bruce Joel Rubin, identification with the hero is strongly established from the moment of his death. About twenty minutes into the film, Sam (Patrick Swayze) is shot in a street mugging. He races after the mugger, but gives up and returns to his girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore). He is shocked to see her cradling his bloody body. He reaches for the face of the dying Sam in front of him; his hand passes through it. His dying self starts to shake. Now extremely alarmed, Sam runs towards two men summoned by Molly’s cries. They don’t see him. Suddenly he is projected back into his bed, waking from a nightmare, calling for Molly. But beside him in the bed

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is a wooden angel from an earlier scene. In that scene, the angel was hauled up from the street and into the apartment; here it falls and breaks on the sidewalk. Sam leaps out of bed: ‘What’s happening?’ Molly looks at him from the bed; a bright light shines down into the room. During this fantasy, we have heard snatches of the conversation in the street between Molly and the two men; here we hear her ask, ‘Is he breathing?’ Sam looks at the light, then back at Molly, baffled. As Molly reaches towards him, abruptly he is back in the street, the beam of light now coming from the night sky. Spots of light float down it, heading towards Sam. Implicitly, his spirit is being invited up to a ‘better world’. But he cannot yet accept he is dead: the two men and Molly are struggling to resuscitate his body; she calls out ‘Sam, don’t you leave me! Hold on!’ Sam turns away from the light; it disappears. He runs back towards the group at his body as a police car arrives. The sequence brilliantly conveys Sam’s trauma as he passes from life to death. We assume the fragmented, elliptical images in the montage show what is flashing through his consciousness as he dies, images which express his complete shock and disorientation as his brain is overwhelmed by the experience. In particular, the montage depicts a frightening loss of the warmth of human contact, as Molly is first replaced by a wooden statue – which falls away from Sam and breaks – and then shown as present but unable to reach him. But, when Sam turns away from the beam of light, he is rejecting the offer of an afterlife elsewhere. This means he is now doomed to remain on Earth as a ghost. In the next scene, in the hospital, we see Sam as ghost wandering around, lost, invisible to Molly and the hospital staff. From this point on, we identify with Sam and his frustration at being an invisible, helpless ghost. He moves through the world as it still is, but he is only visible to other ghosts. He has no substance, so people walk through him. Equally, no one can hear him, and he cannot move anything. He sits with Molly in their apartment, but is unable to let her know he’s there. In short, he is impotent, and it is this aspect of the film Fowkes concentrates on (39-40). By stages, Sam learns to influence his environment. He can spook the cat, and uses this to save Molly when the mugger, Willie Lopez (Rick Aviles), breaks into their apartment. Another ghost teaches him how to move objects. He encounters a medium, Oda Mae (Whoopie Goldberg), who can hear him, and since Molly is now in danger, he forces Oda Mae to go to Molly and act as an intermediary. But the police convince Molly that Oda Mae is a con woman, which frustrates Sam’s attempts to communicate. In the meantime, Sam learns the mugging was ordered by Carl (Tony Goldwyn), a friend from work involved in money laundering. So Sam takes revenge

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by using Oda Mae to siphon off the dirty money and give it to charity. He then signals his interfering presence by tricks such as moving the office furniture and typing on Carl’s computer. All of these elements fit a typical ghost’s agenda. Initially Sam stays on Earth because he cannot bear the idea of leaving Molly, but this soon becomes a quest: he now wants something, and he manipulates people and events to achieve this. However, Sam is very different from the usual scary ghost. He is scary only to the villains; when he startles or annoys Oda Mae, this is handled strictly as comedy. At the same time, the audience can see that Sam’s overriding concern is for Molly. Sam is above all a romantic ghost, and Ghost is in effect a romantic melodrama, a story in which the love affair is the driving emotional force of the narrative. Typical of such a film, the lovers are cruelly separated just when their romance seemed to be on a new footing – Molly had finally said she wanted to marry Sam. Atypically, the continuing obstacle to the romance is that the hero has become an invisible ghost, so both heroine and hero are yearning – an example of the poignancy of much frustrated love in melodrama. Likewise as in romantic melodrama there are intense moments when the lovers do make contact. When Carl threatens the lives of both Molly and Oda Mae, Sam becomes desperate, and finally manages to break through Molly’s resistance. With Oda Mae as intermediary, he talks to her. Oda Mae then allows Sam to ‘possess’ her body so he can physically feel Molly as he dances with her. Sam as ghost and Molly are thus allowed a brief romantic interlude, dancing to The Righteous Brothers’ version of ‘Unchained Melody’. Elsewhere in the film, long shots are used to signal a more objective viewpoint – in such shots, Sam is invisible. In the long shots in this scene, the film collaborates in the fantasy: we see Sam and Molly dancing together. Showing the two women together would not have been so good for the box office. In fact, because the audience knows Molly is really dancing with Oda Mae, this scene has been used by Mandy Merck (1999) to develop her argument that there is suppressed lesbian subtext in Ghost. The film may thus be seen as an early example of a modern ghost film in which lesbian elements are in play. Early in the film, a ghost tells Sam about ‘the other ones’ who sometimes come for the dead. When first Willie and then Carl are (accidentally) killed, fleeing in panic from the invisible Sam, we see ‘the other ones’. As the man’s ghost emerges out of his body, sinister, snarling black shapes condense out of the shadows and carry him off, shrieking. Although it is a little alarming to discover that, for some people, the afterlife is envisaged as

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so merciless, it is to the film’s credit it does not shirk confronting this. Usually in transitions to the afterlife in Western films, there is only the welcoming white light. After Carl’s death, the light returns again for Sam, and now both Molly and Oda Mae can see him, bathed in the light. This scene, with its final farewells between hero and heroine, is very like the parents’ farewell in The Discarnates but, because it is between two lovers, it is moving in a different way. Sam now makes the declaration of love that he had been reluctant to make earlier, and as he leaves he comments that, ‘the love inside – you take it with you’. The film ends with Molly’s view of Sam as he walks off into a haze of lights. Sam is a hero in a romantic melodrama, a type of melodrama in which one of the lovers often dies, as in films from A Farewell to Arms (Frank Borzage 1932) and Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian 1933) through to Titanic (James Cameron 1997). Indeed, sometimes both die, as in One Way Passage (Tay Garnett 1932). The only significant difference is that the blockage so essential to the subgenre is the hero’s ghostly state, and so the sad ending is not his death, but the moment when his ghost says farewell and heads to a better world. Always (Steven Spielberg, US, 1989) Scripted by Jerry Belson and Diane Thomas as an updated remake of A Guy Named Joe (Victor Fleming 1944), Always is in some respects similar to Ghost; in others, very different. Again the hero, Pete (Richard Dreyfuss), is killed at the point where he and his girlfriend Dorinda (Holly Hunter) had been about to start a new life together, and as a ghost he is then obliged to witness her living without him. The differences, however, are equally important. Pete is a fire-fighting pilot killed in action, but at the moment of death there is no trauma. He simply finds himself in another world: a stylised burnt wood. In a patch of grass, he is greeted by Hap (Audrey Hepburn), a sort of heavenly messenger, who says it has been six months on Earth since he died and she wants him to go back to help teach his skills to another flyer, Ted (Brad Johnson). Returned to Earth with an assignment, Pete is thus as much ‘guardian angel’ as ghost. He will have the power to carry out his mission because, although he will be invisible, his spoken words will be heard by Ted as his, Ted’s, own thoughts. Pete is perfectly happy to fulfil this role in relation to Ted as flyer, but there is a complication: Ted turns out to be in love with Dorinda. This upsets Pete’s project.

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When Pete as invisible ghost first talks to Dorinda, she becomes very still, and her responses – such as chuckling when he refers to her funny face – suggest she may be aware of him as a ghostly presence. But when Ted abruptly interrupts, speaking the line Pete was about to utter, this throws her, and it is possible she now assumes Pete’s monologue was her own thoughts, and she just imagined he was there. As Pete attempts to block Ted’s relationship with her (repeatedly saying, ‘You’re still my girl’), the film keeps both these two possibilities in play. For a number of the films she discusses, Katherine Fowkes speaks of a ‘masochist aesthetic’, in which the hero as ghost watches the woman he loves continue her life without him (31-53). This is particularly true of Always, since Dorinda gradually falls for Ted. Pete’s attempts to redirect Ted away from her keep backfiring, and he finds himself an unwilling onlooker to their developing romance. One evening, he watches them dance together, and Dorinda reaches up to kiss Ted. Pete calls out: ‘Hap, take me out of here’. By way of an answer to his wish (prayer?), events now take a different turn. The Platters’ ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, already established as ‘their song’, comes up on the tape deck. Dorinda gets rid of Ted, changes into the white dress Pete earlier bought for her, and dances to the song. Mirroring her movements, Pete silently dances with her. This is the equivalent of the ‘Unchained Melody’ dance in Ghost, but without the same full romantic release: Dorinda may be fantasising that Pete is there with her, but complete awareness is denied her. Afterwards, a pan past a double mirror shows Dorinda in reflection, still wearing the white dress, lying asleep on the bed. She is alone, but as the pan continues, Pete appears lying next to her on the bed. This is the only example I know in modern ghost movies of a ghost being visible outside but not inside a mirror, rather than the other way round. The Halfway House has the same trope, but that was at an early stage in the evolution of Western ghost-movie conventions. Now, it seems unlikely that Spielberg was unaware of the conventions, so I assume the inversion is to stress that this is a different sort of ghost. Pete is not on Earth to pursue a typical ghost’s agenda, he’s there to help the living. But in this scene he exceeds his brief: after talking to Dorinda in her sleep, he makes a vow: ‘I swear to God, I’ll keep you safe. I’ll never leave you again’. Pete is returned to the heavenly forest with Hap. Hap repeats what she said when she first despatched him: ‘You’ve had your life. Anything you do now for yourself is a waste of spirit.’ She now stresses what this means: ‘I also sent you back to settle with the one you love … to say goodbye. Until you do she won’t be free and neither will you’.

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In his continued possessiveness towards Dorinda, Pete has been behaving like a selfish ghost. But that is the very persona he must reject. Sent back to Earth to settle matters with Dorinda, Pete steers her as a pilot through a dangerous mission. He then talks from behind her in the plane, finally able to tell her he loves her: ‘I know now that the love we hold back is the only pain that follows us here’. But he continues, ‘The memory of that love shouldn’t make you unhappy for the rest of your life’. Stressing she will have a good life, he tells her this is his goodbye. He asks her to brush the hair back from her eyes if she can hear him. She does. This, too, is a moving farewell between hero and heroine. Pete’s reference to the pain of unexpressed love being carried into the afterlife matches Sam’s statement about felt love. But Always has two more scenes, a crisis and an epilogue. In the crisis, the plane’s hydraulic system breaks down, and Dorinda is obliged to crash into a lake. Whilst underwater, she seems about to let herself drown. But Pete now makes himself visible and offers her his hand: she takes it and he leads her to the surface – and saves her life. Here he really does act the role bequeathed to him of guardian angel. When Dorinda surfaces, he has vanished. In the film’s final scene, once again just a voice in Dorinda’s head, Pete tells her, ‘I’m releasing you. I’m moving out of your heart’, and sends her to Ted. Although there’s an arrogance to Pete still thinking of Dorinda as ‘his’ to release, at least he’s doing the right thing. The last shot is of Pete walking away from the camera along an empty runway. He is not shown going into the light because there may be other assignments, but the import of the ending nevertheless echoes a famous earlier example. Like the guardian angel Clarence (Henry Travers) at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra 1946), Pete has earned his wings. For all the occasional moments of suppressed intensity in the posthumous scenes between Pete and Dorinda, Always is not really a romantic melodrama. It works better as a bereavement movie, in which we also see the ghost ‘working through’ his bereavement. In part, this is structured as a process of learning; specifically, learning to be selfless. The very nature of a typical ghost – to be selfish and demanding – is quite pointedly suppressed. Sam’s selfishness is redeemed by his love: he just wants to keep Molly safe and for her to know he’s there and he loves her; they finally part with their love reaffirmed and intact. Pete has a much harder task: to help the woman he loves give up her love for him. Another example of a benevolent ghost occurs in Futari/Us Two (Obayashi, Japan, 1991), a charming film in which the ghost of her older sister looks out for the teenage heroine and helps her achieve her own

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individuality. The ghost here is thus like an idealised older sister: a projection from the heroine’s inner world. The notion of an idealised figure summarises the role of a benevolent ghost. In Ghost, Always and Futari, each ghost acts ultimately in the interest of the bereaved heroine, which is not typical ghost behaviour. It’s as though the heroine’s bereavement is followed by a hallowed period during which a ghost watches over her, ensuring that nothing too terrible happens. She is guided through her period of mourning. Then the ghost withdraws; his/her task completed.

The Seductive Revenant Haunted (Lewis Gilbert, UK/ US, 1995) Haunted is yet another sort of ghost melodrama. Here the hero is a ghost hunter, invited to a private house to investigate its alleged ghosts. However, he also unwittingly brings with him another, elusive, ghost, whose role remains a mystery until late in the film. The basic plot of Haunted has elements in common with The Innocents: an English country house occupied by siblings and a housekeeper; an outsider who enters and finds the building haunted. More tellingly, woven into its narrative are details that pointedly echo The Innocents, suggesting that the film was an attempt to create, with updated features, a similarly gripping scary ghost movie. Unfortunately, it has not succeeded. Although thematically quite a rich f ilm, Haunted is weakly directed, lacking atmosphere and tension. Nevertheless, its deployment of ghost melodrama elements merits attention. The provenance of Haunted is James Herbert’s 1988 ghost horror story of the same name. In the novel, sceptical psychical researcher David Ash is invited to Edbrook, a country estate, to investigate sightings of a ghost. The house is occupied by three adult siblings – Robert, Simon and Christina Mariell – and Miss Webb, their aunt and old nanny, who acts as cook and housekeeper. During his short stay, David experiences a series of threatening ghostly phenomena – knocked into a stagnant pond and almost drowned; trapped in the cellar and burnt by an invisible fire – which he cannot explain. He is also seduced by Christina. He then discovers a grave which records that all three siblings died in 1949. David tries to resist the implications of this, so Miss Webb tells him the backstory. In 1949, a stupid prank went too far: Robert was burnt to death,

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Christina was drowned leaping into the pond to put out the flames, and Simon, feeling responsible for their deaths, hanged himself. Over the years the three have returned to Edbrook as revenants to play their childish games. Prompted by the ghost of David’s cruel older sister Juliet – who drowned in a fight with David when they were children – they invited him to the house to make fun of him. Miss Webb suggests David’s scepticism about ghosts derives from guilt at his responsibility for Juliet’s death and his (repressed) fear she will return and seek retribution. The animus of the ghosts is thus once more like a personal return of the repressed. Juliet’s barely glimpsed ghost adds malevolence to the attacks on David – it was she who tried to drown him in the pond. The novel is an effective little ghost story, slowed down only by flashbacks to David’s work at the Psychical Research Institute. Co-produced by Anthony Andrews, who also plays Robert, and scripted by Gilbert, Tim Prager and Bob Kellet, the film preserves the novel’s basic story, but reworks the details in various ways, muting the horror and heightening the melodrama. In a minor shift towards The Innocents, it sets the story in the past, beginning in 1905 with a prologue that shows the childhood accident in which Juliet (Victoria Shalet) drowned. But here her death is unlike the violent, aggressive scene in the novel (Herbert [1988] 2000: 142-146), a change that exemplifies the film’s generic turn towards melodrama. In the film, Juliet wants David (Peter England) to stop fishing and play with her, and she throws stones to distract him. Annoyed, he pursues her. But both are laughing and enjoying the chase. Except for their youthfulness (about eleven), they could be lovers enacting a courtship ritual. Juliet’s drowning is also just an accident: she slips, hits her head, and falls into a stream. David leaps in to rescue her, but she drifts away from him. There is nothing here of the nastiness of the scene in the novel; David is distraught to lose Juliet. Moreover, Juliet was David’s twin. Accordingly, both Ghost Story and Haunted alter the source novel to make the sibling of the protagonist a twin – who then dies at the beginning of the film. Although surely coincidence, this is intriguing. In Ghost Story, the stress is on the contrasting temperaments of the twin brothers, but here the implications are quite different. As David’s twin, Juliet was much closer to him. When she drifts away from him in the stream, it is as though he is losing a part of himself. However, there are other, more striking connotations. Both the fishing scene and Juliet’s sisterly demands on David’s attention suggest Maggie and Tom Tulliver in the childhood scenes of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), where Maggie is one of the most famous incestuous sisters in English fiction. When Juliet returns as a ghost, these overtones, too, seem relevant.

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In Haunted, a further childhood scene follows: woken one night by mysterious noises, David is drawn downstairs to Juliet in her coffin. He kisses her forehead, whereupon her eyes open and she starts. David screams, a scream that cues the film’s title – delayed from the opening credits. David is the figure who is haunted. But since he is asleep at the beginning of this sequence, it is possible he is dreaming. The subjectivity of the sequence anticipates the later scenes at Edbrook. By 1928, David (Aidan Quinn) has become a psychology professor, and he has written a book debunking supernatural phenomena such as ghosts. In an early sequence, he also attends a fake séance in order to expose it. About halfway through the film, he tells Christina (Kate Beckinsale) he suspects he took up psychology to prove Juliet ‘was really gone’. Christina responds: ‘She’ll never really be gone, David. There’s magic in our sense of longing; if you take away the magic, you take away the capacity to love’. In David’s very preoccupation with (denying) the supernatural, we can discern the repressed wish that Juliet is not really gone. This is a significant variation on his presumed motivation in the novel, one which testifies to the very different brother-sister relationship. Juliet in the film is in fact a benevolent ghost, and she comes back with a contrasting agenda to Juliet in the novel: she seeks to save David from the deadly charms of Christina. In the film, it is Miss Webb (Anna Massie) who, having read David’s book, invites him to Edbrook. He arrives with 1920s’ ghost-hunting equipment, but this is useless, since the three sibling revenants are perfectly visible. Moreover, when someone does trip one of David’s hidden wires, it is the family doctor, Dr Doyle (John Gielgud), who is another revenant, but David cannot see this. As a ghost hunter, David is a miserable failure. His failure continues with Miss Webb. Since she knows they are dead, she is terrified of the siblings and Dr Doyle, but David assumes that she is simply ‘disturbed’. As in the novel, it is only after he has seen the three graves that he learns the backstory. In 1923, their mother found Christina and Robert in her bed together – and Simon (Alex Lowe) drunk – which prompted her to drown herself in a lake in the grounds. Miss Webb reacted by locking the three in the bedroom and setting fire to it, killing them, and gutting part of the house. The siblings are now taking revenge – in the supernaturally restored house – by tormenting her, both as invisible ghosts and as mocking revenants. They like having David as a house guest because they can amuse themselves with him, too. Incest is thus the shocking secret lying behind the film’s primary traumatic event. Moreover, Christina and Robert give the appearance of still being lovers: he paints her in the nude, and at one point David observes

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them kiss whilst she models. However, since almost everything we see at Edbrook is from David’s point of view, the events there may also be viewed as like a projection of his inner world. The ‘unnatural’ closeness of Robert and Christina thus reflects back on the closeness of David and Juliet in the opening scenes, contributing to the sense that, despite the twins’ youthfulness, there, too, incestuous desire was – at least in retrospect – implicit. There are other suggestive details. David’s first memory image of the drowning Juliet occurs when he sees Christina plunge naked into the lake; it is Juliet who leads him to see Robert and the naked Christina kissing. When David looks in through the window at the forbidden kiss, there is a strong sense he is seeing his own repressed desire. Christina is a relatively conventional anima figure, seducing David and tempting him to die for her, but Juliet is more complicated. Her death just before puberty could be seen to repress the possibility of incest, a repressed which returns in the Christina-Robert relationship. But, as David’s twin, Juliet also suggests his lost female side, which here includes a sensitivity and openness to the supernatural. In her later appearances, Juliet acts as David’s guide, leading him not just to an understanding of what is really going on at Edbrook, but also hinting at his own repressed fantasies that in some sense interact with this. It is also possible to see here intimations of a repressed element of The Innocents. If, as Miss Giddens thinks, the ghosts really are seeking to possess the children in order to continue their (diabolical) relationship through them, this sexualises the relationship between Miles and Flora. Of course, the film could not possibly show this, but the children seem to share mysterious secrets, and we do not know what goes on when they are alone together. In one scene, Miles gives Miss Giddens a highly sexual kiss, intimating a precocious maturity – a kiss which she returns at the end, albeit when he is dead. It is thus suggestive that Haunted begins with David and Juliet as children, much the same age as Miles and Flora, running around playing in the same sort of way. The reworking of the novel also exemplifies the shift in generic mode, with the David-Juliet relationship now recast in terms of melodrama (a lost twin; repressed incest) rather than horror (Juliet’s supernatural malevolence). In the film, two heightened, melodramatic triangles emerge – Christina pulled between Robert and David; David pulled between Christina and Juliet – both of which are highly unstable because of the double complication of sibship and the ghosts’ imperious demands. Robert, for example, behaves like a proprietorial husband, ordering Christina around, and curtly curtailing her romantic advances towards

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David. But whether Robert and Christina really are still lovers is an issue the film simply avoids. And when David and Christina themselves finally have sex, Robert watches from the shadows, pointedly not interfering. His half smile even suggests he is amused: Christina has got her man. Playing no part in the sexual triangles, Simon acts as a joker, repeatedly enacting puerile pranks. But there are also hints of a suppressed gay subtext. On his first appearance, Simon violently thumps David from behind – it’s virtually an assault – and then runs around naked in an overtly exhibitionist manner. The gay overtones don’t really go anywhere, but they do make Simon’s frequently irritating behaviour seem less pointless. Both he and Robert interrupt kisses between David and Christina, but whereas Robert does this in the manner of a stern superego figure, Simon is like a playful trickster, mocking the heterosexual romance. David spends five nights at Edbrook, and each night something spooky occurs. The incidents build, gradually revealing more elements of the house as a ghost world. On the first night, the happenings are relatively conventional: a dream of Juliet’s funeral in which she also walks behind her coffin; a powerful force behind David’s bedroom door. On the second, Christina’s presence seems to prompt disturbances around David: he hears a piano tune he associates with his mother; Christina appears and he glimpses a ghostly figure (in fact, Juliet) at the piano; a sudden gas explosion knocks David and Christina to the floor. The house is stirring David’s memories, but it also seems to be warning him. On the third night, the incidents multiply. A detail Haunted takes from The Innocents is a gazebo by a lake – Miss Jessel drowned herself in the lake, and twice Miss Giddens in the gazebo sees her ghost in weeds across the lake. In Haunted, setting up his equipment in the gazebo, David is astonished to see his detection powder form into a mini-tornado, travel to the jetty, and disappear into the lake. Implicitly, this represents Mrs Mariell’s ghost re-enacting her suicide. A thunderstorm – a powerful marker of ghostly activity – blows up, and David himself is knocked into the lake. He almost drowns in some weeds; Christina rescues him. Whilst underwater, he sees Juliet’s body drifting away from him – a restaging of his own past trauma that suggests his guilt at her drowning. More, however, is implied. Earlier, Christina and Simon had skinnydipped in the lake; now, at the same site, David is threatened with drowning. It’s as though Mrs Mariell’s ghost, expelled from the house, at night creates disturbances over the lake, its anger fuelled by the earlier skinny-dipping. David insists he was pushed into the lake, and although it could have been one of the siblings, it could equally have been Mrs Mariell. Moreover, back

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on the jetty, David catches another glimpse of Juliet’s ghost, walking away. Presumably this is to suggest, as in the novel, that she, too, could have pushed him. In fact, her presence implies her concern that David be rescued. Wrapped up in their own solipsistic world, the Mariells never see her. The narrative now also becomes more oneiric. David wakes in bed to discover Miss Webb leaning over him, begging him to take her away. She is then swept backwards out of the room by an invisible force. The door slams behind her – and locks. David smashes a panel to unlock it, and goes to check on Miss Webb. She is asleep in bed. Returning to his own room, he is baffled to discover the panel he broke is now intact. These events are in fact an overt sign David is in a ghost world. In such a world, a damaged door can indeed mend itself – and the spirit of someone can leave them whilst they sleep. The next day the house displays further powers. Through the familiar ghost device of a door opening in front of him, David is invited up to the attic. A sunbeam moves to direct him to a trunk, where he finds a 1923 newspaper with a section cut out. The section turns out to be a report of the inquest into Mrs Mariell’s suicide in the lake. Both Christina and Miss Webb have told David that she died in India. Even though it recurs in Histoire de Marie et Julien, the supernatural movement of a sunbeam is an unusual ghost occurrence. The hidden (and censored) newspaper report is however a motif from a number of earlier movies. Perhaps the closest example to Haunted is in the overtly psychoanalytical Still of the Night (Robert Benton 1982), where the inculpating newspaper is locked away in the heroine’s desk, torn up and in Italian. As in Haunted, the report is comprehensively ‘repressed’. In Still of the Night, the report reveals that the heroine killed her father. The report in Haunted merely reveals the earlier lie, but behind the lie is the story of Christina’s responsibility for the suicide, and Miss Webb’s responsibility for the subsequent murders. However, Christina blocks David’s attempt to probe further. On the fourth night, Juliet leads David to witness the incestuous kiss. As though prompted by this, cries then lure David to the cellar, where he is locked in, and a fire breaks out. Although he is released and the fire promptly vanishes, both the fire and the earlier gas explosion may be seen as a form of the return of the repressed, the repressed being the fire which killed the siblings – which was, in a way, punishment for the incest. As David, through his discoveries at Edbrook, uncovers more of his own unconscious desires, so the threat of punishment for such desires is made manifest. On the fifth night, David finally has sex with Christina, but when he wakes, he finds her gone. Moreover, the house has changed: black dust

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sheets cover the furniture; autumnal leaves have invaded the rooms. The house itself has become funereal (see Fig. 8). Seeing Juliet outside, David pursues her. Using the elusive manner of a ghost – always keeping a little way ahead – she leads David to the local cemetery. There he sees the communal grave of the three siblings, ‘who died in the great fire of Edbrook House in 1923’. Both the changes within the house and this revelation are evidently linked to the sex. In Ghost Story, it is the revenant herself who turns strange after sex with the hero. In The Discarnates, sex with a revenant prematurely ages the hero. Here, the first change is to the house. Its funereal atmosphere would seem to suggest the destiny the siblings have planned for David: he will die, and join Christina in the afterlife. Juliet finally speaks to David in Dr Doyle’s house. Earlier, fearing he was suffering a breakdown, David visited Dr Doyle. Now the house is derelict – it, too, was a ghost world. But David cannot accept that this is Juliet’s ghost. And so Juliet resorts to a familiar ghost’s trick. She appears in the road in front of Christina’s convertible, prompting a crash in which David is thrown free, but Christina is consumed in the flames. But when David returns to tell Miss Webb that Christina is dead, the latter spits back: ‘Of course she is!’ This leads into the film’s climax: the revelation of the backstory; the siblings’ murder of Miss Webb (‘We don’t need you any more, Nanny. You told’); their attempt to take David with them into the afterlife. Unfortunately, this is one of a number of sequences which lacks directorial flair. The house bursts into flames, overtly recreating the primary traumatic event, and David is driven into the bedroom where the original fire began. The heads of the three siblings appear within the flames, as though mocking him – a particularly crude effect. But Juliet emerges out of the flames and, as their hands touch, the flames die down. The room has now reverted to its true state: charred and burnt-out (see Fig. 9). Here Juliet finally reveals herself as a benevolent ghost, a sublimation of the incestuous impulse. This also removes the threat of punishment implicit in the blazing fire. Juliet is now the kind, protective ghost sister David would like to have. In addition, the close-up when David takes her hand – and the flames die down – is of great symbolic significance: it answers the despair of the childhood trauma where Juliet in the stream drifted away from him. After a touching farewell, Juliet returns to her own ghost world. However, Christina has not given up. As David arrives back in his university town – and is greeted by his secretary Kate (Geraldine Somerville), who perhaps loves him – we see Christina following him along the station platform.

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On her first appearance, Christina emerges on Edbrook station out of steam from a train engine. In the film’s last shot, she disappears into the steam (or smoke) likewise produced by an engine. This is the dominant trope for the ghosts. Dr Doyle makes his first appearance out of smoke caused by David’s photographic flash powder. After the gas explosion, the three siblings walk away from David into smoke. It’s as though smoke is a portal – both to and from the ghost world and within it. Haunted has an often oneiric narrative, with curious dreams, supernatural happenings, uncanny repetitions. Fire, water and wind are all manipulated by the ghosts. Juliet is a particularly intriguing ghost. In fact, she makes her presence felt early in the film. In the séance David exposes, the medium, Madame Brontski (Linda Bassett), is not a complete fake. Thinking it is someone’s name, she refers at one point to Ed Brook and, at the end of the séance, she cries out in a child’s voice, ‘David, please!’ David is startled, but dismisses the outburst as he dismisses Madame Brontski. It is only in retrospect we realise this was Juliet trying to warn David about Edbrook. Nevertheless, despite promising material, Haunted is disappointing. It lacks intensity, not just failing to deliver scary scenes, but also failing to bring out the more suggestive elements in a resonant way. Its one sex scene is appallingly directed, with the most glaringly unmatched body double (for Aidan Quinn) I have ever seen. Above all, the film lacks the aesthetic coherence of The Innocents, in which everything works together. However, one structural feature from The Innocents does have relevance: the sense that the ghosts dramatise an emotional and sexual conflict within the protagonist, a conflict which is not really resolved.

Seminal Films

4. Ghosts in the City A Ghost World The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, US, 1999) Unlike Ringu, The Sixth Sense is not seminal in the sense that it generated a whole series of similar films. However, in terms of my project in this book, it is aesthetically seminal. Both written and directed by Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense demonstrates that a highly successful scary ghost movie has no need of horror tropes; that a gripping ghost narrative can be forged using nuance and intimation. Although many critics seem to think of it as a horror film, it patently is not; even its scares are restricted to the occasional jump at the sight of a ghost. It is, however, a paradigmatic ghost melodrama. Moreover, The Sixth Sense also has a powerful final twist, one which enriches the film, and which heightens the ghost melodrama elements. This reveals that the hero, Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), was killed in the film’s first sequence, and has spent the rest of the film as a ghost. Because he doesn’t realise this until the end, the audience is not informed either, although there are many details which hint at his ghost status that could well be picked up by an alert first-time viewer. Malcolm is a child psychologist in Philadelphia, and the opening sequence climaxes with him being shot by a disturbed young man, Vincent Gray (Donnie Wahlberg), who had, as a boy, been his patient. Vincent then shoots himself. The narrative jumps forward to ‘the next fall’, when Malcolm approaches a new patient, nine year-old Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Eventually, he wins Cole’s trust, and learns why the boy is so troubled: he can see ghosts. Although Malcolm does not at first believe him, we are now shown the ghosts which are, in effect, haunting Cole. These seem fairly conventional ghosts. They all suffered a violent death, and still carry the wounds of the violence; they seemingly have a ghost’s ability to appear where they want; and they gravitate to Cole because he can see them. They are scary because they tend to approach him aggressively, acting out the traumas of their past relationships and their deaths. However, Malcolm himself seems different: he is not a typical compulsive, demanding ghost. He behaves, we assume, very much as he did when he was alive, and he is unhappy about the way things have changed in his life – primarily his relationship with his wife Anna (Olivia Williams). Of course, the film

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presents him in this manner primarily to conceal that he is a ghost. I would like to look first at some of ways in which the film negotiates this problem. Since the ghosts in the film can only be seen by Cole, it is essential no one else ever reacts to Malcolm. Thus all Malcolm’s post-mortem scenes with Anna, for example, have to be crafted so that, although he may talk to her, she never responds. The film has to satisfy alternative readings here. Anna’s behaviour has to seem plausible to him (and us) as deriving from the cooling of their relationship, which disturbs Malcolm, but which he accepts as having taken place. Equally, her behaviour must make sense when we know Malcolm is an invisible ghost and Anna is in fact mourning his death. Similarly, Malcolm’s own behaviour needs to seem convincing within this dual focus. And in his case, there is an additional factor: at some level, it seems likely that Malcolm knows he is a ghost, but he is repressing such a thought. So he only approaches Anna when she is otherwise preoccupied: she’s asleep, or in the shower, or withdrawn into her own contemplative world. A restaurant scene about thirty minutes into the film will illustrate Shyamalan’s care in sustaining the dual focus. Malcolm turns up late for their anniversary dinner – Anna has already eaten and is drinking coffee – and makes a joke to cover his lateness. He then starts to talk about his work. He mentions the similarities between Cole and Vincent, but he is also concerned about scratch marks on Cole, which suggest abuse. This is a monologue, not an invitation to a conversation. Anna’s unresponsiveness can be put down to their now uneasy relationship and her annoyance that he has arrived so late. When the bill comes, Malcolm’s hand reaches for it, but Anna takes it. The gesture is important – we would expect Malcolm would want to pay – but it must be thwarted: Anna must not see the bill suddenly and inexplicably move. Malcolm now seeks to engage Anna in conversation, but she is leaving. She says, curtly, ‘Happy anniversary’. This could be seen as a cheat but, eating alone in their anniversary restaurant, she might well feel upset, and make the remark rather bitterly to herself. There is a further nuance. In an interview with Annie Nocenti in Scenario, Shyamalan discusses this scene: I played it that she was having her anniversary dinner where they usually go, she orders the same things, and […] she feels really stupid – you got dressed up in this beautiful red dress, you came and sat alone, […] why can’t you let go of this man? You’re acting as if he’s there, which he is. And that’s why she can’t let go, because she keeps feeling her husband is right there. (2001: 57)

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Shyamalan wanted Anna to behave as though she has a ‘sixth sense’ that Malcolm as ghost is present. This would also help account for her coolness and unease: am I really being haunted by my dead husband? Towards the end of the scene, she flashes a look in Malcolm’s direction as if checking: could he possibly be there? Such care is evident in all the scenes where Malcolm interacts with people other than Cole. Equally, however, the film has to be highly selective in the scenes shown. Thus we do not see Malcolm meet Cole’s mother Lynn (Toni Colette). We first see them together one day when Cole returns home from school. Sitting opposite one another, they are necessarily silent, but we assume they have already met and are now waiting for Cole. Lynn then goes off to cook, conveniently leaving Cole alone with Malcolm. Doors are a recurring problem: Malcolm must not open them, since this would spook other people, but we cannot see him just walk through them. Malcolm spends most of his post-mortem life in the house in a study in the cellar, but when he tries the cellar door, it is locked. We then see him feel in his pocket for the keys, followed by a shot of him descending the cellar steps. The elision is very neat. Shyamalan expertly disguises such elisions: The Sixth Sense is a superb example of ‘suppressive narrative’. We can see it once and be surprised by the final twist, but on reviewing discover not only that it doesn’t cheat – there are indeed many moments which should give the game away – but also that Cole knows immediately Malcolm is a ghost. He is initially disturbed by Malcolm’s interest, and reacts very cautiously to his questions. It is only when Malcolm reveals his own problems with Anna that Cole talks about the ghosts: ‘they don’t see each other; they only see what they want to see; they don’t know they’re dead’. The final comment does not apply to all the ghosts: the girl Kyra (Mischa Barton) who contacts Cole is seeking his aid in exposing her murderer. But Cole tells Malcolm this for an important reason: to prepare him for the moment when he realises he is dead. Cole is the sort of psychic child familiar from many modern horror/ supernatural narratives, e.g. the novels of Stephen King. As well as seeing ghosts, he can hear, see or intuit violent incidents from the past: a servant punished by being imprisoned in a cupboard; hanging bodies in the school; even the childhood persecution of his teacher for stammering. But the idea of a man who exists in the world for months not knowing he is dead is much more unusual. Normally, ghosts realise this very quickly, as in Ghost. By contrast, Malcolm seems to accept everything that happens to him as simply the way things are. In effect, Malcolm is in a ghost world but does not realise it. His failure to notice any strangeness does nevertheless have

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a parallel – in the world of dreams. It is in dreams that scenes of logical discussion are mixed with fantastical narratives in which we move around at will, and feelings of estrangement from someone are translated into actual physical behaviour by that person. We might therefore expect the logic and patterning of dreams to have relevance to the narrative of The Sixth Sense. According to Freud, dreams are the product of a series of operations on the ‘dream thoughts’ which, in the unconscious, give rise to the dreams. There are four such operations: condensation; displacement; conditions of representability (selecting material which lends itself to visual representation) and secondary revision (making the dream into a vaguely coherent narrative) (see Freud [1901] 1991: 94-115 for his own discussion of these operations). The story of Malcolm’s life as a ghost may be seen as an excellent example of secondary revision: a coherent narrative is produced out of the rather puzzling set of events he is experiencing. The absence of everyday events such as eating or sleeping is simply not an issue. There are also other dream operations. As Malcolm sits and waits for Cole outside the boy’s apartment block, he looks through some notes. These are in fact about Vincent, and four details are stressed: ‘parents divorced’; ‘acute anxiety’; ‘socially isolated’; ‘possible mood disorder’. When Cole then exits, Malcolm turns to another sheet. These are his notes about Cole, but precisely the same four items are circled. This oneirically conflates Vincent and Cole: the two boys have exactly the same problems. But the notes are also an account of a meeting between Malcolm and Cole that has yet to take place. In other words, the narrative logic itself is here oneiric: the ensuing scene between Malcolm and Cole in a church follows a script Malcolm has already written. Examples of displacement may also be noted. Because Malcolm’s whole post-mortem life is an evasion, he is surrounded by displacements: instead of food, a single place at the kitchen table where Anna has eaten alone; instead of marital intimacy, his and Anna’s wedding video, obsessively replayed; instead of an office where he meets Cole, a church, which Malcolm likens to a sanctuary and which is mostly deserted. But there is one example of displacement which works across the film, tying Malcolm and Cole together. Cole is extremely sensitive to the gazes of other people. He feels certain sorts of look as an accusation: this person thinks I am a freak. In a classroom scene, the teacher Mr Cunningham (Bruce Norris) asks if anyone knows what the school building was used for a hundred years ago. Cole tells him it was used to hang people. Since this is not a part of the official history of the premises, Mr Cunningham denies it: the building was a legal courthouse, occupied by lawyers and lawmakers. When Cole responds – ‘they were the ones that hanged everybody’ – Mr Cunningham says whoever told

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him that was trying to scare him, and gives him a certain look. It’s a look which signals that Cole is a little naive in thinking such a foolish thing. Mr Cunningham is not being scathing, indeed he’s addressing Cole quite kindly, but within the look is a teacher’s assumption of his superior knowledge, and this is unconsciously patronising. Moreover, the whole class is now gazing at Cole. He becomes quite upset, and it’s Mr Cunningham he blames: he seeks to ward off the threatening gazes by accusing him of being ‘stuttering Stanley’. As he does this, he covers his eyes. This, too, suggests displacement, but of an unusual kind. It’s as though the necessary suppression of gazes directed at the hero ‘returns’ in an accentuation of the gazes directed at Cole. At the same time, contained within these gazes is what is repressed by the absence of looks at Malcolm: that he, Malcolm, is the freak. Here, too, the overall narrative of the film conforms to oneiric logic. It is my contention throughout this book that the ghost world is in crucial respects like the unconscious: these oneiric features of The Sixth Sense are another example of this. What we are seeing in Malcolm’s post-mortem world is dreamlike because this is in fact another world, one where different rules apply. A more direct parallel between the unconscious and ghosts arises in a scene where Malcolm speaks to Cole in the living room whilst Lynn tidies Cole’s bedroom. Malcolm is telling Cole about free-association writing, and their conversation is heard in voice-over as Lynn moves around the bedroom. As Malcolm elaborates – ‘If you keep your hand moving long enough, words and thoughts start coming out that you didn’t even know you had in you’ – Lynn comes across sheets of paper on which Cole has scrawled some of the violent language spoken by the ghosts. Cut-ins to the sheets emphasise her shock at seeing such words. Malcolm’s voice-over continues, ‘It might be something you heard somewhere else… or feelings you had deep inside of you’. With the camera still on the scrawled words, we hear Malcolm ask Cole if he ever did such writing. Cole says he did. As the surrealists have often stressed, free association is an attempt to access the unconscious directly, to sidestep the ‘censorship mechanism’ which prevents such material reaching consciousness. The words Cole has written are not in fact from his unconscious, but from the ghosts. But their unmediated violence suggests the surging up of ‘bad thoughts’ from the unconscious. They suggest the return of the social repressed, the repressed here being the domestic violence to which they overtly refer. In the classroom scene, Cole describes graphically what he has seen in the past of the school building: ‘They pulled people in, crying and kissing their families ’bye. People watching spit at them’. Later we see three people – a

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white woman, a black man, and a young white boy – hanging on the stairs. The film is implying that the city of Philadelphia, too, has a repressed: a bloody (racist?) past which is not part of the history taught in schools, nor even known to schoolteachers. But it is a history that is also revealed through the ghosts Cole sees. The ghosts in The Sixth Sense thus represent the return of the repressed in two senses: they refer both to domestic violence and to the bloody history of the city. Most of the ghosts that speak to Cole bear testament to the former. This is most fully developed in Kyra’s story. Prompted by her ghost, Cole and Malcolm go to her home; they arrive during her wake. Appearing under her bed, as though still wanting to hide from something, Kyra’s ghost gives Cole a box, which he delivers to her father, Mr Collins (Greg Wood). Inside is a videotape of a puppet show Kyra had put on for her dolls in a toy theatre in her bedroom. Kyra interrupts the show and moves the toy theatre aside, so we can see into the bedroom itself. As she returns to bed, Mrs Collins (Angelica Torn) brings her some soup – and doctors it. Mr Collins confronts his wife: ‘You were keeping her sick’. This incident has been characterised as an example of Münchausen syndrome by proxy (see La Caze 2002: 114). However, because Kyra dies, it is better viewed as lethal child abuse. Child abuse is also echoed in the behaviour of many of the ghosts, who in their demands on Cole harm him physically, and indeed prompt a hospital doctor (Shyamalan) to wonder whether Lynn has been abusing him. It’s as though the ghosts literalise the child abuse that is uncovered in the Collins’s home. It seems relevant that we discover this abuse when the toy theatre, like a veil, is moved aside: suddenly we see behind the façade of the caring bourgeois family, with its iconic family photograph hanging prominently at the foot of the stairs. During the wake, Mrs Collins is wearing a red dress. The use of red in the film is considered in one of the extras (‘Rules and Clues’) on the Region 2 DVD. A number of people involved in the making of the film discuss both (a) the rules they followed for such matters as which clothes Malcolm was allowed to wear (only those he had worn on the day he was killed), or the conditions under which the ghosts caused a drop in temperature (when they were angry), and (b) the visual clues that were given during the film to alert the audience to something unusual. One of the clues was the use of the colour red. Shyamalan says, ‘we used the colour red to indicate anything in the real world that had been tainted by the other world’. The producer Barry Mendel comments, ‘red is used specifically to connote really explosively emotional moments and situations’. The two observations neatly combine the ghosts (Shyamalan) and the melodrama (Mendel).

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Mendel’s first example is Mrs Collins’s dress. Other examples include the red door to the church; the red doorknob to the cellar door; Cole’s red sweater which is torn from the attacks of the ghosts; Cole’s red tent in his bedroom; Anna’s red dress in the restaurant; and the red napkin on the Crowe living-room table beside the solitary place setting. Most of these examples fit Shyamalan’s observation in particular about the use of the colour red. Mrs Collins, however, is different. She has not been tainted by the other world, she has killed her daughter. Her red dress is surely more overtly outrageous. It’s as though, amongst the mourners in their appropriately sombre clothes, Mrs Collins is actually celebrating her daughter’s death. Red dresses worn in defiance of social convention occur in a number of Hollywood and British melodramas, e.g. Jezebel (William Wyler 1938), Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, GB, 1947), All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk 1955) and Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan 1961). In those films, the connotations of the red dresses are invariably in some sense sexual. In The Sixth Sense, however, conforming to the thrust of the ghost melodramas, an item of clothing that had hitherto signified defiant sexuality becomes one that signifies a perverse celebration of death. In fact, sex does make an appearance in The Sixth Sense, but strictly in the subtext. This has two aspects, one relating to Cole, the other to Malcolm. In Cole’s case, the intimations are relatively innocent: it’s as though the ghosts trouble him because of his guilt at masturbation. Thus the ghosts often haunt his bedroom at night, and the tent where he hides from them has ambiguous connotations. The religious statues in the tent suggest that it, too, is a sanctuary, but when we first see Cole inside, he holds a flashlight between his legs in a distinctly suggestive manner (see Fig. 10). Later, Kyra appears in the tent and is dramatically sick, like a displacement of the guilty activity. In addition, the scars on Cole’s body suggest symbolic castration. And ‘castration’ is the traditional punishment threatened by adults to a masturbating boy. With Malcolm, however, matters are rather more charged. Malcolm is a married man of around forty who works with preadolescent children, but who has no children of his own. Although there could be innocent reasons for this, the opening scene is distinctly suggestive. A child patient from his past appears in Malcolm’s bathroom wearing only underpants. When Anna asks what he wants, Vincent shouts: ‘What he promised me! I want what he promised’. Anna’s reaction is a shocked, ‘Oh, my God!’ It’s as though Vincent’s response has brought to the surface something that, over the years, had worried her about Malcolm.

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Vincent’s appearance in the bathroom also suggests the return of the repressed. For his work with children, Malcolm has just been awarded a ‘citation for professional excellence’ by the Mayor of Philadelphia. Vincent had evidently read about this, and has broken into Malcolm’s home to challenge him: look how you failed with me. Although I don’t think there is evidence that anything improper occurred between Malcolm and the children in his care, it is entirely possible Vincent had picked up on a side to Malcolm that the latter had suppressed, or perhaps more accurately, had sublimated into his work. Certainly it looks as if Vincent here is offering himself sexually: ‘I waited ten years for you!’ His murder and suicide are very like the acts of a spurned lover. Malcolm stays in the world as a ghost because there are unresolved issues in his life, and the primary one would seem to be his failure with Vincent. If he can succeed with Cole, Vincent’s replacement, he can convince himself he really did deserve the Mayor’s award. But the other issue – Anna’s early complaint that she came second in Malcolm’s life – is much more difficult for him to address. Because of his ghost status, he no longer has a relationship with her. Perhaps, subtextually, we should understand the cooling of their relationship – as Malcolm sees it – as a reflection of his true feelings about the marriage. He really was more committed to his work. Malcolm finally realises that Cole can indeed see ghosts after he has played a tape recording of Vincent as a boy and he hears the ghosts murmuring in the background – an echo of the post-séance scene in The Changeling. This is the connection he wanted. Since Cole really does have the same problem as Vincent, if he can help Cole he can make amends for his earlier failure. Here The Sixth Sense conforms to type as a Hollywood ghost movie: as a male ghost, Malcolm is benevolent. He suggests to Cole a way of coping: listen to the ghosts and help them where you can. Kyra is Cole’s first success. Shyamalan has stressed that, in his researches, he found, ‘children that claimed they saw ghosts and talked to spirits were from broken homes’ (Nocenti 2001: 53). This supports ghost melodrama conventions: a parental divorce is indeed the sort of trauma that might open a child up to ghost experiences. In addition, the ghosts’ interactions with Cole – his grandmother’s ghost moving a bumblebee pendant; the torn clothes; the scars on his body – are harming his relationship with his mother. The intimations of castration may also be read Oedipally, as though the ghosts are punishing Cole for being too close to Lynn. Even the stares directed at him by other people may be seen in such terms – as ‘castrating’. It is implied that Cole’s Oedipus complex has been left unresolved by the departure of his father. Cole occasionally wears items that belonged to his

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father – spectacle frames; watch; gloves – as a way, perhaps, of identifying with him. But they do not help either with the ghosts or his Oedipal anxieties. Here both Malcolm and Mr Cunningham assist him. After Cole has followed Malcolm’s advice and carried out Kyra’s request, he begins to feel more self-confident. Mr Cunningham then casts him as the future King Arthur in a school play. Pulling the sword from the stone and waving it in the air, Cole signals symbolically that he has overcome his Oedipal fears of castration; he also brandishes the sword when he says goodbye to Malcolm. Now he has gained possession of the (symbolic) phallus, Cole no longer needs Malcolm’s help. Indeed, in this scene it is he who offers advice. In order to reach out to his wife, Malcolm should talk to her when she sleeps: ‘Then she’ll listen to you and she won’t even know it’. Cole is now secure enough to tell his mother that he sees ghosts, and they were the ones who had been injuring him. This enables Lynn to make sense of what has been happening, and so brings mother and son closer together. The ghosts that had initially harmed the mother-son relationship serve ultimately to help heal it. The film’s final scene is Malcolm returning home and realising that he himself is a ghost. Anna is asleep in front of their wedding video. As she murmurs in her sleep, ‘Why did you leave me?’, a wedding ring falls from her hand, and a shocked Malcolm realises it is his own. Flashbacks to events which now make a different kind of sense – beginning with Cole saying he sees people who don’t know they’re dead – reveal what is racing through Malcolm’s mind. In the present, he now understands the single place at the dining-room table. We also see that the cellar door is blocked off by a table of books, and Anna’s breath in her sleep shows the room has become cold. For the first time in the film, Malcolm turns and reveals the back of his shirt: we can see – and he can feel – it contains a bloody bullet wound. The flashbacks climax with the first event withheld from us in the ‘suppressive narrative’: Malcolm’s death. The flashbacks and realisations about details in the house are neatly combined. For example, Malcolm’s understanding of the significance of the single place at the table is accompanied by Cole’s voice-over (‘they only see what they want to see’) and linked to a brief flashback to the anniversary dinner. This is a revelatory montage, dramatising the return of the repressed for both the narrative and the hero – what Malcolm has been denying about himself. Because Malcolm’s revelation is also the audience’s, the film forges a powerful link between the two, and the sequence is genuinely cathartic. Following Cole’s advice, Malcolm talks to Anna as she sleeps. He says he can go now; he had just needed to do a couple of things. One was to ‘help

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someone’; the other was to tell her she was never second (best). Then he says, ‘You sleep now. Everything will be different in the morning’. More understated than the heroes’ farewells to the heroines in Ghost and Always, this is no less moving. Malcolm has finally realised he has been a disturbing presence around Anna, especially when she turned for comfort to a young man who works in her antique shop. Here he is in effect saying he won’t be troubling her anymore. A white-out on his face suggests his movement into the bright light where the dead are supposed to go. The film actually ends with the wedding video kiss. And yet the issue of Anna’s importance in Malcolm’s life has not really been addressed. All he has learnt is that there is an explanation for her ‘strange’ behaviour in recent months. He can look back at their marriage and feel he may well have given her the (false) impression his work came first, but all he can do now is say that wasn’t the case. This is nothing like his achievement with Cole. The Sixth Sense has none of the violence, or the concerns, of the modern horror film. Instead, the film is preoccupied with such personal matters as estrangement and loss (Malcolm and Anna), together with a child’s anxieties about being different from everyone else, and a mother’s worries about her troubled child. The ghosts do add an undertow of domestic violence, but this, too, has a place in melodrama: Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith 1919) and Tol’a ble David (Henry King 1921) are two early examples. The Sixth Sense is essentially a melodrama in which the ghosts serve to bring out some of the disturbing undercurrents within contemporary urban society. The Sixth Sense was a huge commercial success. It came second in the box-office listings for North America in 1999, beaten only by Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (George Lucas). Duplicated across the world, this success meant the influence of the film was also felt internationally. Shyamalan set out to make ‘a definitive ghost movie’ (Nocenti 2001: 51) and, I believe, he has largely succeeded.

Working-class Tensions Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, US, 1999) Richard Matheson’s novel A Stir of Echoes was published in 1958, after his more famous I Am Legend (1954) and The Shrinking Man (1956). Tom Wallace, a white-collar worker in a California aircraft plant, is hypnotised by his brother-in-law at a party. He finds this has opened him up to a whole

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series of overwhelming psychic phenomena: premonitions, telepathy, mindreading – and a ghost. Told in the first person by Tom, the novel inserts its story of a ghost into a gripping suspense narrative, in which the identity of the ghost and then of her killer are held back until very close to the end. As adapted by David Koepp – by this stage a highly successful screenwriter, e.g. of three films for Brian de Palma and two for Steven Spielberg – the film, updated to the 1990s, fits neatly into the emergent ghost melodrama cycle. Its basic ghost story now echoes that of The Changeling: a girl haunts the house where she was murdered (and her body was hidden) in order to draw attention to her plight. In the novel, Tom’s son is a toddler, barely able to talk; here he’s five year-old Jake (Zachary David Cope), and he’s psychic in much the same way as Danny in The Shining, or Cole in The Sixth Sense. In addition, although the other psychic phenomena are kept in play, the ghost elements are enhanced. However, the most important change is probably in terms of setting. The film is shifted to a working-class community in Chicago. As a consequence, Stir of Echoes becomes a film about class, and it deals with the issue in an unusually distinctive way. Telephone lineman Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon), his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) and their son Jake have recently moved into a newly renovated house near Logan Square. Three points are established early in the film. Jake is talking to a ghost only he can see; moreover, his parents do not notice this. Tom is deeply dissatisfied with his job: ‘I never wanted to be famous, I just didn’t expect to be so … ordinary’. And Maggie is pregnant, which has the effect of trapping Tom more firmly in his job. After Tom has been hypnotised at a party by his sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas), he finds himself subjected to hallucinations – flashes of an act of violence – and he later sees a teenage girl sitting beside him on the sofa. This will turn out to be the ghost of Samantha Kozac (Jenny Morrison), a local girl who disappeared six months ago. When they discover this, Tom and Maggie realise Jake has been talking to Samantha all along. Each member of the household has a different experience of Samantha. During the opening credits, Jake is in the bath talking to the camera. That he is addressing a ghost is made apparent at the end of the scene. Jake asks, ‘Does it hurt to be dead?’, and in the reverse-angle shot from behind him, he is alone – a moment neatly timed to coincide with Koepp’s credit as director. This is the pattern for Jake: he can see Samantha, but we can’t – except for one brief moment when she inserts herself into a television programme. With Maggie, by contrast, we see Samantha making appearances to her – in the bathroom mirror; sitting on the bath; in the cellar – but Maggie sees nothing. Tom’s experiences are different again; they are much more visceral.

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The images of violence he hallucinates will turn out to be direct echoes of the primary traumatic event: Samantha’s murder. These rather contradictory manifestations nevertheless work to highlight the differences between the perceptions of the members of the family. In particular, the film contrasts Jake’s calm acceptance of Samantha (‘Don’t be afraid of it, Daddy’) with Tom’s highly neurotic response. The psychic world into which Tom has been forcefully inducted is a terrific shock to his whole way of life, and he alternates between fighting it off and frenziedly investigating it. His responses are also complicated by the tensions between him and Lisa. College-educated, Lisa looks down on what she sees as Tom’s narrow-minded outlook. Tom learns Lisa suggested to him under hypnosis that he become more ‘open-minded’, a rather pointed dig. At the same time, Lisa herself adopts a sarcastic, smart-ass pose towards the community, and one can understand Tom’s irritation with her. The balanced figure here is Maggie, who is obliged to mediate between a prickly, dissatisfied husband and a cynical, clever sister. Tom’s discovery that he is now psychic is registered above all in a series of emotional assaults. When he and Maggie make love, Tom has fragmented hallucinations of Samantha’s murder. These include images of a tooth being knocked out and a fingernail being broken, images so redolent of castration Tom is incapable of continuing. The violence enacted on Samantha is being experienced viscerally by Tom; looking in the bathroom mirror, he hallucinates that his own tooth has been dislodged. Downstairs, the hallucinations take a different form: Tom has flashes of Samantha thrashing around with a plastic sheet over her head. Only then does Samantha as ghost appear. She sits next to Tom on the sofa, reaching out to him and trying to articulate something. It is possible that the violence is an expression of Tom’s inner world. However, it has more relevance as a reflection of the underlying violence of the local community. Samantha was killed by two local boys, Adam (Chalon Williams) and Kurt (Steve Rifkin). Whilst the house was being renovated, the boys lured her there and Kurt tried to rape her. She screamed, whereupon Adam put a plastic sheet over her face. Although the boys confessed the crime to their parents, the latter helped them cover it up – Samantha’s body was hidden behind a wall in the cellar. Early in the film, Adam’s father Frank (Kevin Dunn) tells Tom: ‘This is the best neighbourhood in the city of Chicago. We all look out for each other’. Samantha’s murder and Frank’s role in its cover-up reveal the sinister implications of this statement. However, Tom’s post-hypnosis experiences radically change him. When he realises Jake talks to Samantha, he questions him very aggressively.

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He behaves like an authoritarian father, which alarms Maggie. He stops going to work and stops sleeping with Maggie; instead he sleeps on the sofa, desperate for Samantha to reappear. The changes in Tom become even more extreme after another hypnosis session with Lisa, a session brought about by his wish to get rid of the hallucinations. During the session, he receives the injunction, ‘Dig’. Maggie returns home to find him frenziedly digging up the garden. Viewed overall, these changes in Tom have fascist overtones. First, his transformation into an authoritarian father, precisely the sort of rigid, bullying personality associated with the fascist male. Second, the disintegration of his ego, and its dramatic reconstitution, now with a mission. In his analysis of the fascist male, Klaus Theweleit writes: This capacity to disintegrate and then emerge with a new ‘ego’ seems to me a peculiar characteristic of the not-yet-fully-born [i.e. the embryonic fascist males]; it arises from their dependence on external egos which are first assembled around them, then dismantled, reassembled and so on. And in the meantime, they experience breakdown, blackout, coma… (1989: 231)

Third, the denial of sex, and the sublimation into digging. Naked from the waist up and wielding a pickaxe, Tom is like a parody of a fascist worker. Here it’s as though he has received an order from an authority-figure, an order which he must obey. More crucially, he no longer feels ordinary: ‘This is the most important thing that’s ever happened to me’. Carrying out the order is an almost transcendental experience. In an interview, Volker Schlöndorff has commented: ‘That’s what fascism is built on: making everybody in the street feel important’ (Hughes 1981: 5). It’s as though Tom has become a conduit for aggressive fascist undercurrents that the community is seeking to keep repressed. At a street party attended by the whole neighbourhood, Tom asks his landlord Harry (Conor O’Farrell), Kurt’s father, if he knows what happened to Samantha. Another local resident, Lenny (Larry Neumann Jr) refers to Samantha repeatedly as ‘the retard’, dehumanising her. Frank angrily attacks Lenny for such language, but immediately, like a displacement of Frank’s aggression, a brawl breaks out between some young men. Frank’s wife Sheila (Luisa Strus) complains this always happens. Such details add up, suggesting an unpleasant, violent side to the community which is openly revealed when Tom finds Samantha’s body. Symbolically, Samantha’s ghost may be seen as a victim of (fascist) violence, appealing for her story to be heard.

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In addition, those attending the street party are almost exclusively white. (The only non-whites are two young Indian Asians.) When Lenny also says he thinks ‘the retard’ ‘ran off with a black guy’ he is registering an implicit racism – another fascist undercurrent. African-Americans appear in the neighbourhood strictly as outsiders, most notably a postwoman. And when she enters a garden, a German Shepherd, which had merely observed Tom, barks at her. The only dog in the film, it, too, seems to be registering an underlying racism. At the same time, Tom’s digging has other overtones. It turns the garden into what looks like a war zone: the mud of the trenches. Searching for evidence of the repressed crime, Tom creates an imitation battleground. The digging also recalls Jack’s repetitive-compulsive behaviour in The Shining; indeed, Tom is as angry with Maggie for interrupting his digging as Jack was with Wendy for interrupting his typing. Both activities suggest the death drive, and in Tom’s case this is even visualised: as he digs up the garden, it’s as though he is feverishly digging graves. The overtones become even more disturbing when Tom moves into the house and begins ‘digging’ there, too – it’s as though his resentment at his life is leading him to destroy the family home. In fact, this is arguably therapeutic. Finding Samantha’s concealed body, he touches it and has a flashback vision of her murder. This liberates him: he knows, now, why he was being haunted. He also knows why, earlier, Adam attempted suicide. He fetches Frank to show him the body, and says he knows who did the murder. He then learns Frank, Sheila and Harry have known all along about the crime. At the climax, the violence that has been marginal or ‘repressed’ enters the family home and erupts. Kurt has noticed Tom’s activities, and he and Harry arrive, intending to kill Tom. Overpowering him, they are about to asphyxiate him – echoing the way Samantha was killed – when Maggie returns home. She, too, becomes embroiled in the life-or-death struggle. Both are in fact saved by Frank, who emerges from the cellar to shoot Harry and Kurt. He rationalises this by saying he couldn’t allow ‘cold-blooded murder’: ‘this is a decent neighbourhood’. The comment is pointedly ironic. At the equivalent moment in the novel, it is the ghost that emerges to save the day, terrifying her killer (a woman). In that Frank comes up from the cellar, he is structurally acting in place of Samantha, but there is also a more crucial point. Throughout the film, Frank has been the spokesman for the community to Tom and Maggie as newcomers, and he has repeatedly extolled its virtues. Now the façade has been destroyed, it is thus significant that Frank should be the person who eliminates the most dangerous

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figures. However, we are left uncertain as to the fate of the community. After Samantha’s funeral, the Witzkys leave the neighbourhood. In a scene set, significantly, outside the community, Stir of Echoes introduces a black policeman, Neil (Eddie Bo Smith Jr), who, in an explicit echo of Hallorann’s role in The Shining, sees that Jake is psychic and mentions this to Maggie. Maggie subsequently visits Neil – equally significantly, in a racially mixed area – to ask him what to do about Tom. It is Neil who points out that the ghost wants something, and she won’t rest until her wish is satisfied. After the deaths of Harry and Kurt, we see that Samantha’s wish has now been satisfied. Her ghost leaves the house and goes off happily down the street, disappearing as a car passes through her. The next scene is her funeral. Samantha has found peace. It is through the haunting that the film becomes a violent family melodrama, in which the husband’s obsessions threaten to destroy his family life. In certain respects the film may be seen as a proletarian reworking of Bigger than Life (Nicholas Ray 1956), with the haunting replacing the cortisone that has such a disastrous effect on Ed Avery (James Mason). Ed’s megalomania is more extreme, and his fascist rhetoric more insistent and overt, but there are some suggestive parallels, particularly after Tom starts digging and becomes imbued with a Messianic fervour. Koepp even hints at such a parallel. When Tom declines to go with Maggie to her grandmother’s funeral, she angrily slams the back door, breaking its glass and fracturing Tom’s reflection. This is a precise echo of the moment in Bigger than Life when Lou (Barbara Rush), angry at Ed’s high-handedness, slams the bathroom cabinet door and the mirror shatters, fracturing Ed’s reflection. In both cases, the shattered reflection alludes to the hero’s damaged personality, and the broken glass serves as a warning of the destructive consequences of his behaviour. In this case, the ghost serves to expose the sickness at the heart of the community. Equally striking, however, are the effects of her haunting on the hero. Tom becomes a ‘receiver’ for a corpus of elements that express what we might call the fascist unconscious of the community: its sadistic, violent, murderous side. Nevertheless, this emotional upheaval purges him. Of the many different investigative paths taken by the protagonists in the films in this book, Tom’s quest into the dark underside of the film’s world is the most like a shamanic journey, involving as it does trances and visions (see Eliade: 1964). At one point, Tom has a psychic dream, seeing fragments of events that have not yet occurred. At another, he finds himself in Samantha’s ghost world, reaching out to her in the house as it was during the renovation. Maggie notices him in a trance-like state and, as she reaches

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out to waken him, her hands uncannily enter the ghost world (see Fig. 11). For a while, it’s as though Tom is ‘possessed’, but he returns to his family whole. Jake, however, remains a receiver. At the end, as the family drives away to an unknown destination, he can still hear the murmurings of ghosts in the passing houses. Both The Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes use ghosts to highlight the underlying violence in city life. The ghosts in these two films address ‘the social repressed’ in the society, and this thematic is also found in later ghost melodramas where the ghost(s) figure a wider malaise, such as Gothika. However, this is not common; at least, not where the ghosts are contemporary. In this respect, The Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes opened up an area for development that remains largely unexplored.

5.

Ghosts in the Machine

Ringu/Ring (Hideo Nakata, Japan, 1998) and Ringu 2/Ring 2 (Nakata, Japan, 1999) Whilst The Sixth Sense was making a huge box-office splash in North America and elsewhere, a low-budget Japanese ghost film was starting a cinematic cultural revolution. Although not released theatrically in the US – and not even released there on DVD until 2003, after the Hollywood remake had completed its theatrical run – Ringu is undoubtedly the f ilm which has had most impact on the ghost melodrama cycle. It has produced dozens of spin-offs, and indeed dozens of websites devoted to its phenomenal impact. Ringu is a hybrid, combining elements from traditional Japanese ghost stories with those from Western sources and mixing in a very contemporary concern with modern technology. In The Ring Companion (2005), Denis Meikle notes some of the sources informing the movie. Its basic narrative premise is similar to that of M.R. James’s story ‘Casting the Runes’ (1904), filmed as Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, GB, 1957), with the written curse of the original here replaced by a video curse – the crucial point in both stories is one can survive the curse only by passing it on (100-103). Certain motifs in the film are directly from Japanese tradition (the ghost’s long, black hair and white dress; the well) (114), others from Hollywood movies, e.g. photographs which signal the impending death of a character from The Omen (Richard Donner 1976) (105). Above all, however, Ringu is not just a ghost melodrama, but a highly effective modern horror movie, with a powerful supernatural ghost monster. Ringu began as a 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki who wanted his title to be Ring (in English). Ringu is simply the Japanese transliteration of Ring, but I will use it for the film to avoid semantic confusion with the Hollywood remake. The novel is essentially a supernatural story structured like a virus thriller. Four young people die of cardiac arrest in different places at the same time, all with expressions of terror on their faces. Asakawa, a reporter, discovers they are connected in that they spent the night together in a cabin at a resort on the Izu Peninsula. He wonders if they caught a virus but, visiting the resort, is led instead to a videotape. The tape contains a series of cryptic images, and watching it makes Asakawa physically sick. At the end there is a warning: you will die in exactly a week’s time, unless you… Unfortunately, the rest of the message is wiped. The phone rings,

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and although no one speaks when Asakawa answers, he experiences more nausea from the sense of evil communicated. As in a virus thriller, Asakawa is working to a tight deadline to find the source of the curse – the virus equivalent – and thus, he hopes, an antidote. He enlists the help of his friend Ryuji, an expert on the supernatural and the occult, who is keen to watch the video. Their task becomes more urgent when Asakawa’s wife and infant daughter innocently watch the video as well. After deducing that the video was produced mentally, by psychic projection, Asakawa and Ryuji track its source to the daughter, Sadako, of a clairvoyant, Shizuko Yamamura, and the man who promoted Shizuko’s talents, Dr Ikuma. In 1955, Shizuko and Ikuma were so vilified by the press for their activities that both became mentally unbalanced: she committed suicide; he contracted terminal TB. Sadako, whose psychic powers far exceeded those of her mother, had a particularly brutal end. As a teenager, she was raped and murdered, and her body was dumped in a well which was then sealed. (We also learn, from her rapist and murderer, that she was a hermaphrodite – a gratuitous twist.) The well is now under the Izu cabin. Asakawa and Ryuji break into it and find her remains. They assume that if these now receive a proper burial, the curse will be lifted. But whereas the deadline passes safely for Asakawa, Ryuji is killed by a powerful supernatural force when his seven days elapse. Asakawa realises he must have unwittingly done something to break the curse, and Ryuji’s ghost appears to guide him: he copied the videotape for Ryuji. This reasserts the virus metaphor. Like a virus, the curse has found a way of using hosts in order to reproduce. People who watch the video know they will have to make a copy and show this to someone else in order to survive; they will thereby spread the curse. That Sadako was infected with the smallpox virus when she was raped reinforces the metaphor. Sadako’s fury at the masses for hounding her parents to their deaths is fused with the smallpox virus’s biological imperative to reproduce. Survival of a virus depends upon transmission from one individual to another, so death of the host is in fact a disadvantage. The same is true here. When Asakawa drives to his wife’s parents, determined that they should watch copies of the video to save his wife and daughter, he speculates on how the curse will spread, first throughout Japan, then the world. The novel’s title refers to this spreading circle. The novel was first made into a TV movie, Kanzenban (Chisui Takagawa 1995) (Meikle: 30-36), but it was the theatrical version that proved seminal. Ringu alters the novel in several key respects. Asakawa is now a young

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woman, Reiko (Nanako Matsushima), a TV reporter, and her six-year-old son Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka) also plays an important role. Reiko is separated from her husband Ryuji (Hiroyuki Sanada), a university maths teacher, but Ryuji’s role is nevertheless much the same as his namesake’s in the novel. Ryuji and, to a lesser extent, Yoichi, are also psychic, which enables screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi to speed up the exposition by a series of ‘psychic visions’ showing Shizuko and Sadako’s past. References to earlier supernatural/ghost movies begin immediately after the opening credits, with a shot that overtly echoes the first shot of Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper 1982). In both movies, we fade in on static on a television screen; the camera then dollies out to show those in the room, who are oblivious to the television: the father in Poltergeist is asleep; in Ringu, one schoolgirl is telling another a story. But in both films the unwatched television will become the site of highly dangerous ghostly activity. As noted in the Introduction, also added are scenes featuring teenage girls. Ringu plays down (but does not abandon) the virus metaphor in favour of the idea of an urban legend – a legend perpetuated primarily by teenage girls. In the first scene, Masami (Hitomi Sato) is telling Tomoko (Yuko Takeuchi) about a cursed videotape originating from Izu. In Masami’s version, a woman on the video informs those watching that they will die in one week – and here there is no reference to the possibility of averting the death. The watchers then receive an eerie phone call. Tomoko looks worried: seven days ago she and some friends viewed such a video, a viewing followed by a spooky phone call. As Masami goes to the toilet, Tomoko is disturbed by the television turning itself on, and then terrified to death by something unseen. An underlying premise of the film is thus that an urban legend becomes fact. Whereas, in the novel, the four teenagers were the first victims of the curse video, here the story of the tape predates their watching it – Tomoko says they had all heard the story beforehand. That the video when we see it does not fit Masami’s description – e.g. no scary woman warning of death – is unimportant. It fulfils the urban legend: watching it kills you. On the ferry to Oshima Island, about halfway through the film, Ryuji suggests an explanation for the urban legend phenomenon. Telling Reiko that no one in particular starts these stories, he suggests that, ‘When people worry, rumours start flying. In other words, people hope things will turn out like this’. On this reading, an urban legend implies the return of repressed anxieties. More precisely, the curse video suggests a manifestation of the return of repressed death instincts. It’s as though Sadako, through her video, figures ‘the repressed’ of Japanese society.

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In the film’s second sequence, Reiko is making a TV documentary about the very urban legend we have just seen enacted: she is interviewing some teenage girls, who tell a similar story to Masami. But one says she’s heard two people have already died from the curse. The scene points to another film reference. In Candyman, too, the heroine Helen (Virginia Madsen) investigates an urban legend by interviewing young people who have heard stories that the legend is ‘true’ – stories which later events violently confirm. At the funeral of Tomoko, her niece, Reiko learns from a group of schoolgirls that, as in the novel, there were four young victims, and all died from heart attacks, their faces frozen in terror, a week after watching a particular videotape. Tomoko’s photographs provide her with more information: they went to the ‘Pacific Land’ Izu resort and, after watching the video, their faces in the photographs became distorted and blurred. At the resort, Reiko finds and watches the tape. She then receives an unnerving silent phone call. Together with the discovery that her face, too, is now distorted in photographs, this convinces her of the danger of the curse. Reiko is thus launched into her investigation with a great deal more background information than Asakawa in the novel, and this also speeds up the narrative. Suzuki’s novel was relatively successful, but the film was a phenomenon, becoming the highest grossing horror film ever in Japan. It was originally released in a double bill with an adaptation, Rasen/Spiral (Joji Iida 1998), of Suzuki’s follow-up novel, in which Sadako contrives to be reborn by niftily transmitting her DNA into Mai, Ryuji’s assistant in Ringu. But even within its own outlandish science-fiction framework, Spiral fails to make much sense, and it was markedly less popular than Ringu. And so, Nakata and Takahashi came up with their own continuation of the story, Ringu 2. This begins where Ringu ends, and I shall consider both films together. The film of Ringu sets the typical familial concerns of melodrama into a basic thriller format. As in the virus thriller Outbreak (Wolfgang Petersen 1995), a separated husband and wife get back together in order to combat, understand and track down the source of the virus/curse. In Ringu, the quest is given added urgency when the couple’s son also watches the video, and the film also includes touching scenes with Yoichi and his grandfather (Katsumi Muramatsu), so that Reiko’s final appeal to her father to watch the video to save Yoichi’s life fits in with the overall sense of it as a (ghost) melodrama. It is also extremely well made: taut and atmospheric, and with a brilliantly unsettling score by Kenji Kawai. Dates on the screen keep the tension building, as the seven days before the curse takes effect are counted off. Overall, Ringu is decidedly superior to Suzuki’s novel.

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With only one ghost moment, the novel is not really a ghost story. In the film, there are ghost elements throughout, beginning at Tomoko’s funeral, where Yoichi is led by a glimpse of Tomoko’s ghost to her bedroom. First, however, I would like to consider the curse video itself, which has its own ghostly ambience. Much simpler than the one in the novel, the video is made up of a series of strange, grainy, black-and-white images. Projected by the ghost girl at the bottom of the well, these images symbolically come from the unconscious, and they have an oneiric charge. A low rumbling is heard over some of the images; a metallic scraping over others. In summary, we see (a) a circle containing an indistinct shape, later revealed to be the view from the bottom of a well showing a man peering down; (b) a woman in an oval mirror combing her hair, interrupted by the mirror jumping sideways to show a girl with long hair in a white dress; (c) a newspaper report in which only the headline ‘Eruption’ can be deciphered, since the accompanying text is distorted and jumps around; (d) two men trying to crawl up a slope, others staggering, as if fighting a terrific wind; (e) a man, his head covered with a towel, standing in wavy water and pointing towards it; (f) a blinking eye in BCU, with the kanji for Sada superimposed on it; (g) a well in a field. We will discover that these elements all have some sort of relevance or function, and Sadako’s childhood memory of her mother combing her hair is indeed re-enacted in Ringu 2. But there is still an air of mystery to them – we cannot be sure what they mean – and, in keeping with the sense of them as projections from a ghost world, they are also uncanny. Perhaps the most resonant image is the man standing in water and pointing (see Fig. 12). First, it provides a clue. A deep voice over it utters a warning that ‘playing with water’ will summon ‘the monster’, a warning spoken in a dialect Ryuji traces to the island of Oshima. This leads the couple to Shizuko, who predicted the eruption of Mount Mihara on the island in 1957. Second, the warning is associated with the sea. When Reiko and Ryuji visit Oshima they learn – from Shizuko’s cousin Yamamura (Yoichi Numata) – that Shizuko had some sort of mystic connection with the sea, and in Ringu 2, it is implied that Sadako’s father was a sea monster. This helps account for her supernatural power. Third, the image of the man recurs. Whilst staying at her father’s, Reiko wakes and sees a dark shape on Yoichi’s bed, which she assumes at first is Yoichi himself. But suddenly she ‘sees’ flashes of the image of the pointing man. The shape vanishes; Yoichi’s bed is now empty. Reiko rushes to the next room, and finds Yoichi watching the video, which ends at that moment. It’s as if the man’s warning is now directed at her: you’ve invoked the supernatural; you’ll summon up the monster. Yoichi says Tomoko told him to watch the video. On the ferry,

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Ryuji provides a darker reading: whoever communicated with Yoichi only seemed to be the ghost of Tomoko. Implicitly, it was Sadako, the monster from the sea. The sense that this one image in the video condenses a number of ideas is typical of the workings of dreams. The image also accumulates additional resonances. The lack of a visible face on the man not only makes him seem ghost-like, but is also a reflection of Sadako’s ‘repression’ of faces. Her own face is always hidden behind her long hair; in photographs she distorts the faces of those who have watched the video; she turns the faces of those she kills into hideous masks of screaming fear. As in Ghost Story, the image of the screened/blurred face is used to suggest the sense of the uncanny associated with the ghost. The sea is also one of the key motifs of the two Ringu films, repeatedly returned to in the imagery. Sitting on a beach, looking out to sea, Yamamura comments to Ryuji, ‘For us, the sea is ominous. Every year it swallows some of us’. Colette Balmain suggests that it is the fear of tsunamis that renders the sea particularly frightening to the Japanese, a fear registered, for example, in the way the eponymous monster comes from the sea in Godzilla (Balmain 2008: 172). The sea is the ultimate source of ‘the other’ in the Ringu films, and Nakata cannily sets the credits of both movies over dark shots of the sea. Moreover, at the end of these credits, each film dissolves from the sea to a television screen, intimating a link between the two. The tsunamis are of course linked to the geological instability of the Japanese archipelago, which is highly prone to volcanic activity (Balmain 2008: 171-172). And this, too, is obliquely referred to in the curse video: both in the newspaper report of an eruption and in the imagery of the men being assaulted by a violent wind. Thus on the one hand, Sadako is using the video to refer to Oshima and her mother’s prediction of the Mount Mihara eruption; on the other, she is registering her fury through the imagery and intimation of violent natural disasters. Immediately after Reiko has watched the video, she sees a girl in white reflected in a corner of the TV screen. She turns round, but no one is there. This must be Sadako (Orie Uzuno). When Ryuji then enters Reiko’s apartment, he senses something, and later realises it was Sadako’s presence. It would seem that Sadako is following Reiko around. In addition, the mirror of the dressing table in Reiko’s bedroom is covered when not in use. This old-fashioned practice (see the Introduction) suggests Reiko has all along been fearful of ghosts. On Oshima, Reiko and Ryuji stay at the Yamamura Inn. This is old Japan, where Shizuko and Sadako once lived: the oval mirror in the video still

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hangs on the wall. Yamamura resists talking about Sadako, but on the beach, Ryuji seizes hold of him. This triggers a ‘psychic vision’: in low resolution monochrome, we see Shizuko’s public demonstration, forty years ago, which Yamamura attended and which ended with a man’s death. The vision is more than just a psychic flashback, because Reiko herself is projected into the scene: it’s as if she, too, is in the hall as an observer. As Shizuko (Masako) consistently gives correct answers to the psychic tasks she is set, a man in the audience accuses her of being a fraud. Others take up the charge, then suddenly the first accuser drops dead. Now Shizuko is called a monster. As Dr Ikuma (Daisuke Ban) leads her away, Shizuko addresses an unseen figure: ‘Sadako! Was that you?’ We come out of the vision to register the implications – Sadako really could kill with her will alone – and then return to it. Sadako flees from her mother’s wrath and runs to Reiko, grabbing her wrist with a hand which lacks fingernails. The vision ends; Reiko almost passes out. Sadako’s grip has left a mark on her wrist. All the other figures in this vision appear ‘normal’, but Sadako remains stubbornly ghost-like. At first she is hidden, and when she does appear, her hair is covering her face. As in all her appearances, she is dressed in white. In Ringu 2, there is a newspaper photograph of this event, and all we can see of Sadako is a blurred figure half hidden in a corner. Again, she looks just like a ghost. Even when alive, Sadako is mediated by the imagery to appear ghost-like. Reiko’s presence in the scene is a reflection of Sadako’s power. The missing fingernails tell us this is not the Sadako who was at the demonstration, but – as we will realise – the Sadako who is in the well, where she lost her fingernails in her attempts to climb out. Her grasping Reiko’s arm is like a mute appeal to help her escape from the well. At the same time, the observers at the 1950s demonstration are all male, and so it is men who are hurling accusations at Shizuko. Moreover, they pointedly exclude Ikuma, one calling out that he, Ikuma, has been fooled. A subtext to Ringu concerns male repression of women, specifically women’s psychic gifts. (Yamamura is differently implicated, since he was eager to profit financially from Shizuko’s abilities.) When Reiko and Ryuji find the well under the Izu cabin, they share another ‘psychic vision’, and this reveals Sadako was hit over the head and pushed into the well by Ikuma, her presumed father. Her mother was destroyed by male vindictiveness; she was killed by male brutality. Although young, Sadako is a modern version of the vengeful female ghost found in traditional Japanese stories and in many earlier movies, e.g. Kuroneko and The Ghost Story of Yotsuya. She is seeking revenge for the

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way both she and her mother were treated by men. But her vengeance is not simply directed at men; unlike in Kuroneko or indeed Ghost Story, this is not a ghost who expresses male fears of female sexuality. The dominant metaphor is of a deadly virus. In particular, although disseminated by video, Sadako’s curse is like a supernatural computer virus, spreading inexorably across the world. Like a computer virus, it is ‘man-made’. But it is also far more powerful: at one point Ryuji comments that the video, ‘is not of this world – it’s Sadako’s fury itself’. Equally, Sadako’s non-human origins in the sea imply a return into modern society of archaic, primitive religious beliefs which demand, on the pain of death, that their ‘message’ be transmitted to others. Just as the curse video can be read, in Freudian terms, as the return of repressed death instincts, so it can be read in Jungian terms as a manifestation of the archetype of the collective shadow: all that has been repressed by science and ‘official’ religions. It is when Ryuji climbs a rope down into the well that we see Sadako’s bloody fingernails embedded in its walls. This detail – also found in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1990) – humanises Sadako. Many children – and not just children – have wished harm on those who injure them in some way; Sadako was simply unfortunate enough to have the power to make this happen. Seeking Sadako’s remains, Reiko and Ryuji gruellingly empty water from the well. But it is not until Reiko replaces Ryuji in the water that Sadako’s corpse appears: first Reiko fishes out some hair, then a hand emerges and grabs her, finally a head surfaces. Reiko peels back the hair to reveal a skull. As Ryuji calls to say her deadline has passed, she embraces the decomposed corpse. At this point, Reiko becomes a mother figure to Sadako, reclaiming her from the depths into which she was cast over thirty years ago. It is significant here that the putrefied corpse which has become a ghost is not, as in Ghost Story, seen as an object of horror. For Julia Kristeva, a corpse is an example of ‘the abject’, and as such it is, ‘almost universally surrounded by taboos and rituals to prevent “contamination” of the living’ (Grosz 1990: 91). Ghost Story registers a conventional revulsion towards the corpse; Reiko maternally embraces it. Here, too, Ringu shows its sympathetic female perspective. As in the novel, Reiko and Ryuji assume that, since Sadako’s remains have been recovered, her curse will be lifted. The mark on Reiko’s arm has disappeared. But the mark has in fact nothing to do with the curse. Sadako marks Reiko to signal that she wants her remains taken from the well, and removes it after that has been achieved.

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The scene in the novel where Ryuji is killed by the curse is vividly described by Suzuki, but the threat is unseen: Ryuji is terrified to death by something behind him. Like most modern horror movies, the film shows the monster. Ryuji’s television switches on. It shows the final image of the curse video: the well in a field. Sadako emerges from the well, and makes her way jerkily towards us. But then she climbs through the television screen into Ryuji’s room (see Fig. 13). Trying in vain to escape, Ryuji finds himself mesmerised by the power of the spectre. Sadako stands, and a series of cut-ins ends on a BCU of her basilisk eye. Ryuji screams; his face turns to monochrome and then to negative. Her look has killed him. This is the famous, terrifying climax of Ringu. The power of the sequence derives partly from Sadako’s appearance, her hair covering her face, partly from her extremely spooky way of moving, but above all from the shock of her violating the boundary between the fictional world on the television and the real world of Ryuji’s living room. The well may now be seen as a route to the underworld. Through her curse video, Sadako is able to emerge from the well, reborn as a deadly ghost. A similar use of a well is found in Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, GB, 1984), where a female werewolf emerges from and returns to the ‘world below’ via a well. Company of Wolves also anticipates the notion of crossing from the fictional world into the real for shock effect. It ends with the wolves from her dream world bursting through the window into the bedroom of the young heroine. Sadako may equally be seen as a personification of Death, a figure that appears in many supernatural narratives at an appointed time to claim an already-specified victim. Above all, however, she is a very powerful monster, and her power is focused in her look – already cited on the curse video. Like Medusa, Sadako usurps ‘the male prerogative of the look’ to lethal effect. When Ryuji’s screaming face freezes and is turned into negative, it’s as though she has rendered him ‘other’; not just killed him, but also projected him into another state of being. This effect was also shown with Tomoko at the beginning. Tomoko’s ghost, seen only by Yoichi, then became an avatar of Sadako, instructing the boy to watch the video. After death, Ryuji becomes similarly subject to her power. As Reiko puzzles over what she did to avoid Ryuji’s fate, his ghost appears reflected in the television and points at her bag, which contains the videotape Yoichi watched. This makes Reiko realise that she was saved because she copied the tape for Ryuji. Ryuji’s ghost here is another echo of the pointing man in the video: his head is similarly covered and he adopts the same posture. Ryuji as ghost has been moulded into a figure from the

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curse video. Moreover, like Tomoko’s ghost with Yoichi, he is Sadako’s emissary. He signals what Reiko must do for Yoichi to survive. But copying the tape will, of course, spread the curse. As Reiko takes the tape and her VCR, and drives to her father’s, in voiceover we hear her phone call to him requesting a favour ‘for Yoichi’. A teenage girl’s voice is then heard, likewise in voice-over, describing what you need to do to avoid being killed: copy the tape and make sure someone else sees it within a week. And they will need to do the same. It will go on and on: ‘But if you don’t want to die, you’ll do it, won’t you?’ This final voice-over is exactly like a continuation of the urban legend interviews we saw earlier. The antidote Reiko has spent the whole movie discovering is now a part of the story of the curse video. At the beginning of Ringu 2, we find this crucial extra information has indeed passed into circulation, and although it is possible Reiko disseminated it, there is no evidence of this. It’s as if it just happened. Once again, the strange workings of the urban legend phenomenon are invoked. The last shot of Ringu shows Reiko’s car driving along a straight road into the distance; turbulent grey clouds signal the disaster – the spreading curse – that lies ahead. Just as the film’s first shot overtly references that of Poltergeist, so this shot overtly references the last shot of The Terminator (James Cameron 1984). In The Terminator, too, the heroine is making this journey for her (there unborn) son, and we know that the apocalypse, likewise signalled by storm clouds, lies ahead. But in Ringu there is also a crucial thematic development between the opening and closing shots. The first shot signals that the curse will enter the home; the last that it will go out into the world. A curious point about Ringu is that it begins in the week of Princess Diana’s death and funeral. Tomoko’s photographs of the trip to Izu are dated, so we know the teenagers watched the video on 29 August 1997. Diana was killed the following night, in the early hours of the morning of 31 August; her funeral was on 6 September. However, the film has also muffled the connection. On-screen, the opening scene is dated Sunday 5 September. In 1997, 5 September was a Friday. In effect, this locates the film in a world parallel to the real world of August and September 1997. I suspect this is in fact a strategy to avoid any direct reference within the film to Diana’s death and its repercussions. Nevertheless, the film’s implicit referencing of these events seems quite deliberate. Early in the film, Reiko’s cameraman Omiya (Kiyoshi Risho) tells her that, when a pop singer died about ten years ago, people saw her ghost on television. Reiko suggests such stories can be prompted by a ‘big road accident’ and ‘tragic deaths’. Later,

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commenting on the way Shizuko was driven to madness and suicide by the press hounding her, and that Ikuma, too, was first praised and then destroyed by the media, Ryuji adds that things have not changed much in forty years. All these observations seem like oblique references to Diana’s death. It is difficult to read these intimations, but since Diana was an iconic figure to Japanese women as well as other women throughout the world, they are at least suggestive. A much-loved princess dies, and a dark female shadow is unleashed on the world. In an article about the Ringu phenomenon in Film Comment, Alvin Lu wrote, ‘people die every time a bootleg is dubbed’ (2002: 38). This is an astonishing error, since the films show precisely the opposite: people die unless a bootleg is made (and is then viewed by someone else). It’s as if he was unconsciously superimposing the norms of Western horror – transgression is punished by the monster – onto the Ringu movies. But Sadako seeks to perpetuate transgression: she wants her curse to go on forever. Moreover, as we discover in Ringu 2, the fact that you have carried out the requirement to copy and pass on the videotape does not necessarily free you from her persistent attentions. Ringu 2 The narrative of Ringu 2 begins just days after that of Ringu ends. In a pre-credits sequence, detective Omuta (Kenjiro Ishimaru) tells Yamamura – Sadako’s last surviving relative – that Sadako died only one or two years ago; in other words, she was alive in the well for thirty years. This chilling information helps account for the intensity of her fury, which is rather more dispersed in this film, manifesting itself in a number of different forms. After the credits, the film dissolves from the background sea, through the static on a TV screen, into the footage from Reiko’s documentary where teenage girls talk about the urban legend. This signals that Ringu 2 will continue to stress the ‘teenage-girl thread’. Later, a teenage girl, Kanae (Kyoko Fukuda), becomes the film’s most high-profile victim of the curse, and the film ends with Kanae herself becoming a ghost. Whereas in Ringu a single quest dominates, Ringu 2 is made up of several distinct narrative threads woven together. One concerns Omuta’s police investigation into Sadako’s curse, made more difficult by the fact that Reiko and Yoichi have disappeared and her father is killed by the curse early in the film. He dies, we assume, in order to stop the curse spreading and thereby save humanity. But he is too late: there are already other copies of the video. The central thread is provided by Mai (Miki Nakatani), Ryuji’s assistant

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(and perhaps his mistress) who found his body. Mai had only a small role in Ringu, but here, in the absence of Reiko, she takes over as seeker heroine, concerned to find out what caused Ryuji’s death. Conveniently, she, too, is psychic. A third thread concerns Okazaki (Yurei Yanagi), Reiko’s colleague in Ringu, who sets out to finish her documentary on the urban legend. These narrative strands form the armature of the film; I will examine its thematic concerns as they emerge. At first, Mai and Okazaki work together. They visit Reiko’s apartment, where they find a burnt videotape (which we understand) and a smashed television (which we do not). They go to see Masami who, unable to speak, is in hospital. There Dr Kawajiri (Fumiyo Kohinata) shows them two sets of photographs. In those of Masami, the outline of the pointing man from the video can be discerned superimposed over her. In those produced by Masami herself on a strip of film, the kanji for ‘Sada’ emerges. Kawajiri calls the manifestations spirit photography, produced by Masami’s mind, but he cannot explain them. In fact, since Kawajiri himself will ultimately die in water as a result of Sadako’s power, the first set implies another warning about the dangers of ‘playing with water’. The second reasserts Sadako’s power. This power is forcefully demonstrated in the next scene. When Mai meets Masami walking down a corridor, the girl seems possessed by Sadako: her head is bowed, and she is shuffling as though burdened by an invisible force. And although Masami is terrified of televisions, compelled by the Sadako within her, she is drawn towards the common-room television, which reacts to her proximity by abruptly showing the image of the well. Moreover, the image forcefully displaces one of a Christian church – a direct hint that Sadako threatens established religion. Sadako begins to climb out of the well. The patients have fits, and pandemonium ensues. Masami, lying on the floor, makes a mute appeal to Mai, who seizes her hands. This triggers a black-and-white ‘psychic vision’ of the night when Tomoko was killed, which reveals that Masami, too, saw Sadako. The scene suggests how Sadako is seeking to use Masami to help spread the video curse. But the vision Masami communicates to Mai partly unburdens her: she can now speak, and begs Mai, ‘Help me’. This prompts Mai to have a revelatory flashback: earlier she saw the spirit of Yoichi, who mouthed something to her; Mai now realises it was ‘Help me’. As Mai discovers when she finds Yoichi, he is in a similar state to Masami. He, too, is mute, and Reiko explains the smashed television in her apartment: when they returned home from her father’s, it switched on when Yoichi went near it.

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By this stage, it is possible to discern the underlying premise of Ringu 2. Sadako’s curse is now spreading in different ways. On the virus metaphor, Masami and Yoichi are like carriers, communicating the curse through involuntary mental projection. Having caused an initial, severe outbreak, many viruses become less virulent, thereby spreading more successfully. This can be seen in these two examples: as carriers, Masami and Yoichi threaten to transmit the curse each time they approach a television. In the mental hospital, the virus has also found a fecund environment: it is the patients, all female, who are affected by the video image, as if in their impaired mental condition they are more sensitive to paranormal disturbances. Here Masami is a particularly effective transmitter of the curse. With Mai, however, matters are less clear-cut. The identical appeals from Yoichi and Masami are in fact ambiguous: Sadako could be using the young people to gain Mai’s attention. The pandemonium of the female patients echoes the uproar provoked by the male spectators in the psychic vision of Shizuko’s demonstration, with Mai replacing Reiko as the stunned onlooker. Masami’s posture on the floor, reaching out to Mai, is a variation on the grasping hands of Sadako. When Mai seizes hold of Masami, Sadako then ‘shows herself’, forcing herself on Mai’s attention as she had on Reiko’s. ‘Help me’ could refer to Sadako inside Mai. Earlier, Mai sensed a presence outside her apartment window; now, when she returns home, she glimpses a female ghost clutching her balcony rail. The absence of fingernails shows that this, too, is Sadako, but her posture suggests a plea for help as much as a threat. There is a sense, throughout Ringu 2, that Sadako wants something different from Mai. When Dr Kawajiri conducts an experiment to ‘free the fear’ from Masami, this introduces another thematic thread: Sadako’s power is being combated by science. But Mai sees to her horror that Masami’s thoughts, which are being videotaped, are producing the curse video. Echoing Reiko, Mai smashes the monitor screen and tears up the tape. She then passes out. Since both Okazaki and Omuta are also present, the conflict here echoes the sexual polarisation at Shizuko’s demonstration. Again, a woman’s mind is the object of study by men; again, her powers are too remarkable for the men to grasp. This is a theme of many horror movies: it is often women who are associated with ‘the other’ of the films, and men whose rational, scientific approach to the women’s perceived otherness is shown to be inadequate. In Men, Women and Chainsaws, Carol Clover discusses this phenomenon in terms of an opposition between ‘white science’ and ‘black magic’ (1992: 82-85). Mai’s faint is another echo of Shizuko’s demonstration:

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Sadako fells Mai as she killed the journalist. But this is also a traditional melodramatic trope, whereby a woman who has done something ‘outrageous’ avoids male wrath by fainting. The male/female polarisation continues in the subplot of Okazaki’s documentary. Kanae is an interviewee, and she provides him with a copy of the curse video. Since she herself has foolishly watched it, she makes him promise he will watch the copy. He doesn’t, but he tells her he has. Kanae is killed, and Okazaki then finds he cannot erase footage of her from the documentary. As a video image of her shaking her head begins to repeat over and over, it morphs into a low-definition Sadako-like image of a woman whose hair covers her face. Accompanied by distorted screaming noises, she starts to advance towards Okazaki, who backs away terrified. This may be seen as yet another ‘mutation’ of the curse. Okazaki, too, ends up in hospital. Each of the three key male figures occupies a different ideological position towards the phenomenon of the curse video. In each case, this is shown through his concern – or lack of it – for a particular victim. Kawajiri, a doctor, seeks to use science to help Masami: he is well-meaning, but naïve. Continuing the films’ critique of (men in) the media, Okazaki, a journalist, is utterly unscrupulous: Kanae dies as a result of his deceit. Omuta, a policeman, seeks to solve the mystery and bring order to the situation. Having seen Reiko’s father’s corpse, with its face distorted in terror, he wants to question Reiko and Yoichi. He uses Kanae’s death – specifically the look of screaming terror on her face – to pressure Mai into revealing where they are hiding. But, after Reiko and Yoichi have been taken into custody, Mai realises that Omuta is just as foolish as Kawajiri: he starts to take Yoichi to a television to see what happens. Telepathically, she signals to Yoichi to flee. As Yoichi runs back to his mother, we see Sadako’s power within the boy. He floors both Omuta and a policewoman with a look; Omuta calls out that he is a monster, and a flashback to Shizuko being called a monster at her demonstration shows Reiko realises the implications: Sadako is possessing Yoichi. Reiko and Yoichi flee from the police station. It is now apparent that there are two past traumatic events echoing in the narratives of the films. As the primary traumatic event, Sadako’s imprisonment in the well is the more potent, since the dominant form of its return is the curse video and the images linked to that. Nevertheless, Shizuko’s demonstration is no less important. It was at the demonstration where the fault lines between female and male, co-operative and hostile, intuitive and rational, were first established. Whereas the curse video may be seen as registering, obliquely, Sadako’s personal trauma, the demonstration figures a social trauma. Moreover, melodramatically this was the founding trauma,

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and its echoes within the narrative of Ringu 2 are varied and dispersed. In addition, elements of the original scene find their way into these echoes. The uproar of the hospital scene climaxes with Mai ‘seeing’ Sadako. The scientific probing of Masami’s mind is followed by Omuta showing Mai a report and photograph of the original demonstration. And now, as we see the threat of the most violent part of the original scene – Sadako using her will to kill someone – we have a flashback to the demonstration itself. But it is Reiko, not Omuta, who is killed. As she and Yoichi reach a busy road, Reiko inexplicably steps into it, and is hit by a truck. This rather shocking twist – Reiko was, after all, the heroine of Ringu – is another illustration of the darkness of the films. But it also seems to me a betrayal of what might have been a feminist project, with Reiko and Mai working together to fight Sadako’s curse. When Reiko steps into the road, she is projected into a monochrome world: a busy street which also includes, among ordinary passers-by, the dead, who are stationary and hanging their heads. Sounds are eerily muffled. Seeing her father, Reiko runs to him. This is another ghost world, one in which, it would seem, the dead cannot bear to be parted from the living, and so remain, invisible, amongst them. But it is a bleak world. In Western films, when relatives reunite after death, this is normally a happy occasion, as in El orfanato or The Woman in Black (2011). Here Reiko’s father has a despairing message: they have not managed to save Yoichi; he is no longer Yoichi. This in turn reflects back on Reiko’s death: it was the Sadako inside Yoichi who propelled her into the road. Reiko has ceased to be of use to her. As we return to the real world, Yoichi again threatens to kill Omuta with a look, obliging Mai to take charge: she stops Yoichi and leads him away. Omuta, silenced, will not be seen again. And Mai’s resolution prompts another psychic episode, in which the imagery again shifts to monochrome, and she hears a snatch from Reiko and Ryuji’s conversation on the ferry in Ringu, including the words: ‘In other words, people hope things will turn out like this’. It’s as though Ryuji as invisible ghost is able to guide Mai, signalling that she, too, needs to travel to Oshima. At the same time, the episode stresses the importance of Ryuji’s past comment to an understanding of the two films. When Mai and Yoichi emerge from the episode, he is once more able to speak. It is thus hinted that it was also hostility to Reiko that was inhibiting his speech; he is more relaxed with Mai. As both Ruth Goldberg (2004: 377-381) and Colette Balmain (2008: 173-175) point out, Reiko puts her work before Yoichi on a number of occasions in Ringu, and however well he copes with this, one can imagine that he is unhappy about it.

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Taking the ferry to Oshima, Mai and Yoichi, too, stay at the Yamamura Inn. In parallel with their trip, Yamamura sails back to the island with Sadako’s remains, her face reconstructed in Plasticine by a police expert. En route, divining this is what Sadako wants, Yamamura puts her coffin into the sea, her father’s domain. In fact, subsequent events suggest that this is indeed what Sadako wants: returning her to the sea seems to open up another side to her, one associated with childhood freedom. In taking Yoichi to Oshima, Mai is evidently hoping to find answers which will help her cure him of Sadako’s possession. But there is also a sense that Sadako, too, wants Mai to come: if Ryuji does guide Mai, it is because Sadako wishes this. Sadako wants her story to be told, and the only person left who can tell it is Yamamura. On the island, Yamamura shows Mai the cave where Sadako was born. It includes a shrine of figurines, and he explains what it memorialises: unwanted children, placed there to be washed away by the tide. This is a shocking revelation. Moreover, since Shizuko, too, had initially put Sadako in the cave, it is as though Sadako is also taking revenge on behalf of abandoned children. In an unguarded moment at the Yamamura Inn in Ringu, Ryuji actually says to Reiko, ‘we shouldn’t have had a kid to start with’. As Reiko protests, she recoils, hides her face and covers her ears – another heightened, melodramatic response. And, in the ‘flashback’ to Shizuko’s demonstration, we see that Shizuko, accused of being a fraud and a monster, had reacted in a very similar way. Ryuji’s comment and this link between the two women suggests another reason why Ryuji should subsequently become Sadako’s most dramatic victim. Mai starts to ask Yamamura about Sadako’s paternity. She is interrupted by a supernatural wind sweeping in from the sea. Cut to the oval mirror in the inn; the reflected image within it starts to shake. Downstairs, Dr Kawajiri arrives, looking for Mai and Yoichi. Electrical disturbances also now invade the inn. Worried about Yoichi, Mai comes racing back indoors. The supernatural forces have also awakened the ghosts of Shizuko and Sadako. In a vivid illustration of the other side to Sadako that has emerged, both Mai and Kawajiri now witness the re-enacting of the little scene from the video of mother and daughter in front of the oval mirror. As Shizuko’s ghost combs her hair, a young Sadako (younger than the teenager who was thrown into the well) comes paddling up and psychically whisks the mirror away from her mother in what seems to be a childish game (see Fig. 14). She is showing off her psychic power, and her mother turns and smiles indulgently. This is a very different Sadako from her other manifestations; she still looks spooky, but she does not seem malevolent. But then Shizuko turns and sees Mai. As Mai, terrified, says ‘You’re dead’, Shizuko reacts in

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a typical ghostly way, gliding sideways to disappear behind a screen, then peering round it unnervingly with just one eye. Mai herself is now shown in the mirror. As a child’s voice repeats, ‘You’re dead’, the camera zooms out on the mirror, which breaks, shattering Mai’s image. The ghosts have gone; Mai slumps to the floor. This is a gripping, atmospheric ghost scene, and it terminates with a typical ghost ‘threat’. No doubt not wishing to be reminded that they are dead, the ghosts warn Mai of their power: she, too, could die. The only other time we see Mai in a mirror is early in the film, when she looks in Reiko’s bathroom mirror and her reflection is replaced by Reiko’s. She ‘sees’ Reiko saying, ‘Father, forgive me. This is to save Yoichi’. But Reiko has since been killed. There is a sense that, as Reiko’s replacement, Mai is alive partly on Sadako’s sufferance. The film now moves towards its climax. Kawajiri sets up his equipment to drain Sadako’s negative energy from Yoichi. Seeking to protect the boy, Mai acts as an intermediary. They are wired to a monitor, with a swimming pool as the reservoir to siphon off the psychic energy. But when Yoichi starts to conjure up the curse video, this summons up forces from the other world. Water is Sadako’s domain, and she reverses the experiment: instead of her anger being drained from Yoichi into the pool, her power comes up from the underworld. Mai can see ghostly lights in the swimming pool, many of them faces in torment. Sadako’s coffin appears in the water, and slides open to reveal her black hair. Yamamura wades into the pool, offering himself as a sacrifice. Kawajiri and his nurse assistant are electrocuted. Breaking off the experiment, Mai seizes hold of Yoichi, whereupon both of them are projected psychically onto the wall of a well. They try to cling on, but Yoichi falls into the water. Mai jumps after him. Once again, the supernatural forces have proved stronger than the scientific attempts to deal with them. Mai and Yoichi have now been pulled into Sadako’s underworld: the well, like the one in the curse video, is in another domain, the world of the dead. As Mai frantically searches in the water for Yoichi, light comes from the top of the well and a rope drops down, like an umbilical cord. Ryuji appears holding Yoichi and, in an intense little scene, he drains the fear from his son. He then sends Mai, with Yoichi on her back, up the rope. Sadako, her face in its Plasticine form, climbs after them. However, when she reaches them, she says to Mai, ‘Why are you the only one saved?’, and falls back into the water. Mai and Yoichi emerge into the swimming pool. Everyone else is dead. Yoichi tells Mai he is no longer scared. Although this sequence takes place in a supernatural realm, it nevertheless replays the well climax from Ringu, with Yoichi in the place of Sadako

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and Mai replacing Reiko as the mother figure. That it is Ryuji rather than Reiko who materialises to mediate – in a scene which is redolent of rebirth – may be because of his psychic powers, but as in Ringu there is also the intimation that Ryuji, killed personally by Sadako, has in some sense been absorbed into her world. Again like the pointing man in the curse video, here he stands in water. But the crucial point is that, in this underworld, Ryuji is able to drain the fear from his son: the very act that science, in the world above, failed to do. The swimming pool (which functions as a portal) and well are echoes of the more primal features of the sea and cave, the places of Sadako’s origins. But presumably Sadako has pulled Mai and Yoichi into her underworld for a purpose. It looks like a test, and in rescuing Yoichi, Mai has passed the test. Mai rescues Yoichi from a well, where Sadako herself had been imprisoned, and from water, the element that swept away the unwanted children. It seems as though the Sadako who has materialised since her corpse was returned to the sea – signalled here by her wearing the Plasticine face – frees Mai because she recognises such links. Sadako’s words (the only time she speaks) suggest she will no longer threaten Mai. The relevance of the coffin and of Yamamura’s role in this climax is more elusive. But, in the film’s opening scene, Yamamura is unnerved by a flash of hair appearing from under the sheet covering Sadako’s remains. This is, I think, a coded (and rare) sexual reference. Given the total prohibition of female pubic hair in the Japanese cinema (Balmain 2008: 21-22), films would occasionally resort to displacement, using cranial hair to intimate the sexual. It’s as though Sadako is teasing Yamamura with a sexual intimation. When Yamamura lurks in the background at Shizuko’s demonstration, it looks as though Shizuko is his (forbidden) object of desire, and Sadako, with her psychic abilities, would have realised this. Sadako knows Yamamura’s secret, and he seeks to appease her. But she can only be appeased by his death, and the flash of hair emerging from her coffin is like her final tease. Apart from the deaths of Kawajiri and the nurse, the outcome to this plot thread is hopeful. However, the film has a chilling epilogue, and this tells us Sadako’s curse will go on. Okazaki’s colleagues find the key that unlocks the desk drawer containing Kanae’s unwatched video. Cut to Okazaki in his hospital cell; a nurse comes to take his photograph. As she does so, he keeps turning his head, as if sensing something behind him. Having taken the photograph, the nurse is puzzled by what it shows. Back in the cell, we now see what has been disturbing Okazaki: Kanae’s ghost is behind him, haunting him. Ringu 2 begins with a door being opened in the police morgue; Omuta and then Yamamura come through it. In the reverse-angle shot, Sadako’s

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covered remains are wheeled on a trolley through an open door. The ensuing narrative is then filled with doors being (unlocked and) opened, to the extent that this becomes a motif – the sort of motif one might anticipate in a narrative which is concerned with investigating a mystery. In the epilogue, the motif is given a new twist. The instant the key is turned in Okazaki’s drawer, the film cuts to the nurse unlocking Okazaki’s cell door and entering. The curse video will be released, but Okazaki will remain locked up: when the nurse leaves the cell she fastens no less than three locks on the door. This, too, encapsulates Sadako’s power. Except for Yoichi, her victims are all either dead, or – as she herself had been – imprisoned in torment. But her curse will continue. Although perhaps not as intense as Ringu, Ringu 2 is nevertheless thematically more developed. As each of its male investigators is defeated by the power and versatility of Sadako’s curse, the curse seems to be both gaining in intensity and finding new ways of disseminating itself. Just as an urban legend is embellished through repetition, it’s as though the curse is being fuelled by the fear of the people who watch and then copy the video – we note that, each time we see the video, the images become clearer, and it is just a split second longer, as Sadako starts to climb out of the well. In a discussion which focuses on what, exactly, Sadako has unleashed on mankind, Eric White suggests that it’s a transformation in the very nature of humanity (2005: 39-47). I would stay, rather, with the curse as virus metaphor. Sadako’s curse is now spreading in a number of different ways, like a virus mutating in order to circumvent the forces arraigned against it. Thus the ending is powerfully downbeat: the curse shows every sign of being dominant. The Ringu movies extend the boundaries of the other films in this study. Like The Omen and its successors, they posit a return of the repressed which threatens not just the family or the community, but the world. Nevertheless, the films are seminal works within the modern ghost melodrama cycle. Even though their particular take on the supernatural shifts the narratives to an extent away from ghosts and into other areas – notably that of a supernatural curse which spreads like a virus – they form a very strong template for future productions in the same generic area. In cultural terms, they have functioned like a cinematic equivalent of Sadako’s curse, not only prompting remakes and spin-offs, but influencing a whole range of subsequent movies. The ghost or other supernatural entity which bears a grudge and seeks to take revenge on mankind has assumed all kinds of forms, and is everywhere in contemporary ‘horror’ movies. Key examples will be discussed in the following chapters.

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However, the first film to exploit the Ringu phenomenon was a disaster. In shifting the story to a Korean setting, The Ring Virus (Kim Dong-Bin, South Korea, 1999), a remake of Ringu, adopts a strategy that perhaps on paper seemed sensible. It takes from Ringu the changes to the novel that seemed successful (such as making the main investigative figure a female journalist), but returns to the novel for some of the material Ringu deleted or modified. Thus The Ring Virus reintroduces the teenage rape, the hermaphroditism and the brutal murder by the rapist of the novel. However, it gains nothing from this, and the overall film is a mess. In particular, the two central figures practically sleepwalk through their investigation into the curse video. The film does make use of a music box to conjure up the ghost of the equivalent of Sadako, but that is about the only point of interest. A far more impressive early spin-off from the Ringu f ilms was the prequel, Ring 0: Birthday (Norio Tsuruta, Japan, 2000). Again scripted by Hiroshi Takahashi from another Koji Suzuki story, the film returns to ‘Forty years ago’, with the teenage Sadako (Yukie Nakama) a student in a theatrical troupe. She is trying to overcome her troubled past: the trauma of Shizuko’s public humiliation and subsequent suicide. However, a female journalist is seeking revenge. Over the last twelve years, all the reporters at Shizuko’s demonstration have died, and one was her fiancé. She blames Sadako for this, and she is tracking her down, intending to kill her. The Sadako we see at this time is gentle and caring. But it emerges that she has a double: the dark, destructive Sadako of the Ringu movies. Her adoptive father Ikuma explains that, although originally there was only one Sadako, her double split from her when she was still a child. And whereas the gentle Sadako was ‘like her mother’, the dark Sadako was (he assumes) ‘like her real father’, i.e. a monster. Here the dark Sadako functions like a psychic projection: the gentle Sadako’s repressed side, a figure who ruthlessly kills to aid Sadako’s career as an actress. In An American Haunting (Courtney Solomon 2005), a similar dark double is psychically conjured up by the teenage heroine. Ring 0 is a highly effective film about ‘the double’ in Otto Rank’s sense (see Rank [1914] 1971). It also possesses a superb theatre climax, in which the triggering incident for the climax is, once again, Shizuko’s demonstration, an audio recording of which is played over the loud speaker system during the public performance of a play. Emphasising once more the importance of the demonstration as the founding melodramatic trauma of the Ringu films, this is its most spectacular narrative return. Nevertheless, despite the supernatural elements of the film, and a brief appearance by Shizuko as a ghost, Ring 0 is not a ghost movie, and so it is outside my concerns here.

6. Schoolgirl Angst Kokkuri-san/Kokkuri (Takahisa Zeze, Japan, 1997) The connection between scary ghost girls and teenage girls was established before Ringu: Kokkuri, scripted by Zeze and Kishu Izuchi, is a case in point. Several of the crucial motifs of the teenage-girl thread to the ghost melodramas are already in evidence here. Structured like an art movie, with an elliptical narrative and complex, fragmented flashbacks, Kokkuri deals with the impact of a young ghost girl on a group of high-school girls, Mio (Ayumi Yamatsu), Hiroko (Hiroko Shimada) and Masami (Moe Ishikawa). Uniquely among the high-school girl films in this book, Kokkuri does not actually show the girls at school. Going to or coming from school, they are frequently in their sailor-suit uniforms, but the school itself is a structured absence – we never even see them do homework. The focal point for the girls is not school, but a late-night radio phone-in aimed at teenage girls, ‘Michiru’s Midnight Blue Birds’, which both Hiroko and Masami obsessively listen to. Mio does not listen to it, because, as Michiru, she presents it. The programme is produced by Mio’s older sister Asako (Rika Furukawa), with whom she lives. But Mio has not told her friends that she is Michiru, which is a very strange omission – as if she is afraid the knowledge would disturb their friendship. Although, in an early scene, Hiroko hints that she recognises Mio’s voice over the air, this is not alluded to openly. As Michiru, Mio dispenses sympathetic advice, but she has also constructed a fictitious persona – for example, claiming to lead a sexually adventurous life. Hiroko does not at first admit this, but both she and Masami see Michiru in idealised terms – like an ego-ideal. And so, when Michiru suggests that her listeners play the Kokkuri game, and then send in answers they receive to questions she now asks, the girls enthusiastically take this up. A traditional form of divination, Kokkuri involves summoning Kokkurisan, an unseen spirit the girls think of as female, through the use of a design similar in layout to a Ouija board. Kokkuri-san’s presence is indicated by a delicate wind, and her replies to questions are conveyed, as on a Ouija board, by moving a coin to spell out words, albeit with the same ambiguity over whether those touching the coin deliberately moved it. When Mio and her friends play the game themselves, some of their questions are about Akira, Masami’s boyfriend whom Hiroko seems interested in. But Kokkuri-san

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also answers Michiru’s questions, one of which was when will she die? The reply is at age seventeen. Mio will be eighteen next month. Fortune tellers in the cinema are almost invariably right in their forecasts, and so this predetermines the narrative: Mio is doomed to die. This raises the issue of why Mio should ask such a question, and then press her friends to play the game and thereby invoke Kokkuri-san. It’s as though, at some level, she wants to die. Kokkuri thus raises the issue of the dangers in the cult of celebrity in an unusual way: it’s as though Mio’s own anxieties fuel her characterisation of Michiru, and that has repercussions on herself as well as her friends. Mio’s anxieties find a focus in the activities of the ghost girl, who, we discover, the game has also served to summon up. When Mio was about six, she had a double, Midori (both girls are played by Saki Aoshima), who committed suicide by drowning herself in a public bath. At that same time, Mio’s mother attempted to drown both herself and the young Mio in the sea; she drowned, but Mio survived. The fragmented flashbacks – in some of which Mio as a teenager in school uniform actually appears, witnessing events as though in a time-slip – lead up to this incident. Mio’s father was already dead, and so the incident functions as her personal traumatic event: the moment when she became an orphan (see Fig. 15). However, Midori’s suicide must have happened at about the same time. Since Midori now becomes the film’s ghost, this is an unusual linking of the heroine’s own past traumatic event with the primary traumatic event. Kokkuri is another ghost melodrama in which water and rain are developed motifs throughout. Tying the pasts of the girls more tightly together, Hiroko tells Mio that she blames herself for Midori’s suicide: as children, they played Kokkuri, and when Hiroko became annoyed with Midori, she told her Kokkuri-san was angry – which prompted the suicide. Hiroko recounts this story in the Aqua Museum, where a staircase descends inside an enormous aquarium, so the girls are surrounded by fish in tanks. It is also here that Mio tells Hiroko about her own near death by drowning. The sequence is visually impressive, plunging the girls symbolically into an underwater world – the world of the past traumatic events and of the ghost herself. In particular, water is associated with Midori, the ghost girl. When Mio goes for the first time to the now derelict apartment block where Midori lived and died (the film’s ghost zone), water cascades from a pipe, effectively creating a screen or curtain at that entrance to the building. A red ball comes bouncing down the stairs, a reference to The Changeling, where the ball comes back down the stairs after the hero has thrown it into a river, and where the ghost is of a boy who drowned in a bath. Midori now makes

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her first appearance as ghost: as Mio washes at home, through the frosted glass of the bathroom door we see a small figure in a red coat, a figure who vanishes when Mio looks. This alludes to Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, GB/Italy, 1973), where the little girl who drowns wears a red coat, and where her father pursues a red-coated figure we think could be her ghost in Venice, with its numerous canals. In Kokkuri, even references to other films stress water as a linking element. Rain, by contrast, is initially associated with Kokkuri-san. When the girls next play Kokkuri, thunder is heard and rain comes into the room through the door left ajar for Kokkuri-san. The camera then films from outside, looking at the girls through the open door, and now the rain itself suggests a curtain across the opening. Simulating Kokkuri-san’s entrance, the camera tracks through the rain into the room. Discussing the rain motif in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock 1954), I suggest rain may be seen as ‘the curtain of the unconscious’ and this ‘clarifies the dream structure of the film’ (Walker 2005a: 398). Kokkuri offers a ghost movie variation on this notion. The derelict apartment block is marked off by a screen of water; Kokkuri-san enters the house from the spirit world outside in the rain. In both cases, the cascading water/rain suggests an interface, a portal, between the world of the living and that of the dead. The water references multiply. Later, Mio returns to the derelict apartment block. In an oneiric sequence in Midori’s now empty apartment, Mio’s childhood self appears, triggering a flashback to the beach scene that culminated with her mother drowning. This is one of the flashbacks in which Mio herself appears, and here the film seems to suggest, not just that she is remembering, but that she is transported back into the past. In the apartment, she is on her knees as she sees her childhood self, and on the beach she is similarly on her knees, as she witnesses this scene from her childhood. At the end of the beach ‘flashback’, with the young Mio still underwater, Midori herself plunges into the sea and Mio is astonished to be confronted with her double. Midori surfaces, to appear in the public bath where she drowned. The teenage Mio is now beside the bath (see Fig. 16). Mio moves down towards Midori as though to kiss her – a puzzling act that looks like a gesture of appeasement towards the ghost. Midori reaches up and pulls Mio into the water to drown her. This is a highly unusual ghost sequence. First, it seems as though Midori’s ghost has contrived to invade Mio’s flashback memory of her own past traumatic event, thereby usurping it. Second, following a familiar symbolic meaning of water, it is as though Midori in the bath has emerged from Mio’s

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unconscious to kill her – suggesting the return of her only partly repressed death drive. Third, as Mio’s double, Midori is an omen of death (see Rank [1914] 1971), and her insistence that Mio, too, now die is also a literalisation of such a notion. Fourth, this is another example of one of more elusive motifs of the ghost melodramas: the immersion in water. It is this I would now like, briefly, to explore. In Always, the climactic immersion is essentially cathartic – under water, Pete makes himself visible to Dorinda, and saves her life. But there is also a sense that the immersion has enabled a boundary between the real world and the ghost world to be opened up. Dorinda can now see Pete as ghost, and he can help her. In Haunted, the lake is the source of ghostly activity, and David’s immersion could arise from a number of different factors. But here, too, the immersion could be seen as taking him briefly into a ghost world, where he ‘sees’ his sister Juliet on the day she died. In Ringu 2, the swimming pool at the climax provides access to the ghost world, and when Mai and Yoichi return to the real world, they emerge out of the pool. In Kokkuri, the flashback encounter with a watery ghost world – Midori’s appearance in the sea as Mio’s mother drowns – occurs before the teenage Mio’s immersion, but the ingredients are nevertheless all present. Immersion in water repeatedly in some sense gives access to a ghost world – if only as a glimpse. We have here another sort of interface between the two worlds. This watery ghost world also illustrates a point noted in the Introduction: it is unheimlich in the absence of the mother. In Kokkuri, the mother dies in the sea and Midori dies in the bath. It is the latter’s ghost that now emerges, from the bath, to claim Mio. The film continues its innovative play with the generic material. Mio seemingly passes out in the bath, but is next seen lying just inside the entrance to her own apartment. It is as though the bath is another portal – and the derelict apartment block itself a ghost world, a notion already implicit in the arrival of Mio’s childhood self to transport her into the past. Asako enters the apartment out of the rain, and rouses Mio. The door remains open throughout the ensuing scene which, heightened by the pouring rain in the background, is particularly melodramatic. Mio becomes distraught: she now realises that Midori thinks she, Midori, died in Mio’s place and she is seeking revenge. It is here Mio’s death drive becomes explicit: ‘I should have died with Mom!’ As Asako comforts her, the curtain of rain in the background would seem to allude to the proximity of the world of the dead from which Mio has somehow miraculously escaped. The film also links Mio’s past traumatic event to the primal scene, which occurred on a beach. The fragmented flashbacks that culminate with the

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mother’s death begin in a scene where the young Asako puts lipstick on the young Mio, whereupon Mio hurries along the beach to show their mother. But she finds her lying with a man who is set on having sex. Frenziedly rubbing off the lipstick and crying, ‘No!’, Mio runs into the sea. In fact, all she does is use seawater to help remove the lipstick, but her mother becomes anxious and runs to her. She asks Mio: ‘Shall we go to Dad’s place?’ Whether or not Mio understands the question, she agrees, and her mother, carrying her, wades further into the sea to drown them both. The revulsion against (heterosexual) sex inscribed in this scene is carried over into the present. When Michiru claims to have had many lovers, Hiroko decides she will emulate her, and sets out to lose her own virginity. Entirely passive throughout the sex – which takes place in a car with an unnamed youth – Hiroko hates it. And Mio’s ‘flashbacks’ to the primal scene are in fact triggered when she sees Hiroko being kissed in the street by Akira, a scene that occurs immediately after Hiroko has had sex in the car. The film quite explicitly links Mio’s present revulsion at the sight of Hiroko kissing with her childhood revulsion to the sight of her mother with the man. There is, however, a complicating factor here: Mio is secretly in love with Hiroko. But she finds herself repeatedly unable to express this. After Hiroko’s burst of promiscuity, Mio takes her in, and she sleeps in Mio’s apartment. In a reference to Vertigo (Hitchcock 1958), whilst Hiroko is (seemingly) asleep, Mio undresses her, telling Hiroko when she wakes she did this because Hiroko’s dress was wet. But, as Hiroko sleeps, although Mio moves to kiss her, she cannot go through with it. Shortly afterwards, apparently in reaction to the awfulness of sex with boys, Hiroko – now echoing Mio’s mother – attempts to drown herself in Mio’s bath. On the one hand, this reflects the film’s pessimism: the girls are repeatedly driven to self-destructive behaviour. On the other, it looks like emotional game playing: Hiroko wants Mio to rescue her and become her lover – the Vertigo thematic. After Mio has struggled to pull Hiroko out of the bath, she confesses that Michiru is a fiction – her fiction. But although this prompts Hiroko to invite Mio to kiss her, once again Mio cannot do this. She backs away from Hiroko, knocking over an aquarium placed in the middle of the room for this very purpose. Although the staging is clumsy, the film is continuing its elaboration of the water motif. As the red fish expire on the sodden carpet, the sequence refers back to Hiroko’s account in the Aqua Museum of Midori’s suicide and forward to the next development. Mio passes out, to be woken by a distraught Masami, phoning to tell her about Akira’s death. This is conveyed in a television news report, which mentions that two youths drowned whilst

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in a car on dry land. At the end of the report, a shot of the derelict apartment block shows Hiroko and Midori standing on a balcony. The implication is that Midori can use water as a weapon, and here she has supernaturally taken revenge on the now-despised boys on Hiroko’s behalf, though whether or not Hiroko consciously wished this is never established. The role of the ghost girl in the girls’ relationships is entirely destructive. But, in symbolising Mio’s death drive and personifying Hiroko’s dark alter ego, Midori has great power over them. Mio and Hiroko do not meet again until the film’s climax, when Mio goes to the derelict apartment block for a third time. She arrives to find a distressed Hiroko with Masami’s body. It is not explained why or how Masami died – whether it was suicide, or whether she, too, was Midori’s victim. The uncertainty is again typical of the film’s lack of resolution in important areas. As in a number of ghost melodramas, the film’s climax is staged at the site of the primary traumatic event – here the public bathroom. Possessed by Midori, Hiroko first tries to strangle, then to drown Mio in the bath. This leads into a long fight in the bath which, driven by Midori, reverses the choreography of the earlier struggle when Mio rescued Hiroko from the bath. However, as she and Mio fight, Hiroko suddenly recovers her own personality, and now it’s as though the sexual tensions between the two girls are translated by Hiroko into an erotic wish that they die together. She says, ‘Let’s go together’, and again reaches to strangle Mio. Mio’s resistance takes another form: she embraces Hiroko and tells her, ‘Stay with me; I’ll always be with you’. The fight has exhausted both of them, and Hiroko leans her head back on the edge of the bath as though inviting Mio to kiss her. Mio does, and the lipstick on Hiroko’s lips transfers to hers. It looks so much like blood it evokes the blood that earlier signalled Hiroko had lost her virginity. Referring back to the lipstick linked to the primal scene, it’s as though Mio has finally lost her virginity to her friend. It seems at first that the murderousness introduced into the girls’ relationship by Midori’s possession of Hiroko has been sublimated into the erotic. This is the opposite of what tends to happen elsewhere in ghost melodramas, where sexual energies are repeatedly displaced into the death instincts, symbolised by the ghosts. Here the water is like an enabling medium: as though the water in which the girls are thrashing around encourages the flow of libidinous currents to and fro between them. However, the erotic promise is not fulfilled. After the kiss, the two girls lean against the sides of the bath as though sexually satiated. This should have been the cathartic act that freed Mio and Hiroko from the ghost’s murderousness, enabling them to return to their ordinary lives. When they

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meet the next day, Hiroko says she can barely remember what happened: ‘It was as though I was asleep’ (i.e. dreaming). But now Mio suggests they die together: she echoes Hiroko’s earlier words, ‘Let’s go together’. We don’t actually see how they do this (implicitly, they jump from the bridge they’re standing on into the canal below), but the final shots are of their two bodies together on a muddy beach. Suicidal teenage girls would become something of a cliché in subsequent Japanese and South Korean movies, and here, too, the double suicide at the end is a cop-out, especially since the girls seem to have worked through the tensions introduced by the ghost. A problem is the film’s pessimism. It would seem Mio is so guilty from having survived whilst her mother drowned that she feels she ought to die: Midori merely emerges as the mechanism to effect this. Equally, the film’s failure to allow the girls to develop a sexual relationship is simply frustrating. Moreover, Hiroko would seem to be no less guilt-ridden than Mio about her own past traumatic event – Midori’s suicide – so that she, too, really wants to die. There is no energy in these two girls, no real will to live. But the film fails to make either Hiroko’s existential angst or Mio’s hesitations compelling. Finally, as a strong wind whips up around the girls as they stand on the bridge, it’s as though Kokkuri-san is asserting mastery. The girls will die because that will fulfil her prediction. Nevertheless, Kokkuri has its place as a pre-Ringu film with a vengeful ghost girl in a modern setting. Although it touches on such subjects as the impressionability of teenage girls, and the cult of celebrity, it is the film’s deployment of the generic material that is most impressive. Elements and features that would become central to the ghost melodramas – an elaborated use of the water and rain motif; an often oneiric narrative – are articulated with some sophistication. Occasionally the film does become confusing and obscure, but overall it is packed with expressive, allusive ideas. In particular, Kokkuri can be seen to have had an influence over the South Korean Yeogo goedam series of films. Although the Korean films are concerned almost exclusively with school life, they, too, concern the close, intense, often self-destructive world of the teenage girl. Moreover, they, too, are melodramas rather than horror films, and they use the activities of the ghost not only to express the inner worlds of the girls but also to crystallise the emotional tensions between them. However, there is also an unfortunate ideological connection between Kokkuri and the Korean films: in both, (potential) lesbian relationships are doomed, and invariably lead to death. Memento Mori, the finest of the Yeogo goedam series, is a case in point.

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Memento Mori (Kim Tae-yong & Min Kyu-dong, South Korea, 1999) Memento Mori is in fact the second film in the Yeogo goedam series of girls’ high-school ghost films, which are discussed in Chapter 13. However, its influence extends beyond that particular series. Confining itself to the school life that Kokkuri omits, the film conveys an exceptionally vivid sense of the girls’ world: its free-flowing energy as well as its silly quarrels; its fierce loyalties as well as its petty jealousies; its exuberance and humour; its intensities and traumas. Here the ghost is created out of this highly emotional teenage world. The debut feature of its two young writer-directors, Memento Mori is a remarkable achievement. Like Kokkuri, Memento Mori also has the elliptical narrative and allusiveness of an art movie. The credits sequence, for example, intercuts two events: the hands of Hyo-shin (Park Ye-jin) creating the schoolgirl diary that circulates through the film, and a fantasy sequence in which she and Shi-eun (Lee Young-jin) plunge in their school uniforms into a swimming pool, their ankles tied together with red ribbon. Deep in the pool, they disentangle the ribbon, but Shi-eun then kicks Hyo-shin into the depths and swims alone to the surface. The whole sequence is accompanied by a voice-over that is like an incantation, narrating how a succession of girls met sadistic deaths. The swimming-pool shots suggest an oneiric representation of a suicide pact thwarted by Shi-eun’s aggressive wish to live, and this is in tension with Hyo-shin’s loving creation. But the primary function of this opening sequence is to set the mood for the film, which is haunted both by the death drive (the incantation; the plunge into the pool) and an ornate, obsessive schoolgirl romanticism (the diary). The scenes in the present all take place on one day; flashbacks show earlier events. The day is both the birthday of Shi-eun, the school’s star athlete, and the date when the girls suffer the embarrassment of the annual physical check-up, with their vital statistics broadcast to the rest of the class. During the day, Shi-eun and Hyo-shin begin to renew their romantic relationship. They were very close, but two incidents a month ago split them up: Hyo-shin took pity on a teacher, Mr Goh (Baek Jong-hak), and, albeit casually, had sex with him, and the girls’ attempt to make their relationship public left Shi-eun feeling humiliated. She broke up with Hyo-shin. At first, it seems the girls’ friendship is being resumed: they return to the out-of-bounds school roof where they were happy in the past. However, about 36 minutes into the film, Hyo-Shin commits suicide, throwing herself from the roof. Almost immediately, her ghost begins to haunt the school through a range of supernatural happenings. At the climax, as a storm rages

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outside, she locks all the external doors to the school, so that – explicitly echoing the climax of Carrie (1976) – the girls cannot get out. Her appearances as ghost create a panic that spreads throughout the school. In a striking visual effect, she then takes the form of a giant face looking down through the entrance-hall skylight at the panicking girls, before withdrawing and unlocking the doors so the girls can escape. The flashbacks which punctuate these events and elucidate Hyo-shin and Shi-eun’s past are linked to the diary – which both helped to create. Another girl in Shi-eun’s class, Min-ah (Kim Min-sun), finds the diary early in the film, and becomes obsessed with the love story it celebrates. The diary is extremely intricate, with collages, photographs, patterns of words, poems, incantations, all elaborately coloured and ornately decorated. The early flashbacks seem partly prompted by Min-ah’s reading of the diary (as though it provides a gateway to the past) and partly triggered by some candy she pulls out of the diary’s spine and eats. Evoking both Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Jacques Rivette, France, 1974), the candy prompts hallucinations. Min-ah is like an Alice figure, drawn through the diary into another world. Not only does she become fascinated with the diary, she also spies on Hyo-shin and Shi-eun in the present, secretly following them around, even to the roof. Later, after Hyo-shin has become a ghost, the roles are reversed. The film uses a particular aesthetic device to signal that the invisible ghost is observing a scene: a high angle shot in which the image is partly bleached, producing a high contrast black and white with only a few smears of stylised colour. This, we infer, is the ghost’s point of view of the scene. And the character who is first tracked this way by the ghost is Min-ah. Setting aside the special case of films like Always and Ghost, it is rare in ghost melodramas to be shown the point of view of an invisible ghost. Indeed, the only example thus far is the I-camera in The Changeling. Here the shots showing Hyo-shin’s point of view as ghost help forge an identification with her. She is testing out her powers as ghost, and is interested in Min-ah because Min-ah has the diary. Like certain other girls in the Yeogo goedam films, Min-ah is also psychic. When Hyo-shin kills herself, a scream draws the girls in Min-ah’s class into the corridor, abruptly interrupting the physical check-ups. Min-ah now experiences a psychic episode: in the otherwise deserted corridor, Hyo-shin runs up carrying two cartons of milk. She looks into the classroom but, finding it empty, runs away again. A subsequent flashback elucidates: Hyo-shin had burst in during a lesson to give Shi-eun some milk, but the

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latter had ignored her, upsetting Hyo-shin. Touchingly, the first act of Hyoshin’s ghost is to try, once more, to give milk to Shi-eun. In both Kokkuri and Whispering Corridors (Park Ki-hyeong 1998), the earlier film in the Yeogo goedam series, lesbian feelings remain in the shadows, registered but undeveloped. Memento Mori, by contrast, is centrally concerned with a lesbian love affair. As soon as Min-ah starts to read the diary, the words, ‘On your lips I’ve smelt the blood that touches my tongue’, are followed by an abrupt cut to a BCU of two girls kissing. Again a later flashback shows the relevant scene. In their bid to make their relationship public, in front of the whole class Hyo-shin passionately kissed Shi-eun – whose lips were bloody from a blow from a male teacher. The kiss was an act of defiance, prompting the horrified pupils and the teacher to rush to break them up. Lesbianism or suppressed lesbianism in schools has typically tended towards melodramatic representation, from Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, Germany, 1931) through The Children’s Hour (William Wyler 1961) to Loving Annabelle (Katherine Brooks 2006). It’s as though the ‘forbidden’ nature of the feelings involved necessarily introduces the suppressed passions and fear of exposure characteristic of melodrama. Moreover, another motif in these f ilms is the suicide (in Mädchen in Uniform attempted suicide) of the girl or teacher who cannot cope – with either the emotional problems of the relationship or the shame of the revelation of her feelings. Although Loving Annabelle does not show this in its main narrative – which ends with the expulsion of the teacher Simone (Diane Gaidry) seduced by the schoolgirl Annabelle (Erin Kelly) – the film nevertheless refers to the suicide of Simone’s previous female lover. We are, accordingly, dealing with a seriously problematic view of lesbian relationships in these films: in a school setting, they almost always lead to an unhappy outcome. The Korean girls’ high-school films are no different. In Memento Mori we discover in a late flashback that Hyo-shin’s suicide was prompted by Shi-eun violently rejecting her. There are also frustrated or self-destructive lesbian relationships in the other films. But Memento Mori shows the most painful example, because the relationship as depicted in the flashbacks is complex and intense. The diary is clearly a labour of love. Introduced immediately after the diary, a camcorder also circulates through the film. This suggests further thematic threads. At first, the camcorder is linked to three girls – Min-ah, Yeon-an (Kim Jae-in) and the rather anarchic Ji-won (Kong Hyo-jin) – who form a little group that, in its squabbling, functions as a counterpoint to the intensities of the romantic

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couple. Wielded mainly by Ji-won, the camcorder introduces a self-reflexive dimension into the film: the girls self-consciously perform for Ji-won’s camera and this in turn reflects on their performances elsewhere in the film. There is frequently a sense they are acting out roles – both for the other girls and the teachers. And there is equally a sense of melodramatic excess to some of these performances. For example, Yeon-an is the most vocal in her hostility to the lesbian relationship and to Hyo-shin in particular. But her histrionic outbursts are ironised: she frequently seems like a silly schoolgirl who is overwrought. Confiscated by a teacher, who objects to Ji-won surreptitiously filming his histrionic performance, the camcorder is then appropriated by Hyo-shin, who takes it to the roof. There, she records herself singing ‘Happy birthday to you’ (in English) on it. In itself, this is a lightweight moment, but it is eloquently recalled at the end of the film. In the present, Hyo-shin and Shi-eun first meet in the staffroom. We now discover they can communicate with one another telepathically, another link with Céline et Julie. Hyo-shin is talking to Mr Goh about her dizziness, seeking his permission to skip the physical check-ups; Shi-eun telepathically interrupts. Mr Goh sends Hyo-shin to the school clinic. When Shi-eun visits her, Hyo-shin says the nurse joked that her symptoms were like those of pregnancy. Hyo-shin herself jokes: ‘At last, our own baby’. Shi-eun is not amused. It is never established whether or not Hyo-shin is pregnant, but it seems likely that this possibility is the main reason Shi-eun later rejects her. Also relevant is the film’s rather striking use of symbolism. Memento Mori includes a number of motifs which might also be read as symbols: rain; the milk; hallucination-inducing candy/pills; eyes; a cream piano. One of the most suggestive is a pink bird that suddenly appears fluttering around in the classroom shortly after Hyo-shin’s death, implying her trapped spirit. But when the same bird turns up later as a bloody corpse in a toilet, it suggests – in oneiric terms – an aborted fetus. This intimates that Hyo-shin is seeking, in the ‘language’ of a ghost, to make a gesture of appeasement towards Shi-eun. Immediately after this, her ghost haunts Mr Goh, and we later see him slumped in a pool of blood at his desk. It’s as though the ghost is trying symbolically to erase all traces of the contaminating heterosexual relationship. Min-ah’s hallucinations begin when she returns to her desk after seeing Hyo-shin’s body. As she sits, looking sick, we see a rapid montage of elements, suggesting her ‘vision’. The montage cross-cuts between Hyo-shin’s ghost on the roof, looking down at the girls milling around her body on

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the ground, and the milling girls themselves. Amongst the girls, Min-ah is stationary, her gaze fixed on the body. The montage ends on the body, but when the covering sheet is removed, the bloody face now revealed is not Hyo-shin’s but Min-ah’s. Cut back to Min-ah at her desk: she screams, a scream echoed by the other girls in the class, who are reacting to the sight of the pink bird, which is flying in panic around the room. Two points emerge. First, the trauma of Hyo-shin’s suicide is now reverberating through the school, both in bizarre happenings and in the hysteria of the girls. But it also now seems likely that the magic hallucinogenic properties of the candy were to enable its intended recipient, Shi-eun, to imagine herself in Hyo-shin’s place – to empathise with her. This would explain why, under the influence of the candy, Min-ah sees herself instead of Hyo-shin. Hyo-shin’s death would seem to block the possibility of seeing things from her point of view. However, Hyo-shin returns as a ghost. The stylised shots of the ghost’s point of view begin later. Although this is not a point of view Min-ah shares – the unseen ghost is observing her – Jung Ji-youn has suggested that, ‘This gaze ultimately pulls Min-ah into Hyo-shin’s world and thus uses her to reveal the truth about Hyo-shin’ (Jung 2008a: 154). Moreover, Hyo-shin also begins to reveal ‘the truth’ about Min-ah. After Min-ah has opened Hyo-shin’s locker and seen her bloody head inside – which could be a hallucination, but could also be Hyo-shin shocking her – she decides the diary is the problem and tries to get rid of it. It mysteriously reappears on her desk, and the only explanation is that Hyo-shin as ghost put it there. Comments in the diary invite her to look into a concealed mirror (where she fails to see the fleeting reflection of Hyo-shin) and to murmur an incantation. The incantation is in fact the English title of the film – the words ‘memento mori’ – and, as with the Kokkuri game, this summons the ghost. Thus the titles of both Kokkuri and Memento Mori point to the mechanism whereby the characters bring about their haunting by the ghost. And in Memento Mori the incantation summons the ghost sexually: hands which she herself cannot see move all over Min-ah’s body. Min-ah has a fit, and is taken to the clinic. This suggests the ghost can read Min-ah’s suppressed desires; as though Hyo-shin is inducting Min-ah into the erotic delights of the lesbian world. When Min-ah leaves the clinic, Hyo-shin appears and, in the typically elusive manner of a ghost, leads Min-ah to another feature of this world. Hyo-shin used to play the (cream) piano for music lessons, and inside the piano base Min-ah finds she has created a fabulous display for Shi-eun’s birthday: paper flowers, suspended origami, an arrangement of photographs, floral decorations, a painting of Shi-eun running, and even a new

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tracksuit. She had been planning to present this to Shi-eun when the latter violently rejected her. Here we see the lavishness of expression, the sheer ornateness of the iconography of schoolgirl romanticism. Min-ah is enchanted, commenting when Shi-eun joins her that the display must have taken a month to create. And inside the display, Min-ah finds the film’s second pill, with a message addressed to Shi-eun: ‘take it if you trust me’. Min-ah does. However, before we see its effect, there are two key events. First, Shi-eun herself now reads the diary, which reminds her of her cruel behaviour towards Hyo-shin: we see a flashback which terminates with her seizing the diary from Hyo-shin, tearing out some pages and hurling them in the air. Second, Hyo-shin’s ghost begins to haunt the whole school. The other girls first see Hyo-shin’s ghost when she interrupts the choir on the platform in the gym. Earlier, they were shown rehearsing a ‘Kyrie eleison’ as a memorial song for Hyo-shin; now they are squabbling over her. Signalled by a ghost point-of-view shot, Hyo-shin descends to the piano; the lights in the gym go off. Supernaturally illuminated in the darkness, and accompanied by thunder and lightning, Hyo-shin appears playing the piano. On the roof, she had mused to Shi-eun, ‘How would people remember me if I died?’ Presumably upset by the squabbling, she now seeks to remind the girls about her memorial song: she plays the opening bars to ‘Kyrie eleison’. However, her dramatic appearance terrifies the girls, and they flee from the gym. As the panic spreads, the pandemonium is increased by their inability to leave the school. In a vivid demonstration of collective female hysteria, the girls rush around in a frenzy. Electrical disturbances cause the lights to flicker; the thunder and lightning continue. Knocked to the floor in the entrance hall, and drugged from the pill, Min-ah now has a fantasy, a fantasy surrealistically introduced by a shot of a tortoise racing across the floor to escape the stampeding girls’ feet. In the fantasy, the girls have gathered on the main staircases and in the stairwell to celebrate Shi-eun’s birthday. A cake with lighted candles is carried forward in darkness; members of the choir sing on an illuminated dais. A smiling Hyo-shin and Shi-eun walk forward to the front of the dais; everyone applauds. There is a sense of harmony and delight in the fantasy; the opposite of the way the two girls have in fact been treated. The ritual has the flavour of a symbolic wedding. The fantasy is then abruptly terminated when Yeon-an, who is presiding, throws the cake in the air. The gesture echoes the moment when Shi-eun hurled the pages of the diary in the air. Yeon-an is also acting out the tensions between the lovers.

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This cues the beginning of the climactic haunting. Cut to Shi-eun in the gym: she now recalls the (thus far unseen) later stages of the scene that morning on the roof with Hyo-shin. In a flashback, she rejects Hyo-shin’s kiss; the latter says, ‘Are you ashamed of me?’ Cut to the skylight of the entrance hall; rain pours down on it; thunder is heard. A full choral version of ‘Kyrie eleison’ begins on the soundtrack and continues throughout the remainder of the climax. An overhead shot of the girls rushing around in a blur is dissolved into a huge eye, an eye we now see belongs to the giant ghost of Hyo-shin, looking down through the skylight. On the one hand, the giant eye suggests a ghost with cosmic powers looking down on the world she is manipulating. On the other, the cut from ‘Are you ashamed of me?’ to the torrents of rain emphasises not simply that the storm is a part of Hyo-shin’s haunting but also that her distress is translated into pouring rain. In a powerful articulation of the ghost-movie rain motif, this is also an anguished haunting: the rain stands for Hyo-shin’s tears. The way the blur of action vanishes into the eye has additional resonances. An eye motif runs through the film. In the first flashback, Hyo-Shin refers to the ‘eye Buddha’ (the notion that the Buddha’s eye had such penetration it could see into someone’s soul) and asks Shi-eun to look into her eyes. All Shi-eun can see is herself. Similarly, when Min-ah looks into the mirror, all she sees is herself. When Min-ah is in the clinic, there is a striking sequence in which three people who talk to her – Yeon-an, Mr Goh and Shi-eun – are shown purely through their reflections in her eye. Although this could be Min-ah’s hallucination, all are nevertheless behaving selfishly: they are not thinking of Min-ah, but pursuing their own agendas. Collectively, these eye references seem to be gesturing towards an insight that each person who looks into an eye is refusing. The final image of Hyo-shin’s giant eye is different. As the image of the panicking girls is absorbed into the eye, it’s as though Hyo-shin looks down and understands: she has caused this. Before we see her reaction, however, the film moves to the second half of the climax: the revelation of what caused her to kill herself. After some more shots of the panicking girls trying to get out of the school, we return to Shi-eun in the gym. Two final flashbacks show the traumatic ending to the roof scene. Although Hyo-shin threatens to kill herself, Shi-eun still rejects her, and she leaves the roof thinking bitterly about her. Cut back to Hyo-shin looking down through the skylight; we can now see her whole face (see Fig. 17). There are tears in her eyes, but she also half-smiles. Her face withdraws into the night sky. The doors to the school spring open; the girls flee into the rain. The film cuts to Mr Goh, dead at his desk.

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It’s as though Hyo-shin as ghost is not simply generated from her misery at Shi-eun’s rejection, she is magnified by the girls’ hysteria – and also, perhaps, their collective pettiness. Throughout the film, most of the girls have ostracised her, taunted her, even assaulted her. She is now like their collective shadow, projected above them and terrifying them with her all-seeing gaze. Nevertheless, she takes pity on the panicking girls and releases them. However, there has also been a hidden agenda to her haunting. Although there are shots during this climax of Shi-eun looking around, she fails to see Hyo-shin as a ghost. For her, Hyo-shin is converted into the storm and the electrical disturbances: Hyo-shin shows her displeasure in the manner of an angry deity. Combined with her guilt-ridden memories of how badly she treated Hyo-shin, this creates a pressure on Shi-eun. We now see the consequences of this pressure. The next morning, the school is empty but for Shi-eun and Min-ah. Again Min-ah follows Shi-eun up to the roof. But as Min-ah starts to open the door to the roof, there is a white-out, and the film cuts to Hyo-shin, sitting on the parapet at the place where she jumped. She looks down and smiles; the camera pans away from her across the sky. The main piano theme begins (a wistful tune associated with the lovers), signalling the approaching end of the film. But there is then a subjective simulation of the point of view of a body falling to the ground. Cut to black; then to Hyo-shin singing the ‘Happy birthday’ she recorded on the camcorder – a poignant reminder of the lost happiness. Finally, with the piano theme still playing, the film returns to an early flashback of the two girls fooling around on the roof. The credits come up. Although presented elliptically, the ending indicates that Shi-eun, too, has jumped from the roof. In an interview with Kim Tae-yong, Jung Ji-youn assumes the subjective shot of a falling body is a flashback to Hyo-shin’s death (Jung 2008b: 179). But there is no narrative logic to such a flashback, whereas Shi-eun’s suicide delivers a powerful punch at the end of the film. Hyo-shin’s smile is that of a ghost who has got her way: Shi-eun is joining her in death. A small but telling detail here is we hear a church bell ring over the shot of Hyo-shin on the roof. Earlier Hyo-shin told Shi-eun she heard church bells ring when she first saw her; now she hears them again as Shi-eun joins her in death. Textually, the white-out bars Min-ah from the roof: this is now the exclusive domain of the (ghost) lovers. In all three sequences where we see Hyo-shin as a ghost on the roof, the film includes a steeple and cross on a nearby building in the background of the shots. But in the one shot of this steeple before Hyo-shin becomes a ghost, there is no cross. Accordingly, the film seems to be using Christian

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imagery in an unusual way. Just as the ‘Kyrie eleison’, a part of the Roman Catholic Mass, is sung in the film implicitly as an appeal to God to have mercy on the departed, so the Christian cross would seem to be placed to offer comfort to Hyo-shin in the afterlife. This also ties in with the sudden introduction of the sound of a church bell. The Christian symbolism intimates a spirit of forgiveness and blessing. The film also adapts Buddhist beliefs to its own ends. When Hyo-shin wondered to Shi-eun how she would be remembered, she added, ‘we’re supposed to be reborn’. But here the rebirth is as a ghost. The notion is strengthened by the return to Hyo-shin singing ‘Happy birthday’ to Shi-eun at the end. Shi-eun, too, has been reborn as a ghost and is here welcomed by Hyo-shin into the afterlife. Referring to the opening swimming-pool scene, Art Black comments: ‘suicide in Korea is frequently accomplished by drowning, and always with one’s shoes removed. This allows for freer, easier reincarnation’ (2003: 196). But although we note that Hyo-shin loses her shoes when she jumps from the roof, when she leads Min-ah around the school, she still wears them. However, in the final scene, both she and Shi-eun are barefoot, just as Jin-ju is barefoot in the opening shots of Whispering Corridors. This stresses their status as ghosts. As a ghost, Hyo-shin seems at first to be using her powers to guide and manipulate Min-ah. But after she has appeared playing the piano, more dramatic supernatural manifestations take over: she conjures up a thunderstorm; she also disrupts the plumbing. It is thus regrettable we do not know how she brings about Mr Goh’s death. This is the only time her ghost speaks, saying, ‘You feel better now, don’t you?’, as though her death has relieved him of the consequences of having (probably) made a pupil pregnant. But she then whispers something to him, and although this makes him smile, when we next see him he is dead. Hyo-shin’s subsequent transformation into a giant face haunting the whole school is a different matter: it seems to be something that just happens; as though the panic of the girls feeds her power. However, as with most ghosts, she also has a more selfish agenda. She is not content until Shi-eun joins her in death. On the one hand, the final shot, in referring back to a past happiness, is achingly sad. On the other, it also signals a future ghost world, in which Hyo-shin and Shi-eun will always be together. But the implication is still clear: it is only as ghosts that the lesbian couple can find happiness. On a loose analogy with what Thomas Elsaesser has called the ‘deep structure’ of a Hollywood film (2012: 113-114), Memento Mori has a high/ low structure mapped across its narrative. Thus the first three flashbacks take Hyo-shin and Shi-eun from what will later be the first significant site

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of Hyo-shin’s haunting – a washroom – down to an empty swimming pool and then up to the roof. The girls are ordered to clean the swimming pool as a punishment for being caught loitering in a toilet by a male teacher – symbolically, as punishment for their lesbian relationship. As Black notes, in the swimming pool, the walls are patterned with crosses, ‘likening it to a cemetery, with the lovers six feet underground’ (2003: 196). But from a symbolic place of death – like the swimming pool in the opening scene – the two girls ascend to the roof, which will become their ghostly heaven. Indeed, the final scene of them on the roof is an extended version of the last part of this early flashback scene. A little like the opening of Angel (Ernst Lubitsch 1937) that Thomas Elsaesser analyses, these three early scenes lay out the film ‘in a nutshell’ (2012: 125). For example, Min-ah and her friends follow a similar trajectory during and after lunch, and in the middle scene they, too, are carrying out a disciplinary cleaning – here of the deer cages. And, throughout the film, events in the present – the return to the roof; Hyo-shin’s suicide; Min-ah’s fantasy; Hyo-shin’s giant face looking down – refer repeatedly to the high/low paradigm. Chosen by many Korean critics as the best Korean film of 1999 (Jung 2008b: 176), Memento Mori is vivid and exciting, and virtually every subsequent Korean ghost film I have seen includes some reference to it. Its representation of the often overwrought and feverish world of the teenage girl is particularly compelling: the film is strongly keyed in to the emotionalism of the schoolgirls’ world and, at the climax, there is an operatic feel to the orchestration of hysteria and panic. The film is an excellent example of the sheer range of heightened melodramatic representation. Although some critics (Black 2003; Grossman & Lee 2005; Choi 2009) have automatically assumed it is a horror film, they have had to concede it is untypical of one. That is because Memento Mori is not a horror film. Jung Ji-youn puts it rather neatly: ‘Rather than saying Memento Mori is a horror film, it may be more accurate to call it a requiem for a girl rejected by others and a sad melodrama about guilt’ (2008a: 152).

7.

Childhood Abuse

A number of ghosts in the films thus far have been children, especially children who have been murdered. But in some of these films, the child was also subjected to physical abuse before the murder: Joseph in The Changeling, Kyra in The Sixth Sense and Mary in Riget (1994) (discussed later). Ringu offers an extreme example: Sadako remained trapped in the well for thirty years before dying. The notion that childhood abuse could influence a ghost’s agenda is crucial to the three films in this chapter. In Dreams (Neil Jordan, US, 1998) and The Dark (John Fawcett, UK/ Germany, 2005) Both Bari Wood’s Doll’s Eyes, from which Neil Jordan and Bruce Robinson adapted In Dreams, and Simon Maginn’s Sheep, from which Stephen Massicotte adapted The Dark, were published in 1994. Respectively a serial-killer story and a horror story, both novels are highly effective psychological thrillers, but they bear only a minimal relationship to the films. In that it has a psychic heroine who becomes aware of the actions of a serial killer, In Dreams takes part of its narrative from Doll’s Eyes, but in the novel the heroine is childless and the killer murders women, not children. In addition, he has no supernatural powers. Sheep and The Dark are even more dissimilar: the novel has the same Welsh farmhouse setting, but the horror is located at the heart of the family that moves to live there. The supernatural/ ghost elements that have led me to these two films play no part in the source novels. However, I will return to the novels at the end of this section, and look at the implications of the ways in which they have been transformed. My contention that In Dreams may be seen as a seminal ghost film requires explanation. Although the film ends with the heroine becoming a ghost, there have been no ghosts up to this point. ‘Supernatural horror’ and ‘serial-killer movie’ are the terms typically used to categorise the film. Nevertheless, although In Dreams is not in itself a ghost movie, it has the structure and themes of one, and this was confirmed when The Dark was released. The Dark is a ghost melodrama, but it was as if it had followed the template of In Dreams. The films are strikingly similar. About twenty minutes into each, a girl is killed, and the rest of the narrative focuses primarily on her mother’s increasingly overwrought reaction. In In Dreams, seven year-old Rebecca (Katie Sagona) is murdered – and her body sunk in water – by a serial killer with whom her mother Claire (Annette Bening)

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has some sort of telepathic connection. Claire finds herself subjected to psychic visions and dreams from the killer, and she becomes obsessed with the need to stop him killing. In The Dark, eleven year-old Sarah (Sophie Stuckey) is mysteriously lured to her death in the sea by the ghost of Ebrill (Abigail Stone), a girl who died fifty years ago, but Sarah’s mother Adelle (Maria Bello) becomes convinced that Sarah is still alive in the world of the dead, and she can bring her back. Each film has multiple dream sequences and indeed an overall oneiric narrative, and each climaxes with the mother dying in the same water as her daughter and being reunited with her, but at the cost of herself becoming a ghost. I am arguing that In Dreams is like a ghost movie. Both the history and the supernatural powers of its serial killer, Vivian Thompson (Robert Downey Jr), suggest a revenant who has returned to the world of the living to enact a perverse agenda. Inhabiting a typical serial-killer’s ‘lair’ – a disused cider factory in the woods – he has many connections with Ebrill who, coming from the world of the dead, is a genuine revenant. In addition, In Dreams is saturated with ghost references and with the tropes of the ghost melodrama. In her monograph on Neil Jordan, Carole Zucker considers In Dreams as an example of Irish Gothic (2008:116-130), and Gothic themes are also present in the backstory of The Dark. These are important as a background influence, but my primary concern here is the way the films’ parallel narratives mesh with generic patterns and concerns in the modern ghost melodramas. 1. Opening sequence: water and the past traumatic event. In In Dreams, a brief pre-credits sequence shows the creation of a ghost town: in 1965, the flooding of a Massachusetts valley to make a reservoir caused the town of Northfield to be submerged. During the credits, we see the submerged town as it is today: police divers are searching it for the body of a little girl – the latest victim of a serial killer. Carole Zucker writes: ‘The subterranean swimmers are bathed in a blue light as they swim silently through the drowned town. Their torches create an eerie, otherworldly luminosity. From the outset, In Dreams is situated in an oneiric world that is at once ghostly and unrelenting’ (2008: 118). In effect, this sets the mood for the film. Later we will learn of the serial killer’s own connection with the ghost town. As a boy, Vivian lived in Northfield, and was tyrannised by his mother. Here, the whole of Vivian’s childhood was in effect a traumatic event. When the town was flooded, his mother chained him up and left him to drown. In The Dark, the opening credits are set on the Welsh coastline. During them, bodies and possessions plunge into the sea. This refers to a social

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traumatic event, which hangs over the film but which is only explained much later. In the early 1950s, Ebrill lived with her father (Richard Elfyn) who, known as the Shepherd, was the leader of a pagan cult founded on Welsh legends. When Ebrill died from illness, her father put her body into the sea, which was thought to give access to Annwyn, the land of the dead. But the Shepherd also believed that a dead person could be brought back from Annwyn if someone was given in exchange: ‘One of the living for one of the dead’, in the words of the film’s publicity. And so he convinced his followers that the way to Paradise was to die – it was here they threw themselves off the cliffs into the sea. This past mass suicide is in fact taken from the novel, but whereas in the film the act does bring Ebrill back from the dead, in Sheep there are no supernatural overtones: the followers simply threw themselves off the cliff in a frenzy of religious lunacy. Both the reservoir in In Dreams and the sea in The Dark will turn out to function in much the same way. In In Dreams, when Vivian escaped from his mother’s imprisonment and swam to the surface, it was as though he was emerging from the land of the dead under the reservoir. In The Dark, Ebrill really does come, through the sea, from the land of the dead. Further links between the two settings occur throughout the films. 2. Mother and daughter. After the credits, each film begins with mother and daughter. In In Dreams, Claire and Rebecca are walking with Dobie, the family dog, in woods alongside the reservoir, rehearsing for Rebecca’s forthcoming performance as a fairy in a children’s open-air production of Snow White. Here the mother-daughter relationship seems entirely harmonious. In The Dark, Adelle and Sarah are travelling by car to visit her father James (Sean Bean) who, separated from Adelle, is living in a coastal farmhouse in Wales. But here there are signif icant motherdaughter tensions. We will learn that, back in New York, Adelle and Sarah have recently had a particularly destructive row, and Sarah now wants to live with her father. In the early flashbacks to the row, we see Adelle slap Sarah, but we do not see what then happened until the climax of the film. In In Dreams, the danger is out there: in the background of this scene, we can see the police vessels supporting the search of the reservoir. Their presence is also prophetic: only days later, the police will be looking for Rebecca’s body in the same place. In The Dark, it is as though Adelle and Sarah have brought their emotional problems with them. But in both cases, the supernatural figures who will destroy the family are close at hand, and they appear first in the heroine’s ‘dreams’.

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3. The heroine’s visions/dreams. In In Dreams, Claire tells her husband Paul (Aidan Quinn), an airline pilot, about the visions she has been having of the serial killer with his latest victim: he’s leading her through an orchard. The film hints, however, that the danger is closer to home. That night, as Dobie is disturbed by something he cannot see, an I-camera shot outside the house suggests that the killer is in some sense invisibly spying through the windows on Claire and Paul. Moreover, their love-making is interrupted: Claire’s visions of the killer leading the girl by the hand become so insistent that, like Tom in Stir of Echoes, she cannot continue. Claire thinks her visions refer to the killer’s abduction of his most recent victim but, more disturbingly, they are in fact a precognition of his taking of Rebecca. Equally, however, the imagery has resonances with her own work. Claire writes fairy tales for children: later, Vivian handles a copy of Grimm’s fairy tales, adapted and illustrated by Claire Cooper. And on the cover is a drawing of a little girl being led through the woods by an adult, like an anticipation of her opening vision. There is thus a perverse sense that fairy tales have drawn Vivian to Claire and Rebecca. The focus on the production of Snow White strengthens this: the image on Claire’s cover could well be the huntsman taking Snow White into the forest. In addition, since Snow White’s death is ordered by the Queen, and all Vivian’s activities are in some sense a response to the psychological damage done to him by his mother, in both cases a man under the sway of a powerful evil matriarch is being compelled to murder a little girl. It is immediately after the performance of Snow White that Vivian abducts Rebecca. During the search for Rebecca, Claire then has her most terrible vision: a sinister figure advances on Rebecca in a place filled with apples, and Claire knows this is the moment of her daughter’s murder. In The Dark, Adelle’s equivalent experience is a ghost-induced dream. Whilst they are driving to James’s house, Adelle and Sarah are caught in a storm, and spend the night in the car. Adelle wakes to find Sarah missing, then sees her near a stone memorial on the clifftop. But as she goes to fetch her, Sarah mysteriously vanishes. Terrified, Adelle looks over the cliff, but sees no one. At that moment, a female figure hurtles at her and pushes her off the cliff. She awakes with a start; Sarah is still sleeping next to her. In effect, Ebrill’s ghost world has already invaded Adelle’s dreams. Moreover, this is the first echo of the past traumatic event. Although the female figure is not clearly identifiable, she is wearing Ebrill’s dress, and Adelle’s fall is followed by two flash frames: of Sarah, then Ebrill – an unnerving juxtaposition of the two girls. There is then another brief flash: a zoom in to the word ANNWYN carved on the monument. We will learn this is in

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fact the spot, Stumble Head, where the Shepherd’s followers jumped to their deaths. But the dream may also be read, in the traditional Freudian manner, as Adelle’s repressed wish: in her unconscious, she wants Sarah to disappear. But this thought brings with it the terrifying fear of being killed herself as a punishment. In effect, this dream condenses the subsequent events of the film. Ebrill may thus be seen as in part conjured up by Adelle’s unconscious. It is perhaps not surprising that fairy-tale elements in In Dreams and ghost elements in The Dark serve a similar structural function, mediating the psychic connection between heroine and killer. Connections between the fairy-tale and ghost worlds are noted in the discussion of The Shining, and the same sort of links in Neil Jordan’s work in the discussion of Ringu. Furthermore, in the production of Snow White, Rebecca’s role is the voice in the mirror that informs the Queen who is the fairest of them all. Behind the mirror, Rebecca is already symbolically in a ghost world (see Fig. 18). That ghosts often lurk in mirrors is reinforced in the final scene, when Claire as a ghost comes through a mirror to attack Vivian. After Rebecca has been killed, there is even a moment which suggests that her ghost has returned. Whilst working, Claire is distracted by sounds from the garden of a child’s laughter and Dobie barking. She looks out of the upstairs window: Dobie catches a bouncing ball and the garden swing is moving. The sense that Rebecca’s ghost has just been playing with Dobie is very strong. In this and other details, it is as though In Dreams is foregrounding the sense in which it is like a ghost movie. The Dark furthers such links by giving Welsh legends a place in the narrative. Shortly after Sarah’s disappearance, in a close echo of the scene in In Dreams, Adelle looks out of an upstairs window and sees a girl pass by. Thinking she is Sarah, Adelle pursues her, but she turns out to be Ebrill. Adelle takes her in and soon realises that she is in fact a revenant, who once lived in the farmhouse with her father. This fuels her conviction that Sarah, too, can be brought back from the dead. Her conviction is strengthened when she learns about Welsh legends that refer to a bridge between the ghost world and the real world: ‘the living and the dead crossing back and forth’, in the words of a librarian she consults. Moreover, in an equivalent of Claire’s vision of Rebecca’s murder, Adelle has a psychic dream of Sarah calling for help as she is being tortured – which we will later realise is her terrible fate in Annwyn. Sarah herself thus appeals for Adelle to come and rescue her. 4. Childhood abuse. In In Dreams, childhood abuse by his mother helped create the serial killer – a notion taken from the novel, although the details

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are significantly different. Moreover, having escaped from his mother’s tyranny, Vivian in the film was taken in by the authorities and subjected to more abuse: we see him in Stapleton, a mental hospital, being given cold showers and electric shocks. He escaped from Stapleton as a teenager (Geoff Wigdor) in 1972, killing two people as he did so. Flashbacks showing these events form a part of Claire’s psychic dreams. In The Dark, Ebrill likewise suffered abuse. Adelle learns about this from Dafydd (Maurice Roëves) who, as a boy, was the only one of the Shepherd’s followers not to jump off the cliff. Again, flashbacks illustrate his story. Although Ebrill did return from the dead, she also brought ‘the dark’ back with her: she mysteriously caused sheep to die. It was here the abuse occurred: Ebrill’s father subjected her to a series of brutal operations, trepanning her head to ‘remove the evil’. This clarifies Adelle’s psychic dream of Sarah being tortured, and indicates that the Shepherd is still conducting his ‘operations’ in the afterlife. Although the young Dafydd took pity on Ebrill and freed her from captivity, when she then pushed her father off the cliffs into the sea, Dafydd decided that she was better off dead – we see him return her body to the sea. The film does not say how she died a second time, but Dafydd must have killed her. Certainly, Ebrill as revenant takes revenge on him, screaming to spook the sheep in the farmhouse abattoir into a stampede which drives Dafydd onto the blade of a farm implement. This is a clear sign Ebrill is not, as she presents herself to James in particular, just a sweet little girl who is lost. Both childhood traumas arose in part (In Dreams) or entirely (The Dark) from sadistic treatment by a parent of the opposite sex. The drive in each film by the supernatural figure is to heal the trauma, either by forming a new family unit (Vivian kidnaps but does not harm another girl, Ruby [Krystal Benn], and then psychically shows Claire how to find him), or by seeking a new, good, parent (Ebrill asks James to be her Daddy). At the same time, the past in each film seems like a dark age, where figures of authority were able to subject children to quite shocking brutality. 5. The heroine and melodrama. After the death (In Dreams) or disappearance (The Dark) of her daughter, each heroine reacts differently, and this is shown in the films’ major melodramatic scenes. Claire reacts self-destructively. When the police discover Rebecca’s body in the reservoir, Claire suicidally drives into the river on the far side of the reservoir dam. In a powerful sequence, her long plunge down towards and into the water is cross-cut with Rebecca’s body being brought up out of the water. However,

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as Claire then floats free from the sinking car, Rebecca appears, under water, saying to her, ‘I’m not afraid anymore, Mommy’. In effect, Claire here dies and encounters Rebecca in the afterlife. A BCU of Claire’s eye opening is then followed by the camera moving underwater to a submerged house. It enters through an upstairs window and shows a children’s doggerel written on a wardrobe, a doggerel which is also being whispered. As subsequent dreams will make clear, this is the room where Vivian was chained as a child and it is his voice Claire is hearing. In the discussion of Kokkuri, I mention the motif of immersion in water, noting that it can give a glimpse into the ghost world. This scene from In Dreams is a particularly vivid example, reinforcing the sense that the town under the water is like a ghost world. With reference to In Dreams, Robert Cettl has written: ‘The town […] is a symbol of the unconscious mind shaped by a very real trauma, and the common ground that thus provides access to the killer’s mind and dreams’ (2003: 220). Here the underwater world symbolically connects the unconscious of the heroine and that of the killer. In In Dreams, this scene is the climax at the end of the first act. Strikingly, at the same point in The Dark, Adelle, too, is immersed in water: when Sarah goes missing from the seashore, Adelle dives into the sea to look for her. However, it is not until Adelle swims to Annwyn in the last act that the ghost world itself makes an appearance. Claire recovers consciousness in hospital. When she learns she has been there six weeks, she asks, ‘Why did you bring me back?’ She speaks of herself as having died and, when she returns home with Paul, she says she feels like, ‘some ghost looking down on myself’. This near-death experience also heightens her communications with Vivian: he can now deliberately make contact with her through psychic dreams and visions. Having shared in a similar near-death experience, it’s as though they are psychically linked. Hideaway (Brett Leonard 1995) presents this idea explicitly. After the hero and the serial killer have both been brought back from death by a ‘special procedure’, they can psychically share one another’s experiences. In effect, Claire experiences an acute form of the psychological ‘opening up’ that can occur with the bereaved, and Vivian is now able to ‘haunt’ her more aggressively. Without actually appearing, he begins to torment her. As she kisses Paul, he makes her bite Paul’s lip. He leaves an apple on the garden swing; he causes her radio to play, ‘Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree’. The apple is Vivian’s motif, and in Claire’s vision of Rebecca’s murder, the murder was symbolised by his foot crushing an apple. And here, too, the chain of associations includes Snow White, where Snow White is poisoned with an apple.

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Vivian’s ‘haunting’ also takes a form that suggests the intervention of a malevolent ghost. After Claire has frenziedly tried to get rid of a pile of apples on the kitchen table, he supernaturally invades her computer: an anticipation of a familiar trope in the ghost melodrama cycle. First, he types out his childhood doggerel; then, when Claire shouts at the screen, ‘You think you can scare me, you sick fuck’, he types that, too. Claire hurls the computer out of the window, then throws red paint at the wall. Cut to Paul arriving home to find the walls and other surfaces in the house smeared with the paint, and with Rebecca’s name and Vivian’s doggerel daubed across them. Claire is lying on her bed with slit wrists: she begs Paul, ‘Help me’. Again, she ends up in hospital. Variants on this scene – a woman ‘going crazy’ in the family home – occur in many melodramas, e.g. La signora di tutti (Max Ophuls, Italy, 1934), Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt 1947), Raintree County (Edward Dmytryk 1957) and Repulsion (Roman Polanski, GB, 1964). But here the red paint smeared everywhere makes the interior of the house seem like an expressionistic representation of the chaos in Claire’s mind. Within the ghost melodrama cycle, this is actually quite a close anticipation of the blood-splattered walls produced, whilst possessed, by Miranda in Gothika. It’s as though Claire, too, is possessed. But Dr Silverman (Stephen Rea), the psychiatrist now supervising Claire, refuses to accept such an explanation. Although this is presumably a coincidence, Sheep has a very similar sequence of events. Adèle (as her name is spelt in the novel) is driven crazy in the family home by the activities of a killer who is psychically able to influence her behaviour, and she is committed to hospital with suspected schizophrenia. But, although she explains to her psychiatrist what is in fact going on, the latter does not believe her. It’s as though an element of Sheep that would play no part in The Dark has nevertheless uncannily found its way into In Dreams. In The Dark, Adelle’s melodramatic scenes take a very different direction. The arrival of Ebrill – who carefully fosters her hopes that Sarah is still alive – prompts Adelle to go on the offensive, attacking the obstacles she encounters. For example, Sarah’s red jacket turns up, inexplicably, plastered into an attic wall. Adelle tells James it’s a message from Sarah: ‘She’s telling us how to find her’. Ebrill now appears at the attic door: ‘I know where to find her’. But Adelle aggressively shouts at Ebrill, frightening her into a fall that injures her. Here it is Ebrill who ends up in hospital. Later, to Dafydd, Adelle expresses her ruthless determination: ‘Imagine what a parent would do for a child. Look at me! Imagine what I’m willing to do!’ In In Dreams,

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the melodrama is inner-directed and self-destructive; in The Dark it is outer-directed and dynamic: Adelle drives the narrative forward. 6. The heroine’s journey to the ‘other world’. Both films have structurally similar last acts, in which the heroine travels to the world from which the supernatural figure derives in order to rescue an imprisoned little girl. By this stage in In Dreams, Claire is in Stapleton, the mental hospital. Again, this is Vivian’s doing: he supernaturally masters Dobie into luring Claire out of hospital to cause a multiple pile-up on the highway. On Silverman’s advice, Paul commits her to Stapleton. As the film’s main representative of rational (male) scientific authority, Silverman – typically of such figures – continues to disbelieve Claire’s claims. His resistance leads to a brutal development: Vivian kills Paul, too. Claire foresees this in one of her psychic dreams: in a flowing red dress, she enters a derelict hotel where she finds Dobie over Paul’s body, chewing his face. As she moves through the hotel corridors, her body is faded into and out of the décor, so she is already visualised as a ghost. But her subsequent distraught attempts to warn Paul lead to her being put under restraint – and then drugged to the point of semi-incoherence. Colluding in this, Silverman fails to offer any positive help. Vivian lures Paul to the hotel by pretending to be a woman who has found the missing Dobie, and murders him by thrusting a spike into his eye – a killing which is also a symbolic castration. Here, it is Vivian who wears a red dress, so he now seems like Claire’s alter ego. However, as will be clarified later, red was his mother’s colour, and his wearing a red dress is also an aspect of the psychopathology of the serial killer. In Dreams includes the earliest example in these films of a message hidden behind peeling wallpaper, a motif I consider in the discussion of The Ring. Behind the wallpaper in her bedroom in Stapleton Claire discovers the doggerel she ‘saw’ in Vivian’s house, and so realises this was also his room. By ‘dreaming’, she is able to see how Vivian escaped from the hospital and follow his route. This sequence is edited so that Claire, twenty-five years later, seems to follow Vivian out. Vivian escaped through an air duct, a standard escape route from buildings in thrillers. But, on an analogy with the negative symbolisations of the womb noted in the Introduction – the wells, baths and cisterns from which ghosts emerge – the duct may be seen as a negative symbolisation of the birth canal: it, too, is man-made and degraded. Leaving behind, not just his doggerel, but also ‘Vivian Thompson, R.I.P.’ scratched on the wall, the teenage Vivian crawled through the duct to be reborn as a monster, killing both a nurse and a security guard – who may

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be seen as symbolic parent figures. In fact, such a reading could equally be applied to the well in Ringu movies: it, too, is like a hideous version of the birth canal, out of which Sadako emerges as a monstrous killer. Vivian was dressed as a female nurse when he tempted and then killed the security guard, an early sign of his perverse psychopathology. He then walked off into the woods, to disappear for twenty-five years. It was as though he had vanished into another world. In following Vivian’s route and imitating his actions – e.g. she, too, hijacks the car of a lecherous security guard – Claire is pursuing a dangerous course. Guided by Vivian, she is led to a place on the edge of the reservoir. Vivian appears and, filmed in reflection in the (curved) side window of the car, he looks like some strange monster out of the woods. Like a sinister figure from a fairy tale, he asks: ‘Want to come over to my house, Claire?’ He claims she haunts the place, and when Claire arrives there, Ruby asks her: ‘Are you a ghost?’ Vivian’s lair in the derelict cider factory does indeed seem to be in another world. Not only have the police overlooked it as a likely hideout of the serial killer, it is still filled with apples, as though it was frozen in time years ago, its raw materials intact. The place lacks the charge of the more sinister serial-killer lairs – e.g. that of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) in The Silence of the Lambs – but Claire still has to deal on the one hand with Ruby, who seems quite won over by Vivian’s performance as a Daddy who can also act like a Mommy, and on the other with Vivian’s psychotic fantasies. He seems to think that he and Claire can be parents to Ruby, but he is quick to find fault with Claire, knocking her unconscious, dressing her in ‘bad Mommy’s’ crimson dress, and trussing her up. Although Claire succeeds in freeing Ruby, it is at the expense of her own life. Pursued by a demented Vivian brandishing a sickle, she is spotted on the dam at the end of the reservoir by police in a helicopter. A marksman shoots – and both Vivian and Claire tumble into the river. Vivian is saved, but Claire drowns. However, in a very moving little scene, she is reunited with her daughter. Echoing the moment when Claire earlier plunged into this water, Rebecca swims up to her. She quotes from their opening scene: ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?’ Claire: ‘You are’. Rebecca: ‘Wrong. You are’. Each speaks the lines of the other in the opening scene, showing their roles have now reversed. There Claire was the guiding figure, but here Rebecca is. This becomes clear when they embrace, and Rebecca says: ‘Come with me’. ‘Where, darling?’ ‘Home’. Rarely has the ‘let’s go home’ ending of melodrama been more poignant. They float upwards in the water towards the light.

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However, In Dreams has an epilogue. Judged insane, Vivian is sentenced to indefinite imprisonment, but says to himself: ‘I can live with that’. But, as he sleeps in his cell, Claire’s ghost wakes him, biting his lip. When he goes to the mirror, her hands come through it and smash his face against it. He then finds himself pulled around his cell by an invisible force, and the words ‘Sweet dreams, Vivian’ in bloody red are splashed repeatedly across the walls. He screams for help. Cut to black. Over the closing credits, Roy Orbison sings ‘In Dreams’. In a sense, Claire was unwillingly brought back to life after her first suicide attempt: it is only a matter of time before her death is completed. Hence all the references to her as a ghost. In Dreams is a film in which the ‘pulsation’ of the death drive is very strong: Rebecca, then Paul, then Claire all die. Nevertheless, Claire completes her mission, rescuing Ruby and ensuring that Vivian is caught. She is a prototype of all the heroines who take on the powerful supernatural figures in these movies, even at the cost of their own lives. In The Dark, Adelle’s equivalent journey to rescue Sarah really is to the land of the dead. I would like to consider this last act in some detail, not just for its remarkable visual density, but also because it handles the ghost melodrama material in a particularly impressive way. Clutching Ebrill, Adelle jumps off Stumble Head into the sea, and is then washed up in the land of the dead which, filmed in a yellow-tinted monochrome, we soon realise is a sepulchral version of the real world. On the stony beach, she has to negotiate some dead sheep, a reminder of Ebrill’s dark power. She follows Ebrill to the derelict, degraded house which is the underworld version of the farmhouse. Encrusted with decades of dirt and grease, the home to some distinctly sinister sheep, this is a striking symbolisation of a world saturated with a sense of evil and decay. Because there is no illumination, Adelle uses a torch she finds, and this eerily echoes the torches probing the ghost town at the beginning of In Dreams. Upstairs, Adelle encounters the Shepherd, who advances menacingly towards her holding some very nasty-looking pincers. She escapes into a sewer – an echo of the air duct in In Dreams – and, through this, to the equivalent of the abattoir where, in the real world, the Shepherd conducted his operations on Ebrill. However, the girl she meets there is a chilling composite: Sarah’s body, Ebrill’s voice and dress, and sightless eyes. Of all the examples discussed in this book, this is the most sinister and compelling representation of a ghost world. Both Vivian’s lair and Annwyn are presided over by a diabolical male figure who has in his power a young girl, but the Shepherd’s world is far darker. The world of Gothic horror he

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created in Wales in the 1950s has festered, to become even more monstrous in the afterlife. In fact, Sarah is imprisoned elsewhere in the building (Adelle can hear her calling) and the composite figure who now confronts her is Ebrill presenting herself, for dramatic purposes, as ‘Sarah’. Abruptly, Adelle finds herself strapped into a chair identical to that used by the Shepherd for his trepanning operations. Now speaking in Sarah’s voice, ‘Sarah’ goes to the surgical instruments: ‘We’ll now finish what you started’. Adelle asks her to come home. ‘Sarah’ walks back to Adelle: ‘Home? Mother, home is where we came from’. She slaps Adelle. An abrupt cut to Adelle slapping Sarah in the past in New York leads into a long, complex sequence of cross-cutting between past and present. In the past, we now see that the row between Adelle and Sarah culminated with Sarah shutting herself in the bathroom and taking an overdose. As Adelle bends over her body saying ‘Don’t die’, the film cuts back to the present as ‘Sarah’ says to Adelle: ‘Don’t you want the dark to come out of your head?’ Adelle: ‘Yes’. ‘Don’t you want me back, Mom?’ ‘Yes’. ‘This is the only way’. Another flashback to Adelle’s slap as ‘Sarah’ slaps her in the present. Now it is Ebrill, not ‘Sarah’, who is tormenting Adelle in the chair. She accuses Adelle of killing Sarah; Adelle begs for a second chance. Ebrill: ‘The dead don’t get second chances’. She plunges a scalpel into Adelle’s head. As the blood trickles down Adelle’s face, the film cuts to a ‘dream version’ of the New York scene, in which Adelle is the one harmed (her head bleeding as in the present). We hear Sarah’s voice: ‘Mother, you know what this is don’t you?’ But it is Ebrill who enters the New York room and advances on Adelle on the floor. Ebrill: ‘It’s the end’. Again, Adelle says she wants a second chance; again Ebrill repeats, ‘the dead don’t get second chances’. The cutting between different times and realities becomes even more complex. In the dream version of the past, as the wounded Adelle keeps repeating, ‘I’m not dead’, Ebrill tries to persuade her that she is: ‘Don’t you remember? We fell from Stumble Head. Water filled your lungs…’ We see Adelle apparently drowning in the sea. A dissolve then leads into the continuation of the actual New York scene, as Adelle frantically responds to instructions over the phone about what to do to save Sarah’s life. Sarah’s precarious fate in New York thus becomes linked to Adelle’s fate in the sea, which is in turn linked to Adelle’s fate in the chair. At the climax, the Shepherd joins Ebrill as she says, ‘One of the living for one of the dead’ and again stabs Adelle in the head. This triggers three flash frames of Sarah as she appeared in Adelle’s early dream. Mysteriously, Adelle’s torture comes to an abrupt end. Freed from the chair, she finds herself falling downstairs.

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Guided by Sarah’s calling, she searches the house for her. She finds her, frees her, and takes her back through the sea to the real world. This sequence is one of the finest examples in these films of what I shall call the ‘key montage’, an expository sequence of cross-cutting that sometimes occurs at a climactic point in the films. Thus far it has occurred in a number of different forms. One is a montage that implies the supernatural, as in The Changeling and The Shining, where cross-cutting is used to suggest the transmission of supernatural forces. A second is the rush of images and experiences occurring at the moment of death, as in Ghost. A third is a revelatory montage, as at the climax of The Sixth Sense, where the sequence reveals the hero’s thoughts as he puts together a whole series of incidents and comments, thereby finally realising what has been happening. A fourth type of example combines elements which elucidate the past with a haunting, as at the climax of Memento Mori. And a fifth is the sort of complex montage we have in The Dark, which combines both elucidating and supernatural elements. Although The Dark is not chronologically the first ghost melodrama to include this type – both Dark Water (2002) and Chakushin ari are earlier – it is a particularly rich example. All five types of example include cross-cutting between different places (and times) and, as they draw connections through this editing, they generate a powerful narrative energy. In The Dark, the sequence dramatises a number of issues. First, it is now suggested that Sarah did (briefly) die in New York. The dissolve from Adelle underwater to Sarah lying on the bathroom floor contrives to position the sun (as seen from underwater) so it becomes like a light hovering over Sarah: as if her soul had left her body (see Fig. 19). When Ebrill says, ‘You killed her’, she reinforces this notion: Sarah ‘died’ just as Claire ‘died’ during her first suicide attempt in In Dreams. Like Ebrill, Sarah has thus already been brought back from the dead, which accounts for the strange early scene when Sarah, like Ebrill in the past, causes sheep to jump off the cliff to their deaths. She, too, now carries ‘the dark’ with her. Second, it is also clear that Sarah blames Adelle for the break-up of the marriage, and Ebrill, like Sarah’s dark double, is here carrying out an adolescent’s brutal revenge on a flighty parent, whose ‘crime’ was to have stayed out all night. The cross-cutting stresses that the violence of the attack on Adelle in Annwyn is an echo of her own past violence towards Sarah. The attack on Adelle is excessive – when she struck Sarah, she was immediately sorry – but it does no more than literalise the sort of vengeful feelings adolescents can have towards their parents. Third, ‘Sarah’s’ scornful reference to home as the place they have come from highlights it as another bad world, contaminated by the hostility

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between mother and daughter. As so often in ghost melodramas, the notion of home is rendered problematic. Fourth, the supernatural power of the sequence is shown in the way Adelle is projected back into a dream scene in New York where, with her wounds from the ‘trepanning’, she is the vulnerable victim. As a punishment for her treatment of Sarah, she is made to relive a moment in her life differently. But the significance of some of the details – e.g. Ebrill’s ‘One of the living for one of the dead’ – only emerges after Sarah has returned to the real farmhouse, to be welcomed by an overjoyed James. The underlying dynamic of The Dark arises from a double operation: just as Ebrill wants to return to the land of the living and find a new father, so Sarah wants to get rid of her mother and live with her father. In a series of increasingly chilling revelations, we now see just how successful each has been. When Adelle follows Sarah back to the farmhouse, the door is abruptly shut in her face. As father and daughter are reunited, and James tells Sarah her mother has now died, Adelle finds, to her anguish, she is only able to watch. She has become an invisible ghost. That night Adelle is in Sarah’s bedroom, fondly observing her: ‘I want you to be happy’. But, when Sarah opens Ebrill’s locked box, Adelle is surprised. Thinking it might yield important secrets, Adelle had repeatedly tried to force her way into the box – found by Sarah in the farmhouse attic – but had always failed. Puzzled by Sarah’s knack, Adelle touches her and speaks her name. Sarah screams and leaps away, and flashes a torch around, looking for Adelle. She then repeats something Ebrill said earlier: ‘Is that who you’re looking for? You won’t find her here’. Shocked, Adelle is psychically projected back into the underworld, where Sarah can see her. Adelle now realises this is Sarah possessed by Ebrill. ‘Sarah’ walks over to her and speaks soothingly: ‘Don’t cry. You brought your daughter back, Adelle. You did a very brave thing’. She vanishes, and Adelle slumps to the ground howling, ‘Why!’ A shot of her drowning in the sea marks the transition to the even more chilling ending. James is driving with ‘Sarah’ away from the farmhouse; he has agreed to take her ‘home’, which presumably means New York. The apparent satisfaction of Sarah’s Oedipal desire thus masks Ebrill’s wish to be taken far from Wales and its memories. ‘Sarah’ tells him that when she was lost she kept picturing one thing, ‘because I knew one day I wouldn’t have to picture it anymore’. She won’t tell James what it is, but a series of cuts from ‘Sarah’ to Adelle in Annwyn tells us this is what she pictured. In the final shots, Adelle turns to see the Shepherd slowly advancing on her. The film cuts to black.

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The last act of The Dark is a very impressive piece of filmmaking. It works at a visceral level – the successive revelations at the end are like hammer blows – but it also plunges into the dark world of the restless, relentless ghost. The ghost world of the dead may again be likened to the unconscious, and those who inhabit it appear – like desires in the unconscious – implacable. Adelle has no more power over the Shepherd and Ebrill than the conscious ego has over the unconscious id: she is ruthlessly subjected to their sadistic whims. Whether Adelle drowns in the sea – and so arrives in Annwyn already dead – or whether she is killed in the torture chair, she is only able to leave Annwyn as a ghost. The complex cross-cutting of the key montage can now be seen to have further overtones: like Sam’s subjective images when he’s dying in Ghost, this is what is going through Adelle’s mind as she dies. Again, this is a shocking emotional experience – she dies overwhelmed with guilt at the way she treated her daughter. The close links between In Dreams and The Dark suggest that the earlier film may now be seen as a proto-ghost melodrama, opening up generic territory for the development of the cycle. In particular, key elements such as the investigative heroine, the use of the master motif of water, and certain supernatural powers of the serial killer – e.g. the ability to infiltrate dreams and to invade a computer – would become commonplace in the films of the cycle. 7. The adaptations. In the novel Doll’s Eyes, the only paranormal element is the heroine’s (highly sophisticated) psychic ability. All the film’s more allegorical/supernatural elements – Vivian emerging like a revenant from the ghost town under the water; the nature of his powers; the implicit fairy-tale connection between him and Claire; the multiplicity of ghost references – were introduced by Neil Jordan and Bruce Robinson. In short, all the material which prompts me to view the film as a proto-ghost melodrama is down to Jordan as auteur. The adaptation of Sheep was a very different matter. When The Dark was in production during 2003 and 2004, the ghost melodrama cycle was in full swing, and there was a mass of generic material to draw upon. Nevertheless, John Fawcett notes on the Region 2 DVD of The Dark that he insisted on the introduction of the supernatural elements, and he brought Stephen Massicotte in as writer in order to effect this (Fawcett 2006). This suggests the cycle had, by now, a strong generic purchase, but equally that Fawcett felt he could do something original with the ghost material, as indeed I feel he has in the film’s remarkable last act.

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The Haunting (Jan de Bont, US, 1999) This film is included primarily for thematic reasons. The script by David Self lacks the focus of the 1963 version and, as noted in the Introduction, the film succumbs to an excess of alienating special effects. However, it is not entirely without interest. The haunted house itself is an impressive piece of production design; the backstory is suitably chilling. The latter concerns the activities of a 19th-century industrial tycoon, Hugh Crain, who built the house. Crain not only employed children in his factories, he brought many of them to the house and murdered them. Their ghosts as well as his own now haunt the house, and it falls to the heroine Eleanor (Lili Taylor) to free the ghost children from his tyranny. Crain’s role as a serial killer of children may seem to imply paedophilia, but there is no real evidence for this, just as there is no real suggestion of paedophilia with Vivian in In Dreams. In the ghost films that deal with child abuse, this abuse would almost always seem to be physical rather than sexual – another example of the expulsion of sexuality from the films. The child ghosts in The Haunting appear as fleeting shapes – under sheets, behind curtains – but they can be heard by Eleanor, and she deduces that Crain’s hold over them is such that their souls are trapped in the house. Crain’s own ghost appears as a malevolent entity, frightening Eleanor through a variety of sinister apparitions. Discovering from clues within the house that she herself is in fact a descendant of Crain and his second wife Carolyn, Eleanor, guided by the children, sets out to use the power of the house itself against Crain. Eventually, she is successful, but at the cost of her own life. In one of the film’s more embarrassing effects, Eleanor’s spirit joins with those of the freed children as they ascend to Heaven. The film has a few minor felicities. As it becomes apparent the house is not just a ghost zone but a ghost world, so there are shifts in the nature of the building. The ashes under the hearth in the main hall are found to contain the bones of the murdered children – a subversion of the traditional associations of the (Victorian) hearth. As Kim Newman has pointed out (1999: 44), one of the rooms in the house is like a giant music box, an unusual variation on the music-box motif in ghost movies. Here the room presents Eleanor with mirror reflections of herself that address her in the allusive manner of ghost communications. The house also becomes like a labyrinth, another motif of the serial killer movie, as in The Silence of the Lambs and Kiss the Girls (Gary Fleder 1997), where the killer’s lair is also like a

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labyrinth. Finally, there is one remarkable coup de théâtre. Towards the end, Eleanor passes through the old nursery to discover a room that is a precise duplication of her dead mother’s bedroom, complete with her mother’s stick on the bed. Given the terrible associations of that room – Eleanor looked after her bedridden mother for eleven years before she died – it’s as though the house is seeking to shock Eleanor into accepting her role as liberator. It is here she tells the others with her in the house that she is staying for the sake of the children.

Evolution of the cycle

8. Generic Developments 1: Messages from the Dead Although The Sixth Sense demonstrated the enormous box-office potential of the ghost melodrama, it was not a typical Hollywood blockbuster. Hollywood production companies are more comfortable with projects that fit pre-existing generic norms, and the three films in this chapter illustrate the more familiar practice whereby ghost melodrama elements are incorporated into other genres. What Lies Beneath was promoted as a Hitchcockian thriller with a supernatural twist; The Gift is primarily a Southern Gothic small-town melodrama; Dragonfly fits into a short cycle of films dealing with bereaved husbands. But in each film there is also the ghost of a young woman, struggling to communicate with the living.

A Ghost Movie Thriller What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, US, 2000) What Lies Beneath was a major Hollywood production: an A-list director, two top stars, high production values and a script – screenplay by Clark Gregg from a story by himself and Sarah Kernochan – with built-in audience appeal. However, although it was a box-office success, coming tenth in the listings for 2000, critically the film has not fared so well. David Thomson’s lofty dismissal – ‘a Hitchcock rip-off without any real point’ (2002: 959) – is typical. But it is a mistake to view the film simply through the Hitchcock lens. It is also a ghost melodrama. In fact, the Hitchcock references are among the least interesting aspects of the film. Throughout the early scenes, Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer) spies on her neighbours Warren (James Remar) and Mary Feur (Miranda Otto) in a manner which echoes the way Jeff (James Stewart) spies on his neighbours in Rear Window, even to the extent of using binoculars. In due course, Claire becomes convinced Warren has murdered Mary. In order for her to come to this quite erroneous conclusion, some remarkable coincidences are required, such as (a) in Claire’s one, truncated, conversation with Mary, the latter gives Claire the impression her husband is harming her, and (b) the female ghost which is already haunting Claire just happens to have the same initials as Mary. It is something of a relief when this matter is resolved

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and the film can concentrate on the much more promising ghost movie material which has been emerging. Claire is married to university academic Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford) and lives with him in the luxurious Vermont lakeside house he inherited from his father, a world-famous mathematician. Although Norman lives in the shadow of his father, he is himself a successful geneticist, and in the early scenes the couple shows every sign of being happily married. The narrative begins when Claire’s daughter Caitlin (Katharine Towne) goes to college, leaving Claire alone during the day. Having fantasies about the neighbours could be seen as one consequence of this, but another is more striking: Claire realises she is being haunted. At first this is apparent only in minor events: the front door opens when Claire reaches it; a framed photograph of the ceremony in which Norman was awarded ‘the DuPont Chair in Genetics’ keeps falling over, twice breaking the glass. Then Claire starts to catch glimpses of the ghostly face of a young woman. When she sees something under the lake at the end of the pier, the face is very indistinct. But one evening the bath mysteriously fills with water, and Claire sees the reflection of a young woman alongside her own reflection in the water (see Fig. 20). She turns and there’s no-one there. Unsure what is happening, Claire consults Dr Drayton (Joe Morton), a psychiatrist. He suggests she try and find out what the ghost wants. A Ouija board session with her friend Jody (Diana Scarwid) is not a success, because Claire is still convinced the ghost is that of Mary Feur – and so she is addressing the wrong woman. However, after Jody has left, the ghost makes another appearance. We see Claire walk from the empty bath, through the door into the bedroom, out of the bedroom onto the landing and then back into the bathroom through the landing door. The bathroom is now full of steam and the bath full of water. This is all done in one continuous 140-second Steadicam take, during which the ghost appears in the bathroom mirror and also reflected in the bathwater. Still in the same take, Claire turns and asks nervously, ‘What do you want?’ The response, ‘You know’, is now inscribed in the steam condensed on the mirror. What Lies Beneath is full of long takes, but this is a particularly skilful example. What we see is impossible – even with a ghost to turn on the taps, the bath couldn’t have filled so quickly. But in the supernatural realm of the ghost, time as well as the material world can be manipulated. The vital point here is the ghost is striving to communicate with Claire through an appeal to information which Claire herself already has. That this response from the ghost is the same as the spoken response at the beginning of Ghost Story is probably coincidence. It does, however,

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illustrate a crucial feature of the ghosts in these films: their manifestation often in some sense relates to the inner world of a particular character. Claire does indeed know, but she has repressed all memory of the relevant incident. However, the ghost is guiding her to remember. On the back of the framed photograph of the award ceremony – which was cut out of a newspaper – is a report of a missing woman, Madison Frank (Amber Valletta). Her photograph on a police website confirms she is the ghost. Norman denies any knowledge of her. Claire visits Madison’s mother (Micole Mercurio), and surreptitiously takes a braid of Madison’s hair. She then uses a spell (Jody has helpfully provided her with a book on Witchcraft, Ghosts and Alchemy) to conjure Madison up. Madison possesses Claire, which enables Claire to re-enact the events of a year ago, when she returned home to see Norman and a young woman having sex. In this sequence, it is Madison inside Claire who is in control. Wearing a red dress, Claire disturbs and fascinates Norman by turning into a sexual aggressor, forcing him back on his desk and ripping open his shirt. During this, as in a time-slip, she sees herself – through a hall mirror – enter the house during a rainstorm and stand transfixed at what she saw through the same mirror: Norman and Madison together. In other words, through possessing Claire, Madison reminds her of what she herself had witnessed. Here the supernatural elements – using witchcraft to summon a ghost and effect a possession – are articulated melodramatically, but Claire is nevertheless discovering what is, in fact, inside her own head, but repressed. Shortly after witnessing Norman’s infidelity, Claire drove her car suicidally into a tree; in the aftermath, she forgot the incident and accepted Norman’s description of the crash as an accident. By voluntarily admitting the ghost into herself, Claire now begins to discover the dark side of her marriage: that her husband is not only unfaithful, but also a murderer. Although Norman manages to keep this last piece of information temporarily suppressed, it is at the end of this scene that the façade of a happy marriage cracks, and the tensions which have been suppressed over the years erupt in a violent row. In short, it’s here the film turns into a marital melodrama – and it is the ghost that has effected the transformation. Norman is Claire’s second husband; they married after her first husband had died, when she was a single mother but also a successful cellist. The row reveals the resentments of both stemming from those early years. Claire claims she had to give up everything; Norman retorts that she was only too happy to do so. The row balances the positions – and resentments – of both husband and wife, and emphasises the difficulties of adjustment on both sides. It is prompted by the wife’s discovery that her husband has been

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unfaithful, a familiar situation. But the impulse to rake over this material displaces the far more serious issue of Norman’s responsibility in Madison’s death. At the end of the row, Claire walks out, and spends the night with Jody. This gives Norman time to stage what looks like a potentially fatal accident to himself (a hair dryer in the bath), so it looks as though the ghost was responsible. As he intended, Claire becomes concerned about his welfare, and fails to question him too rigorously about Madison. Instead, she blames herself for using the braid of hair to invoke Madison. In fact, Norman assumes Claire knows about the affair, and has been lying about a ghost to scare him into a confession. But he now begins to fear Madison’s ghost really has returned. His fears are exacerbated when, clutching the braid of hair – i.e. still under the influence of Madison – Claire goes to the end of the pier and dives into the lake. She is led, unerringly, to a box buried in the mud at the bottom of the lake. But Norman dives after her and pulls her away from it. He asserts control, and burns the braid of hair. The next day, Claire plays her cello for the first time in the film. She tells Norman Madison’s presence has gone from the house. At this stage – we are nearing the end of the third act of a four-act movie – I would like to look in more detail at the ghost movie material in order to consider its resonances. Like many of these films, What Lies Beneath begins with shots of water: an expanse of water, then, after the film’s title has come up, underwater shots of a lake. After a brief flash of Madison’s face under water, cut to Claire’s face under the bathwater. She surfaces spluttering; the camera zooms vertically out. This is a striking beginning. When linked to the ghost’s later appearances in the bathroom, it suggests first that the bath was the site of Madison’s murder. It also points to a disturbing presence under the surface of the luxury bourgeois home, a presence linked to Claire, as though Madison’s ghost were in some sense her other self. We assume Claire dozed off in the bath and sank beneath the water; accordingly, it’s as though Madison appeared in her dream. ‘What lies beneath’ refers in the first instance to a murder that occurred in the family home, but also to something the heroine herself has repressed. The scene of Claire’s possession by Madison extends the associations. Again the ghost – like a number of others in this book – seems like the heroine’s alter ego: here, her suppressed, more adventurously erotic side. Norman does not seem to register that Claire is behaving ‘like’ Madison, as though this more aggressive persona is not completely atypical; that it recalls, perhaps, Claire in her youth. Not until the end of the scene – when Claire-as-Madison tells Norman his wife is beginning to suspect something

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– does Norman become spooked. Otherwise, the ‘possession’ has seemingly served to release what is latent in Claire. We now also understand why the front door has been supernaturally opening in front of Claire. This is where she stood and witnessed her husband’s infidelity with Madison; Madison’s ghost has been seeking to ‘open the door’ to her repressed memory of that moment. Doors are a major motif in ghost melodramas: ghosts open doors to invite people into their world, or shut them to trap people in it. In What Lies Beneath, the threshold is also being used, again, melodramatically. The heroine entered her home to discover it had been usurped by another woman. The haunting has other overtones. Claire tells Dr Drayton the ghost looked like her, but she suppresses a crucial detail: it was noticeably younger. The person the ghost suggests is, rather, Caitlin. Thus on the one hand, the ghost seems like an ‘uncanny’ replacement for Caitlin; on the other, it also seems like a warning: in the Oedipal configuration, Claire herself could be displaced by Caitlin. The possibility that Norman might find Caitlin sexually desirable is something Claire has suppressed. But it can be read in the subtext of their row: during it, Caitlin’s name comes up, and Norman’s next line is, ‘And then some bright young woman finds me attractive’. Late in the film, as he prepares to drown Claire in the bath, Norman confirms his intentions regarding Caitlin: ‘I’m sure that in some tragic way, your suicide is gonna help bring Caitlin and I closer together’. The sense that the ghost is both ‘real’ and a reflection of suppressed anxieties in the heroine is typical of ghost melodramas. Outwardly successful, Claire’s marriage is in fact a sham – and at some level she recognises this. Similarly, the one thematic justification for the inclusion of the Rear Window subplot is it serves to express, in a displaced form, Claire’s repressed anxieties about Norman. When Norman is first introduced, he comes up behind Claire – she is spying on the Feurs – and puts his arm around her neck. She doesn’t feel threatened by this, but the audience may well be disquieted by the gesture: it hints at a potentially sinister side to the hero. We could also say ‘what lies beneath’ refers to an unacknowledged unease in Claire about the state of her marriage, and an uncertainty about what her husband is really like. In this respect, the casting of Harrison Ford is inspired. Since becoming a star, he had always played heroes, but there is nevertheless a creepy, ruthless side to his star persona. In What Lies Beneath, he is a very convincing villain. The car crash a year ago also has its place in this dynamic. It’s as if its traumatic impact serves for Claire as a convenient way of repressing what she knows about Norman. After the crash, her friends collaborated in this:

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Jody knew Norman was having an affair, but kept this from Claire. The ghost also represents a personal return of the repressed for Claire. There are also a number of minor felicities with regard to the film’s ghost elements. That the newspaper report of Madison’s disappearance is on the back of the framed photograph of Norman’s academic appointment locates the disappearance as structurally his repressed – he killed Madison because she threatened to ‘go to the Dean’ about their affair, which endangered the very status bestowed on him in the photograph. Two early ghostly manifestations are triggered by Claire cutting herself, as though the ghost’s return is facilitated by wounding. Echoing In Dreams, Claire finds the ghost addressing her through her computer: mocking Claire’s predilection for online card games, Madison inserts her own initials instead of Claire’s on a game website, typing MEF repeatedly across the screen. When Madison’s photograph comes up on the police website, it emerges gradually as the digital pixels increase, visually suggesting the return of the repressed on which the narrative is predicated. ‘What lies beneath’ refers equally to everything Norman has sought to repress about Madison: her body (sunk in her car in the lake); a box of her possessions (thrown off the end of the pier into the lake); the key to the box (dropped under a grating beside Norman’s desk). Claire finds the key early on; now it prompts her to retrieve the box from the lake. Inside she finds a necklace which she knows from photographs is Madison’s. This is a more successful Hitchcock reference – like Scottie (James Stewart) in Vertigo, Claire realises a murder has occurred when she handles the victim’s necklace. This discovery triggers the film’s somewhat over-extended climactic sequence – here the ‘Hitchcockian thriller’ element returns with a vengeance. Norman uses halothane to immobilise Claire: she remains conscious even though she cannot move. After he has placed her in the bath and turned on the taps, he notices she is wearing Madison’s necklace. But, as he goes to remove it, Claire’s face momentarily transforms into that of the dead Madison, which so frightens Norman he leaps backwards and knocks himself out. This is the ghost’s most aggressive appearance, and it is motivated by the fact that Claire is about to be drowned as Madison was drowned – again, the repressed returns. However, although Norman is now incapacitated, there is a long, suspenseful scene in which the bathwater rises and threatens to drown Claire; it is only at the last second she manages to jerk the bathplug free. This, however, is only the first climax. In the second, Claire drives the pick-up truck – which is towing a trailer carrying a sailing boat – away from

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the house only to discover Norman has installed himself in the back. As she stops to phone the police, he attacks her from behind. Fighting him off, she drives on, whereupon Madison’s ghost appears in the road front of her, causing Claire to swerve off the road and into the lake. We then have the third climax: as the truck sinks, Norman – whose foot is jammed – prevents Claire from escaping and starts to drown her. But Madison’s ghost emerges from her car at the bottom of the lake, floats up and frees Claire. Claire surfaces spluttering; Norman drowns; Madison returns to the depths. The truck crashing into the water echoes Claire’s suicidal car crash. As details of the car crash emerge during the film, we can theorise Claire’s repression of its suicidal nature as a repression of her death drive. And so here the association of the ghost with the return of the repressed death instincts is strongly in evidence. All Madison’s early ghostly appearances can be read partly in such a light. But Claire no longer wishes to die. However, rather than re-repress her death drive – and thereby, on Norman O. Brown’s schema, perpetuate her neurosis ([1959] 1968: 102) – I would like to think that, through Madison, Claire comes to terms with it. It is surely no accident that the under-the-water climax here echoes its equivalent in Always – Zemeckis was a Spielberg protégé; one of the production companies for What Lies Beneath was DreamWorks, Spielberg’s company. In both cases, it’s as though the ghost absorbs and carries away the side of the heroine that wishes to die, and not only restores her to life, but also brings emotional balance back into her life. As in a number of these movies, a descent into and re-emergence from water is a clear image of rebirth. Wearing a white nightdress, Claire dives into the lake and retrieves Madison’s box early in the fourth act, and the film contrives to keep her in the wet nightdress for the remainder of the act – a full thirty minutes of screen time. Moreover, her soaking in the lake is followed by subsequent immersions, first in the bath, then back in the lake. Here the motif of the heroine being immersed in water becomes elaborated. It is only at the end of this sequence that the immersion gives Claire a glimpse of the ghost world. What seems more remarkable is that, despite at least one opportunity, she fails to change into dry clothes. This merits consideration. In part, her failure is a matter of genre: because thrillers like to keep moving, heroines are regularly sent into action in the most inappropriate clothes, adding to the complications and suspense. A famous Hitchcock example is Eve (Eva Marie Saint) in North by Northwest (1959) clambering on Mount Rushmore in high heels and carrying a handbag – very sensibly, she gets rid of both. In What Lies Beneath, however, there would seem to be more of a ghost-based rationale. Madison wears white

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in all her appearances, and Claire, barefooted and in a white nightdress, seems herself rather ghost-like, visually linking the two women. When the film reaches the climactic point where the ghost saves the heroine, they do now seem like doubles. Claire’s immersions, which echo Madison’s, add to this. In another narrative, the heroine might symbolically descend into the underworld to do battle with her dark side, but here the terms have changed: her ghost double arrives to save her from her murderous husband – a feminist reworking. Madison first emerges as a ghost when Claire has unrecognised, and so unresolved, issues in her life. Unconsciously, however, she is aware something is amiss: as the opening juxtaposition of each of them submerged suggests, it’s as though Madison’s ghost comes up from Claire’s own unconscious. During the film, the ghost assists Claire: it helps her remember what she has – if only temporarily – repressed, and exposes her husband as a murderer. But it also guides her to the place where Madison’s own body is submerged. Madison, finally, can have a proper burial: an important concern of a number of these ghosts. In the epilogue, Claire acknowledges Madison’s importance in her life. The events in the film have taken place during the months from summer to winter, and the ground is now covered with snow. Claire visits Madison’s grave, and places a rose on her tombstone. In the background we can see the lake, now frozen over. As the image of Claire walking away from the grave begins to fade out, Madison’s face is momentarily superimposed over the snowy landscape. But she isn’t shown as a skull, like Mrs Bates (Psycho), but as an attractive young woman. Madison is finally at peace. Although What Lies Beneath is uneven, its ghost elements are by and large successful, as they serve to bring out the dark undercurrents to a deeply flawed bourgeois marriage. And one source of these elements is surely Stir of Echoes. Here, too, a young woman who was murdered in the house haunts the bathroom in particular, seeking to make someone aware of her plight. Here, too, for most of the film the ghost is only fleetingly glimpsed and has problems communicating. Both ghosts resort to possession to convey ‘what happened’. Claire becomes almost as obsessed as Tom in her quest to uncover the truth, and her statement to Norman, ‘That girl must be brought up’ – a pivotal line, since it prompts Norman to set out to murder her – might well have been delivered by Tom. The use of hypnosis in Stir of Echoes is echoed in the use of a Ouija board and witchcraft rituals in What Lies Beneath. And here, too, the murder victim is both avenged and given a funeral – which lays her ghost to rest. These connections point to the evolution of the ghost melodrama: one does not feel the elements

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have been simply ‘copied’, but have been reworked and given new life by being embodied in a very different sort of film.

Southern Gothic The Gift (Sam Raimi, US, 2000) Scripted by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, The Gift integrates ghost melodrama elements into very different generic material from What Lies Beneath. Set in the fictitious town of Brixton, Georgia, The Gift is primarily a mixture of woman’s film and small-town melodrama. The central character is Annie Wilson (Cate Blanchett), a widow with three young sons, Mike, Miller and Ben Jr. Annie uses her ‘gift’ as a psychic to act as a sort of moral adviser to the disadvantaged of the town. Apart from a few brief flashbacks, the narrative stays with her or her sons. The town itself contains a familiar array of characters: respectable businessman Kenneth King (Chelcie Ross) and his wayward daughter Jessica (Katie Holmes); battered wife Valerie Barksdale (Hilary Swank) and her violent husband Donnie (Keanu Reeves); Jessica’s fiancé, school principal Wayne Collins (Greg Kinnear); garage mechanic Buddy Cole (Giovanni Ribisi); sheriff Pearl Johnson (J.K. Simmons), and D.A. David Duncan (Gary Cole). The main narrative thrust of the film centres on Jessica’s disappearance – which will turn out to be murder – and this in turn reveals structural elements typical of small-town melodramas: the class division between the country club and the ‘honky-tonk’, Ay Jays, outside town (significantly, Jessica has sex with the D.A. at the former and Donnie at the latter); the everglades where Donnie and Valerie live and where Jessica’s body is found, sunk in chains in Donnie’s pond. However, as befits the deep-south setting, the small-town elements are also infused with the ‘excesses’ of Southern Gothic. Donnie is an extreme version of a brutal redneck: he not only beats up his wife, but accuses Annie of Satanism and witchcraft, and violently threatens her and her sons because Annie has dared to advise Valerie to leave him. Buddy is protective of Annie, but he, too, is psychologically disturbed. He suffers from a repressed childhood trauma, which is revealed to be sexual abuse by his father – this thread climaxes with Buddy tying his father (Erik Cord) up, whipping him, and then soaking him in petrol and setting fire to him. There are other violent, melodramatic scenes: Donnie bursting into Annie’s house and dragging Valerie out by her hair; a ferocious confrontation between Donnie

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and Buddy – the latter is protecting Miller from the former – in which Buddy smashes Donnie’s truck with a crowbar and then dares Donnie, who has pulled a gun, to shoot him; the moment when Jessica’s half-naked body is hauled up out of the pond and her overwrought father rushes towards it and has a heart attack in the water. Yet another generic thread is the heroine being an inadvertent witness, through her psychic powers, to violence and murder. Already seen in In Dreams, where it stems from the source novel, Doll’s Eyes, this plot device dates back (at least) to The Eyes of Laura Mars (Irvin Kershner 1978), and it occurs in a number of subsequent films, e.g. Fear (Rockne S. O’Bannon 1990) and Dead on Sight (Ruben Preuss 1994). In these works, it is the activities of a serial killer that the clairvoyant heroine finds herself witnessing – either in advance or as he tracks his victims. This leads to her more-or-less desperate attempts to communicate something useful from her visions to the authorities, notably the (usually sceptical) police. Although in The Gift only one murder is involved, the violent psychic images – and experiences – with which Annie is assaulted are much the same as in the earlier movies. She feels herself being strangled one night at 1.28 a.m., the time when Jessica was killed. (A flash frame of Jessica herself being strangled confirms the link.) After she has been approached by Kenneth King to use her powers to help find Jessica, she has an oneiric vision of being drawn to a specific pond in the everglades – again it is 1.28 a.m. Outside her house, she has another vision: of Jessica’s body in chains floating in a tree. Her description of the content of the first vision leads Sheriff Johnson to a pond on Donnie’s property. His men find Jessica’s body and Donnie is arrested. Ghost elements are introduced gradually into this heady generic mix. Annie’s first psychic experience is an uneasy premonition. Jessica, standing with Wayne, asks her, ‘Do you think we will live happily ever after?’ Annie ‘sees’ a pencil roll off Wayne’s desk and splash into water at Jessica’s bare, dirty feet. These are the bare feet of Jessica both as future submerged corpse and as future ghost. But in retrospect the pencil also fingers her killer. It is a weakness of the film that Annie can lack insight into the meaning of her visions. A later vision is explicitly violent. Annie is visited by her dead grandmother (Rosemary Harris), which triggers a warning: the sky clouds over and Annie sees brief, elliptical images spattered with blood, images that will turn out to be precognitions: Buddy’s crowbar smashing Donnie’s windscreen; a torch being wielded as a weapon; Jessica’s half-naked body hitting the ground. Here, however, the images are too rapid for Annie to make sense of them: they are inchoate fragments of the violence to come.

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Occurring after her murder, the vision of Jessica’s body floating in Annie’s cypress tree is particularly striking. Although it suggests a typical ghost’s agenda – Jessica will haunt Annie until her body has been found and her murderer dealt with – it is also pointedly surrealistic: the body in the tree really does seem to be floating in water. This is quite daring, since when Donnie is tried for murder, the defence attorney Gerald Weems (Michael Jeter) can mock the vision at Annie’s expense. Since there was no need for the film to risk such ‘outrageous’ imagery, it would seem that it was seeking to stress the oneiric aspects of Annie’s visions. The film’s title is in fact ironic. Like most psychics – at least in films – Annie is as much tormented by her gift as empowered by it, a theme developed most fully in In Dreams. In The Gift, this becomes explicit when Weems’ bullying almost reduces Annie to tears on the witness stand. Like Stir of Echoes, The Gift is also about class, and Annie is aware that, as a single working-class mother with three sons, her position in the town is precarious. Annie’s difficulties in providing for her family and her vulnerability are typical woman’s film concerns, and they are sensitively handled by the film. After Donnie has been convicted for Jessica’s murder, Jessica’s ghost makes a more conventional appearance. Still wrapped in chains, it appears sobbing in Annie’s bath, and swears at her (see Fig. 21). Annie realises the significance: Jessica is angry because the wrong man has been convicted. Donnie is undoubtedly a very nasty piece of work, but he did not kill Jessica. Here the ghost may also be seen as a projection of Annie’s guilt. It was her evidence that led to the discovery of Jessica’s body and, given Donnie’s threats, she is only too happy for him to be locked up. But her visions now reveal that she herself is under threat: she is the person being struck by a torch. Realising that the killer is still out there, she goes to David Duncan and says she wants him to reopen the case. Since she knows he was one of Jessica’s lovers, she can put pressure on him. But she is also taking a risk: Duncan could well be the killer. Up to this point, the film has handled the various thematic threads skilfully, but now the plotting becomes clumsy. If Annie is reckless in going to Duncan, she is simply foolish when she allows herself to be persuaded by Wayne to return with him to the pond where Jessica’s body was found. Her visions now reveal explicitly that Wayne was Jessica’s killer – and that he is the figure wielding the torch. There is of course a generic imperative to put the heroine in jeopardy from the killer in the last act, but this can usually be contrived without making her behave too stupidly.

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In addition, Annie is saved by that most unconvincing of dramatic devices, the deus ex machina. Buddy appears out of nowhere, knocks Wayne out, and helps Annie get him to the police station. Moreover, this turns out to be Buddy’s ghost – Annie learns that Buddy committed suicide in hospital earlier that evening. In general, the violence of the Southern Gothic melodrama is compelling, and Annie’s visions, too, are vivid and forceful. But the murder plot is poorly handled. Nevertheless, there are strong ideological reasons why it should be Buddy who saves Annie. He tells her: ‘You’re the soul of this town, Mrs Wilson’. Annie uses her gift mainly to help the poor and uneducated: her first client is a man with a genital problem for whom she offers to make a doctor’s appointment. It is on behalf of the ordinary townspeople that Buddy saves her from the killer. An additional factor is Buddy is implicated in a rather Gothic Oedipal scenario. Although his murder attempt on his father is not prompted by desire for his mother (she, too, is blamed for the childhood abuse: ‘You knew!’), an Oedipal triangle is still implicit, with Annie as the mother figure. During the film, Annie in effect acts as Buddy’s analyst, and his transference onto her is strong. It is also, tacitly, sexual: his need to talk to her about wanting to ‘touch himself’. Moreover, Buddy wants Annie to witness his assault on his father, as though he is doing this partly for her. His ghost saving her life may thus be seen as a defusing of these tensions, recasting him as a good, non-sexual son, simply wishing to protect the mother figure. Nevertheless, the ghost elements in The Gift are not a central part of the film: they blend in as just another aspect of Annie’s psychic abilities, and also perhaps as another Gothic flourish. The film certainly takes them seriously: Raimi has said ‘One of the premises of this movie is that the supernatural exists, and we wanted to make that real for the audience’ (Holben 2000: 62). But the main interest of the film lies elsewhere: in the dark undercurrents of a deep-south small town, and in Annie’s struggle to keep her family afloat. Like What Lies Beneath, The Gift has an epilogue set in a cemetery. Annie and her sons visit Ben’s grave, something Mike has been urging throughout the film. In front of the grave, they huddle together in a tight family group. This evokes the last shot of Lady in White, where the father and his two sons huddle tightly together as they witness the burning of the ghost dwelling. It’s as though The Gift, too, wanted to reaffirm the family at the end of the film. But here the ideological tensions within the town have not been resolved: Donnie will come out of jail; he and Valerie

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are still married. The tightness of the final huddle also suggests a family under threat.

Bereaved Husband Dragonfly (Tom Shadyac, US/Germany, 2002) The seminal modern bereavement film is, I think, Trois couleurs: Bleu (Krzysztof Kieslowski, France, 1993). Before Bleu, bereavement films – Don’t Look Now and The Changeling are two – were infrequent; after it, they became common. Bleu also has a typical bereavement narrative. Julie (Juliette Binoche) loses both her husband Patrice and young daughter Anna in a car accident. At first, she also wants to die; then she reacts by cutting herself off from the world. However, the world slowly forces its way back into her life. Patrice had been a famous composer, and Julie finds herself haunted by his music – as though it were his ghost. She then discovers that Patrice had a mistress Sandrine (Florence Pernel) whom he had made pregnant. It is after she has arranged to provide for Sandrine and her future child that Julie is finally able to grieve. One bereavement film influenced by Bleu was Angel Eyes (Luis Mandoki 2001). In Angel Eyes, a sympathetic policewoman, Sharon Pogue (Jennifer Lopez), seeks to restore a traumatised bereaved husband and father, Catch (Jim Caviezel), to psychological health. Like Bleu, Angel Eyes uses the musical past of the bereaved figure therapeutically: as this past returns into Catch’s life, he begins to recover. Angel Eyes could in turn be seen as initiating a short-lived but remarkable series of bereaved-husband f ilms, one of which was Dragonfly. Although thematically linked, the films are generically diverse. In The Mothman Prophecies (Mark Pellington 2001), after his wife’s death, John Klein (Richard Gere) is plunged into a world where giant moth-like creatures foretell disasters. In Signs (M. Night Shyamalan, 2002), aliens invade the rural community of bereaved husband Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), an expriest. In Solaris (Steven Soderbergh 2002) – a remake of Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1972) – Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) finds that, as he circles the planet Solaris in a space station, mysterious forces make his memories of his dead wife ‘real’, and she rematerialises. In White Noise (Geoffrey Sax 2004), Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton) receives messages from his dead wife through electronic recording equipment, messages which lead him to encounter malevolent spirits. Amongst these films, Dragonfly,

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limiting its post-bereavement phenomena to ghostly activities, is relatively conventional. Apart from Angel Eyes, in all these films it’s as though his wife’s death takes the bereaved husband into a world of the preternatural – either the supernatural or the paranormal. Although the wider implications are beyond the scope of this book, Dragonfly fits into the developing ghost melodrama cycle. As in many ghost movies, the messages Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner) seems to be receiving from his wife Emily (Susanna Thompson) after her death suggest his yearning: he cannot let her go; he even hopes she may not be dead. At the same time, like several of the bereaved-husband films, Dragonfly has the structure and rhetoric of a thriller, which is how it was marketed. Scripted by David Seltzer, Brandon Camp and Mike Thompson from a story by Camp and Thompson, Dragonfly begins with the urgency of a thriller. Working as a doctor for the Red Cross in a remote area of Venezuela, Emily, who is heavily pregnant, is being evacuated from a danger zone; Joe, head of emergency services at Chicago Memorial Hospital, is trying desperately to get to her. Just two minutes into the film, the crucial accident occurs: the bus carrying Emily and other evacuees is swept by a landslide into a fast-moving river. No-one on board survives, but although Joe visits the crash site, the authorities cannot find Emily’s body. Throughout these early scenes – which spread the opening credits over more than seven and a half minutes – it rains incessantly, and although rain does not play a significant role in the rest of the film, the emphasis does serve to introduce the water motif, a key ingredient in the film’s climax. The film’s title comes from Emily’s personal motif: she had a birthmark that looked like a dragonfly, and had adopted the insect as her ‘totem’. The motif now keeps cropping up. The first example is surely a reference to Bleu. Before Julie cuts herself off, she takes one object from her old home, a glass mobile from the nursery. When Joe returns home after visiting the crash site, he receives a dragonfly mobile Emily had ordered for the nursery. In invoking Bleu, Dragonfly would seem to be hinting that Joe, like Julie, cannot really grieve. The second dragonfly reference is spooky: Emily’s dragonfly paperweight mysteriously rolls across the bedroom floor one night. Then, in the paediatric oncology ward where Emily had worked, two boys, Jeffrey (Robert Bailey Jr) and Ben (Jacob Smith), report having seen her during their near-death experiences; she asked each to give Joe a message. However, the messages are cryptic: Joe has to go to ‘the rainbow’, which the boys link to a wiggly cross both of them draw, a symbol no-one can explain. One evening, Joe and

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Emily’s pet macaw goes berserk, and Joe himself catches a fleeting glimpse of Emily’s ghost. He now consults Sister Madeline (Linda Hunt), a nun who believes in the validity of near-death experiences. She is convinced Emily’s ghost really is trying to reach Joe. However, she, too, is unable to explain the wiggly cross. Dragonfly is another ghost film in which the ghostly activities are related to the unconscious. Sister Madeline tells Joe there are a hundred steps on the ladder between consciousness and death, and an anaesthetic only takes you down ten steps. Emily’s ghost is able to make contact with the sick boys in the deep unconscious, but she can only communicate with them in the language of the unconscious, through (cryptic) symbolism. Sister Madeline’s role here is the equivalent of a psychoanalyst, but the film stops short of making her analytical; instead she stresses that Joe needs belief. It is here religion smuggles its way into the film. In the film’s final words, Joe in voice-over quotes Sister Madeline: ‘It’s belief that gets us there’. ‘Belief’ evidently means ‘faith’. In the meantime, Joe has had to cope with a whole range of sceptical, obstructive figures. His boss Hugh (Joe Morton) and friend and neighbour Miriam (Kathy Bates), a lawyer, assume he is cracking up, and want him to take time off to grieve. Others – a priest; the police – react to his agitated state with an officious hostility. The combination of the ‘inexplicable’ ghostly encounters and these frequently hostile, blocking figures is part of the narrative strategy to position the film as a thriller: the hero is cast into a paranoid world in which mysterious events are occurring, but ‘everyone’ acts to frustrate his attempts to penetrate the mystery. Sister Madeline’s own story – she worked with the children in the oncology ward but, vilified in the press, was sacked – mirrors Joe’s, and furthers the sense that a belief in the supernatural is so dangerous it merits ideological suppression. Unfortunately, Joe himself contributes to the others’ view of him as deranged. He is frequently overwrought, and after he has heard Emily calling to him through the medium of a man everyone else claims is dead, he becomes so violent that he is manhandled to the floor and arrested. After his arrest, Joe is calmer, as though now submitting to the constraints imposed by the authority figures. Deciding to move on with his life, he puts his house up for sale. The ghostly activities promptly increase. The dragonfly paperweight, which Joe had packed, returns to the bedside table. Emily’s dresses likewise return to the wardrobe. And Joe is guided to discover what the wiggly cross means: it’s a cartographic symbol for a waterfall. Amongst the photographs Emily sent from Venezuela, Joe finds one that shows her against a waterfall, a waterfall where the spray has created a rainbow.

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The waterfall now becomes Joe’s goal, but it remains tantalisingly out of reach. His guide and translator in Venezuela, Victor (Jacob Vargas), takes him to the point where he can see it, but it is next to a Yanomami village, and Joe cannot go there without official permission. Again, his quest is being blocked. Nevertheless, two Yanomami tribesmen take him to the graves of the people on the bus, and Joe is able, finally, to grieve. The Yanomami men also recognise Emily’s photograph, but disagree about what to do. Joe’s frustration translates into a standard thriller trope: he breaks away from the men and makes a run through the jungle towards the waterfall. With oneiric logic, his flight takes him to the very bus in which the initial accident occurred. Still in the river, the bus is only partly submerged, but when Joe climbs in, it starts to sink. Trapped inside, Joe sinks under the water and experiences a rush of images from his past, suggesting that he is drowning. This is another example of a key montage. At first, as in Ghost, we see what is flashing through Joe’s mind as he is in effect dying. The montage is punctuated with a recurring shot of Jeffrey walking away along a corridor, wheeling a drip feed. Here Jeffrey is a ghostly alter ego, and his steady movement away from the camera symbolises Joe’s descent into the unconscious – and towards death. Throughout the montage, there are fragments of speech: Ben saying, ‘She wants you to go there’; Emily calling, ‘Joe, can’t you hear me?’; Sister Madeleine’s reference to, ‘a hundred steps on the ladder of consciousness’; Joe’s insistent, ‘Where’s the body?’ The images register Joe’s dying concerns. Emily is represented through her paperweight, her photograph and a brief appearance by her in a hospital. A flat line on a monitor is followed by Jeffrey spooking Joe by opening his eyes. Joe’s quest is symbolised by shots of the wiggly sign, the jungle waterfall and the Yanomami village. Here the montage climaxes with frustration: Joe being manhandled to the floor, crying, ‘Listen to me!’ In twenty-six shots in twenty-seven seconds, this is a highly compressed piece of filming. However, the sequence also has a second part. As we return to Joe in the bus, Emily’s ghost slowly approaches him (see Fig.22). Both reach out; their hands lock. Joe now sees what was elided at the beginning: the details of the primary traumatic event. The bus crashes down the hillside, plunges into the water, and most of the passengers are killed. But Emily, still alive, floats away from the vehicle. Downriver, hands pull her from the water. At this point, a hand pulls Joe out of the bus and, in a neat switch, it begins as Emily’s but turns into Victor’s. Here the immersion in water gives the protagonist an unusually vivid insight into the ghost world: this is the most extended example thus far of

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that inflection of the motif. The first half of the montage sequence captures Joe’s frustration as he fails to make contact with Emily, but the second half is cathartic. As with the boys, Emily can finally communicate directly with Joe when he, too, has a near-death experience. Again her medium of communication is visual: she shows Joe what happened. Also as in other films, the water symbolises the unconscious and Joe’s emergence after ‘drowning’ is clearly a rebirth. Victor tells him that, when he first surfaced, he was not breathing. This sets up the climactic revelation. Despite Victor’s continuing protests, Joe now feels licensed to go to the Yanomami village. When the landslide occurred, the tribe, already isolated in the jungle, was completely cut off from the outside world. Metaphorically, the Yanomami exist in a realm like the unconscious. If the authority figures blocking Joe symbolise the film’s collective superego, the Yanomami symbolise its id. At first, the villagers are indeed hostile, the men surrounding Joe and pointing weapons at him. But they recognise Emily’s photograph, and turn matters over to an elderly native woman (Ana Garcia). With Victor translating, she tells them Emily was dying when they pulled her out of the river: ‘they could not save her body, but they saved her soul’. Her soul turns out to be Emily and Joe’s daughter, who is ceremoniously presented to him. Even here, the Judaeo-Christian religion is invoked: the baby, like Moses, is waiting for Joe in a (pristine) basket woven from rushes. The structure of Dragonfly reveals its overall melodramatic impulse: the narrative begins with the death of the hero’s pregnant wife, and ends with the arrival of his daughter – the family is destroyed and then, if only in part, re-made. Here, too, the film obliquely echoes Bleu. The concluding sequence of Bleu – an eloquent montage of the main characters in Julie’s odyssey – includes a scan of Patrice’s baby in Sandrine’s womb. Although Dragonfly is a relatively minor contribution to the evolving ghost melodrama cycle, it mobilises some of the key motifs of the cycle – notably water and the unconscious – in a productive way. As with a number of bereaved protagonists, there is a sense in which Joe unconsciously wants to die, and it is not until his symbolic death and rebirth that he is finally able to complete his quest and move on.

9. Spain and History 1: Politics and War Four of the five Spanish ghost films discussed in this book make reference, to a greater or lesser extent, to the political-historical background of the film. This is particularly true of The Devil’s Backbone and The Others, both released in 2001. Each is set during a period of political turmoil – the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s; the end of the German occupation of Jersey in 1945 – and in each case aspects of this turmoil are reflected in the film. This integration of politics into the ghost story enriches the films, and is crucial to my analyses. El espinazo del diablo/ The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, Spain/Mexico, 2001) In an interview with Kimberly Chun in Cineaste, del Toro outlines the long genesis of The Devil’s Backbone. A Mexican writer-director, he originally placed the story against the background of the Mexican Revolution, but could not find financing. It was when Pedro and Augustin Almodóvar came on board with their production company El Deseo that the screenplay was rewritten – by del Toro, Antonio Trashorras and David Muñoz – for the Spanish Civil War. The film is now set towards the end of the war in an isolated boys’ orphanage in Catalonia. Del Toro found this worked much better: ‘I wanted to portray within the walls of the orphanage a microcosm of the world going on outside’ (Chun 2002: 29). He notes that the characters allegorise the political conflict, with the school principal Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and the Argentinian Dr Casares (Federico Luppi) representing the Republicans, the brutal young caretaker Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) the fascists and the boys themselves Spain (29). The allegorical emphasis in effect shifts the political conflict to the foreground of the film. The war as such does not reach the orphanage, but events there mirror it. Early in the film, the young hero Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is brought to the orphanage by two Republican fighters, Ayala and Dominguez. Aged about thirteen, Carlos does not know his father has been killed fighting for the Republicans – as has Carmen’s husband. We gather that other boys also have (or had) fathers fighting for the cause. With its ‘reds and children of reds’ (Carmen’s phrase), the orphanage is like an outpost of Republicanism in a Spain now dominated by Franco’s Nationalists. The vulnerability of the Republicans is shown through a contrast between two pairs of men who visit the orphanage. Whereas Ayala and Dominguez

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arrive cautiously, Dominguez carrying a concealed shotgun, Jacinto’s fascist friends, Marcelo (José Manuel Lorenzo) and El Puerco (Paco Maestre), work there quite openly. They have nothing to fear. Although the political conflict tends to dominate the narrative, The Devil’s Backbone nevertheless begins with a remarkable pre-credits sequence which introduces it as a ghost film. As the camera tracks towards an archway which (we will learn) leads down to the ghost zone in the basement, we hear the voice-over of Dr Casares: ‘What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself again and again?’ A series of images then introduce elements from the film’s world: through the bomb bay of an aircraft, a bomb drops towards the earth; a boy, Santi (Junio Valverde), lies on a stone floor in shock from a head wound; another boy, Jaime (Iñigo Garcés), upset, lifts Santi’s head; in murky water, Santi’s weighted body sinks slowly into the depths; Jaime squats by the cistern of water and cries. During these images, the voice-over continues: ‘An instant of pain, perhaps? Something dead which seems to be alive? An emotion suspended in time? Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber’. The voice-over then ceases and we move into the credits sequence. Close-ups of body parts preserved in an amber liquid flow into one another. The parts seem to belong to human fetuses with strange malformations; an embryonic face eerily recalls the similarly preserved face of the ghost girl in Riget. The credits sequence closes with a series of shots emphasising the serrated backbone which Dr Casares will later identify for Carlos as ‘the devil’s backbone’. A number of points are relevant. First, this is the earliest example I know of a pre-credits sequence that shows an elliptical version of the primary traumatic event: the murder of the boy, Santi, who subsequently becomes a ghost. Although Jaime perhaps seems the killer, he is fact mourning his friend’s death. Second, the credits sequence introduces the malformed fetuses, preserved in jars, which function symbolically in the film. Third, the voice-over, musing about the nature of a ghost, is synchronised with the images in a haunting, evocative manner. ‘A tragedy condemned to repeat itself again and again’ refers not only to (the compulsive behaviour of) a ghost, but also, through the on-screen imagery, to the dropping of a bomb, i.e. to war. Arriving on the night of the murder, an unexploded bomb in the courtyard becomes a resonant symbol throughout the film. ‘An instant of pain, perhaps?’ implies the injured Santi; ‘Something dead which seems to be alive’, his future as a ghost. ‘An emotion suspended in time’ and ‘like a blurred photograph’, occurring over shots of Santi’s body sinking through the water, likewise anticipate the nature of his haunting. Known to the boys as ‘the one who sighs’, his sighing a reflection of his sadness, Santi

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also looks hazily insubstantial. ‘Like an insect trapped in amber’ is more allusive. On the one hand, it is an auteurist touch: del Toro’s fascination with insects is evident in his two previous films, Cronos (Mexico, 1993), and Mimic (1997), and finds an equivalent, in The Devil’s Backbone, in the slugs that populate the borders of the cistern and fascinate the boys. On the other, both Santi in the murky (amber) waters of the cistern and the fetuses in the amber preservative are ‘trapped in time’, like an insect in amber. The fetuses, too, are ghost-like. The film concentrates primarily on the boys in the orphanage, but their interaction echoes the political divisions between the adults. Carlos’s arrival disturbs Jaime, who considers himself the boys’ leader. But whereas Jaime is a bully, seeking to dominate by force and deceit, i.e. a fledgling fascist, Carlos represents such leftist virtues as concern for others, solidarity and fairness. Jaime takes from the other boys; Carlos shares with them. Gradually Carlos humanises Jaime. Although Jaime repeatedly tries to humiliate or best Carlos, Carlos not only declines to inform on him but on one occasion even saves him from drowning in the cistern. As he does this, the ghost of Santi in the depths of the cistern impassively observes – a fleeting example of immersion in water taking the protagonist into the ghost world. Jaime has not told the other boys that Santi is dead, and is ‘the one who sighs’. The teachers have heard rumours about a ghost, but they avoid the subject, and insist that Santi must have run away. The boys themselves think the bomb brought the ghost. However, whereas they are frightened by the ghost, Carlos is cautiously drawn to it, and realises it is Santi. Visually, Santi is a most unusual ghost: he moves around in a haze of water droplets, his head wound still bleeding upwards, as though he were sinking in water. On occasions, he seems scary, but this is to create suspense: he may wish the boys harm. In fact, he wants to warn them, but his warning, though prescient, is unhelpful: ‘Many of you will die’. Four of the five adults in the orphanage are connected through sex and desire. (The fifth is another teacher, Alma/Berta Ojea.) Dr Casares is chastely in love with Carmen, but she is being sexually serviced by Jacinto. At the same time, Jacinto is courting the young cook Conchita (Irene Visedo), who considers herself engaged to him. This nexus of relationships is typical of melodrama. Jacinto himself was once an orphan at the institution, and even then, whilst Carmen’s husband was still alive, he had sex with her. Since she is old enough to be his mother, there are clear Oedipal overtones to the affair. Jacinto now has another motive: he sleeps with Carmen in order to access her keys to the safe, where she keeps ingots of Republican gold. Dr Casares is fully aware of the affair, but feels unable to do anything. The sympathetic

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Republican figures are rather pointedly ‘damaged’: Dr Casares is implicitly impotent; Carmen is an amputee with a prosthetic leg. Played by Noriega, a glamorous star, it is the fascist who is young, handsome, virile – and ruthless. Nevertheless, the sexual-romantic melodrama has no connection with the ghost. Although it was Jacinto who killed Santi, this was because Santi caught him trying to access the safe: the boy who became a ghost was the victim of Jacinto’s wish to conceal his criminal activities. Santi fits, rather, the film’s political theme: for Jacinto, he embodies fascist guilt – an innocent killed in the pursuit of a drive to steal the wealth of the people. When Carlos tries to talk to Dr Casares about the ghost, the latter brushes him off, referring to the superstitions of the Spanish. To illustrate this, he shows Carlos the specimen jars of malformed fetuses, including the one possessing what the locals call ‘the devil’s backbone’. He puts the malformation down to poverty and disease rather than the intervention of the devil, but the strange, reptilian backbone looks more like a mutation. The fetuses are preserved in a liquid which is an exotic mixture of rum and spices. Dr Casares sells the concoction in town – ‘They say it helps blindness, kidney ailments and also, apparently, impotence’ – and the money supports the orphanage. He refers to the belief in the liquid’s curative powers as ‘rubbish’, but now drinks some of it himself. It would seem that, concerned about his own impotence, he secretly shares the locals’ superstitions. Why this strange mutation should provide the title of the film merits consideration. It seems likely that the title is an allusion to a famous book about Spain: the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s España Invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain), first published in 1922. In Ghosts of Spain: Travels through a country’s hidden past, Giles Tremlett summarises Ortega’s argument: ‘Spain, [Ortega] warned, lacked a strong backbone to hold it together. It had been falling slowly apart since it reached a height of imperial grandeur […] at the end of the sixteenth century’ (2007: xxii). On this reading, Franco may well provide Spain with a strong backbone, but it will be a devil’s backbone, with all the horrors that implies. The pathetic fetus with its deformed backbone could thus be seen as a metaphor for the Spain to come. Because Santi carries the murky water of the cistern around with him, his visual appearance is not unlike these preserved specimens, which sets up further intimations. We could see fascist Spain as symbolised by these two ‘creatures’, the malformed embryo (the future) and the murdered ghost (the victims of the past). The external fascist threat moves closer. During a visit to town, Dr Casares sees a group of the International Brigade lined up by the Nationalists and shot; among them are Ayala and Dominguez. Back at the orphanage, fearful

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that Ayala talked under torture, he tells Carmen they must leave. As they prepare to depart, Jacinto confronts Carmen, demanding the gold. She and Dr Casares drive him away, but he secretly returns and takes their petrol to blow up the safe. Conchita tries and fails to stop him; the ensuing explosion is huge, destroying the kitchen area and killing Alma and many of the boys outright. Dr Casares is badly injured and rendered deaf; Carmen mortally wounded. Since their truck has also been destroyed, Conchita sets out to walk across the deserted plain for help. With this revelation of the extent of the fascist villain’s brutality, the film unexpectedly takes on the aura of a western. Despite his wounds, Dr Casares sits at an upstairs window of the orphanage, a shotgun across his lap, watching for Jacinto’s return. Framed at the window, he evokes a figure in a western awaiting an Indian attack. The orphanage is now rather like a cavalry fort under attack; Conchita like the rider who has gone for outside help. And, like many of her western counterparts, she is killed in the attempt. Having walked all night, she encounters a van. But it turns out to contain Marcelo and El Puerco – and Jacinto himself. When she refuses to ‘apologise’ and join him, Jacinto stabs her. Equally, extending the allegorical implication, it’s as though the Spanish Civil War is being enacted in microcosm by the film’s few characters. Jacinto has now killed most of the inhabitants of the orphanage; only the seriously injured Dr Casares and seven boys, some of them wounded, remain. When Jacinto and his henchmen arrive outside the orphanage, they see Dr Casares, Carlos and Jaime at the upstairs window. They decide to wait. The orphanage itself is now like a bombed war building: the boys sleep huddled together on mattresses on the floor. It is here that the reformed Jaime tells Carlos about Santi’s murder: a flashback fills in the details of the primary traumatic event. We see Santi interrupt Jacinto at the safe; Jacinto pursues him into the basement, attacks him and drowns him in the cistern. Jaime witnessed this, but he kept silent: he now admits he was a coward. This also accounts for his bullying. Fearful of Jacinto, Jaime has been emulating him, seeing this as a way to keep control over the other boys. He wards off his own guilt by identifying with the brutal killer – a characteristic fascist act. Immediately after Santi’s murder, Jaime runs out into the courtyard. It is raining; he looks up and sees planes flying overhead. The bomb crashes to earth and settles in an upright position. Although it does not explode, the bomb is a symbol of fascist power: the Nationalists were supported militarily by the German Condor Legion. Visually stressed throughout the film, the bomb thus serves not just as a reminder of the war, but of the fascist threat

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hanging over the orphanage. It is indeed like a monstrous fascist phallus, and the threat it embodies is very much alive. Arriving on the night of his murder, the bomb, like the rain, is also linked to Santi. When Carlos first arrives, he is fascinated by the bomb and taps it. Santi appears in the kitchen doorway, as though summoned by the taps. The bomb has been defused, but Jaime doesn’t believe it is ‘switched off’: ‘You can hear it ticking. That’s its heart. It’s still alive. And it knows we’re here’. The film supports this. Later, Carlos addresses the bomb, asking it where Santi is. A ribbon tied to the bomb blows free, leading Carlos to a storeroom, where he finds Santi. As the first victim of fascism within the orphanage, Santi haunts the building under the shadow of the bomb, a portent of what could happen to all of them. Dr Casares dies at his post at the window. This allows Jacinto and his henchmen to re-enter the orphanage: the seven boys are locked up; the three fascists break into the safe. But the gold is not there. Instead, Jacinto finds his old orphanage file – the fact that Carmen kept it in the safe suggests she was perhaps in thrall to the Oedipal affair. The file includes photographs of Jacinto’s parents and his childhood, and on the back of a photograph of himself as a teenager on a beach is the very phrase Carmen had earlier used to characterise him: ‘A prince without a kingdom’. This is in fact a rather poignant scene; for the first time, we can see that Jacinto, too, suffered loss. Now himself a ghost, Dr Casares releases the boys from the locked room. They learn that Jacinto intends to kill them. The next day, Jacinto finds the ingots in Carmen’s prosthetic leg. Since Marcelo and El Puerco have left, Jacinto takes possession, tying the ingots to his belt. Santi is an unusually weak ghost: he wants revenge on Jacinto, but seems too frightened to haunt him directly. He asks Carlos for help. And so the boys lure Jacinto down to the basement and execute a choreographed assault, using sharpened stakes to drive him into the cistern. The overtones here are of a bullfight: as Jacinto, stabbed by the stakes, crawls across the floor, he suggests a wounded bull. As he faces death, he is thus granted a certain animal pathos. When he is pushed into the cistern, in a neat example of melodramatic reversal, the ingots weigh him down, and he tries frantically to untie them. Santi appears in the depths and claims him. From at least The Conquering Power (Rex Ingram 1921) and Greed (Erich von Stroheim 1925) on, gold is a destructive element in movies. Not only does it generate excessive greed (both these films feature misers), it causes deaths, often many deaths. At the end of Greed, the hero, handcuffed to his dead nemesis in Death Valley, is destined to die with the gold. In the last shot of Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich 1954), Ben (Gary Cooper) walks

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through the dozens of corpses of Mexicans and US mercenaries killed in the climactic battle for the gold bullion. In this respect, The Devil’s Backbone is entirely conventional: in his greed for the gold, Jacinto kills all the adults and most of the boys in the orphanage, and he himself dies. As an allegory of what the Civil War did to Spain, the film is bleak. This bleakness is infused in the ending, which leaves the orphanage to the ghosts. Jaime and Carlos leave Dr Casares at his post, the shotgun returned to his lap. His opening voice-over is now repeated, but with a different set of images. The opening shot of the archway here dissolves to Santi, standing on the water in the cistern – presiding over his territory (see Fig. 23). The image coincides with, ‘A moment of pain perhaps?’, as though his ghostly state now answers the early image of him dying. ‘Something dead which still seems to be alive’ is linked here to Jacinto’s body in the depths of the cistern; ‘an emotion suspended in time’ to his family photographs floating on the surface – another poignant moment. The film dissolves from the photographs to the unexploded bomb in the courtyard. Then the stunning last shot: the orphanage gate swings open and the surviving boys walk out, shown from behind in vivid silhouette. The last two phrases from the opening voice-over (‘Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber’) are spoken over this shot, as though we are seeing a momentary fragment of time. As the boys walk into the sunlight, a silhouetted Dr Casares, carrying the shotgun, enters on the left-hand side of the image. He walks forward and watches them leave. The framing through the gate is a tribute to the famous ending of The Searchers (John Ford 1956), and there is a similar sense that the boys, like Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), have nowhere to go. As for Dr Casares, his last words are: ‘A ghost – that’s what I am’. Although The Devil’s Backbone works well as a political film, it is less interesting as a ghost movie: the ghosts are not resonant enough. Nevertheless, the film also gestures towards ghosts in a metaphorical sense. As they talk about the rumours of a ghost, Carmen says to Dr Casares, ‘I sometimes think that we are the ghosts’. She means that, with the inevitable victory of the Nationalists, the future of the Republicans would be as no more than ‘the ghosts of Spain’. As the title of Tremlett’s book suggests, Spain is often seen as a country of metaphorical ghosts. A haunted orphanage could perhaps be seen as a suitable symbol of the lost ideals of the 1930s. The Others/Los otros (Alejandro Amenábar, Spain/ US, 2001) In The Devil’s Backbone, politics move into the foreground, pushing the ghost story into the background. In The Others, this is reversed, and the

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political elements are more like a subtext. Accordingly, I shall consider the ghost movie aspects first. Although made with a Hollywood star, Nicole Kidman, and an Englishspeaking cast, The Others is in other respects a Spanish production. It was filmed in Spain by a young Spanish writer-director and with a Spanish crew. Tom Cruise, who had chosen Amenábar’s previous film, Abre los ojos/Open Your Eyes (Spain/France/Italy, 1997) for a Hollywood remake (Vanilla Sky, Cameron Crowe 2001) facilitated this, and Cruise-Wagner Productions was one of the production companies for The Others. Nevertheless, Amenábar was given full artistic freedom. The result is an unusually rich, haunting work and, for a low-budget film, it was a major box-office success, coming 21st in the North American listings for 2001. The Others, too, has an impressive opening sequence. Over a black screen, we hear Nicole Kidman speak the once-familiar opening words of the BBC Radio programme Listen with Mother: ‘Now children, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin’. As she narrates that God created the world and its plants and animals in seven days, the credits begin over a drawing from a children’s book illustrating this world. The voice-over then ceases and the rest of the credits – starting with the film’s title – are accompanied by drawings which anticipate, somewhat loosely, scenes from the movie: children on the stairs, then with a nanny; a candle and key; a girl pointing; a boy being terrified in bed; a puppet with angel’s wings; the house across a pond. Amenábar’s credit – written and directed by – occurs over the final illustration, which dissolves to an identical view of the house, filmed now within the diegesis. ‘Jersey, the Channel Islands, 1945’ establishes the setting. Cut to Grace (Kidman) in bed, screaming, as though she has just woken from a nightmare. Although the reference to Listen with Mother is a touch anachronistic (it was broadcast between 1950 and 1982), the credits sequence nevertheless evokes a child’s world of the past. It also sets the tone for the rest of the movie. The opening voice-over and drawing establish Grace’s Catholic fundamentalism: throughout the film, she instructs her preadolescent children, Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley), in the dogma of Church and Bible, and refuses to countenance anything which complicates her view of the cosmos. The subsequent drawings allude to the twilight world of the house itself, where events occur which cannot be accounted for within Grace’s ideology. As the film unfolds, we discover that the diegetic world is highly circumscribed. We never venture beyond the house, its grounds, and some nearby woods. Three servants arrive in the second scene, and Grace’s husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) returns home about

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halfway through the film, but otherwise there are no visitors. This enclosed world is also consistently grey and sombre: the sky is permanently overcast; a creeping fog surrounds the house and grounds much of the time. There is no electricity, and because the children are allergic to bright light, during the day the curtains are drawn in rooms they enter. The children also look pale and sickly. The overall effect is of a claustrophobic, isolated world from which the vitality of ordinary life has been drained. As in The Sixth Sense, the explanation only emerges at the end of the film: we are in a ghost world. Grace, her children and the three servants are in fact all dead, as is Charles, killed at the front. And so the spooky disturbances that occur throughout the film are not produced by ghosts, but by the living: a family, the Marlishes, who have just moved into the house. The three servants – nanny Bertha Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), gardener Mr Tuttle (Eric Sykes) and the maid Lydia (Elaine Cassidy) – know they are ghosts, killed in a tuberculosis epidemic in 1891. But Grace has repressed her memory of killing her children and herself, and the children are confused about what happened: Anne remembers what her mother did, but accepts things as they are; Nicholas refutes Anne’s story that their mother ‘went mad’. The shot of Grace in bed, screaming, suggests she has had a dream recalling the primary traumatic event. There are other films which begin with a character dreaming of a past trauma, but it is unusual for us to be given no inkling of the details. Equally, this is the only (potential) reference to dreaming in the film, which, given the number of scenes of the characters in bed, in itself hints at the strangeness of the world we’re in. In movies such as Ghost Story and The Dark, the ghost world invades dreams. Consistent with the film’s inversion of the two worlds, the implication here is Grace’s presumed dream registers a disturbance from the ‘real world’. The ghost world now takes over: until the end, it is all that we see. The strangeness is accentuated by the hauntingly atmospheric mise en scène, which, particularly in the darkened interiors illuminated only by lamplight, evokes the paintings of old masters. In an interview on the Spliced Wire website, Amenábar suggests that the children’s allergy is a metaphor, relating it and the darkness they live in to Grace’s fundamentalist teachings (Blackwelder 2001). Equally, it is Grace’s murders that have consigned them to a twilight world, banishing the radiating sun in the children’s drawing that introduces the film. Only at the end, when Grace accepts both her crime and her ghostly status, does the sun shine. In keeping with its critique of Grace’s fundamentalism, the film also has no time for the afterlife of Christian belief. Grace instructs her children

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about hell and limbo, but the film itself tells a different story. It suggests that many (all?) who die become ghosts, existing in a darkened version of the world they have left, invisible for the most part to the living. At the end, after Grace has confessed to her children what she did, Anne asks: ‘If we’re dead, where’s limbo?’ Grace is obliged to reply: ‘I don’t know if there even is a limbo. I’m no wiser than you are’. We could call the ghost world of the film ‘limbo’, but it is a very different limbo from that of Catholic doctrine. The narrative of the film charts the journey of Grace and her children to the moment when they realise they are dead. As such, it is about the traumatic aftermath of violent death, a coming to terms with the way everything has changed. Given that most ghosts – Malcolm in The Sixth Sense is a famous exception – realise very quickly that they are dead, the film is perhaps also suggesting it is Grace’s strict Christianity which blocks her understanding. At the same time, her concern about where one goes in the afterlife bears witness to her repressed guilt for her similarly repressed crime. The Others shares with The Sixth Sense the sense that the protagonist is in denial. Here this is structured into the narrative trajectory, which reverses that of a typical ghost melodrama. In a film such as What Lies Beneath, the heroine investigates the uncanny manifestations she encounters, but here Grace is determined to drive out whatever is making strange sounds and opening locked doors, and she arms herself with a shotgun. But it also seems likely that behind the denial of death lies another denial, which relates to the reason why Grace murdered her children and shot herself. Critics usually claim this was in response to the news of Charles’s death at the front, but there is only circumstantial evidence for this, notably Mrs Mills’s line (she is referring to the Victorian practice of taking photographs of the dead): ‘Grief over the death of a loved one can lead people to do the strangest things’. Before considering this further, however, I would like to look at the implications of the ghost-like manifestations. We experience these first through Grace, who hears a child sobbing, and is told by Anne it is Victor, a boy who has moved into the house. Subsequently Victor (Alexander Vince) makes a fleeting appearance in the children’s bedroom, first opening the curtains, then complaining that they are in his bed, then – at the bidding of Anne – touching Nicholas, who screams in response. We only see Victor fleetingly, so he appears distinctly ghost-like. Grace not only refuses to believe Anne, but punishes her for ‘lying’ – a mark of the extent of her repression. The next manifestation is more insistent. Grace hears thumps from upstairs; Anne tells her people have gone into the ‘junk room’. When Grace enters the room, we hear whispered voices, but Grace cannot find anything untoward. Anne now says that the people have

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dispersed throughout the house. Grace becomes almost hysterical: ‘For five whole years during the occupation I managed to avoid a single Nazi setting foot in this house, and now there is someone here, under my nose, opening and closing the doors’. Anne has made drawings of the people she has seen: Victor, his parents, and an old woman. Grace instigates a complete search of the house, but they find nothing. After further manifestations – the piano is played; a door is slammed in her face – Grace sets out to the local priest for help. She becomes disorientated in the fog in the surrounding woods – another sign of the strangeness of this world: it is impossible for Grace to leave the immediate area. But inside the fog, she meets a similarly disorientated Charles, and brings him home. He seems distant, and proceeds to spend most of the time in bed. The most eerie phenomenon occurs when Anne tries on her first communion dress. She plays with a puppet, but when Grace returns, she sees an old woman (Renée Asherson) in the dress, speaking in Anne’s voice. Grace violently attacks her, whereupon the old woman turns back into Anne. Grace is shocked, but Anne is distraught: ‘She wants to kill me!’ Anne now tells her father about the day her mother ‘went mad’, but Charles’s attempts to talk to Grace about this fail. And so Charles leaves, telling Grace he just came to say goodbye to his family, and he’s returning to the front – despite her insistence that the war is over. It is never established how much he understands. The intruders now carry out their most aggressive disturbance: they remove all the curtains, causing Grace to rush around desperately trying to find somewhere to shelter the children. Some of the intruders’ disturbances are typical of ghosts, but others are not. The impulse of ghosts is to take the characters towards darkness, the underworld, water, the depths. But these manifestations – especially the last – suggest a movement towards the light. The reason is clear: these are not ghosts, but the living. But the significance of the reversal is equally important: Grace is also being driven towards a realisation of what she has done. At the same time, her likening the early intrusions to Nazis in the house is suggestive; this is the familiar sense of the ‘return of the repressed’ of the ghost movie. Insofar as the disturbances are ghost-like, it would seem Anne is the character who has summoned them up, and her mother is the one at whom they are directed. It’s as though they are designed to make her mother accept something she is denying. The moment when Grace attacks Anne is the culmination of this thread; clutching Mrs Mills, Anne shouts: ‘She won’t stop until she kills us!’ When the possession of Anne by the old woman is reinterpreted from within the world of the living – it was Anne as ghost

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who possessed the woman – we can see that this crossover between the two worlds in fact serves to confront Grace with her original crime: she didn’t stop until she killed them. The film provides several hints as to why Grace killed the children and then herself. After a row between Charles and herself about why he went to war, Grace delivers a monologue about how she felt, left on her own ‘in this darkness; in this prison’. The remark could refer to the island under German occupation, but it surely refers more immediately to the house. The children’s sensitivity to light means Grace has been forced to live in a perpetual twilight, and she tells Mrs Mills she finds this ‘unbearable’. Hence her need for servants – to share some of the burden. It is made clear on more than one occasion that the previous servants left and then Grace ‘went mad’. Implicitly, their departure triggered Grace’s violence, which can be seen as her despairing reaction to the realisation that she has been left alone in her ‘prison’. There is however another implication running through the film. In an interview in Shivers, Amenábar says, ‘the situation [on] the island during the war […] was a great metaphor for guilt’ (Mauceri 2001: 13). It is possible that Grace was a collaborator, and it was fear of retribution that prompted her murders and suicide. Although the German occupation of the Channel Islands was less repressive than elsewhere in Europe, there were collaborators, and they did fear reprisals (see Wood & Wood [1955] 1969: 299-303). There are a number of details which support such a reading. First, Grace’s hysterical outburst about someone ‘opening and closing the doors’ refers to her regime of always locking doors behind her – allegedly to protect the children. But the practice is irrational: the children know they must avoid daylight, and they behave perfectly sensibly about the matter. If Grace were a collaborator, locking the doors would make sense: she was frequently doing something she wished to hide from the servants and children. But equally the act can be seen to imply her unconscious feelings about the children: she wants to keep them ‘imprisoned’. Second, the film draws a parallel between two evacuations from Jersey. It was because the servants were not evacuated in 1891 that they succumbed to tuberculosis. Since Grace declined to be evacuated before the German invasion in 1940, perhaps she also succumbed to a disease (of collaboration). Those of her family who were evacuated have ceased to communicate with her, but Grace comments, ‘I don’t blame them’, indicating that they have good reason for this. The children’s allergy could be seen in another light – as though Grace’s ‘disease’ has been displaced onto them and takes the form of a need to hide from the outside world.

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Third, a story the children read about Roman children who refused to deny Christ (read, refused to collaborate) and so were killed could be understood as a (negative) reference to Grace under the occupation. Discussing the story, Anne says she would have kept her Christianity a secret from the Romans. Grace agrees this would have saved her life, but insists it would also have condemned her to Hell. If we see the Germans as the equivalent of the Romans, this hints that Grace did not show the integrity of the Roman children. Fourth, that the figure from the real world who initially disturbs Grace is called Victor is also suggestive. ‘V for Victory’ was one of the more potent Allied symbols of World War II, and in 1941, a campaign on Jersey in which islanders surreptitiously chalked ‘V’ signs on buildings enraged the occupying Germans (Wood & Wood: 141-145). Here it is Grace who is enraged by the elusive Victor – linking her with the Germans. Fifth, Grace says to Nicholas: ‘Daddy went [to war] because he’s very brave and he wasn’t prepared to have the Germans telling him what he had to do’. The phrasing suggests that perhaps Grace did let the Germans tell her what to do. (We know this is true about one detail: the house has no radio, a banned item during the later years of the occupation: Wood & Wood: 169.) In the next shot Grace is sitting on the floor sobbing. Although she cries for Charles, this is the only time she reacts this way – she could equally be crying because she let Charles down. In addition, Grace tells Mrs Mills that Charles left only eighteen months ago, long after the start of the occupation. Ghosts can be unreliable about time, but if she is correct, Charles would have been missed by the German authorities, and reprisals against his family would have been very likely (Wood & Wood: 138). Collaborating would have protected the family. Sixth, there is one clear intimation that Grace either hid her fervent Christianity or did something she was ashamed of during the war: a life-size statue of Christ has been consigned to the junk room and covered in a dust sheet. When Grace searches the junk room, she backs into an outstretched hand from the statue, which thus seems to prod her. She whips off the dust sheet, and it’s as though she is being confronted with a silent accusatory figure. She removes other dust sheets, the final one from a mirror, and now her own reflection confronts her. This is the only time in the film Grace looks directly into a mirror, and again there is a sense that her reflection, looking back at her, is like an accusation. Behind her in the mirror, the door closes: this brief intimation that she was uncovering a hidden (repressed) world is again closed down. Finally, when Mrs Mills and Mr Tuttle discuss Charles’s return, the latter asks, ‘Do you think her husband suspects anything?’ The phrasing is

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ambiguous, and could well refer to something other than the material state of himself and his family. Individually, each of these details may seem slight; collectively, they add up. Overall, the disturbances occasioned by the intruders represent the threat of ‘the truth’ forcing its way into Grace’s world: that she and her children are now dead and she is responsible. But the film strongly suggests that behind this there is another, more buried, truth. It is implied from the beginning that the role of the servants is to ease Grace and the children into accepting that they are dead – hence Mrs Mills’s comment: ‘The children will be easier to convince’. This suggests an extended session of therapy, in which the patient, Grace, has to accept that she is experiencing something her religion refutes: in Mrs Mills’s words, ‘the world of the dead… mixed up with the world of the living’. Charles’s return reverses Grace’s progress: she now denies there are any intruders. But when she blames the servants for removing the curtains and drives them out of the house, Mrs Mills decides to take more drastic action. The servants uncover their hitherto hidden gravestones. As the children, to their horror, discover these, Grace, to her horror, finds a photograph of the three servants, all dead, dated 1891. But this is only the first revelation concerning the dead. Grace and the children still have to realise that they, too, are dead. This occurs when they witness a séance carried out by the old lady, who is a blind medium. Grace walks in on this scene – the children are already there – and the shock effect is of her entering another world. Five people, including Mr and Mrs Marlish (Keith Allen and Michelle Fairley), are sitting round a table, and the medium is producing ‘automatic writing’: scribbles interspersed with the children’s answers to her spoken questions. She is in a trance, and the answers are read out by her assistant. It’s a brilliant scene, switching between the perceptions of Grace and the children – who can see the séance enacted in its entirety – and those of the living, who cannot see the family, only the disturbances created by Grace in her frenzy of denial at the revelations (see Fig. 24). But, in the aftermath of the séance, when the Marlishes discuss the events from their point of view, Grace is forced to accept what she did, and hence the ghost status of herself and the children. Mrs Mills arrives to reassure her, implying she will remain with them in the house. The séance is explicitly based on the one in The Changeling: it follows an identical pattern, with the same number of people round the table and similar questions being asked. Indeed, Amenábar reveals he is paying tribute to the earlier movie by naming Mr Tuttle after an equivalent character

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in The Changeling. The homage also has thematic relevance: the primary traumatic event in The Changeling concerns ruthless filicide. I refer to those who cause the disturbances as ‘the intruders’ because that is what the characters in the film call them. ‘The others’ is used more loosely: by the children to refer to the previous servants; by Grace and Charles to refer to the other islanders. The title of the film thus has several possible meanings. It could refer to the intruders, but it could equally refer to the ghost characters themselves, characters who are now all mysteriously ‘other’. And it also alludes to the people who existed in the world of the film before the primary traumatic event, people who have vanished, banished by Grace’s crime. Although the war has now ended, metaphorically it’s as though it continues to cast a pall over the world of the film. The sense of gloom and darkness, of enveloping fog, is all-embracing, suggesting that – likewise thanks to Grace’s crime – this corner of the Channel Islands has been unable to experience the release of liberation. Only at the very end, when we leave the ghost world of the dead, does ordinary life return – and the sun shine. And, as the family members now become ghosts in the traditional sense, they come out with typical ghost demands. They assert proprietorship over the house: Grace leads her children in a chorus of, ‘this house is ours’, and she herself adds, ‘No-one can make us leave this house’. They have succeeded in driving ‘the intruders’ from the house, which they will now occupy – presumably for all eternity. Our final sight of them is at the window of the house as the Marlish family leave. Victor is looking up at them, but they vanish. The Others clearly owes much to The Sixth Sense, but its unusual setting, and the fact that the protagonist herself was responsible for the primary traumatic event, means it mobilises a rather different set of concerns. In its dominant discourse, the film has the structure of a family melodrama, in which a wife and mother tries to cope with mysterious threats to her family. But when we learn that the threats derive – albeit obliquely – from her own past actions, Grace can perhaps be seen to suggest the guilt of those in the Channel Islands who actively cooperated with the German occupation. At the end, the traces of this betrayal are consigned to the ghost world. But they do not exactly go away, they disappear into the shadows, unseen but ever-present, and liable to return if disturbed. Although, to the best of my knowledge, The Devil’s Backbone and The Others were made independently of one another, they may be linked in a number of ways. Both are set almost exclusively in a haunted building and follow a typical ghost melodrama trajectory, with children as the victims of adult repression and the ghostly phenomena as ‘the return

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of the repressed’. Both end with the haunted building abandoned to the ghosts. But, more unusually, both use a limited number of characters to echo and refer to a conflict in the world outside. It is this last which, among the ghost melodramas of the 2000s, makes them so distinctive.

10. Hollywood Reinflections The Ring (Gore Verbinski 2002) and The Ring Two (Hideo Nakata 2005) When Hollywood decides to remake a foreign film, inevitably it reinflects story and material to suit the domestic market. Plots tend to be streamlined, ambiguities minimised, characters made less enigmatic, climactic moments heightened, downbeat resolutions softened. In particular, the film will, if possible, be tailored to fit existing generic norms. In this respect, The Ring is only partly typical: although it does perhaps lessen the ambience and tension of the original, scripted by Ehren Kruger it is in many respects a close, effective remake. The 115-minute film may be divided into four acts of roughly equal length, and the first and much of the last act substantially follow the original. It is only in the middle two acts that The Ring significantly departs from the basic narrative trajectory of Ringu. The opening scenes are particularly close to the original. Here, too, one teenager, Becca (Rachael Bella), tells another, Katie (Amber Tamblyn), the story of a cursed videotape, whereupon Katie is supernaturally killed. The heroine Rachel (Naomi Watts), a journalist for a Seattle magazine, is again the aunt of the dead girl and learns at her funeral about the video. She begins to investigate. Like Reiko, she is led to the resort (Shelter Mountain Inn) where the teenagers watched the tape, views it herself and receives a sinister phone call (a woman’s voice says, ‘Seven days’). Her face, too, is now distorted in photographs. In addition, Rachel, too, has a young son, Aidan (David Dorfman), who is psychic, and she likewise enlists the aid of the boy’s father, Noah (Martin Henderson), her ex-boyfriend and a video expert. Only when Rachel starts to track down the backstory does The Ring vary the basic Ringu template. Accordingly, I will concentrate on the differences between the two movies. After the opening scene, neither the urban legend idea nor the focus on teenage girls is really pursued. The four teenagers recorded the tape whilst at the cabin, so they were probably the first to watch it. There is no sense here of a circulating urban legend that simultaneously excites and terrifies the young people. The Ring does however introduce a new element in the early scenes. Rachel enters the film conducting an extremely aggressive phone call with her editor, and in the ensuing scene with Aidan’s teacher (Sandra Thigpen), she perches on a desk, looking down on the teacher, barely listening to the latter’s concerns about Aidan. Rachel, in short, is hostile and dismissive.

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Then, when she dresses for Katie’s funeral, Rachel puts on an undershirt which, unusually, has a design on its front: a silhouetted ballerina inside a ring. Given the prominence The Ring gives to the ring shape itself, this suggests Rachel is in some sense already associated with ‘the ring’ and, as the source of the curse is unravelled, this association would seem to focus on her aggression. It’s as though Rachel’s anger, projected out at the world, returns in the unremitting hostility of the ‘ghost girl’, here called Samara (Daveigh Chase). A major difference between the films is the curse video imagery. In The Ring it is much more detailed, lacking its predecessor’s eerie suggestiveness. Noah comments that it’s ‘very student film’, and I would only wish to add ‘à la David Lynch’. It includes just two elements from the original: the mother and daughter mirror scene and the final image of a well. Otherwise, with such details as an intestine being pulled out of a mouth, seething maggots and amputated fingers twitching in a box, the video overloads us with imagery, some of it self-consciously surrealist. In place of the seven elements in Ringu, here there are over thirty, and some are repeated. I shall only mention the few which have significance for material elsewhere in the film. Here the video has what is in effect a logo: an introductory image that then echoes through the film in a variety of ways. It shows a circle of light around a black shape, and although the film suggests this was Samara’s view from the bottom of the well as the stone closed above her, this is clearly impossible. When the stone was in place, no light would be visible. We can perhaps take the image as a poetic stand-in for Samara’s sense of being trapped but, adopted as the film’s logo, the image also has other meanings. One has been noted by the film’s producer, Walter Parkes, who suggests the film’s title could refer to, ‘the ominous image of an eclipse-like ring of light’ (Meikle 2005: 173). This is in fact what the ring of light actually looks like: a solar eclipse. Moreover, this is a good metaphor for the film: the moon obliterates the sun, and thereby brings darkness to the day. About halfway through the film, Rachel says to Noah, ‘I think before you die, you see the ring’. She means the ring of light, and she is right. When both Katie and then Noah are frightened to death, a montage of subliminal images from the curse video flashes on-screen; in Katie’s case, beginning with the ring of light; in Noah’s, ending with it. Both ‘see the ring’ before they die. This suggests another meaning. In Hollywood films especially, the subjective experience of death is frequently visualised as heading towards a bright light. Here, pointedly, the light is obscured. These deaths are not transcendental.

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During Act Two, Rachel investigates on her own. She identifies a lighthouse on the video as on Moesko Island, and the woman as Anna Morgan (Shannon Cochran), who lived on the island. Another image on the tape refers to an incident in 1978, when horses from the Morgan ranch inexplicably drowned themselves in the sea. Anna is the equivalent of Shizuko, her daughter Samara of Sadako, and the horse ranch the equivalent of the Yamamura Inn. Although the consequence of a supernatural attack by Samara directed against her parents, the horses incident traumatised Anna in much the same way that Shizuko was traumatised at her demonstration. Anna, too, subsequently committed suicide. We first encounter Samara in a dream sequence. After almost choking on a long thread of woven black hair with an electrode on the end, Rachel goes into Aidan’s room. A girl with long black hair over her face sits on a wooden chair in a pool of water. With a decomposing arm, the girl (Samara) grabs Rachel – light floods the room, Rachel is whirled round, and the background changes to a bare cell which is also a laboratory. A female figure is sitting on a chair; electrodes and wires are lying on a table; a camera is set up to film her. Zoom in on the figure: it’s Rachel herself. She wakes up. The dream is the equivalent of the psychic vision of Shizuko’s demonstration, and Rachel, like Reiko, finds that her arm is now marked by the supernatural encounter. But the import here is quite different. Referring to something elucidated later – Samara was committed to a psychiatric hospital, and subjected to tests – it stresses Samara’s demonic power. She seizes Rachel not as a plea for help but in an aggressive statement of intent: she wishes Rachel to suffer as she did. Moreover, Rachel has the dream at the same time as Aidan watches the curse video. It’s as if Samara is enjoying her power: as she infects Rachel’s son with the curse, so she subjects Rachel herself to a disturbing nightmare. The dream also fits in with the sense that, in The Ring, the curse video has a more lasting psychic effect on those who watch it. The victims become haunted, not just by images from the video, but also by incidents from Samara’s life. In Katie’s scrapbook, Rachel discovers the faces of the models Katie had pasted in have been scribbled over, so they seem to be covered in black hair, which both renders them Samara-like and fits in with Samara’s ‘repression’ of faces – another motif from Ringu. But also in the scrapbook are sketches both from the video (e.g. a ladder) and from events in Samara’s life (e.g. a camera pointing at an empty chair). Over a sketch of a jumping horse, Katie had appended the comment: ‘Why is this in my head?’ A scrapbook is a neat way of suggesting a teenager’s thoughts. More freeflowing than a diary, it includes doodles, sketches, pasted-in photographs

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etc. Its fragmented, idiosyncratic structure and inclusion of visual imagery suggests in part material which has emerged from the unconscious. This is one of The Ring’s more successful additions to the Ringu template. After Aidan has watched the video, the phone rings and, assuming this is Samara’s call, Rachel cuts it off. The phone rings again; Rachel shouts into it, ‘Leave him alone!’ But the caller is Noah, who has belatedly discovered that his face, too, is distorted in photographs and who now wants to help Rachel. This is another example of Rachel’s anger being hurled at someone else, and that the recipient is Noah – and the subject Aidan – hints at the nature of their past relationship. Moreover, only now do we learn that Noah is indeed Aidan’s father. Revealing this through Rachel’s rage highlights the film’s use of the melodramatic mode. On the ferry to Moesko Island, we see a further example of Samara’s malevolent power. Rachel approaches a horse in its box, and it panics when she strokes it. The horse breaks out, charges wildly round the ferry and jumps into the sea, to be mangled by the ferry. In this short sequence, there are two shots from the curse video: a BCU of the horse’s terrified eye, and the sea made bloody from its mangled body. Rachel’s failure to realise the horse is reacting to the presence of Samara inside her is symptomatic. It’s as though, in contrast to Katie, Samara can ‘infect’ Rachel without the latter being fully aware of this. Whereas the scribbled-over faces in Katie’s scrapbook suggest a conscious, albeit obsessive, activity, during her research, Rachel discovers she has unconsciously scribbled over Anna’s face in a similar manner. It is only later, to Dr Grasnik (Jane Alexander) that Rachel says she is ‘seeing things’ in her head, things she attributes to Samara. The implication, at least at first, is that Samara fits a little too comfortably into Rachel’s inner world. In The Ring, the ghost story elements are played down in favour of the notion of Samara as a supernatural monster. The presence and nature of those images on the curse video that anticipate Rachel’s quest stress Samara’s omniscient and sadistic power. In the Ringu video, the eye in BCU belongs to Sadako, the maker of the video. Here it belongs to the terrified horse, Samara’s victim, whose bloody death is also cited in the video. As the ferry sails on towards the island, there is a flash frame of the ring of light. It’s as though Samara is celebrating yet another victim. When Rachel arrives at the Morgan ranch, the presence of the oval mirror from the video shows she is in the right place. However, Richard Morgan (Brian Cox) denies he has a daughter. He also makes a speech which, although possibly unfair to Rachel, indicts the popular press: ‘What is it with reporters? You take one person’s tragedy and force the world to

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experience it. You spread it like sickness’. This continues the vilification of the media that began in the novel. From Dr Grasnik, Rachel learns that Samara, who was adopted, could transmit malevolent thoughts into other people, and because this was driving Anna crazy, Dr Grasnik referred mother and daughter to the Eola Psychiatric Hospital. Here The Ring refers to generic tradition: Samara was like Damien in The Omen, an adopted child who revealed demonic powers. But the use of institutionalisation to deal with a troublesome young person, as in In Dreams, also serves to comment on the medical practices of the time. Back at Morgan’s ranch, Rachel finds a videotape that records these practices. Filmed in her cell, Samara is already like a ghost: she is dressed in white; she doesn’t sleep. We then see her on the chair in the laboratory from Rachel’s nightmare; the electrodes are being attached to her. A doctor questions her; in reply to his statement ‘You don’t want to hurt anyone’, she replies, ‘But I do, and I’m sorry. It won’t stop’. She intimates it is her father’s fault she is in hospital. At this point, Morgan appears in the room behind Rachel. Intermittently lit by the sweeping lighthouse beam, he, too, seems rather like a ghost. Still talking about her father, Samara says: ‘But he doesn’t know’. The doctor asks her what she means, but the tape finishes. On the one hand, the tape re-emphasises Samara’s inherent malevolence: she admits she wants to do harm. In The Ring Two, it is implied she was evil from birth. This simplifies the film’s dynamic. Whereas, in Ringu, a number of factors contributed to Sadako’s vengeful fury, here the film presents us with another manifestation of the ‘devil child’ familiar from 1970s’ Hollywood horror movies, and reinforces the link by setting these past events in the 1970s. Nevertheless, as the product of a dysfunctional American family, the 1970s’ devil child carried its own set of cultural resonances, an argument pursued by Linnie Blake in The Wounds of Nations (2008). Blake relates Samara both to bellicose US foreign policy and to the ‘horrors’ of the American family (2008: 56-64). Nevertheless, the treatment of Samara is also a little disturbing. She is seated some way from the doctor, as if she were infectious, and wires from the electrodes go to a junction box on the wall, as though directly into the electricity mains. Together with aspects of Rachel’s dream – almost choking on an electrode; being projected into the laboratory chair – such details intimate that Samara’s experiences in hospital were distressing. The scene lacks the violence suffered by the young Vivian in the equivalent hospital scenes in In Dreams, but it still seems rather sinister. In the ranch, it is Morgan who turns violent. Knocking Rachel to the floor, declaring ‘She’s never gonna whisper in my fucking ear again’, he

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takes the TV upstairs and connects it to an elaborate array of electrical equipment already set up in the bathroom. Tormented by the idea that Samara is once again hurting people, he steps into the overflowing bath and electrocutes himself. With its explosion of Hollywood pyrotechnics, this scene is a rather overwrought example of the bath scenes that haunt these movies. At the same time, the scene may also be seen as a culmination of the associations between Samara and water. In the opening sequence, water seeps from under Katie’s bedroom door, heralding Samara’s imminent, deadly appearance. In Rachel’s dream, Samara appears in a pool of water. The horse, like its predecessors in 1978, is killed in water, and we assume Morgan’s histrionic suicide is also orchestrated by Samara. Indeed, one detail powerfully suggests this: before electrocuting himself, he puts on a horse bridle. In the hospital video, Samara implies that he prefers horses to her, and now, as he lies dead in the bath, she mockingly turns him into another dead horse. Rachel has learnt from Aidan that Samara had been imprisoned in the barn. With only one day to go before Rachel’s seven days elapse, Noah has now rejoined her, and the two find the attic in the barn where Morgan had in effect kept Samara prisoner. With just a bed, a TV, a wooden chair and a minimum of toys, this is a miserable little room. Lacking a fourth wall, it is completely without privacy. The attic in The Changeling is perhaps also evoked; here, too, the room contains a ‘music box’: a small musical roundabout of horses, which eerily plays. Hidden behind the wallpaper is an etching of a tree. Both recognise the tree (a Japanese maple): Noah from the video; Rachel from Shelter Mountain Inn, where it stands close to the cabin. They realise the cabin is where they need to look for Samara’s body (see Fig. 25). The credits to El orfanato are revealed by children’s hands tearing aside wallpaper. In both In Dreams and The Woman in Black (2011), messages from the past are hidden behind wallpaper. This is one of the more curious motifs in these movies. It may be traced back to The Haunting (1963), where Eleanor hears male murmuring and eerie female laughter coming from behind the embossed wallpaper in her bedroom in the haunted house. There is a famous short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper (1890), in which a woman is driven crazy by her sense that a woman is creeping behind the peeling wallpaper in her room at night (Gilman 1998). But I suspect that a stronger candidate for the source of the wallpaper references in ghost melodramas is Såsom i en spegel/ Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1961). During one of her schizophrenic attacks, Karin (Harriet Andersson) hears voices from

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behind the wallpaper in an empty room. The scene is distinctly eerie: as Karin listens against the wall, mysterious lights play over the leafy curlicues on the wallpaper and we hear whispered voices. (The film’s working title was The Wallpaper: see Bergman 1994: 249.) Moreover, early in the film Karin plays a ghost in a short family play, at the end of which she disappears back in the ghost world. This hints at a link between the ghost world and the enticing fantasy world behind the wallpaper. The Haunting strongly evokes this scene: the wallpaper even has a very similar design. It’s as though, mediated by The Haunting, Bergman’s intense little scene has passed into the ghost movie. What lies behind the wallpaper in these films is a revelation of the inner world of a troubled character. Here the tree is Samara’s message: this is where I am. Back at the cabin, Rachel and Noah discover the well under the floorboards. Unfortunately, at this point The Ring once again resorts to cliché and overwrought imagery. As they ponder what to do, there is an eruption of CGI effects: a swarm of flies bursts out of the well; the cabin’s television slides down onto Rachel and she is catapulted into the depths. In Ringu, the emphasis in this scene was on back-breaking work; here the couple are saved such work by (Hollywood) magic. Nevertheless, an effect of this variation is that Rachel is completely immersed in the water of the well – which does not happen to Reiko. And, after Rachel has surfaced, Samara’s hand emerges and grabs her. This triggers a ‘psychic vision’ of Samara’s murder, which reveals it was Anna who killed her: she wrapped a plastic bag round Samara’s head and pushed her into the well. The motif of the immersion in water thus leads once again to the heroine receiving a glimpse of the ghost world. The sense of being enveloped in black plastic accounts for one image on the curse video that occurs twice, first linked to a shot from below of the well top being closed, then to a shot of Anna turning to look guiltily at the camera. These juxtapositions now make sense. Samara herself now emerges out of the water, her body at first perfectly preserved. But as Rachel embraces the body, it disintegrates into a decomposed skeleton. The rest of The Ring narrates the events a little differently from the final scenes of Ringu. First, Aidan is horrified when he hears Rachel has released Samara: ‘You weren’t supposed to help her. Don’t you understand, Rachel? She never sleeps’. Yet his silence in not telling his mother what he knows about Samara almost makes him her accomplice. Noticing that, unlike her own, the mark on Aidan’s arm has not disappeared, Rachel phones Noah. But she is too late: Noah’s television has already switched on, displaying the image of the well. As Noah watches, mesmerised, The Ring repeats the

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electrifying trope from Ringu: Samara crawls out of the TV screen and into the room. Like Ryuji before him, Noah is terrified to death. Second, it is Rachel who discovers Noah’s body. When she arrives at his studio, Noah is seated on an office chair, in a pool of water, his back to her. Since we saw Noah die on the floor, this repositioning of his body so that it echoes Rachel’s first (oneiric) encounter with Samara is suggestive. Samara is presenting Rachel with a tableau of death that can be traced, by association, back to her experiences in the hospital. Again this suggests how traumatic the hospital must have been for her. Moreover, it seems relevant that an iconic image of a torture scene is someone seated on a (wooden) chair in the middle of a room. The water under the chair is a further feature: in a torture scene, it is the water that has been thrown over the victim to return him or her to consciousness. The image may be seen, for example, during the torture of Barnes (George Clooney) in Syriana (Stephen Gaghan 2005). Barnes also has his fingernails pulled out. It’s as though The Ring is aware of the significance of the image and is implicitly playing on its associations. Third, when Rachel returns home, she is seething with rage and frustration. She shouts at Aidan, and mangles the videotape, uttering the cry of anguish that echoes through the modern ghost melodrama: ‘What do you want from me?’ As she puzzles over what she did to break the curse, the camera moves to show the copy she made. She picks it up, whereupon a rapid montage of elements from the film suggest her thoughts – which provide the answer to her anguished question. Like its equivalent at the end of The Sixth Sense, this is a revelatory montage. Juxtaposing moments and comments in a striking manner, it is initiated by Rachel recalling her observation to Noah when they found Samara’s body: ‘She just wanted to be heard’. The montage now drives home the terrible implications of that thought. In the montage, Samara saying, ‘But he doesn’t know’, is followed by Aidan’s warning, ‘She never sleeps’. Here Rachel grasps Samara’s calculating ruthlessness. Morgan’s attack on the press is linked to a shot showing a reflection of Rachel on a TV screen, her face positioned within the ring of light. (We saw this shot when Rachel copied the tape for Noah.) This is a particularly suggestive juxtaposition: with reference to Morgan’s words, it implies that Rachel will indeed spread Samara’s curse ‘like sickness’. The montage climaxes with Samara’s response to the doctor, ‘But I do’ – shots of the death mask screams of Katie and Noah – ‘And I’m sorry. It won’t stop’. Rachel now realises: ‘I made a copy’. This emphasises that Samara has a project and she is utterly relentless. Rachel realises not just that making a copy saved her, but also the

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implications. The epilogue makes these clear. As she gets Aidan to copy the tape, Rachel cannot answer his question about what will happen to the person who watches it. Moreover, we do not know who this will be. In the less socially cohesive world of the US, there is no benevolent grandfather who can be called upon to sacrifice himself for his grandson. Rachel will have to unleash the curse on the world. The sinister feel to this epilogue is compounded by another factor. Quite unlike the warm and easy-going Yoichi in Ringu, Aidan from his first appearance seems cold and detached, as if there’s something emotionally lacking in him – as if he, too, were an embryonic devil child. We could perhaps rationalise this as a defence against Rachel’s aggression. In a rather contentious article on Ringu, Ruth Goldberg argues that Reiko is an ineffectual mother and this makes her ‘monstrous’ (2004: 376). More specifically: ‘The family is already cursed with the burden of secrets and lies, repression, and avoidance before the narrative begins’ (379), and it is this that gives rise to, ‘a demon-daughter who embodies the family’s collective rage’ (381). As an analysis of Ringu, this seems to me quite alarmingly wide of the mark, but shifted to The Ring, the argument has purchase. In particular, the relationship between Rachel and Aidan is charged with a pervasive unease. But the problems with Aidan also go deeper. Although there are photographs of him smiling with Katie, during the film itself, Aidan is never actually friendly to anyone. There is a telling moment after Samara’s corpse has been brought up from the well. Travelling home in the car, Aidan notices a tentative gesture – Rachel reaches to touch Noah’s hand – which hints they could get back together. And so, when Samara murders Noah the next day, it’s as though she is also enacting Aidan’s secret wish to get rid of his father. Strengthening this Oedipal reading, we should also note Aidan woke that morning to find Rachel in his bed. Although The Ring is less of a ghost story than Ringu, it has its own resonances. Rachel and Aidan both seem much more complicit than Reiko and Yoichi in the manifestations of the curse video, as if Samara has been conjured up by their unconscious desires. The final scene thus also seems like a disavowal: this horror has surfaced, but it has nothing to do with us – it will be sent elsewhere. There is, perhaps, another Japanese horror film that is alluded to in The Ring, one which adds to the Hollywood film’s disturbing undercurrents. During the film, there would seem to be no less than three references to the notorious torture film Audition (Takashi Miike 1999). The most striking is the twitching fingers in the curse video. In Audition, the sadistic heroine Asami (Eihi Shiina) has amputated three fingers from her captive victim,

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and in one scene the hero Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) actually fantasises that he can see these fingers on the floor. In addition, both Noah and Aoyama leave the mark of a coffee-mug ring on a sheet of paper at a crucial point. It’s the link between the timing of these moments that is so suggestive: in The Ring, the mark heralds the appearance of Samara as monster, and hence Noah’s own death; in Audition, the mark, left on Asami’s audition application form, is the ‘accident’ that first leads Aoyama to her – and thus to his future as her torture victim. Finally, the ballerina in the ring design on Rachel’s undershirt also recalls Audition: Asami trained as a ballet dancer, and we see scenes of her dancing as a girl. If The Ring is referencing Audition, then this is also highly suggestive, since it would imply that something of Asami’s personality is being subtly imputed to Rachel. Collectively, these references supplement the other intimations of torture in The Ring, and help create a rather troubling aura around the film, as if there is something deadly linking Rachel to both Samara and Asami. I suggested that, in the subtext to Ringu, there are allusions to the death of Princess Diana. In the subtext to The Ring, there are, I believe, allusions to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Filming on The Ring began on 2 December 2001, less than three months after 11 September (Meikle 2005: 193), and so it is not surprising that there are echoes of the attacks. After all, 9/11 was probably the greatest trauma for the US since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Echoes of the trauma are registered above all in Aidan’s drawings. We see a lot of them during the film, but the first significant examples depict Katie’s burial. That he drew them before Katie died is perhaps not too significant: Katie had told him she was going to die; he believed her. In these drawings, there is only one with a plane flying overhead, but after Aidan has seen the curse video, the drawings become markedly more suggestive. At one point, the camera pans over a set of them; almost all have a plane or planes in the sky (see Fig. 26). And now there are other 9/11 motifs: a skyscraper; a fire truck. The pan also reveals that the drawings evolve, suggesting a narrative. The fire truck reaches the skyscraper. Then its ladder stretches up to the sun, but the sun is already flawed, with a black dot at its centre. In one drawing a plane is knocking the skyscraper over; in others the building seems to be on fire. But throughout the drawings the black spot in the sun is getting larger, and we realise the sun is becoming the well. In the later drawings, the ladder still connects the sun/well to the ground, but the focus is mainly on the sun’s metamorphosis. In the final drawing, the image is unmistakeably the well: a solid black circle surrounded by the lighter shape of the well’s walls. The metaphor of the solar eclipse is once more suggested.

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Just as Katie’s scrapbook suggests, in part, material from her unconscious, so Aidan’s drawings suggest material from his unconscious. But this material, albeit influenced by Samara, incorporates the iconography of 9/11 in a suggestive way. It’s as though the national trauma resonates with Samara’s own trauma. The ladder is like an umbilical cord connecting Ground Zero to the sun, which becomes the well. Read one way, the ladder is the conduit whereby darkness is sucked from Ground Zero to transform the sun; read another, the ladder is Samara’s escape route from the well: a dark inversion of Jacob’s ladder in the Bible. Although one would not wish to make too much of these details, they do suggest other undercurrents to the film. Kevin J. Wetmore has shown how the contours of the US horror genre were transformed by the events of 9/11, with many films, in their imagery, registering the impact of the attacks (see Wetmore: 2012). In The Ring, the well symbolises the unconscious, and although Samara may not look like a terrorist, she does emerge to dispense an arbitrary, unstoppable, completely deadly attack. The emphasis, in Katie’s and Noah’s murders, is of the impact of the moment of death: the camera zooms in on their terrified, screaming faces. Moreover, the figure who delivers these death attacks does not have the face of a girl. She is an ageing, malevolent woman. The Ring Two The Ring Two takes a completely different narrative path from Ringu 2. Although Nakata was the director, he was only offered the project when scripting was completed (Meikle 2005: 238). Regrettably, however, the script, again by Ehren Kruger, is a much more conventional effort. After a promising beginning, the idea of a spreading curse is abandoned, and the conflict becomes entirely personal, as Samara focuses all her attentions on Rachel and Aidan. Nevertheless, as Rachel investigates Samara’s past, hints of a more subversive thread emerge. The film starts dramatically. A nasty teenage boy, Jake (Ryan Merriman), tries to get an innocent teenage girl, Emily (Emily Vancamp), to watch the curse video before his seven days elapse. Fortunately for her, but unfortunately for him, she closes her eyes whilst it is on. In a heightening of the visual impact of Samara coming to get him, Jake finds himself plunged into the video itself: he is next to the well as she clambers out of it (see Fig. 27). Emily is a terrified witness. This occurs in Astoria, Oregon, where Rachel and Aidan are now living. Hearing a police report of Jake’s death, Rachel, now working for The Daily Astorian, goes to investigate. As she sneaks into

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the ambulance to look at Jake’s face, Samara erupts out of the body bag and grabs her: ‘I’ve found you’. Although Rachel retrieves and destroys Jake’s copy of the tape, Samara’s reappearance in pursuit of her sets the agenda for the rest of the film. This charts Samara’s possession of Aidan, and Rachel’s long battle to free him from her. Nevertheless, although the film is primarily about possession, it also includes touches which keep the ghost melodrama elements in play. Early in The Ring Two, Aidan has a dream which is the equivalent of Rachel’s dream in The Ring. The television switches on, the image of the well comes up, and water begins to spread across the living-room floor – the sign that Samara is coming. As Samara within the television moves forward from the well, Aidan backs away from the water towards the television. Samara reaches through the screen to seize him from behind, pulling him partly into the television itself before he wakes up. This, we realise, is stage one of Aidan’s possession. As in The Ring, Samara’s influence extends to dreams, and Aidan is now partly in her power. Samara completes her possession in a public washroom. In a mirror, Aidan sees her behind him, but – the trope is standard – she is not visible when he turns. He takes photographs through the mirror of her movement towards him; it is these which later alert Rachel to his possession. Here uncanniness resides in an almost subliminal effect: in the still photographs of Aidan in the mirror, Samara behind him can be seen to flicker with movement. It is at this point that the film begins its critique of the heroine. Aidan becomes hypothermic, but even after Samara has driven them from their home, Rachel declines to take him to hospital. Instead, they go to the house of her colleague Max (Simon Baker). Seeking to raise Aidan’s temperature, they run a bath. Rachel now witnesses Samara’s power: first, she expels the bath water into the air; then her arms are visible around Aidan (see Fig. 28). Finally, after the water has cascaded back into the bath, Aidan becomes Samara. Without thinking, Rachel pushes her back under the water. Max enters the bathroom to see Rachel apparently trying to drown Aidan, who now re-emerges in place of Samara – a repetition of a trope from The Others. This troubling detail feeds into the next sequence. At Max’s insistence, Aidan is taken to hospital. Because Aidan is not only hypothermic but also has bruises from Samara’s grasp, Dr Temple (Elizabeth Perkins) suspects he is a victim of child abuse, and she bans Rachel from being alone with him. In The Sixth Sense, a doctor hints that child abuse could be a source of Cole’s cuts and bruises, but this is not followed through. However, in that film there is no subtextual intimation that the mother might have

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(unconsciously) wished to harm her son, but here there is. It is Rachel who is responsible for Samara’s persistent attentions, and so Aidan’s possession, and the marks on his body, are a signifier of her guilt. But there is also another reason for her to be guilty: she must have fled from Seattle without alerting anyone to the existence of the curse video. Reiko behaves far more responsibly: she seeks to keep the dangers within the family; she leaves behind footage from her uncompleted documentary. Rachel by contrast is terrified of going to the authorities because of what they may find out. Banned from the hospital, Rachel investigates Samara’s past. The project here is to exonerate her: to show that, although she behaved recklessly, she can redeem the situation. Nevertheless, there are details along the way which make matters more problematic. Rachel is eventually led to Evelyn (Sissy Spacek), Samara’s birth mother, who is institutionalised. Whilst Samara was still a baby, Evelyn had tried to drown her – Rachel asks her why. Evelyn says her baby told her to, and Rachel’s child will likewise tell her to kill him: this is the only way ‘to send it back’. She believes Samara as a baby was possessed by an evil force from the world of the dead. Confirming Rachel’s deeper fears, she tells her it is her own fault her child is possessed: ‘You let the dead get in’. However, although Evelyn’s forecast to Rachel proves correct, she shows every sign of being schizophrenic. In the Morgan’s basement, Rachel found a scrapbook Evelyn composed ‘for Samara’, and its ramblings about death suggest she was deranged. Advising Rachel what to do, Evelyn says, ‘Listen to the voices’ – hearing voices is a standard sign of schizophrenia. In addition, Samara as a baby could not possibly have told Evelyn anything. This tension between Evelyn as sage and Evelyn as crazy woman is not resolved by the film. Moreover, the tension is compounded. We learn Evelyn has become a sort of patron saint for mothers who are having difficulties with their babies. If her advice is typically to kill the child in order to save it, one would have thought the consequences would be a little drastic. The casting of Evelyn enhances this: it’s as if Sissy Spacek’s eponymous character in Carrie (1976) has survived and grown up to become a replica of her demented mother. In Evelyn’s account, Samara represents in an extreme form a mother’s fear that there is something mysteriously evil about her child. At the same time, her explanation mitigates the devil child intimations. As in The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973) – and here in contrast to The Omen – Samara was not inherently evil: she, too, was possessed. A nun describes Evelyn’s concept of the world of the dead as, ‘the waters of the world beyond this one’. Once again, the water motif is stressed. This

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also accounts for the nature of Aidan’s possession, which is very different from the histrionic, sexualised possession of Regan (Linda Blair) in The Exorcist. The opposite of fiery, it is cold and damp, and the deaths resulting from it are low-key. When Dr Temple refuses to let Aidan leave the hospital, Samara within him prompts Dr Temple to fatally inject herself. At Max’s house, Max is killed off-screen. In fact, Max’s death is primarily Rachel’s fault – another factor that indicts her. When Max has difficulty believing her story that Aidan is possessed, she suggests he try photographing Aidan: ‘The proof is what will happen’. What happens is Max is killed. Like the ghost girl Dark Water (both versions), Samara is seeking a mother. When Rachel returns to Max’s, she finds Aidan clinging and dependent, and obsessively watching television cartoons – a reminder of Samara’s only distraction in the barn attic. She also discovers Max’s body. But, reworking an idea from The Sixth Sense, Aidan talks to Rachel as she sleeps – here this is the only time Samara as ghost cannot hear them – and he confirms Evelyn’s advice: to get rid of Samara, she will have to drown him in the bath. Nevertheless, this whole sequence is very disturbing. Aidan talking to Rachel in her sleep is what Evelyn meant by ‘the voices’, and it is entirely possible this scene is taking place purely inside Rachel’s own head. When she starts to drown Aidan, perhaps she is confirming the fears of both Max and Dr Temple. Given the stress she is under, there could be a side to Rachel that does not care whether Aidan lives or dies: she just wants the persecuting attentions of Samara to cease. However, the film lets her off the hook. A digital Samara rises vertically out of the bath and disintegrates; Aidan is all right. In fact, Samara has been driven back into the well. The television switches on, and she re-emerges from the well. In place of Aidan, Rachel offers herself (‘Take me!’) and allows Samara to pull her through the television into the depths of the well. This explicitly refers to the moment in The Exorcist when Father Karras (Jason Miller) cries to the demon possessing Regan, ‘Take me!’, and is swept through the window to his death in the street below. Unlike Adelle in The Dark, Rachel, however, is given a second chance. As in Ringu 2, the well here represents the world of the dead. But the ensuing scene has nothing of the drama and resonances of the original. Rachel reasons that Samara can get out of the well because its top is open, and so, with Samara clambering after her, she climbs up and seals it – echoing what Anna did in the past. Then, finding herself in the silver birch wood in the video, she follows the sound of Aidan calling, and is led to the clifftop from which Anna committed suicide. Again following Anna, she casts herself off

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the cliffs. But, far from killing her, this returns her to Aidan. She wakes to find herself on Max’s living-room floor, with Aidan next to her. This is a very disappointing journey to the world of the dead – especially in comparison to The Dark, made the same year. However, narratively, it serves its function. A significant difference between The Ring and The Ring Two is the characterisation of Rachel. In the later film, she is no longer so angry and dismissive of others; it’s as though that side of her has been purged by the events in The Ring. Aidan, by contrast, seems just as emotionally detached – even before he becomes possessed. As a consequence, troubling undercurrents to the mother-son relationship persist. Rachel evidently has fears about Aidan, and his possession serves to make these fears more acute. That is why sealing the well is symbolically so important. Rachel survives by re-repressing her fears: by sealing Samara back in the well. Writing of the 1970s’ American horror film, Robin Wood argues that it is the family that gives birth to the monster (1979: 17-18). In the ways in which they have reinflected the material of the Japanese originals, The Ring films, despite the smokescreen of possession, offer support to this thesis. Melodramatically, the two films become increasingly focused on the mother-son relationship. After Samara’s body has been brought up from the well in The Ring, Aidan becomes the dominant focus of Rachel’s concern. But his strangeness problematises this: at the end of The Ring Two, there is no sense, as at the end of The Exorcist, of innocence regained. In addition, two developments that occur in the late stages of each film emphasise just how Oedipal the narratives are: (a) the father (The Ring) or potential father figure (The Ring Two) is killed and (b) the competing attentions of a dark female ghost entity are repulsed. Both films end with Rachel alone with Aidan, but both endings are bleak and empty.

Male Melodrama Below (David Twohy, 2002) Below is a one-off in the ghost melodrama cycle, and I am including it in this chapter purely because of its date. It was released in the US in the same month as The Ring, but was virtually ignored. Scripted by Lucas Sussman, Darren Aronofsky and Twohy, and set on a submarine, the USS Tiger Shark, during World War II, Below is a very different sort of melodrama. Early on, the submarine picks up three survivors, one a nurse, Claire (Olivia

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Williams), from the torpedoing of a British hospital ship, Fort James. Eerie and inexplicable happenings promptly begin to occur: breaking on-board silence, twice a Benny Goodman record switches itself on; a disembodied voice is heard by several different people; the lights keep going out; a ghostly figure is occasionally glimpsed. It is Claire who says what the men are terrified to admit: the submarine is haunted. And it is Claire who seeks to discover what happened to cause this, so that the only woman in the film becomes, in effect, the investigative figure. It emerges that the ghost is of the submarine’s Captain, Winters, knocked overboard by Lts Brice (Bruce Greenwood) and Loomis (Holt McCallany) as, together with Lt Coors (Scott Foley), they attempted to cover up a spectacular blunder: the vessel they had just torpedoed was not, as they thought, a German U-boat, but a British ship, the very hospital ship on which Claire had been travelling. This is a rare example of the introduction of a ghost into what is essentially an all-male community (Claire is of course an outsider, whose very presence as a woman is itself disturbing to the men). Moreover, the community is a group of men at war. The Howard Hawks reference in the submarine’s name is not misplaced: with one exception, the men really do seem to be a skilled professional unit, working as a team and with each man competent at his specific job. The exception is Brice, who has assumed command. He quickly realises the survivors are from the ship that he and Loomis thought was German, and he tries to control his anxiety with toughness. Learning that one survivor is a German POW in Claire’s care, he blames the man for turning on the Goodman record and shoots him. The dead German then becomes an early mouthpiece for Winters’ ghost, a voice from it addressing first Claire, then Stumbo (Jason Flemyng), a rating. When Brice tells Claire the first lying account of Winters’ death, the lights go out and the ghost makes a fleeting appearance – signalling its disapproval. In addition, the submarine now comes under attack from grappling hooks, whereupon Brice becomes indecisive, demonstrating his unfitness for command. The arrival of the survivors and the spooky incidents are like the return of the repressed, bringing the guilt Brice, Loomis and Coors tried to suppress back into the submarine. The Goodman record, for example, was Winters’. With a growing sense of desperation, the three guilty officers try to deny what is happening and deflect awkward questions. When Ensign Odell (Matt Davis) joins Claire in asking such questions, Loomis sends Coors with Odell, Stumbo and Wally (Zach Galifianakis), another rating, on a repair mission with what we realise are orders to kill Odell. The repairs are to the outside of the pressure hull, which requires the men to go out of the

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submarine into an area between the pressure hull and the sea hull, an area partly filled with sea water. It is here the ghost makes its most dramatic intervention, spooking and causing the death of Coors. This is shown in a brief but impressive example of a key montage. After Coors has told Odell the second lying account of Winters’ death, he is about to drop a mallet on Odell when – through a curtain of falling water – he sees the ghost. It rushes towards him, briefly appearing as Winters at the moment of his death. Startled, Coors loses his footing and drops the mallet, which misses Odell. Cut to Brice at the ship’s log, belatedly about to fill in yet another lying account of Winters’ death. His pen blots the paper. Cut to a rapid montage of reaction shots throughout the submarine as the crew and Claire hear a scream. Cut back to Brice. His ink blot grows and morphs into Winters’ head in the water – the very image which spooked Coors. Cut to a flurry of activity, both in the submarine and between the hulls, climaxing with the other three discovering Coors’ bloody body floating in the water. Then Odell, too, sees the ghost. The three flee back into the main body of the submarine. This is in fact a striking example of haunting montage. The dead Winters’ head emerging into the written lying account of his death visualises the return of the repressed – as though he bursts into the account to disrupt it. Immediately after the three have returned into the submarine, the crew pick out a message in Morse from thumps on the hull – it spells out ‘BACK’. From this point, the ghost demonstrates that it is in control: it takes charge of the rudder, steering the submarine back towards the sunken Fort James; it prompts a lethal hydrogen explosion that kills most of the crew. It then spooks Loomis, first by moving his reflection independently of himself – a striking anticipation of Into the Mirror – and then by appearing in the place of his reflection. Loomis is so terrified, he flees out of an escape hatch and frenziedly tries to swim to the surface. But the ghost will not let him escape: he is caught on the conning tower. Brice survives until the climax, when he tells Claire that the reason Winters has not killed him is because he knows it was unnecessary. In a final act of cowardice, Brice shoots himself, demonstrating that Winters was right. He then falls, as Winters did, off the deck of the submarine. Only four survive to be rescued: Claire, Odell, Stumbo and Wally. The last two are perhaps saved because they repaired the submarine, thus enabling Winters to satisfy his wish, but Wally is also a wise sailor who understands the ways of the supernatural and who tells Claire and Odell that what is troubling Winters is that he did not go down with his ship. After the rescue, the submarine sinks from its injuries. It descends into the depths, and lands next to the wreck of the Fort James – close, we assume, to Winters’ body.

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In terms of its ghost and setting, Below is the exception in this book: a male ghost haunting an (almost) all-male group. But the tropes, motifs and structures are still much the same. Again we have an enclosed environment, like the hotel in The Shining, the schools in the Yeogo goedam films, the orphanage in The Devil’s Backbone, and the hospitals and prison in films still to be discussed. Moreover, here there is virtually no possibility of escape from the setting – a submarine is an archetypal example of an isolated world. Again, as is usual in this type of ghost melodrama, the ghost is an insider – someone who once belonged to the enclosed community but who, in a past melodramatic eruption of violence, was killed. Like Santi in The Devil’s Backbone, Winters’ ghost returns to reveal what is wrong within the community: in The Devil’s Backbone, fascism; in Below, the corruption of an attempted wartime cover-up. Also like Santi’s, Winters’ haunting is aided by the arrival of a sympathetic outsider. The ghost does not start to haunt the submarine until the survivors have been taken on board, and it begins by using the dead German to speak to Claire. It is through other victims that it first makes its presence known. And although the men – as opposed to the guilty officers – face the supernatural happenings with more aplomb than most haunted groups, again the ghost is still utterly ruthless – almost everyone is killed. Below is an impressive achievement. Sequences of the men in action are filmed with real verve by Twohy; the claustrophobic interiors are consistently used to considerable dramatic effect. Characters are vividly drawn; the performances are uniformly excellent. Only the CGI exterior shots of the submarine under water lack conviction. It is time for the film’s merits to be recognised.

11. Asian Variations Pon/Phone (Ahn Byung-ki, South Korea, 2002) Phone is one of the most intriguing, but also one of the most frustrating, of the spin-offs from the Ringu films. It is self-consciously derivative: again an aggrieved female ghost is using modern technology (here the  cell  phone)  to  communicate her rage; again this kills people; and again the figure investigating the deaths is a female journalist, Ji-won (Ha Ji-won). At the same time, ghost motifs and references to other ghost films are effectively blended in, and the film also incorporates a ­striking family melodrama. There are, however, problems. The most serious is that the ­narrative (script by Ahn and Lee Yoo-jin) is very awkwardly structured, with long explanatory flashbacks, ‘which tend to unroll as if  the heroine were learning the information but then take over the main ­narrative thread’ (Newman 2004: 77). When the film begins, there is already a backstory which includes horror, melodrama and ghost elements, much of which Ji-won only gradually uncovers. I will unravel these at the outset. The past melodrama has two threads. First, when her close friend Hojeong (Kim You-mi), an artist, learnt she was infertile, Ji-won provided her with eggs, and the daughter born as a result of this, Yeong-ju (Eun Seo-woo) is now about five. But there are suppressed tensions: on the one hand, Ho-jeong is grateful to Ji-won; on the other, Ji-won spends a lot of time with Yeong-ju. Although Yeong-ju calls Ji-won ‘aunt’, in a late scene, Ho-jeong reveals her fears: ‘Do you know how jealous I get when you look into Yeong-ju’s eyes? Maybe she would see you as her mother’. Second, Ho-jeong’s husband, Chang-hoon (Choi Woo-jae), a company CEO, has had an affair with schoolgirl Jin-hee (Choi Ji-yeon), who fell in love with him. The eponymous cell phone was given to Chang-hoon by Jin-hee for their private communications. But the phone also revealed the affair: when Chang-hoon began ignoring Jin-hee’s calls, a suspicious Hojeong found the phone with Jin-hee’s string of messages, and these revealed she was pregnant. Ho-jeong confronted Jin-hee, a violent fight ensued, and – partly in self-defence – she killed Jin-hee. She then concealed her body – Jin-hee’s hand still clutching her own cell phone – behind a wall in a house in Bangbae that Chang-hoon had bought for the family in the future. Chang-hoon seemingly knows nothing of Ho-jeong’s activities with regard to Jin-hee, and Ji-won knows nothing of any of this.

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The Ringu-derived elements of the plot arise from Jin-hee’s rage at her faithless lover and his murderous wife. The phone’s number is now back in circulation, and new recipients find themselves subjected to terrifying supernatural calls. Before the film begins, the number has already been passed on, first to a taxi driver, then a young woman. Before dying crashing his cab, the taxi driver even identified the source of the terrifying calls as a ghost. The film actually begins with the woman’s death: trapped in the lift up to her apartment, she receives such a frightening phone call (indecipherable invective followed by a high-pitched screech) she has a fit and dies of a heart attack. Like the curse video in Ringu, Jin-hee’s rage has a lethal supernatural power. There is, however, another backstory, and this introduces further horror elements. Ji-won is being threatened by a stalker for having exposed a paedophile sex ring. He subjects her both to cyberstalking – emailing bloody images of her dismembered body – and to threatening phone calls. To escape his threats, Ji-won moves into the Bangbae house. She also changes her cell phone number, and Jin-hee supernaturally ensures that she is the next recipient of the deadly number. But Jin-hee’s agenda is now different: it is the family she is targeting. When Yeong-ju answers Ji-won’s phone, Jin-hee is able to use this to possess her. And so, five-year-old Yeong-ju becomes aggressive towards her mother and sexually demonstrative towards her father – for example, kissing him on the mouth in a highly inappropriate manner and then slapping him. The Oedipal scenario has rarely been so blatantly enacted. As the narrative now develops, it is apparent that there has been a generic shift. First, although the stalker has not given up, Ji-won receives no more bloody images on her computer. Jin-hee is now the figure manipulating Ji-won’s computer, but she wishes Ji-won no harm. Second, the Ringu notion of a supernatural death curse is largely abandoned. Jin-hee’s revenge on the family falls within the province of melodrama rather than horror. From relatively early on, Phone becomes primarily a ghost melodrama. Phone reintroduces a type of ghost familiar in the classical Japanese ghost story, such as The Ghost Story of Yotsuya: Jin-hee is a rejected lover, seeking revenge. In Korean terms, Jin-hee is a wonhon: ‘typically a young, innocent woman for whom family conflict and sexual violation are the common causes of an early death’, and ‘an unfulfilled ghost wandering this world, seeking revenge and a way to fulfil its worldly desires’ (Lee 2013: 23). Jin-hee, however, seeks revenge on the whole family. As will become explicit in the scene when Ji-won uncovers Jin-hee’s corpse, another film being referenced is Stir of Echoes. In Phone, too, a murdered teenage girl

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whose body has been buried in the wall of a house seeks to make her plight known. But whereas Samantha’s corpse bears testament to the repressed of the community, Jin-hee’s ghost actively intervenes to expose the fault lines in the marriage. Chang-hoon has been unfaithful, and the sexualisation of his young daughter is like a personal return of the repressed for both himself and his wife, expressing his guilt at the affair, and Ho-jeong’s guilt at the murder. Despite its awkward narrative structure, much of Phone is impressive. It is stylishly filmed, and has a density of resonant imagery. Two examples involve portraits. In her Bangbae bedroom, Ji-won hangs a portrait of Yeongju, painted by Ho-jeong. We will discover that it hangs precisely over the buried Jin-hee’s face. And so, behind Yeong-ju lies the girl who will possess her, but also behind the charming painting Ho-jeong did of her daughter, like her repressed, lies her far more sinister creation: Jin-hee’s body, plastered into the wall with a professional skill. The possession then occurs in an art gallery: Ho-jeong and Ji-won are looking Renoir’s Irene Cahen D’Anvers (1880); Yeong-ju answers Ji-won’s phone. But a reproduction of the Renoir painting is in the Bangbae house, and Ho-jeong actually murdered Jin-hee in front of it. It’s as though the ghost is taking a knowing revenge. Shortly after the possession scene, Ji-won encounters the ghost in a dream sequence. She goes into the master bedroom at Bangbae and discovers a girl with unnaturally long black hair sobbing on the marital bed (see Fig. 29). As Ji-won walks over to the girl, a hand comes out from under the bed and grabs her leg. She wakes up. The scene is remarkably similar to Rachel’s dream in The Ring, but the two films must have been in production at much the same time. And here the dream ghost is quite touching: Jin-hee is crying over her lost romance – the bed is where she and Chang-hoon made love. The long black hair is another mark of the wonhon: ‘In contrast to the neat hairstyle of the married woman, the wonhon’s long, uncombed hair signifies an uncontrollable energy’ that ‘implies youth, a life-force that defies sexual restraint and control’ (Lee: 24). Although this is the only explicit dream sequence, much of the film has oneiric imagery. Such imagery is associated in particular with the film’s master motif, which is rain. Initially, as in so many of these films, thunder and rain are linked to the ghost. Thus it is raining during the opening sequence, where in addition to her deadly phone call, the ghost turns up as a shadowy figure outside the lift where the young woman is trapped. Then, some 22 minutes into the film, Ji-won in her car picks up a schoolgirl at a bus stop in the pouring rain. Ji-won chats to her, but the girl does not speak. Ji-won asks her the way: the girl points. As Ji-won rounds a corner,

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she is then confronted by what seems to be the girl herself in the road in front of her. She gets out to check, but the girl vanishes: she’s not in the road; she’s no longer in the car. Later, from Jin-hee’s diary, Ji-won learns the bus stop was where Chang-hoon first picked her up, likewise in the rain, and so this encounter was with her ghost. In retrospect, we can see that Jin-hee was directing Ji-won where to go (to find her body?): Ji-won discovers the car has stopped close to the Bangbae house. At the same time, there is an oneiric flavour to the scene, especially in the way the girl appears in two places at once – as in the dream sequence itself. From this point on, rain will be associated, not just with the ghost, but also with the oneiric. The most elaborate example of this begins when the detective on the paedophile case is driving in the rain, trying to phone Ji-won. A car is slewed across the road in front of him; he gets out to check. But Ji-won’s stalker is in the car waiting for him, and stabs him. When Ji-won then comes to the hospital to see the wounded detective, the stalker ambushes her and tries to throw her off the building. Now the rain has been replaced by whirling snow. Ji-won is saved by Jin-hee’s intervention over the phone: the stalker answers it, and is so maddened by what he hears, he has some sort of attack. As Ji-won cautiously observes his dead body (now, mysteriously, slumped in his car; the ghost is glimpsed in the back), there is a shock cut to her waking in the bath, as though what we have just seen was a dream. At the beginning of this sequence, receiving no response to his phone call to Ji-won, the detective wonders, ‘Is she asleep?’ This is like a clue; combined with Ji-won waking at the end, it is entirely possible that the whole sequence is a dream. This would account for the curious ellipses: the stalker ambushes Ji-won in her car, but in the next shot is beating her up on a fire escape; the stalker is vanquished on the fire escape, but ends up in his car. However, unlike the appearance of the ghost in the bedroom, it is not explicitly a dream sequence. This ambiguity is not uncommon in contemporary South Korean movies. The narrative often seems oneiric but without explicitly being so. This gives the films an ambience which is peculiarly apt for ghost melodramas. The films tend to possess a heightened mode of narrative, a mode which includes the oneiric. In Phone, the mode also includes the expressionist: when the stalker beats Ji-won up on the fire escape, stylised lighting effects are used to simulate lightning. It is as though the fight is also an expression of anxieties within Ji-won, anxieties which stem from the stalker’s threats and which are resolved by the miraculous intervention of the ghost. Here, suggestively, the ghost may be seen as summoned by Ji-won.

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Other ghost manifestations are more conventional. After Jin-hee has possessed Yeong-ju, there is a telling scene in which the lovemaking of Chang-hoon and Ho-jeong is interrupted: Ho-jeong sees a female ghost over the bed, a ghost who is immediately supplanted by the arrival of an upset Yeong-ju. When Yeong-ju then stays with Ji-won in Bangbae, she talks precociously about love, telling Ji-won that she herself loves Daddy. She ignores Ji-won’s question about Mummy. Ji-won is carrying Yeong-ju on her back, but she now sees, reflected in a window, a teenage girl in Yeong-ju’s place – another sign of the possession. Another (presumably coincidental) link with The Ring is that Phone, too, uses a child’s drawings to signal the intervention of the ghost. When Ho-jeong and Chang-hoon consult a child psychologist about Yeong-ju’s increasingly erratic behaviour, the psychologist suggests Yeong-ju’s drawing of herself with long hair ‘symbolises her as an adult thinking sexually of her father’, and ‘she gets jealous when you and your husband get intimate’. The long hair here echoes the long hair of the ghost in Ji-won’s dream, where it seemed an oneiric symbol of yearning. The psychologist adds cheerfully that this is just a phase Yeong-ju is going through. Oedipus is not mentioned. Another oneiric ghost sequence occurs in the Bangbae house. As Ji-won tosses in her sleep, Jin-hee’s ghost sits and watches her, tears in her eyes. When Ji-won wakes, the chair is empty, but a pan around the room then reveals a dream scene: reflected in the mirror, we see Jin-hee playing a piano. We hear no music, but can hear a girl humming bars from Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’, which Jin-hee had been learning to play. Startled, Ji-won sits up in bed, whereupon the camera shows the rooms downstairs (where the piano actually is): a rocking chair eerily rocks. In a few, brief, strokes, the film suggests Jin-hee’s loneliness as ghost in the Bangbae house: she can move around; she can even play the piano, but she is painfully isolated from the living. Markedly less satisfactory is the film’s attempt, following Memento Mori in particular, to include a haunted schoolgirl subplot. A flashback shows Jin-hee’s friend Sang-mi read her diary and learn she is pregnant. Jin-hee catches her reading, and her ghost subsequently takes revenge by phoning Sang-mi at school, terrifying her to the extent that Sang-mi pierces her eardrums and blinds herself to escape the threat from the phone. The gratuitous nastiness suggests the filmmakers did not really know how to incorporate the almost obligatory schoolgirl world into the movie. Nevertheless, a detail strongly conveyed in these scenes is the obsessive attachment of teenage girls to their phones. It would seem to be unthinkable to Sang-mi that she simply got rid of it.

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When Sang-mi’s phone rings during class, the classroom lights begin to flicker, panicking the other girls. This electrical disturbance is also seen in the film’s opening scene: the lift stops, the lights flicker, then the phone rings. As at the climax of Memento Mori, we can see this as part of the rhetoric of the modern ghost movie: like a translation of the ghostly forces into something both visible and frightening. But because both Sang-mi and the woman in the lift were anticipating the frightening call, the electrical disturbances are also like a translation of their panic onto the outside world. In a classroom of schoolgirls, this is a particularly effective trope. Intensity returns as the film moves towards its climax. Whilst her mother sleeps, the possessed Yeong-ju picks up a knife – a scene surely inspired by The Shining. As she holds the knife up, we see the reflection of her eyes in its blade. A match cut takes us to the eyes of Ji-won in the rear-view mirror of her car: she is driving to confront Chang-hoon with Jin-hee’s diary. Again it is pouring with rain, and the cut suggests that Jin-hee is now orchestrating events: both Yeong-ju and Ji-won are doing her bidding. Ji-won assumes that Chang-hoon killed Jin-hee, but he seems too stunned by the revelation of the diary to respond. The film cuts back to Ho-jeong, who wakes to discover that Yeong-ju has stabbed the knife into Chang-hoon in a family photograph and disappeared. Here, in contrast to The Shining, it is the possessed child who is murderous. Yeong-ju turns up at the Bangbae house, and confirms her possession by playing part of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano. Ji-won tries to talk to the Jin-hee inside Yeong-ju, but merely receives a ghost’s enigmatic answer – a quotation from Jin-hee’s diary. When a panicking Ho-jeong also arrives at the house, Jin-hee supernaturally locks both women out of the hall. Then, through the door window, the two women are horrified witnesses to the possessed Yeong-ju throwing herself downstairs. Unfortunately, because of the film’s awkward construction, we do not yet know the deeper significance of this: that Jin-hee is re-staging, for Ho-jeong’s benefit, her own fall downstairs on the night she was killed. Yeong-ju arrives at the Bangbae house barefoot, in her white nightdress and wet from the rain. Ji-won does not seem to f ind her dry clothes. This remarkable link to the way Claire is dressed throughout the last act of What Lies Beneath suggests a psychoanalytical rationale: in her nightdress, Yeong-ju is being kept ghost-like because she is being identified with the ghost, a requirement that usurps verisimilitude. Even though Jin-hee was not drowned, she has by now become so associated with rain that wetness is a part of this association: the trope is also found in Gothika.

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The violence the ghost then inflicts on Yeong-ju is part of its revenge and, strikingly, this climaxes with Yeong-ju lying at the foot of the stairs, injured, exactly as Claire lies in the hall after Norman has immobilised her with halothane. Since Claire is then threatened with the same death (drowning in the bath) as Madison, Phone includes the key elements of this sequence in What Lies Beneath, but compresses them. In both films, it would seem that there is a strong impulse to re-enact the material of the primary traumatic event, with someone else in the same position as the original victim. This compulsion to repeat, suggesting a narrative return of the repressed, is an excellent illustration of Peter Brooks’ model of narrative noted in the Introduction. Moreover, the compulsion to repeat would seem to be occurring, quite unconsciously, across films from different countries. It is not until close to the end of the film that a flashback reveals the melodramatic confrontation between Ho-jeong and Jin-hee, wife and mistress, both equally determined to claim Chang-hoon, and both with compelling arguments. As so often in such confrontations, the man in the triangle seems bland when compared with the emotional intensity of the two women. Jin-hee knows Yeong-ju was conceived with another woman’s egg – suggesting Chang-hoon has revealed confidences that do indeed indicate unease about his marriage. On her part, Ho-jeong points out that Chang-hoon is no longer taking Jin-hee’s calls: he’s tired of her. The women become violent: Jin-hee tries to strangle Ho-jeong; Ho-jeong kicks her downstairs. The fall seems to kill her, but when Ho-jeong is starting to dispose of her body, Jin-hee ‘resurrects’. Ho-jeong bludgeons her to death. After she has plastered the body into the wall, she sobs on her knees. This is not something she wanted to happen. There is a further aspect to this murder: it’s as though Ho-jeong has also killed Jin-hee on behalf of her husband. Chang-hoon’s seeming lack of curiosity about what has happened to Jin-hee suggests his indifference to her fate, and her pregnancy would presumably have threatened both his social standing and his career. The bourgeois marriage is also haunted by an implicit shared complicity in a murder. When the possessed Yeong-ju throws herself downstairs in front of Hojeong and Ji-won, we can see in retrospect that Jin-hee is taunting the former. This is another scene where stylised lightning plays in the background, again suggesting a heightened, expressionist mode. In the confrontation between the two women, Ho-jeong told Jin-hee to get an abortion. Here, Jin-hee threatens to kill Ho-jeong’s child. Moreover, she is able to do this in a manner that reminds Ho-jeong of the violence the latter inflicted on

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Jin-hee herself. As Yeong-ju lies at the foot of the stairs, she smiles evilly at her mother. Unfortunately, the resolution of all these tensions is weak. After Ji-won has found Jin-hee’s body, both Chang-hoon and Ho-jeong arrive independently at the house. And now Ho-jeong simply turns into the villain: she bumps off her husband and then sets out to kill Ji-won. It’s as though the writers found themselves with a need to resolve matters quickly (the film has several ellipses which suggest a forced shortening) and they resorted to cliché – an abrupt change in a hitherto not unsympathetic character. Nevertheless, the dramatisation of the climactic intervention of the ghost has some force. By this stage, Ho-jeong has not only tied Ji-won to a chair, but also gagged and blindfolded her. As a consequence, when Ho-jeong douses the room and Ji-won with petrol and tries to set fire to it, Ji-won is not a witness to the impressive intervention of the ghost, putting out the flame and pulling herself out of the wall. As in Ji-won’s dream, Jinhee’s hair has continued to grow after her death – a surrealistic touch also found in Luis Buñuel’s Le fantôme de la liberté (France, 1974) – and it is now comprehensively entangled in the plaster. Accordingly, she can only extricate herself with great effort. She advances on a mesmerised Ho-jeong and seemingly kills her with a kiss. Jin-hee’s emergence from the wall could be seen as her Sadako moment, but it is in fact sufficiently distinctive not to seem derivative. It also has additional resonances. Again it is as though Ji-won has summoned the ghost. Her inability to see adds to the sense that the scene is orchestrated by her own unconscious. So far as Ji-won is concerned, it is now better that Ho-jeong dies: then Jin-hee will be appeased and Yeong-ju will be safe. And so, Jin-hee comes out of the wall to effect this. The film’s ending strengthens this reading. Although the convoluted narrative of Phone means it lacks the concentration and intensity of the finest ghost melodramas, the ghost has nevertheless fulfilled its function: it has shown what is wrong with the film’s representative bourgeois marriage. But, as intimated, Jin-hee as ghost may also be seen in another light – as the dark alter ego of the heroine. In the epilogue, Ji-won throws her cell phone into the sea, a gesture which one might reasonably see, as Kim Newman does, as serving to ‘exorcise the ghost’s influence on Yeong-ju’ (2004: 76). But another interpretation is possible. With both Chang-hoon and Ho-jeong dead, we can be fairly sure that Ji-won will become mother to Yeong-ju, who is, after all, genetically her daughter. Ji-won may also be seen as discarding the phone because she no longer needs Jin-hee’s assistance to achieve this goal.

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Ju-on (Takashi Shimizu, Japan, 2002) and The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, US, 2004) Although preceded by two straight-to-video releases by Shimizu (Ju-on: The Curse, 2000, and Ju-on: The Curse 2, 2000), Ju-on (2002) is the first theatrical film within the Ju-on franchise, and I shall refer to it as Ju-on rather than Ju-on: The Grudge. Shimizu has since extended the franchise: Ju-on 2 (2003), The Grudge and The Grudge 2 (2006) were all directed by him, and there are other, more recent, Ju-on films. I shall merely look at Ju-on and The Grudge. Ju-on centres on a house in Nerima, Tokyo, where a jealous husband, Takeo Saeki (Takashi Matsuyama), murdered his wife Kayako (Takako Fuji) and son Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) and then killed himself. It is implied that he thought his wife was unfaithful, but he himself was evidently deranged. The ghosts of the three – especially Kayako and Toshio – continue to haunt the house and proceed to kill anyone who enters it. The premise is explained at the beginning of Ju-on: ‘Ju-on: a curse born of a grudge held by someone who dies in the grip of anger. It gathers in places frequented by that person […], working its spell on those who come into contact with it and creating itself anew’. As in the Ringu films, a lethal supernatural curse is enacted by murderous ghosts. However, because the curse seems absolute – all who enter the house die, either then or later – the Ju-on films have two main problems. Since nothing can be done to combat the ghosts, the films offer no hope: everyone dies. In addition, the narrative is inherently repetitive. Ju-on seeks to handle the second problem by adopting a shifting narrative structure, with six sections set at different time periods, each headed by the name of a character who is central to that section. This lends the film a certain narrative complexity, as one works out the connections between the sections. Each section then ends with a fatal ghostly encounter, but these are all different. Although, compared with Phone and Chakushin ari, the Ju-on films seem relatively minor spin-offs from the Ringu films, they nevertheless include a number of tropes and motifs. Ju-on begins with an opening sequence which shows an elliptical version of the primary traumatic event. As in The Devil’s Backbone, the images are too fragmented for the viewer initially to make much sense of them, but they are nevertheless suggestive. We see a demented Takeo, bloody from murder, and his lifeless victim Kayako. He grabs a cat, but the frightened Toshio flees to hide in a cupboard. This opening montage has in fact been discussed in some detail by Jay McRoy

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who relates Takeo’s murderousness to the crisis in masculinity in Japan following the collapse of the economic bubble (2005: 178-179). Both Ju-on and The Grudge have the same basic plot: a family (husband, wife, husband’s mother) has recently moved into the cursed house; the heroine, a social worker, visits the mother, who has dementia; she encounters the ghosts of Toshio and the cat; Kayako’s ghost spooks her and kills the mother; the police discover the bodies of husband and wife, already killed by the ghosts, in the attic; events develop from there. Ju-on has a more elaborate narrative than The Grudge but, once that has been unravelled, the film seems to me rather thin, only achieving complexity in the sixth section. Its main achievement up to that point is several moments which are genuinely scary. In particular, the ghosts violate the bed, the ‘safe space’ of childhood fears. In his analysis, McRoy notes that Ju-on is a generic hybrid (ghost film plus US slasher film), and seeks to argue that, ‘Kayako’s and Toshio’s ultimately uncontainable wrath suggests an irrepressible hostility towards an abusive and antiquated “official culture, specifically… the norms and values of patriarchy” (Creed 1995: 146)’ (McRoy 2005: 180). This is hard to sustain as an argument because everyone who enters the house is killed, including schoolgirls. Nevertheless, McRoy also considers the film’s skill at manipulating audience response as Kayako and Toshio stalk and kill their victims. The ghosts’ murderousness is not confined to the house. In the third section, Hitomi (Ito Misaki), the husband’s sister, who entered the house earlier, finds herself haunted in her own apartment. Through the peephole in her outer door, she sees her brother Katsuya (Kanji Tsuda), but he is not there when she opens the door. She is so spooked she retreats to bed. But she becomes aware of another presence in the bed, and lifts the covers to see Kayako peering at her. She screams, and we see her shape under the bed clothes abruptly flatten. The false appearance of Katsuya at the door reminds us that ghosts have the power to control thresholds – to the extent of converting the other side of a door into a psychic space where illusions can occur. But Hitomi’s encounter with Kayako in her bed conveys a genuine sense of existential terror: the ghost does not just kill Hitomi, it obliterates her. Later, the police cannot find her. However, although a powerful moment, this raises an ontological problem: what has happened to Hitomi’s body? The notion that ghosts can dematerialise someone completely, as in Kairo/Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2001), seems distinctly unsatisfactory. In the fourth section, the heroine Rika (Okina Megumi) also has an alarming experience in bed. She wakes to discover Kayako at the head of

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the bed peering down on her, and Toshio squatting on the bed. Toshio’s pose vividly evokes the incubus of the nightmare, famously illustrated in Henri Fuseli’s painting Nightmare (1781). However, although this is a ghostly tableau, the ghosts are not harming Rika. It is even possible that, in their terms, they are watching over her (see Fig. 30). In the sixth section, Rika discovers that a peekaboo gesture can be used to communicate with the ghosts. She has returned to the house to try and save her friend, Mariko (Kayoko Shibata), but she is too late: Mariko is dragged off (we assume by Kayako) and murdered in the attic. However, Rika then has a revelation about the peekaboo gesture, which flashbacks reveal has been used by a number of characters, including herself, during the film. In front of the hall mirror, she performs the gesture, whereupon Kayako’s reflection replaces hers and makes the same gesture. Rika now has the hallucinatory sense that Kayako is emerging from her own body. Colette Balmain suggests that the film evokes The Shining (2008: 144), and the peekaboo gesture, too, comes from The Shining, where Danny uses it to make the ghost sisters vanish. This suggests a child’s sense of magic: if you hide your face, you can make bad things disappear. Ju-on goes further: the ghosts seem to understand the gesture as addressed to them and they respond – albeit in a mysterious, ghost-like way. When Kayako emerges out of Rika, it is as though she had been possessing her. That these ghosts can possess the living was shown earlier, when Takeo possessed Katsuya. Now, however, in response to the peekaboo gesture, Kayako leaves Rika. Earlier, we saw Kayako crawl down the front stairs and advance on two terrified policemen – seemingly to kill them. Kayako now repeats her crawl downstairs, but she is different. She is still a ghost, but she is bloody and, emerging out of a plastic bag, she suggests Kayako on the day of her murder. At the bottom of the stairs, she reaches out to Rika, as though appealing to her, like Masami to Mai in Ringu 2. Rika performs the peekaboo gesture; Kayako transforms into her non-bloody ghostly self. This triggers another series of flashbacks, showing Kayako at the moments when she was about to kill someone: Katsuya’s mother; Hitomi; the two policemen. But in the flashbacks of Kayako with Rika herself – looking down on her in bed; massaging her hair in the shower – she is pointedly not harming her. When Rika uncovers her eyes, Kayako has disappeared. This is a cryptic sequence of events, but it does suggest that Kayako does not want to kill Rika; that the ghost feels some sort of kinship with her. It’s as though the bloody Kayako is appealing to Rika to save her from her demented husband. But when she transforms into the ghostly Kayako,

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she seems to have accepted her fate: she really is dead, and Rika cannot do anything to help. Now the look Kayako gives Rika is one of sympathy. It could be seen as one woman sharing with another a sense that they are both helpless in the face of implacable male murderousness. As much is confirmed when Takeo himself comes down the stairs, still bloody from his murders, and advances on Rika – evidently to kill her. Following Kairo, Ju-on has an apocalypse epilogue. Shots of empty streets with posters of missing persons suggest that, in this suburb of Tokyo, everyone is going missing, that is, being killed by the ghosts and vanishing. It may not be as silly as Kairo, but it still makes the film seem unnecessarily portentous. The Grudge Scripted by Stephen Susco as a remake of Ju-on, The Grudge is in fact more intriguing than the original. Although the basic elements are the same, the film concentrates primarily on American expatriates in Tokyo – which sets up productive cultural tensions. These centre on something only alluded to briefly in Ju-on: the motive for the original murders. In The Grudge, the family that moves into the cursed house is American. Again, the mother has dementia; again a young social worker, Yoko (Yoko Maki) visits her. Drawn by mysterious noises through a closet to the attic, Yoko is brutally killed by Kayako. The heroine, Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), is Yoko’s replacement. Karen’s experiences in the house echo Rika’s in Ju-on: she is spooked by Toshio, but it is Kayako’s manifestation as a mass of black hair and staring eyes that causes her to pass out. When Karen recovers, she turns detective, trying to discover what happened in the house. This is one significant difference from Ju-on: Rika does not investigate, she leaves everything to the police. The American heroine is more dynamic. Having found out about the original murders, Karen is led to the apartment of a college professor, Peter Kirk (Bill Pullman), whose photograph she had seen in a diary in the house. The day after the murders, Peter committed suicide – the film’s opening scene. As Karen looks at photographs of Peter and his wife, she notices a Japanese woman lurking in the background, looking at Peter. Karen recognises her as Kayako. A flashback reveals Kayako had a crush on Peter, sending him many letters. And in the photographs, it is as though Kayako is already a ghost, haunting Peter. Her obsession is recorded in the diary, which has an adolescent feverishness, with Peter’s name scrawled repeatedly across the pages. But another issue

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is that Kayako desired a Caucasian man. This is something that troubles the film, and implicitly fuelled Takeo’s fury when he found the diary. That the film has a subtle aversion to these Americans in Japan can be seen in several details. When Karen goes to Detective Nakagawa (Ryo Ishibashi) with her findings, she discovers that he already knows about the house: whilst investigating the original murders, two of his colleagues died and a third disappeared. He tells Karen the story of the curse, concluding: ‘death becomes part of [such a] place, killing everything it touches. Once you have become part of it, it will never let you go. I’m sorry’. He bows to her and leaves. The words ‘I’m sorry’ are missing from the ‘director’s cut’ of the film – which was also the version shown in Japan. This is a telling cultural detail. Overall, the Japanese release version is some six minutes longer than the US version, which deleted minor elements to tighten the film but also removed moments of ‘excessive’ violence. In this instance, however, something has been cut from the Japanese version. It’s as though Shimizu felt that, for a Japanese audience, it would be inappropriate for a Japanese figure of authority to apologise to a Westerner for her misfortune at becoming a victim of a peculiarly Japanese curse. But Nakagawa is an entirely sympathetic figure: the apology is exactly the sort of gesture he would make. To cut it is to diminish the sense that he cares. This tiny detail illustrates my sense about The Grudge: that, whatever he consciously maintained, at some level Shimizu felt these Americans in Tokyo were aliens who did not belong there. In an early scene, Karen asks a Japanese woman the way. She speaks Japanese, and the woman replies politely, but when Karen smiles at her young daughter, the woman hides the girl behind her. On the DVD commentary of the director’s cut, Shimizu confirms his intention: ‘She’s afraid of foreigners’. But it is the mother who pushes the daughter out of Karen’s sight – as if Karen were somehow sinister. Of course, in Ju-on all the victims of the ghosts are Japanese and here there are Japanese victims as well. But it’s as though, in this version, Kayako’s desire for an American is such a cultural taboo it releases an uncontrolled rage across the film, which the ghosts embody. In Ju-on, there is a brief, poignant, time-slip where a policeman, who has gone to the house to burn it down, sees his young daughter, years later as a teenager. The Grudge has a more developed time-slip sequence. Karen’s boyfriend Doug (Jason Behr) has gone to the house; Karen hurries to warn him. As she enters, the lighting supernaturally changes, and she sees Peter on the day he visited the house. Already a ghost, Toshio sees her; Peter does not. Peter finds Kayako’s diary, and so realises the extent of her obsession

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with him. He also discovers its consequences. Takeo has cut Kayako’s face out of family photographs; the faces are pinned to a closet with the pins through her eyes. Peter looks into the closet; Kayako’s body falls down from the attic. Peter flees from the house. As an invisible presence throughout this, Karen is a witness to Peter’s trauma. She has been sidetracked from her mission – to get Doug out of the house – by the house manifesting itself as a genuine ghost world, where one can be a witness to events of the past. And the events Karen sees are focused on the very issue which so disturbs the film – Kayako’s obsession with a Westerner – and its terrible consequences. We are familiar with the idea of an enraged or upset person symbolically erasing someone from their past by cutting them out of old photographs. But Takeo’s attacks on Kayako’s eyes suggest a deeper impulse. Kayako was a voyeur, spying on Peter, and here her husband seeks to blind her. His rage may well have been compounded by drawings of eyes in the diary itself, drawings that suggest Kayako was aware of herself as a voyeur. In the final shot of the diary, a page of (presumably feverish) writing has been torn through, exposing an eye underneath. ‘Seeing’ had served to express Kayako’s obsession. There are also psychoanalytical intimations. As Sándor Ferenczi has pointed out, eyes can also be a female sexual symbol (Ferenczi [1913] 2002: 270). Implicitly, Kayako was signalling, through her drawings of eyes, that she was offering herself to Peter. Symbolically, her husband’s assault on her eyes is also suggestively sexual. The time-slip continues: Karen discovers Takeo’s hanging body in Toshio’s bedroom and then experiences psychic flashbacks (in grainy monochrome) which reveal Takeo’s rage and murderousness after he found Kayako’s diary. Here the director’s cut is markedly more informative: the US release version chops the sequence to pieces. Before the flashbacks, we see Toshio’s ghost is taking revenge on his father by swinging the hanging body so its legs hit the wall: this was the sound that drew Karen to the bedroom. Moreover, long black hair hanging from the ceiling suggests it was Kayako’s ghost that hanged Takeo – she, too, has taken revenge. In the psychic flashbacks, we see Takeo murder Kayako: he knocks her down, then pursues her as she crawls downstairs. Catching her, he breaks her neck – an act witnessed by Toshio from the landing upstairs. In Ju-on, Takeo’s killing of his family is seen only elliptically in the opening sequence. In The Grudge it is shown in much more detail, and through the eyes of the (American) heroine. Again we can discern the film’s ideological thrust: Karen is being made to see in detail what happened as a consequence of Kayako’s insane infatuation with a foreigner.

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In fact, the monochrome sequence depicting the primary traumatic event continues after Karen has left the time-slip, so there is a second half she does not see. As Karen is downstairs trying to drag a semi-catatonic Doug out of the house, the camera cranes up to show Takeo drag Kayako’s body along the landing. We also see him drown Toshio and the family cat. Kayako’s body ends up in a plastic bag in the attic. When we come out of the monochrome sequence, Kayako is now a bloody ghost, crawling downstairs to prevent Karen and Doug leaving. As she does this, her crawling out of the plastic bag – more emphasised than in Ju-on – evokes emerging from a chrysalis. Here, however, there is no hint of any rapport with the heroine: the chrysalis imagery suggests rather that Kayako has been reborn as a murderous ghost. Once again, there are intruders in the house, and once again she arrives to despatch them. Kayako kills Doug, but Karen puts up a fight. Kicking over a can of petrol Nakagawa brought earlier, she sets fire to the house. The gesture is suicidal, but Karen miraculously survives the blaze. The epilogue takes place in a hospital. In an ironic touch, the authorities report they were able to save the house from the fire. And Kayako has attached herself to Karen: we see her standing back to back with her. The implication is Karen will now forever be haunted by her. The main problem with the Ju-on films is that unstoppable murderous ghosts cease after a while to be of interest. It is when the films engage with other issues – the enigmatic communication between heroine and ghost at the climax of Ju-on; the racial undercurrents in The Grudge – that they become more charged. Nevertheless, the films are skilfully made: scenes are well-paced; there is often a compelling sense of creeping dread; they deliver a fair number of chilling ghostly scares. The franchise itself is testament to their popularity. Chakushin ari/One Missed Call (Takashi Miike, Japan, 2004) Scripted by Minako Daira from an original story by Yasushi Akimoto, Chakushin ari, like Phone, uses the cell phone as its mechanism to transmit deadly supernatural forces. But here the basic story is modelled more closely on Ringu. The victims receive a phone call, with a distinctive ringtone, which inexplicably is from a few days in the future and their own phone number. The phone message turns out to be their own voice speaking their dying words. When they reach the date and time of the call, they are violently killed by a supernatural force – having just ‘inadvertently’ spoken these words.

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For its first two acts (of four), Chakushin ari develops its own inflection of the Ringu notion of a supernatural death foretold. This is done with some skill, and includes a few original developments – notably a savage attack on the media – but is in general fairly derivative. However, when an investigation into the source of the threat begins in Act Three, the film becomes markedly more complex and resonant. Accordingly, I will just summarise the first two acts. Here the focus is on (mainly female) university students, and the unexplained deaths began some months before the film starts. The first person we see killed is Yoko (Anna Nagata), a friend of the heroine Yumi (Ko Shibasaki). Earlier, Yoko and Yumi listened to Yoko’s ‘missed call’; now, as Yoko phones her, Yumi realises the time is that of the call. Yoko says her last words, and is promptly precipitated from a bridge on to a passing train. At Yoko’s funeral, in a direct steal from Ringu, some schoolgirls tell Yumi what they have heard about these deaths. They mention the supernatural transmission of the curse (the next victim’s number comes from the current victim’s cell phone); one comments, ‘They say it’s a woman who died full of hatred’. Again, their story is like an urban legend come true. After the death of Kenji (Atsushi Ida), pulled by a supernatural force into a lift shaft in front of Yumi, the fear spreads. Natsumi (Kazue Fukiishi) receives the next death call: a grainy image on her phone, showing her being scared by a jerking arm, and a spooky woman’s head, poking out horizontally from behind a wall. She gets rid of her phone, but it doesn’t help. Her death threat image somehow ‘goes viral’, and Natsumi is waylaid by a TV crew. As soon as the reporter provides her with a substitute phone, it rings with an updated version of the image: evoking Sadako emerging from the well, the woman’s face moves further out. Recognising a scoop, the reporter sweeps Natsumi off, so the TV station can stage a live broadcast at the time when she is supposed to die. He will however bring in an exorcist, Tendo, to help protect her. Yumi teams up with Yamashita (Shin’ichi Tsutsumi), who has been investigating the supernatural deaths since his sister Ritsuko became an early victim. During the broadcast, Yumi and Yamashita force their way into the studio. At the appointed time, Tendo is hurled aside, and the spooky woman appears behind Natsumi in the pose on the cell phone. Yumi and Yamashita rush to help Natsumi, but as they hold her, the bones in her arm begin to break. A deep female voice says, ‘I’ll take you to the hospital’. Natsumi’s arm is twisted and broken; finally she is decapitated. As Yumi sits stunned, her phone rings. When she and Yamashita listen to the message, timed at 7.13 the following evening, they hear Yumi ask, ‘Why?’

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Throughout these scenes, the underlying thrust of the narrative follows Ringu. Again, a cryptic message points to the imminent death of the recipient; again, the death occurs at a specified time and is enacted by an unstoppable supernatural force; again, the heroine is now herself threatened. At the same time, the film mounts a scathing attack on media exploitation of a desperate young woman: even during the broadcast, more attention is paid to the assembled pundits and to Tendo than to Natsumi. We are also shown the complete indifference of the Tokyo crowds to the broadcast, which is visible on a huge outdoor TV screen. Colette Balmain sees this as a symptom of the ‘disconnection’ between individuals in contemporary Japanese society (2008: 177), but it seems to me more like denial. A spectacular example of the destructive power of the supernatural is about to be broadcast live, and people simply ignore it. As Yumi and Yamashita begin to investigate the origins of the threat, both family melodrama and ghost elements are introduced. Ritsuko worked in child welfare, and her notes mention two sisters: five-year-old Nanako, who was repeatedly admitted with unexplained injuries, and ten-year-old Mimiko, who died of an asthma attack. Since their mother Marie Mizunuma has disappeared (later we learn she is dead), Yumi suspects that, suffering from Münchausen syndrome by proxy, it was she who harmed the girls. Yumi tells Yamashita about her own childhood trauma, already alluded to in elliptical flashbacks. She herself had been abused by her mother; her grandmother had tried in vain to protect her. A flashback shows her mother burn the young Yumi with a cigarette to force her to look through a hole in a wall – and see her grandmother’s hanging body. Yumi has since had a phobia about looking through peepholes: psychically she fears that what she will see is death. The sense that elements of their quest resonate with Yumi’s own past continues when she and Yamashita visit the abandoned Mizunuma apartment. There Yumi reassembles a torn photograph of the family, a motif from Ju-on. When we finally learn it was Mimiko, not Marie, who was harming Nanako, the ‘damaged’ all-female family in the photograph can be seen as a distorted version of Yumi’s own childhood family: Nanako is the equivalent of Yumi, Mimiko of Yumi’s mother and Marie of her grandmother. The apartment is also haunted. When Yamashita presses Mimiko’s asthma inhaler, its noise momentarily conjures up a ghost, which appears in a cupboard, frightening Yumi. And inside the cupboard, Yamashita finds a hidden camcorder – although the cassette is missing. In fact, the film flirts with a ghostly ambience around Yumi from the opening scene. In a restaurant, whilst Yumi is trying to light a gas table

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stove, Natsumi tells their gathered friends about Yumi’s phobia about holes. Kenji analyses Yumi’s fear: ‘It’s probably related to some trauma. They say fears are one thing we cannot forget’. Three things then happen in quick succession: the gas catches light; we see the fragmented flashback images later linked to Yumi’s childhood trauma; and Yumi looks round, as though sensing a presence. Another male student tells a ghost story about a friend who saw ‘a woman’s hand resting on his shoulder’. During this, a ghostly hand rests on Yumi’s shoulder, then withdraws. Although Yoko now appears beside Yumi, it was not her hand. Yumi here is already being haunted. Not only is Kenji’s analysis ‘confirmed’ by the elliptical flashback images, but Yumi is attracting a ghostly presence. The ghostly hand will turn out to belong to Mimiko (Karen Oshima), who is an elusive figure throughout the film. In the murders of Yoko and Kenji, she is unseen, her presence registered purely by the sound of her asthma inhaler. In the murder of Natsumi, the scary woman’s face sticking out from the wall is Marie’s (Mariko Tsutsui); only the jerking arm belongs to Mimiko. (This is unclear in the film itself, but is revealed in the ‘Making of’ feature on the Region 2 DVD.) Two ghost-related points arise. First, Mimiko has been drawn to Yumi independently of the deaths related to the phone calls. This is strengthened by a scene in the restaurant washroom. When Yoko’s phone beside her rings, Yumi is looking at her own reflection in a mirror. The film cuts to show the ringing phone in the foreground; Yumi is now in the background, and her reflection is in another mirror. Given the importance in these films of mirrors as windows to the ghost world, there is a sense that Yumi is unconsciously conjuring up the murderous ghost, as though the chain of linked deaths is heading towards her. Perhaps Mimiko is drawn to Yumi because Yumi herself was a victim of childhood abuse. However, it is not as a fellow sufferer that the ghost is attracted to the protagonist – as is the case in, say, Lady in White or Dark Water (2002) – instead, Mimiko’s interest in Yumi is sadistic – the Miike thematic, as evidenced above all in Audition. Second, Marie’s ghost threatening Natsumi implies that Mimiko has supernaturally mastered her mother to assist in the deadly attacks. Poking out from behind the wall, Marie is like Mimiko’s puppet. Mimiko’s bent arm even evokes a puppeteer’s. But why and how Marie is involved in the killings is unclear. In addition, Marie has an independent role as a ghost. The face glimpsed in the cupboard in the Mizunuma apartment seems to be Marie’s. Perhaps, reinforcing her structural link with Yumi’s grandmother, Marie’s concern is to warn Yumi. Certainly she would seem here to be drawing attention to the video camera, which we assume she placed in the

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cupboard – a sign of her suspicions about Mimiko. As we will discover at the climax, the missing cassette contains the key evidence that Yumi and Yamashita need. On the evening of her predicted death, Yumi, still looking for Marie, goes to a derelict hospital. It turns out to be a ghost world: one in which boundaries between the real and psychic worlds are blurred, and where ghosts can manipulate time and space. This is suggested from the moment Yumi enters: she hears Yamashita’s phone ringing, but she cannot locate its source. We then catch a glimpse of Yamashita walking away from her through the hospital corridors. This is a bizarre development, suggesting Yamashita is already in the hospital but in a different psychic space, unaware Yumi is there, calling for him. Yumi now experiences a whole series of scares and threats. Further ringing leads her to her own cell phone (destroyed earlier by Yamashita), and, in an allusion to its death threat, it is surrounded by maggots. Meanwhile, first seen in a mirror, a long-haired female ghost (Marie) is stalking her, at one point coming up behind her on the ceiling, at another stretching an arm over Yumi’s shoulder and breaking its own finger. Fleeing from it, Yumi sees a child’s hands push specimen jars containing objects, one a fetus, through three different doors. She discovers such a jar on her lap: inside is another fetus. Frantically, she casts the jar aside, whereupon Marie’s ghost drags her backwards over the floor and then disappears into a cupboard. This is an unusually allusive and enigmatic sequence. First, the haunting of Yumi would seem to be split. We assume the child’s hands are Mimiko’s, so the fetuses could relate to a revelation in Chakushin ari 2 (Renpei Tsukamoto 2005): Mimiko was the child of rape, and her mother regretted having her. Mimiko might well identify with these fetuses, whose fate could have been hers. This suggests a more oblique link with Sadako, who, as noted in the discussion of Ringu 2, was almost killed at birth. Preserved fetuses also crop up in The Devil’s Backbone and, like the preserved body of the ghost girl in Riget, they have their own ghostly ambience. By contrast, Marie’s ghost could still be trying to warn Yumi: breaking her own finger could be a ghost’s way of alerting Yumi to what is going to happen to her. When she drags Yumi backwards, she is removing her from Mimiko’s presence. But Marie would also seem to be terrified of Mimiko’s power, hence, as in the apartment, she hides in a cupboard. There is an oneiric density to these hospital encounters, and their import is ambiguous. At the same time, Yumi is also being led to the source of the supernatural threat: a phone which is ringing to tick off the seconds to her death. It is after Yamashita has joined her that they find the phone, and Yamashita manages

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to switch it off. The phone is in the hand of Marie’s putrefied body in a bath, and Yumi now understands: ‘She wanted to be found’. But this precipitates an overt ghostly attack: Marie becomes animated and grabs Yumi by the hair. Yamashita is swept into another room behind a locked door. There he is addressed by the ghost of his sister Ritsuko, who says, cryptically, ‘There’s a different sky for each of us’, and vanishes. Marie’s decomposing body continues to advance on Yumi, and twice it transforms into Yumi’s own mother. When Marie’s hands reach for Yumi’s throat, Yumi addresses her as though she were her own mother, ‘I won’t run away any more; I’ll be a good girl’, and embraces the figure. A ‘flashback’ to Yumi’s mother now shows her in a different light, looking caring, rather than venomous. Freed, Yamashita re-enters the room to see a striking image: Yumi holding the putrefied figure in a pose which evokes the pietà. Although the time of the death threat has passed, the decomposing corpse confronts Yumi with yet another type of threat. The visual slippage between Marie and Yumi’s mother, and the fact that Yumi is able to pacify the seemingly murderous figure, suggest Yumi’s mother is somehow animating Marie’s corpse. We do not know whether or not Yumi’s mother is still alive, but a strong link is nevertheless intimated between Yumi’s mother and Mimiko, both driven to harm Yumi – a combined threat that goes back to the ghostly presences around Yumi in the opening scene. The derelict hospital is thus a very unusual ghost world, one in which highly personal psychic encounters can occur. Again we could relate this world to the unconscious. The overall sense of the hospital sequence is that Yumi has entered a ghost world where she has encountered, and triumphed over, some very personal demons. Her quest has taken her into an oneiric representation of her inner world. There is also the suggestion of an overt intertextual reference. ‘She wanted to be found’ echoes the comment Rachel makes in The Ring (‘She just wanted to be heard’) when she finds the body of Samara, the ghost girl, in the well. The Ring was released in Japan in November 2002; Chakushin ari was made in April and May 2003. It seems likely that Miike had seen The Ring, so this link between the films could be deliberate. Marie in the bath, like Sadako and Samara in the well, may be seen as a point of condensation: not just the object of the quest, but also a symbol of the family breakdown at the heart of the story. The police arrive and remove the corpse. Since Marie’s phone contains all the victims’ numbers, the case seems to be closed. Like Ringu, however, Chakushin ari has a final twist. Nanako is now placed in a foster care home. Traumatised, she no longer speaks, but when Yamashita visited

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her earlier we heard the distinctive ringtone as a song on her teddy bear. Yamashita now returns with Detective Motomiya (Renji Ishibashi) to the care home. The missing videocassette from the camcorder in the Mizunuma apartment has been found. The viewing of the video initiates an impressive piece of cross-cutting, involving three locations and two time periods. Although not edited with the same dynamism as the climax in The Dark, this is nevertheless an equivalent ‘key montage’, one that combines both elucidating and supernatural elements. The video shows it was Mimiko who was harming Nanako: using a heated object, she burnt her sister’s arm. But the film cuts to show this as a flashback, the close camera emphasising Mimiko’s cruel expression. Watching the monitor, Yamashita winces. Cut to Yumi in her shower: she senses something. She bends down; we see Mimiko’s ghost behind her. The effect of the link – Mimiko in the past, burning her sister/Mimiko as ghost in the present, haunting Yumi – is complex. The generic aspects are familiar: the real (ghost) monster has only now been identified and she is already threatening the heroine. But the sudden close shot of Mimiko burning Nanako has other resonances. It was, after all, burning by her mother that led into Yumi’s past traumatic event. It’s as though Mimiko’s sadistic act precipitates her into Yumi’s shower – the link between Mimiko’s sadism, Yumi’s mother’s sadism and Yumi’s childhood suffering is heightened. In the flashback, Mimiko tells the crying Nanako: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take you to the hospital’. Although the line suggests another allusion to Münchausen syndrome by proxy, Mimiko’s cruelty towards Nanako seems more like a very nasty example of childhood bullying. Mimiko suffered from extreme asthma attacks; she wanted Nanako to suffer, too. It is here, still in the flashback, that Marie returns home and realises what Mimiko has been doing. Immediately, Mimiko has an asthma attack. Cut to Yumi drying her hair; the clock on her dressing table starts to go backwards. As the events in the past lead up to Mimiko’s death, so she manipulates present events to bring about Yumi’s. Cut to the care home: Nanako is brought in, and Yamashita says he now knows it was her sister not her mother who was hurting her. Nanako speaks for the first time: ‘But she always gave me sweets afterwards’. Since the victims all died with sweets in their mouths, this is Yamashita’s moment of realisation. He races forward out of shot. Cut to the monitor: in a matched action, Marie races forward and wrests her own cell phone from Mimiko. As she hurls her daughter to the floor, again we go into flashback. Mimiko writhes on the floor, gasping for air. The ringtone song (from Nanako’s off-screen teddy bear) plays. Picking up Nanako, Marie looks at Mimiko and hesitates. Then she carries Nanako

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out of the apartment, leaving Mimiko to die. The song continues over a shot of Yumi still drying her hair. She seems to hear something and switches off the dryer. The song stops. Her clock continues to go backwards, heading towards 7.13. Throughout this montage, there are motifs which echo those in earlier ghost movies. From The Changeling: a tune heard by the dying figure during the primary traumatic event which is then used as a part of the subsequent haunting. From Ringu 2: a young person rendered mute from a traumatic experience who finds her voice when someone finally understands the nature of her trauma. Both these motifs highlight the importance of trauma and its aftermath in the narrative development of these films. From Ringu, a video that reveals the ghost girl’s secret inner world: coded and cryptic there; explicitly malevolent here. Finally, the spooky ghost in the shower comes from Ju-on, but here it is dynamically related to other elements. The cross-cutting also links Yamashita and Marie: as each realises about Mimiko, he/she rushes forward. Symbolically, they are the good parents, hurrying to save the vulnerable child (Nanako; Yumi) from the bad child (Mimiko). In Yamashita’s case, the dynamic is that of a thriller: now he knows who the monster/murderer really is, he has to drive across town to rescue the heroine, who is already under threat. This is a common trope of the serial killer movie, e.g. Copycat (Jon Amiel 1995), Kiss the Girls and The Bone Collector (Phillip Noyce 1999), this last varying the trope in that it is the heroine who must rush to save the disabled hero. In Marie’s case, where she tears the phone, not the weapon, from Mimiko, it is as though she knows the phone somehow gives Mimiko power. This is a reference to the film’s master motif. The deadliness of the cell phone continues even after the victims’ deaths, when their phones dial a number to continue the chain of death calls. There are other associations. On the video, Nanako’s left leg is bandaged below the knee; a reference, we assume, to an earlier inflicted injury. And in the flashback to Yumi’s childhood trauma, she is limping, her left leg bandaged below the knee. The moment when Marie carries Nanako out of the apartment is thus like a reworking in fantasy of Yumi’s own trauma: the mother is really benevolent, and cares for her injured daughter. This is what Yumi would have yearned for. But by doing this, the mother is abandoning Mimiko. Given the omniscient knowledge but perverse logic of ghosts, we might imagine that Yumi’s structural-emotional identification with Nanako was something Mimiko held against her. The two moments when the film switches from showing something on the monitor to a flashback are both triggered by an act of domestic violence.

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Clearly Miike felt these moments required a more immediate, visceral presentation. Equally, they are moments of melodrama: the family is turning against itself, and the repercussions reverberate through the more formulaic supernatural death-curse material. As in a number of ghost films, child abuse is a theme running through Chakushin ari. Not only does it apply to both Yumi’s family and the Mizunumas, but Ritsuko worked in child welfare and, early in the film, Yumi, Yoko and Natsumi all attend a lecture on childhood abuse and bullying. Nevertheless, no clear point of view emerges. That both the self-destructive families are all-female might suggest they have been ‘damaged’ by the absence of a patriarchal figure. However, the only patriarchal figures we see – Detective Motomiya; the TV reporter; Tendo; Professor Hirayama, a TV pundit – are all pointedly useless. Ideologically, the film seems uncertain, as though uneasy about locating positive values anywhere in modern Japan. Only Yumi and Yamashita, pursuing a desperate quest to appease the ghosts of the past, are viewed more affirmatively. Yumi notices that her clock is moving backwards, and so realises the supernatural has invaded her apartment. And so, when she hears a hammering on the door, with Yamashita’s voice calling to her, she hesitates before opening. But, in order to check who is at the door, Yumi has to overcome her phobia and look through the peephole. This confirms her fears: not only does she see Mimiko’s ghost, but immediately a long spike comes through the hole – had Yumi not moved, it would have pierced her eye. This is a variation on a motif in Ju-on and The Grudge, where a figure a woman sees through a peephole turns out not to be there: he was an illusion produced by the ghost. Here the illusion resides in the ghost’s ability to imitate Yamashita’s voice. This motif dates back to the classical Japanese ghost films, e.g. The Mansion of the Ghost Cat. But Mimiko’s deception is more deadly. Repeatedly in ghost melodramas, the ghosts confront the protagonists with their deepest fears, particularly fears concerning death. Yumi has already faced these fears once, when she embraced the Marie/ mother figure. Now this allusion to her own past traumatic event suggests she will have to confront them again. Yumi returns to the living room; Mimiko is sitting on the couch. As Yumi asks ‘Why?’, Mimiko walks towards her, moving in the jerky, spooky way of ghosts. Yumi screams. When Yamashita enters Yumi’s apartment, she seems to be all right. However, as he embraces her, she stabs him. Falling to his knees, he looks in a mirror: in place of Yumi’s reflection, he sees Mimiko. Yumi has been possessed (see Fig. 31). As Yamashita loses consciousness, he hears Yumi speak: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take you to the hospital’.

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We now see Yamashita’s dream: he goes into the Mizunuma apartment, finds Mimiko gasping on the floor, and administers her inhaler to resuscitate her. He wakes in hospital. Yumi mysteriously appears next to his bed; she has a knife behind her back. She bends over to kiss him, but instead transfers a sweet to his mouth. He sucks the sweet. Yumi looks down at him and laughs. Cut to the film’s last shot: a blue sky with scattered clouds. This is a peculiarly enigmatic ending. Endings that stress the nightmare is not over and/or the monster will return are a cliché of the modern horror film. Seen in such a light, this ending suggests that Mimiko is still possessing Yumi, and Yamashita is at her mercy. However, Yumi’s laugh belies this: it’s a happy laugh – she can see Yamashita knows the sweet is a joke (hence his exaggerated sucking), and she’s enjoying his joining in the joke. But the knife belies that: Yumi has come to see him carrying a knife as well as a sweet. In Chakushin ari 2, we are retrospectively given the horror version: Yumi, possessed by Mimiko, subsequently killed Yamashita and went missing, so neither of them were seen again. But this seems no more than a scripting convenience: the filmmakers were keen to develop the material in a completely new direction, and didn’t want to be cluttered up with past complications. The way Chakushin ari 2 implies the death of Yamashita – using a manga drawing of spurting blood – even signals that we should not take the idea too seriously. The key to a positive reading of the ending is in fact the last shot, which refers back to the comment of Ritsuko’s ghost. Yamashita’s sky – or, indeed, Yamashita and Yumi’s sky – is bright and sunny. Given that Yamashita’s whole quest has been to solve the mystery of his sister’s death, and that his dream shows him carry out the very act which would have saved Mimiko and so prevented her becoming a ghost monster, I think we can say he’s earned a happy ending. A similar case for Yumi is harder to make. Whereas she knew how to placate the Marie/mother figure, Mimiko is a more deadly threat. That Yumi was possessed rather than killed by Mimiko could simply suggest Mimiko had other plans for her. However, I don’t think that Yumi at the end is murderous – she seems too happy. A song over the closing credits also complicates matters. Entitled ‘Ikutsuka no sora’ (‘Separate skies’), it is about two lovers going their separate ways. It, too, relates to Ritsuko’s comment and to the last shot: it includes the line, ‘Somewhere beyond loneliness, there’ll be a new sky just for us’. But its last line is, ‘Our footsteps will go on under separate skies’. On the surface, Chakushin ari is both strongly derivative of and structurally inferior to the Ringu films. Unlike Sadako, Mimiko is a monster with

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no real explanation. The film also gets a little too excited about horrible ways of killing young women. However, there is also a great deal of resonant ghost melodrama material, which opens the film up in suggestive ways. A final point is tentative. Since the urban legend idea is abandoned as soon as it is introduced, the significance of the cell phone as the means of transmitting the curse is never interrogated. However, there is perhaps a buried explanation. Cell phone ownership and use shows how interconnected young people (in particular) like to be. However, there are dangers in this: bullying messages can be very unpleasant indeed. Perhaps that is the implicit allusion of these cell phone threats: they are like heightened (monstrous) versions of such bullying. In which case, they, too, may be integrated into the film’s theme of childhood abuse. Although it is highly unlikely these four films would even have been made without Ringu and Ringu 2, a difference is nevertheless already apparent between the South Korean and the Japanese spin-offs. One senses at the end of Phone that, now Jin-hee has achieved revenge, she will be appeased. Whereas in the Ju-on films and Chakushin ari, the ghost(s) will seemingly carry on killing. Moreover, unlike in the Ringu films, where spreading the curse is paramount, killing seems to be these ghosts’ primary concern. Chakushin ari has an ambiguous ending, but at the end of the Ju-on films the ghosts seem to show an undiminished murderousness. This is unusual in ghost movies and aligns the films with horror series such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Candyman. The curse, it seems, cannot be combated, nor the ghosts placated. This also raises the attitude of the authorities to such murderous ghosts. There is a structural point at which the films stop. We do not see the reaction of the Japanese parliament, or even the Japanese press, to the on-air murder of Natsumi in Chakushin ari. We do not learn why the dangerousness of the house in the Ju-on films, which has persisted for years, has not led to an official investigation. In both Ju-on and The Grudge, a policeman acts on his own in trying to burn the house down, but in both films he is killed and the house is saved. Of course, the house itself is now a part of the curse, so it would no doubt be able to protect itself. But no-one seems capable of taking matters further. It’s as though officialdom is paralysed, and the ghosts hold the upper hand.

1. The Changeling. Bath and primary traumatic event. Joseph’s murder by his father.

2. The Shining, 1. Mirror reveals ghost horror. Jack sees what he’s kissing.

3. The Shining, 2. World of the dead. Wendy’s vision of the repressed of the hotel.

4. Ghost Story. Revenant and concealing hair. Alma illuminated by lightning.

5. Lady in White. Ghost creates lightning. Ann and her blazing house.

6. The Discarnates, 1. Benevolent ghost world. In an Ozu-like shot, Harada (right) plays cards with the ghosts of his parents.

7. The Discarnates, 2. Frenzied, levitating ghost. Accompanied by lightning, Kei reveals she is a ghost.

8. Haunted, 1. Dangerous ghost world and incestuous desire. The funereal house. David looks for Christina; Robert’s uncovered portraits of her signal his feelings.

9. Haunted, 2. Benevolent ghost contact. Holding David’s hand, his twin Juliet stops the fire.

10. The Sixth Sense. Freudian anxieties. Clutching a torch, Cole hides in his bedroom tent.

11. Stir of Echoes. Dangerous ghost contact. Tom drawn by Samantha (hand bottom left) into her ghost world; Maggie’s hands (top right) reach to rescue him.

12. Ringu, 1. Curse video. The pointing man.

13. Ringu, 2. The violated television. Sadako emerges to kill Ryuji.

14. Ringu 2. Ghost scene. Shizuko and Sadako re-enact the mirror scene from the curse video.

15. Kokkuri, 1. Past traumatic event. Young Mio watches her mother drown in the sea.

16. Kokkuri, 2. Ghost in bath. Midori’s ghost appears to the teenage Mio in the bath where she drowned. Followed by Mio’s forceful immersion.

17. Memento Mori. Haunting. The huge face of Hyo-shin’s ghost haunts the school through the skylight.

18. In Dreams. Mirror scene. Rebecca’s role in Snow White symbolically anticipates her fate.

19. The Dark. Near-death experience. A light hovers over Sarah as she attempts suicide in New York.

20. What Lies Beneath. Ghost encounter at bath. Claire sees the reflection of Madison’s ghost.

21. The Gift. Ghost in bath. Jessica’s ghost appears to Annie.

22. Dragonfly. Immersion and near-death experience. In the sinking bus, Emily’s ghost reaches out to Joe to show him what happened to her.

23. The Devil’s Backbone. Child ghost and cistern. Santi presides over his territory.

24. The Others. The séance. The unseen Grace animates the medium’s writing paper.

25. The Ring, 1. Message behind wallpaper. Rachel and Noah look at the etching of the tree.

26. The Ring, 2. Child’s drawings. Some of Aidan’s drawings registering the trauma of 9/11.

27. The Ring Two, 1. Well. Samara emerges to annihilate Jake.

28. The Ring Two, 2. Possession in bath. Displacing the water upwards, Samara possesses Aidan.

29. Phone. Dream and long hair. Ji-won dreams she encounters Jin-hee crying on the marital bed.

30. Ju-on. Haunting. Kayako and Toshio haunt Rika in bed.

31. Chakushin ari. Mirror reveals possession. Stabbed, Yamashita sees that Yumi is possessed by Mimiko’s ghost.

32. Dark Water (2002). Watery lift. As Mitsuko as ghost imposes her will, Yoshimi inside the lift looks helplessly at her daughter Ikuko outside.

33. Whispering Corridors. Arrival of ghost. Barefoot and accompanied by flashes of lightning, Jin-ju arrives at the school.

34. Voice. Lesbian victim. The music teacher hanged by a ruthless ghost.

35. Into the Mirror. Body behind a mirror. Accompanied by Woo, Ji-hyun finds her twin’s hidden body.

36. Fragile. Lesbian saviour. Maggie as ghost kisses and resurrects Amy.

37. Gothika. Time-slip. Miranda (foreground left) sees her possessed self, illuminated by lightning, slaughter her husband Doug.

38. Inner Senses. Ghosts invade a computer. Yan sees that the ghosts of Mrs. Chu and her son are behind her.

39. Bhoot. The power of the mirror. The possessed Swati stares at Sanjay; Sarita is out of focus on the left.

40. Ryeong. Immersion and body. In the pool, Ji-won finds Su-in’s preserved body.

41. Sakebi, 1. Haunting. The woman in red haunts Yoshioka in his apartment.

42. Sakebi, 2. Revenant becomes ghost. Harue’s transformation.

43. El orfanato. Doors. The penultimate shot: the doors swing open to signal to Carlos that Laura has found Simón.

44. No-Do. Time-slip and primary traumatic event. Francesca finds herself witnessing the past murders by the Catholic Church.

45. The Awakening, 1. Ghost face thrusts up in cushion. Implicitly, Tom signals to Florence (on the left) his rage that she has had sex with Robert.

46. The Awakening, 2. Past traumatic event. Florence both witnesses and re-experiences her futile childhood attempt to stop her father killing her mother.

47. The Awakening, 3. Closet and hide-and-seek. Tom and the young Florence hide from their demented, murderous father.

48. The Woman in Black (2011). Ghost world and afterlife reunion. In the otherwise deserted station, Arthur and Joseph reunite with Stella.

12. Generic Developments 2: Ghosts in the Woman’s Film The woman’s film is one of the richest of all genres. In Movie 29/30, I discuss the genre within the contexts of (a) melodrama, where I include it within the broad category of ‘melodramas of passion’ (Walker 1982a: 16-19), and (b) the Hollywood f ilms of Max Ophuls (Walker 1982b: 43-60). With a woman and her concerns at the centre of the narrative, the woman’s film typically focuses more on domestic issues than the other genres. Equally, however, the genre frequently offers a critique of the dominant ideology: ‘In general, the woman’s film does not show the heroine as a passive victim in the traditional melodrama vein, but as a victim of patriarchy’ (18). At the same time, ‘Actions, ambitions, success are always complicated for [her] by emotional commitments’ (19). It is above all in the woman’s film where we see a heroine’s sensitivity to emotional issues: the feelings of others; the complexities of moral choices; the difficulties of balancing conflicting concerns. Although my observations about the genre were there restricted to American films, films of other countries where patriarchy is an oppressive force are little different. Many woman’s films are about the heroine as mother, struggling to provide for herself and her child(ren). It is this tradition to which both versions of Dark Water belong. Honogurai mizu no soko kara/Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, Japan, 2002) Honogurai mizu no soko kara translates roughly as ‘From the depths of the gloomy water’; it was released in English-language countries as Dark Water. Confusingly, its Hollywood remake is also called Dark Water. Elsewhere in this book, the films are distinguished by their dates; in this chapter, for convenience, I will refer to the Japanese film as Dark Water, and the remake as Dark Water (2005). The provenance for Dark Water is a 1996 short story by the author of Ring, Koji Suzuki, published in a collection entitled Honogurai mizu no soko kara. The story was translated into English as Floating Water, and is included in the collection Dark Water (Suzuki 2005). It is a typical ghost short story. After divorcee Yoshimi and her six-year-old daughter Ikuko have moved into a Tokyo apartment block, spooky incidents start to occur. She and Ikuko find a child’s red ‘Kitty bag’ on the block’s rooftop; this is thrown away, but returns to the rooftop. Ikuko starts playing in the bath with an

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imaginary friend; the lift behaves strangely. After several such incidents, Yoshimi begins to fear they are being haunted by the ghost of Mitsuko, a girl who disappeared two years ago from another apartment. Her fears are strengthened when she realises Mitsuko vanished on the day the water tank on the rooftop was last cleaned – and its top opened. After vomiting at the thought that the water they have been drinking has been polluted by a body in the tank, Yoshimi has a ‘hallucination’ of Mitsuko floating in filthy bath water. She flees with Ikuko from the apartment block. In expanding the short story into a feature film, scriptwriters Yoshihiro Nakamura and Ken-ichi Suzuki developed it as a typical woman’s film narrative. Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki) is now involved in a bitter custody battle with her ex-husband Hamada (Fumiyo Kohinata) over Ikuko (Rio Kanno). The two mediating officials deciding on custody are introduced early in the film; Yoshimi has to prove to them she can provide for Ikuko and herself. However, Yoshimi is faced not only with a hostile ex-husband, but a whole series of problems. She manages to find an apartment, and a kindergarten for Ikuko, but water leaks from the apartment ceiling, and – because she is a woman – neither the manager of the block nor the estate agent responds to her complaints. During a game of hide-and-seek at school, Ikuko passes out, and becomes mysteriously ill. Such stresses are typical of those faced by the heroine of a woman’s film. In her struggle to achieve independence from Hamada, Yoshimi has to cope with Japanese patriarchy, which is patronising and unsympathetic towards a single mother. She is also an anxious, unassertive person, and she finds it difficult to remain calm in the face of Hamada’s malicious allegations. One telling detail the film takes from the short story is Yoshimi’s past as a copy editor. Some of the novels she had to edit – and thus read repeatedly – were so graphic and sadistic she had a nervous breakdown, and was obliged to seek psychiatric treatment. In the first session with the mediating officials, Yoshimi discovers Hamada has mentioned this treatment to argue that she is an unfit mother. There is a clear ideological thread here: men write ‘graphic and sadistic’ novels that sell, and so publishers want to publish them; the novels are badly written and so a more literate person, here the heroine, is called upon to correct them; the content of the novels leads the heroine to have a breakdown; her husband uses this against her. In addition, events seem to conspire against Yoshimi – a common feature of melodrama. An interview for a new job as a copy editor is chaotically interrupted, and Yoshimi is then late picking Ikuko up from kindergarten. When she arrives at the school, it is closed and Ikuko is not there. Yoshimi’s

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attention is drawn to a poster about a girl, Mitsuko, who went missing in July 1999 – a chilling hint of what might have happened to Ikuko. In fact, Hamada has been summoned to collect her, but when Yoshimi catches up with them, there is a parental tug-of-war, as Yoshimi pulls Ikuko away from Hamada. At the next meeting with the mediating officials, Hamada exaggerates the incident to provide ammunition against Yoshimi: she’s late ‘almost every day’ in picking Ikuko up from school; she ‘yanked Ikuko’s arm and dislocated her shoulder’. Yoshimi denies the accusations but becomes distraught, reinforcing the sense that she is unable to cope. At this point, a sympathetic man, the lawyer Kishida (Shigemitsu Ogi), appears and helps Yoshimi. When she discovers the leaking ceiling derives from a flood in the empty apartment above hers – someone had turned on the taps – Kishida sorts it out, forcing both the manager and the agent to accept their responsibilities and ensuring that Yoshimi’s ceiling is redecorated. Were this a conventional woman’s film, Kishida would continue to fulfil a crucial stabilising role in the heroine’s life, and could even turn out to be a romantic prospect. It is the ghost elements that disturb this. Yoshimi and Ikuko are in fact being haunted by the ghost of Mitsuko (Mirei Oguchi), and she is responsible both for the flooded upstairs apartment and the incident at the kindergarten when Ikuko passes out. She also provokes tensions between Yoshimi and Ikuko. Ikuko is upset when her mother fails to pick her up after school, but on the way home, mother and daughter reconcile. Ikuko says, ‘I don’t need anyone but you’; Yoshimi responds, ‘I can handle anything so long as you’re with me’. This is a crucial woman’s film scene: mother and daughter affirming their mutual dependence. However, when they return home, Mitsuko prompts another rupture. The red Kitty bag (a bright vinyl bag bearing the name Mimiko and a cartoon rabbit logo) has already made two appearances, and now, as Yoshimi and Ikuko go to the roof, it appears again. Ikuko innocently runs to pick it up, but Yoshimi pulls her away so forcefully Ikuko cries out in pain. It’s as though Mitsuko knows Yoshimi’s vulnerability and is able to exploit it. Although Yoshimi has been catching glimpses in the apartment block of the ghost-like presence of a little girl in a yellow raincoat, it is some time before she admits to herself what is going on. Even when she hears Ikuko in the bath talking to an invisible friend called Mitsuko, she fails to connect the name with the Mitsuko on the poster – who went missing wearing a yellow raincoat. Instead, Yoshimi blames Hamada for moving the Kitty bag, and assaults him in front of the mediating officials.

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One explanation for Yoshimi’s reluctance to face up to the nature of the mysterious events would seem to lie in her childhood. The film begins with Yoshimi as a little girl (Yukiko Ikari), waiting forlornly on a rainy day for her mother to come and pick her up after school. It then cuts to Yoshimi as an adult, with the same melancholy expression. She is filmed through a rainsplattered window, and it’s as though the rain represents her inner tears. The juxtaposition summarises the deep unhappiness in Yoshimi. As a child, she was forever being ‘abandoned’ by her mother. But Yoshimi learns, from the kindergarten principal, that Mitsuko, too, had been abandoned by her mother. Yoshimi then has a dream in which Mitsuko is waiting to be picked up from the kindergarten. No one comes, so Mitsuko walks home – in the rain that occurs in most scenes in Dark Water. In the apartment block, she enters the lift at the same time as two workmen; at that point, Yoshimi wakes up, roused by water dripping on her from the ceiling. The ghost-induced dream connects Mitsuko to Yoshimi’s inner world: it reminds her of her own childhood; it warns her of the consequences of not coming to pick up Ikuko. We will learn later that it shows Mitsuko on the day she died. Although the workmen going to clean the water tank are not shown to be responsible – except through carelessness in leaving the tank for a time with its cover off – ending the dream on an image of a little girl getting into a lift with two men communicates unease. More specifically, it’s as though Yoshimi is seeing, through Mitsuko, echoes of her own abandonment as a child, and this is too painful for her to contemplate. Her fears are reinforced when she wakes and finds Ikuko is missing. As she frantically searches the building, she is led to the upstairs apartment: it is here she finds it flooded. Ikuko is wandering around in the apartment in a daze; Mitsuko is a ghostly presence in a corner. The label outside the apartment reveals that Mitsuko used to live there. Yoshimi starts to move them out, telling Kishida, ‘Mitsuko has returned to the apartment upstairs and now she’s trying to take Ikuko away’. But Kishida advises her that another move would jeopardise her custody case, and he proceeds to find rational explanations for all the mysterious incidents. Yoshimi accepts his explanations. Although Kishida is sympathetic, he, too, is a representative of Japanese patriarchy, and his view of the situation is skewed: Yoshimi is seeing things. Typically of a woman’s film, Yoshimi’s own understanding of the events is much closer to the truth. But only at the climax does she realise that not only is Mitsuko responsible for the incidents (the flooding; the appearances of the Kitty bag), but also, like most ghosts, she has an agenda – and she is utterly ruthless in carrying it out.

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The climax begins when Yoshimi finds the Kitty bag inside Ikuko’s school bag. Seizing hold of the Kitty bag, Yoshimi has a psychic flashback of it falling into water. Leaving Ikuko in the apartment, she goes to investigate the water tank on the roof. The film starts to cross-cut between Yoshimi on the roof and Ikuko in the apartment. Another example of a key montage, this sequence is structurally similar to that at the climax of Chakushin ari. Again the cutting is between one place, where (here psychic) flashbacks reveal the primary traumatic event to the hero/heroine, and another, where the ghost girl threatens her next victim. Moreover, the victim is more vulnerable because of the absence of the hero/heroine. However, because of the specific dramatic conflict going on in Dark Water – Mitsuko wants to displace Ikuko, and claim Yoshimi as her mother – the dynamic of the cross-cutting here is simpler. On the roof, Yoshimi learns, through a series of psychic flashbacks, how Mitsuko drowned in the water tank. In the apartment, Mitsuko supernaturally fills the bath with filthy water. The sequence on the roof climaxes with thumps from within the tank that are so powerful they bulge out the metal – a translation of the terrifying thumps from Joseph’s ghost in The Changeling into a physical manifestation. The sequence in the apartment climaxes with Mitsuko’s ghostly hands coming up from the filthy bathwater and pulling Ikuko down into it. Yoshimi races back to the apartment and, thinking she is rescuing Ikuko, carries her unconscious body out to the lift. But the lift has already been established as part of Mitsuko’s domain. Mitsuko first makes her presence known to Yoshimi in the lift; a CCTV monitor in the manager’s office keeps showing a small shadowy figure in the lift; water floods it constantly, and Mitsuko has demonstrated her power to move it at will. And now, as Yoshimi waits anxiously for the lift to start, water again pours down from the lift roof. The water signals Mitsuko’s power: the lift will not start until matters have been resolved to her satisfaction. Seeing Yukiko stagger out of the apartment, Yoshimi discovers with a shock that the girl she rescued is Mitsuko. Mitsuko clutches Yoshimi, crying ‘Mama!’ Ikuko reaches the lift, where the falling water creates a curtain – both Yoshimi and Ikuko look at each other through this curtain. As in Kokkuri, the curtain marks off the ghost world – the world inside the lift (see Fig. 32). As Ikuko watches in anguish, Yoshimi realises what she must do, and tells the clutching Mitsuko, ‘I’m your mother’. Mitsuko’s grasp relaxes; Yoshimi embraces her – as Reiko embraced Sadako in the well. The lift doors close across the curtain of water; Ikuko, and the camera, are now shut out. Through the glass in the doors, mother and daughter exchange agonised looks. The lift goes up to the top

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floor; Ikuko runs after it. But when its doors open, water alone floods out. The lift is empty. Lifts and lift shafts are linked to ghostly activities in a number of films – e.g. Riget, Phone, Ju-on and Chakushin ari – but it is Dark Water, and, later, Voice, that use the setting most extensively. The deluge of water that pours out and drenches Ikuko may be seen as the ghost motif equivalent of the blood that floods out of the elevator doors in The Shining. But in Dark Water, the lift is also a portal, a portal through which Yoshimi has passed into the ghost world. The water washing over Ikuko signals Mitsuko’s triumph: she has taken her mother. Ikuko is left lying on the floor, helplessly crying ‘Mama!’ It is not uncommon in the woman’s film for a mother to sacrifice her own happiness for that of those she loves – Stella Dallas (King Vidor 1937) and The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding 1939) are famous examples where the sacrifice is for her daughter. But it is rare for the sacrifice to go so far as the mother’s death. Nevertheless, in this very fine resolution to Dark Water, it is possible that the filmmakers wished to allude to the ending of Stella Dallas, where Stella (Barbara Stanwyck), outside in the rain, watches through the window as her daughter Laurel (Anne Shirley) is married. In Dark Water, the falling water evokes rain, and here both mother and daughter look at each other through the window as the sacrifice is made, thus rendering its impact far more powerful. Yet Dark Water is also aware that Ikuko is perhaps too young to grasp that Yoshimi is abandoning her to save her. And so, there is an epilogue. Ten years later, a teenage Ikuko (Asami Mizukawa) returns to the now derelict building, and finds the apartment much the same. Then Yoshimi appears. It is only now, as Ikuko talks to her, that she understands the extent of her mother’s sacrifice. At first, she naïvely assumes Yoshimi has been living in the apartment on her own all these years, and eagerly asks if she can come and live with her. Then she realises there is something strange about the way Yoshimi is speaking to her. Yoshimi is not alone. We see Mitsuko in the shadows behind Ikuko; she vanishes as Ikuko turns. Then Yoshimi also vanishes; she, too, is a ghost. As Ikuko walks away from the apartment block, we hear her voice-over: ‘My mother was here all that time protecting me’. Dark Water is extraordinarily sad. This sadness is apparent from the beginning: Yoshimi as a little girl waiting for a mother who will never come. Norman O. Brown writes: ‘It is because the child loves the mother so much that it feels separation from the mother as death’ ([1959] 1968: 107). Dark Water is haunted by the death drive, which is what Mitsuko, whose

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childhood was so like Yoshimi’s, primarily embodies. She is like Yoshimi’s childhood self come to claim her. Because of the lasting effect of Yoshimi’s childhood trauma (of separation from her mother), Brown’s observation may in fact be extended. As an adult, Yoshimi experiences the agonies of parent-child separation doubly: from her own point of view as a mother and, through identification, from the point of view of Ikuko. When she is delayed in her job interview, Yoshimi tries to phone Ikuko’s school to let them know. At this point, there is a flashback to herself as a child waiting at school: a teacher receives a call to say her mother won’t be coming. Appalled that she is putting Ikuko in the same position, Yoshimi abruptly leaves the publishers. In the meantime, whilst waiting for her mother, Ikuko wanders out of the school. Again it is raining and, across the road, she sees Mitsuko in her yellow raincoat observing her. That evening Yoshimi finds Ikuko talking in the bath to an invisible Mitsuko. Mitsuko has moved into the space created by Yoshimi’s lateness, and made friends with Ikuko. Mitsuko’s ability to connect with Yoshimi’s own unhappiness makes her a peculiarly potent ghost: ultimately, Yoshimi is helpless against her. It is also significant that water should play such a major part in the film. As noted, water is the element most associated with ghosts, but in Dark Water it is almost everywhere, as though leaking out from the ghost world to engulf both Yoshimi and Ikuko – which is what finally occurs. So often a symbol of the unconscious, water here – dark water – becomes like a symbol of death. Just as Dark Water darkens a traditional mother-daughter woman’s film narrative by virtue of its ghost, so it offers a ghost movie variation on a famous mother-daughter horror narrative. The basic premise of the film echoes The Exorcist: a recently divorced woman moves with her daughter into a new house/apartment; a malevolent entity emanating originally from the attic/upstairs seems bent on harming the daughter. The invasive water in Dark Water could be seen as the ghost movie equivalent of, first, the severe drop in temperature brought about by the demon’s presence in the bedroom of twelve-year-old Regan, then the violent supernatural disturbances in the room. The rhetoric of The Exorcist is of course that of a religious horror movie: frenzied demonic possession; grotesque sexualisation of a pubescent girl; blasphemy; the spewing forth of foul bodily fluids and a climax involving an exorcism and priest murder. The ghost’s activities in Dark Water have nothing of this frenzy, but they are relentless, and whereas in The Exorcist it is a priest who sacrifices his life to save the daughter, in Dark Water, it is her mother, leading to a far more downbeat ending.

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Dark Water is also crucially about modern alienation: the bleakness of the urban world in which the newly divorced Yoshimi is now living. There is a sense that Mitsuko’s activities also in part stand in for the stresses of that world – like an externalisation of the hostility of Hamada, and the indifference of society towards someone in Yoshimi’s position. It is Mitsuko’s actions that push Yoshimi to the point where she becomes the ‘irrational’ woman Hamada claims she is. Although we do see two elderly women gossiping in the lobby at one point, there is otherwise no sign that anyone else lives in the apartment block, which thus becomes almost an allegorical space: the concrete wasteland of urban living. Dark Water (Walter Salles, US, 2005) It is much the same in Dark Water (2005), which was scripted by Rafael Yglesias as an unusually close remake of the original. Here the apartment block is on Roosevelt Island, situated between Manhattan and Queens, but it is similarly degraded. It is also similarly haunted. Although Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) does not see Natasha (Perla Haney-Jardine) as much as Yoshimi sees Mitsuko, she is made aware of her. Natasha insinuates herself as the invisible friend of Dahlia’s daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade), and gives Ceci information that, in the omniscient way of ghosts, she just happens to know, such as Dahlia’s own childhood abandonment by her mother. Equally, she appears to Dahlia in the latter’s dreams, where she substitutes herself for Ceci, hiding her own identity behind Ceci’s except when Dahlia is not looking at her. In one ghost-induced dream, Dahlia goes into the upstairs apartment and discovers a woman, whom we initially take to be Natasha’s mother, vomiting into the toilet. But the woman turns into Dahlia’s own mother. Immediately, Dahlia shows concern: ‘Let me help you’. But the woman is vicious: ‘Get away from me! I hate you!’ Dahlia is expelled into the hall, where water cascades down on her to dramatise her distress. A striking point here is the way the scene echoes Yumi’s confrontation with the ghostly apparition of her mother in the derelict hospital in Chakushin ari. Again, this draws attention to the melodramatic concerns of these films. In both these cases, the heroine is confronted with the monstrous mother from her childhood, the figure who left her with psychological scars she still carries. But, unlike Yumi, Dahlia fails in her attempt to reconcile with her mother. Dark Water (2005) is in fact an excellent remake. The sense that Natasha is Dahlia’s childhood self come to claim her is here strengthened by the

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casting: Perla Haney-Jardine also plays the young Dahlia. In addition, the sense of alienation felt by Yoshimi is arguably felt even more strongly by Dahlia. Here the leaking ceiling seems in itself like a malevolent force, impossible to bring under control, and it drives Dahlia to the verge of a nervous breakdown. When Dahlia climbs the water tower, unlike Yoshimi, she actually looks into the water tank – and sees Natasha’s body. The discovery is like a confirmation of the existential bleakness of the world: a little girl went missing, and each of her parents chose to assume she was with the other. Neither bothered to check. At the climax of the film, Natasha turns openly ruthless. Shutting Dahlia out behind shatterproof glass, she begins to drown Ceci in the bath in front of her. Simultaneously, water supernaturally cascades down on Dahlia. As Dahlia becomes increasingly desperate in her attempts to break the glass, she utters the cry of despair of the modern ghost movie: ‘What do you want?’ She then tells Natasha she will be her mother. As in The Ring Two, the link with The Exorcist is here made explicit: Dahlia’s last words to Natasha are, ‘Take me!’, the exhortation addressed by Father Karras to the demon inside Regan. Only in its ending is Dark Water (2005) markedly less compelling than the original. Here the epilogue takes place a mere three weeks after the main action. Ceci and her father Kyle (Dougray Scott) are moving her possessions out of the apartment; Dahlia as ghost appears in the elevator to Ceci and reassures her that, ‘Whenever you need me, I’m here’. The scene is quite touching, but it has nothing of the bleakness and power of the ending of Dark Water. Mother-daughter relationships have a privileged place in the woman’s film, and the final scene between them in Dark Water conveys as keen a sense of loss as in any of the great examples of the past. Half Light (Craig Rosenberg, Germany/US, 2006) Scripted by its director, Half Light is a very different sort of film from Dark Water, both in its basic story and its ghost elements. It was marketed, like What Lies Beneath, as a Hitchcockian thriller with a supernatural twist, but here the Hitchcock elements are more nuanced. Although the film does include some macabre echoes of lines from Psycho, it is not until some way into the narrative that the background plot, and the significant Hitchcock influence, emerges. Half Light can then be seen to be a modern version of a type of film, popular in the 1940s and early 1950s, that mixed both film noir and the woman’s film, and in which certain Hitchcock films featured prominently.

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After the accidental death by drowning of her young son Thomas (Beans Balawi), famous American crime novelist Rachel Carson (Demi Moore) retreats from her London home to an isolated cottage on the Scottish coast to try and complete her latest novel. But she finds herself haunted by Thomas. When he appears and chides her for not coming out to play (had she done so on the day he fell into the canal, she could have saved him), this could be a hallucination. But there are other manifestations, and local psychic Morag (Therese Bradley) tells Rachel she can see Thomas’s ghost following her around. But it is not until late in the film that Morag tells Rachel why: Thomas wants to warn her because her life is in danger. Like other psychics in these films, Morag is right. Rachel’s estranged husband Brian (Henry Ian Cusick) and her friend Sharon (Kate Isitt) are planning to murder her for her money. They have hired a man called Patrick (Hans Matheson) to impersonate local lighthouse keeper Angus McCulloch. As Angus, Patrick seduces Rachel, but then disappears. Rachel now learns from the locals that Angus McCulloch has been dead for seven years, having committed suicide at the lighthouse after a bloody fight with his wife’s lover left both wife and lover dead. Moreover, there is no longer any keeper: the lighthouse is now automated. Rachel cannot believe that she has been having an affair with a ghost; equally she resists the locals’ assumption that she has been fantasising. However, she also fails to work out what is really going on which, since she is a mystery novelist, is a serious narrative weakness. Half Light is in fact a rare contemporary example of a ‘persecuted wife’ film, a noir woman’s film that flourished in particular in a cycle during the wartime and immediate post-war years. First identified by Thomas Elsaesser (who calls the films ‘Freudian feminist melodramas’) in ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’ (1972: 11), the cycle has received occasional critical attention over the years (see Walsh 1984: 176-185; Doane 1987: 123-154; Walker 1990: 16-30; Britton 1992: 38-41). Hitchcock contributed three films to the cycle, Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1942) and Notorious (1946), but it is Gaslight (Thorold Dickinson, GB, 1940), its Hollywood remake Gaslight (George Cukor 1944), and Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur 1944) that are the more significant predecessors to Half Light. In those films, too, the husband’s plot against the heroine is designed either to drive her insane or to make her seem insane. Her murder can then be staged as a plausible suicide. The ghost elements return towards the end. By the time Morag warns Rachel, the trap against her is ready to be sprung, and Brian and Sharon chloroform her and throw her weighted body into the sea. But she is saved by a communication from Thomas: as she sinks, she hears his voice repeat

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something his ghost had communicated earlier, ‘Look behind you’. She turns to see the dropped key that enables her to free herself from the anchor. Rachel and the three who plotted against her are then drawn to the lighthouse for a climax that echoes the fight seven years ago. At this point, we discover that the ghost of the real Angus is in the lighthouse – and it steps in to save Rachel. We do not see its face, but the ghost possesses Patrick, kills Brian, and then makes Patrick commit suicide. In fact, films associating lighthouses with ghostly activity go back to the silent era, e.g. Out Yonder (Ralph Ince 1919). Subsequent examples include Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle 1949), The Fog (1979) and El orfanato. In the ghost comedy Casper (Brad Silberling 1995), the animated ghost boy Casper takes Kat (Christine Ricci) to his favourite place: sitting on the top of a lighthouse, looking out to sea at night. Equally, it is a lighthouse that leads Rachel in The Ring to Moesko Island – where she learns about the ghost girl. Yet why there should be such an association is not immediately apparent. Each of these cases is different. It’s as though the isolated setting of the lighthouse, as well as its liminal position between land and sea somehow opens the way to ghostly happenings – ghosts, too, live in a liminal world. The importance of the liminal to the symbolism of a lighthouse also occurs in Paperhouse (Bernard Rose, GB, 1988), where the lighthouse is a transitional space between life and death. Although Half Light does not produce a lighthouse ghost until the climax, the ghost’s entrance is nevertheless impressive. In Half Light, the ghost elements are nevertheless secondary to the persecuted wife plot. They are also, perhaps, a little half-baked, being used primarily as plot conveniences. An early ghost moment does however have resonances. Rachel dreams Thomas is trying to drown her by pulling her down into the sea by her legs. This suggests, first, Rachel’s guilt for Thomas’s death, but there are other overtones. Since it anticipates how she will subsequently be pulled down by the anchor, it could also be a ghost’s warning: Thomas has penetrated Rachel’s dream in order to dramatise a future threat to her life. But Thomas is also enacting that most familiar of all ghost wishes – that the person he loves join him in death. The various possible interpretations are held in tension. The Marsh (Jordan Barker, Canada/ US, 2006) The Marsh may be seen as a companion film to Half Light. Again a famous novelist, here Claire Holloway (Gabrielle Anwar), goes to an isolated house in a remote area to write; again she is subjected to ghostly events

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within the house; again the locals seem friendly but make her feel uneasy. However, despite Claire’s independence and the fact that she is a children’s author with a close rapport with her readers – in the pre-credits sequence, she reads from her latest book, The Swamp, to a group of children in a library – this is not really a woman’s film. In this case – the script is by Michael Stokes – the ghost elements dominate. During the credits sequence, we see Claire’s recurring dream, in which a little girl in a white nightdress flees from a house into a marsh. Also wearing a white nightdress, Claire runs after the girl, encountering a young man who terrifies her. As she sinks into the swamp, she wakes up. Whilst she sleeps, Claire is being monitored: an electroencephalograph registers her brain’s activity. An ensuing session with a doctor reveals that Claire is very disturbed by the dream, but we learn no more. Only at the film’s climax do we discover the dream’s import. It is in fact a censored version of a repressed childhood incident that was both her own past traumatic event and the primary traumatic event. This is an unusually sophisticated reworking of (pre-) credits sequences which show elliptical versions of those events. The dream is troubling Claire because the repressed memory is trying to force its way into her consciousness. In 1982, eight-year-old twins Claire and Rose (both played by Niamh Wilson) were taken to the empty Rose Marsh Farm by their teenage babysitter Mercy (Jessica Greco), who went in the company of three teenage boys: Noah, Ernie and Brendan. As the twins played hide-and-seek, Brendan (Joe Dinicol) came across Rose. Evidently a highly disturbed young man, Brendan killed her, an act witnessed by a distraught Claire as she hid in a cupboard. The other three teenagers burst into the room, and the enraged Mercy had to be prevented from shooting Brendan with a derringer he had brought to the house. As the four debated hysterically what to do, Claire came out of the cupboard and shot Brendan dead with the gun. Noah, Ernie and Mercy buried Brendan’s and Rose’s bodies in the swamp beside the house; Philip Manville, Brendan’s father and the town’s most powerful man, ensured the matter was hushed up. Adopted after the death of her parents into another family, Claire herself forgot all about the incident – even that she had once had a twin. Like her namesake in In Dreams, Claire also illustrates her stories, and much of the imagery comes from her recurring dream. It is equally her dream that leads her back to Rose Marsh Farm. Watching a television documentary, Claire sees the house from her dream. Locating it, she rents it and moves in to write. But she finds herself haunted, by the ghosts of a little girl in a nightdress (Rose) and a nasty-looking teenage boy (Brendan).

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The girl appeals to her by name, but Claire has no recollection of her, and so no idea what she wants. Some of the ghosts’ appearances seem to be in time-slips, with the studio where Claire works returning to its old role as a nursery, and so the house may be seen as a ghost world. Claire enlists the help of paranormal consultant Hunt (Forest Whitaker). He deduces that a door Claire had rehung at the entrance to the studio is a portal, and its restoration has prompted the ghosts to return. A number of ghost melodramas are referenced: one is Ghost Story. The teenagers who disposed of the bodies are now about forty, but they still live in Marshville, the local town and, like the elderly members of the Chowder Society, they fear the past murders and cover-up may yet be exposed. We deduce that they know the Claire who has moved into Rose Marsh Farm was the Claire involved in the original incident, and Noah (Justin Louis), now editor of the local newspaper, fakes an old newspaper report to try and throw her off the scent. Likewise as in Ghost Story, one by one the three are ‘dealt with’ by the ghost girl. The first to be killed is Ernie (Kenner Ames). Rose spooks him in his store, and then contrives to hang him with the wiring from a Christmas tree. But she stages this so Claire, shut outside the store, sees through the door window what is happening. As in Haunted, it is as though a character looking in through a window is shocked by being confronted with a repressed element of his/her inner world. Claire has already half recognised Ernie as the scary teenager in her recurring dream, and here she sees a dramatic representation of what is repressed by the manifest content of the dream: she killed someone. After Rose has also contrived to kill Mercy (Brooke Johnson) in her barn, Claire, who has identified Brendan as the male ghost from old photographs, goes to see his father (Peter MacNeill). But Philip, too, is anxious the past remains buried, and he turns to Noah for help. The ruthlessness of those with something to hide now becomes apparent. With Philip’s tacit consent, Noah sets out to murder Claire. One aspect of The Marsh can now be seen to echo a film noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone 1946). There Sam (Van Heflin) returns to the small town of his childhood, where powerful figures within the town think he knows about a murder that occurred when they were children but was then covered up. Fearful that he will expose them, they have him beaten up. In both cases, it’s as though the returning figure embodies the guilt of those who have remained in the town. Philip fears his son will be exposed not only as a murderer, but also as a paedophile: Brendan’s assault on Rose was probably sexual.

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Like a number of ghost melodramas, The Marsh has two climactic sequences, the first in the marsh, when Noah tries to kill Claire; the second in the house, when Claire and Hunt rescue Rose from Brendan. However, whereas the events up to this point have been developed with some care, the film now becomes markedly more conventional (the sequence in the marsh) and awkwardly staged (the climax in the house). Nevertheless, there are still a couple of points of interest. After Hunt has saved Claire from Noah’s murder attempt, and Rose has spooked Noah so it is he who is drowned in the marsh, Claire and Hunt return to the house. Philip now relents, and provides Claire and Hunt with a blanket (significantly, a child’s comforter) to help send Brendan ‘back’. One of the more unusual ghost melodrama motifs now comes into play. At a key point in What Lies Beneath, Phone and Gothika, a woman or girl enters the haunted house barefooted and soaked through, her physical state echoing that of the ghost. Crucially, in none of the films does this figure, in two cases the heroine, stop to put on dry clothes. It is similar here. Having been submerged, like Rose’s body, in the marsh, Claire enters the house covered in mud. Again, she does not stop to change, but she does cast off a couple of outer layers of muddy clothing. The motif is preserved, but the actress does not look too unglamorously muddy as she moves into the climactic scene. Claire now identifies the ghost girl, remembers her own part in this past, and realises what Rose wants. Her quest thus echoes the heroine’s at the climax of both In Dreams and The Dark: she seeks to rescue a little girl from the clutches of a malevolent male. Moreover, as with David in Haunted, the ghost girl turns out to be her twin sister. After Brendan, with Hunt and the blanket’s help, has been despatched back through the portal, Rose appears by the marsh to wave goodbye to Claire – a moment that echoes Juliet’s farewell to David in Haunted. Despite weaknesses, The Marsh for the most part shows an intelligent engagement with the generic material of the ghost melodrama cycle. Not only does it include a number of familiar motifs – a mirror in which the ghosts first appear; a nursery; a door as a portal; time-slips; hide-and-seek – it also includes something unusual for a Western ghost movie: a scary male ghost.

13. Ghosts and Institutions 1: South Korea The School The Yeogo goedam films Certain institutions are peculiarly suited to melodramatic representation. Extreme examples would be prisons and mental hospitals. With their forcible incarceration, rigid rules and overall sense of claustrophobia, such institutions create a pressure on the inmates, the sort of pressure that triggers the emotional and violent outbursts of melodrama. The same may be said of certain enclosed military worlds, such as the submarine in Below. Though less extreme, strict school systems as in South Korea may serve to generate similar tensions. This is shown quite forcefully in the Yeogo goedam (‘high-school girls’ ghost story’) films. These constitute a highly distinctive series of ghost melodramas. Beginning with Yeogo goedam/Whispering Corridors (1998), the series has to date reached Yeogo goedam 5/A Blood Pledge (2009). In Chapter 6, I have already discussed the second and most impressive film in the series, Memento Mori (1999). The third and fourth films are Wishing Stairs (Yun Jae-yeon 2003) and Voice (2005). Each film is self-contained: there are no specific continuities within the series other than those pertaining to genre and to the nature of the school system itself. Apart from Wishing Stairs, the films are all set in day schools, but although pupils and teachers go home at night, the narrative rarely leaves the schools – not until A Blood Pledge are there major scenes outside the school. Equally, only in A Blood Pledge do boys become an issue: although there are a few male teachers, this is overwhelmingly a female world. Collectively, the films deal primarily with the complexities of the relationships between the girls: the intense but often shifting friendships; the individual aspirations; the insecurities; the petty disputes; the hierarchical conflicts; the sexual tensions; the bitchiness; the gossip; the bullying and many other features. As in Memento Mori, emotionalism runs like a current through the girls’ interactions, and it’s as though the ghosts in the films arise partly out of the complex of teenage angst and help to express it. At the same time, the films are also about the schools as educational establishments. A school is another institution with rules and hierarchies, where (here young) people are forcibly gathered together whether they

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wish to be there or not. The Korean school days are also punitively long, with evening ‘voluntary study’ (which is rarely voluntary) keeping the girls at their desks until around 10 p.m. In addition, the academic pressures on the girls can be severe. These elements, too, contribute to a heightened melodramatic representation. We might expect the ghosts in these schools also serve to reveal the ideological fault lines: the points where the institution is particularly under strain. As melodramas, the films are different from the majority of American high-school movies. Even those US high-school movies which focus on the girls’ (frequently bitchy) relationships are rarely melodramas. First, set in co-educational establishments and featuring scenes outside the school, they lack the claustrophobia of the Korean movies. Second, they typically view high school more ironically: in general, the pupils are not oppressed by the system. Third, although the films may well include melodramatic incidents, overall most are inflected towards comedy. Whether musicals, e.g. Grease (Randall Kleiser 1978), naturalistic comedy-dramas, e.g. Some Kind of Wonderful (Howard Deutsch 1987), black comedies, e.g. Heathers (Michael Lehmann 1988) or, more recently, satirical comedies such as Mean Girls (Mark Waters 2004) and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (Sara Sugarman 2004), both with Lindsay Lohan, the films tend to be inherently upbeat. Fourth, through the energy and drive of these films’ young female stars in particular, the bitchiness is overcome – the girls are not defeated by the cruelties of their peers. There are nevertheless exceptions. Occasionally horror films are set in American high schools, Carrie (1976) being the seminal example. And Carrie should really be seen as a generic hybrid, combining horror and melodrama. The primarily school-based Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubal Kuzui 1992) prompted the long-running (1997-2003) Buffy TV series, which also includes melodrama along with the horror. The Faculty (Robert Rodriguez 1998) is a science-fiction horror movie set in an Ohio high school. Finally there is an occasional melodrama amongst these modern American high-school films, e.g. Loving Annabelle (2006). Set in an all-girls’ Catholic boarding school and with a lesbian theme, this is a special case, mentioned briefly in relation to Memento Mori. The two main films discussed here – Whispering Corridors and Voice – complement the discussion of Memento Mori. Whispering Corridors merits consideration as the film that initiated the series, and Voice, like Memento Mori, is a remarkable ghost film in its own right. For reasons of economy, I have excluded Wishing Stairs and make only a brief reference to A Blood Pledge. Set in an arts institute and focusing mainly on ballet

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students, Wishing Stairs is the weakest of the five films, and it offers little that is original. Again the girl who becomes a ghost kills herself, and again she had unrequited lesbian feelings for a friend. But her haunting, which focuses on just two girls, has little charge. Moreover, the film is relentlessly pessimistic: it concentrates on just four girls, and all of them die. With a template that rapidly proved commercially successful in the domestic market, the Yeogo goedam films seem to have been a training ground for young Korean directors – and, of course, the girls who act in them – but they are by no means formulaic in the manner of the familiar American horror franchises. Each film takes a different slant on the highschool setting; each ghost has a different agenda. Whispering Corridors (Park Ki-hyeong 1998) Scripted by its director and In Jung-ok, Whispering Corridors was seen by its makers and by critics at the time as a horror movie (see Totaro and Rist 2001; Black 2003). Certainly it begins like a horror film, with a bloody (ghost) murder, and there are a couple of later horror scenes. But the film’s central focus is on the relationships – between the girls themselves, and between girls and teachers – within the school setting, relationships which, in the highly pressured setting of the South Korean high school system, are represented as melodrama. Like Ringu, the film starts with a scene which establishes both the enigma and the murderousness of the ghost. Set at night, the opening shots show a barefoot schoolgirl ghost, accompanied by flashes of lightning, arrive outside the main school building. We do not see her face (see Fig. 33). Inside, Mrs Park (Lee Yong-nyeo) does some calculations involving dates, and consults the yearbooks for 1993 and 1996. She then phones her colleague Eun-young with a cryptic message: ‘Jin-ju is here… She’s definitely dead, but she’s here. She’s been here all along’. She is cut off, and confronted by the ghost, whom we only glimpse as a reflection in one of her spectacle lenses. She is then hanged, a hanging which mysteriously turns rather bloody. This bloodiness is a rather crude signifier of ‘horror’ – blood comes and goes throughout the film in an oddly random way. The next day, the body is found hanging from a walkway bridge. The police are said to be investigating, but we see nothing of this. Despite the bloodiness of the body, the death is passed off as suicide. A new teacher who, nine years ago, was a pupil at the school, Eun-young (Lee Mi-youn) becomes by default the investigative figure: she wants to make sense of Mrs Park’s final phone call. Flashbacks reveal that Eun-young

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and Jin-ju had been friends at school, but Mrs Park turned the other girls against Jin-ju because her mother was a shaman. Locked by her classmates in an art room in the dark, Jin-ju died from a chisel wound – it was assumed this was self-inflicted. Eun-young feels guilty about the death – she could have rescued her friend. Eun-young then learns from Mr Oh (Park Yong-soo) that Jin-ju’s ghost supposedly haunts the old art room, now a storeroom. Moreover, since Jin-ju’s face is concealed in the flashbacks, it is implied that she is not just a night-time ghost, but also a daytime pupil we might recognise. That Jin-ju was the daughter of a shaman is perhaps relevant to her ghostly identity. Shamanism was the ancient religion of Korea, and it still has adherents, especially amongst the poorer people. Art Black maintains that the schoolgirl heroine Ji-oh (Kim Gyu-ri) is also the daughter of a shaman (2003: 193), but the film merely suggests that she can summon the spirits. However, in a scene where she attempts to do this for So-young (Park Jin-hee), academically the top student, other girls in the class, fascinated, gather to watch. The scene illustrates the readiness of the girls to accept the spirit world. Nevertheless, after the opening sequence, the ghost story moves into the background, and the film concentrates on one class in the 12th grade (or high school third grade). As represented in the film, the South Korean educational system is brutal. Not only are the girls kept at school until late evening, the teachers can be vicious. Mrs Park’s victimisation of Jin-ju is shown in the flashbacks. Her replacement as the ‘homeroom teacher’ of the class, Mr Oh, is even worse. He repeatedly bullies the girls, and when Ji-oh does a painting that displeases him – it was ‘inspired by’ her last sight of Mrs Park – he not only rips the painting to pieces but savagely assaults her. In the meantime, he has been openly fondling So-young, who is repelled by this, but helpless. The friendships, petty jealousies and tensions between the girls themselves are shown through focusing on just four girls. Shy, introverted Jae-yi (Choi Se-yeon) befriends the self-confident Ji-oh. So-young haunts the library, and strikes up a friendship with Eun-young. Jung-sook (Yun Ji-hye) is the girl in the class who feels most pressured by the system: she arrives early each day to study, and as a consequence is seen by the others as a weird outsider. The absence of curiosity about the strange circumstances of Mrs Park’s death; the casual references to a ghost; the bullying teachers – collectively, these point to an oddly dysfunctional educational establishment. It is much the same when Mr Oh himself is killed by the ghost: his disappearance

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elicits no more than casual speculation that the ghost has got him. No one seems bothered to investigate further. Up to this point, the ghost has made appearances purely to terrify and then kill unpleasant 12th-grade teachers. This suggests the ghost has been empowered by the class, and may even have been generated by the girls’ collective hostility towards these teachers. The ghost terrorises Mr Oh in a way that echoes his violent treatment of Ji-oh: he is knocked around in a similar way, and is murdered in the classroom where he assaulted her. The ghost also severs his ear – a symbolic castration that suggests punishment for his fondling of So-young’s ear. The sense that this is being done in the name of the girls is anticipated in a scene in the storeroom. The teachers are frightened to enter the storeroom and so, banned from the art room, Ji-oh decides to use the room to paint. She finds So-young goes there to smoke. Joking that she is the ghost, So-young comments: ‘you want to kill him [Mr Oh], don’t you?’ Ji-oh replies, ‘Yes… why don’t you kill him for me?’ It’s as though the ghost hears her. In effect, the storeroom is the ghost’s lair: it is there So-young finds the 1993 and 1996 yearbooks, missing since Mrs Park’s murder; it is there Ji-oh finds Mr Oh’s buried body. The ghost has hidden the yearbooks because they reveal her identity. Jae-yi’s photograph in each indicates that, for the past nine years, Jin-ju has been enrolling at the (three-year) high school so that every third year she passed through the 12th grade – after which she re-enrolled in the first year under a different name. Jae-yi is simply her current alias. The implausibility of someone being able to re-enrol in a school under a new name and not be recognised as a past pupil is glossed over. One consequence of the academic pressures of the system emerges during a maths lesson. As So-young effortlessly solves a maths problem on the blackboard, Jung-sook tears up her own maths text book in despair. The enraged maths teacher strikes her to the floor. On the one hand, Jung-sook is cracking up. Earlier, Mr Oh berated her in class for her failure to match So-young’s brilliance; now, admitting her inferiority, she mangles her textbook as she mangles her hopes. On the other hand, given the propensity of these teachers to physical violence, Jung-sook is surely provoking the assault. After it, she gives the shocked So-young a charged look. Later, in the storeroom, she accosts So-young herself. As the girls argue, we realise this is a past friendship that has turned sour. But here Jung-sook goes out of her way to insult So-young, provoking So-young, too, to hit her. The two blows Jung-sook receives are like a confirmation, to her, of her failure, and that evening she hangs herself. Although we can see a

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masochistic despair in this, Jung-sook is also a victim of the system. When she rips up her textbook, this is like a cry for help. Instead she is assaulted. Jung-sook’s suicide is integrated into the film’s climax, which, as in several ghost melodramas, is edited to draw together a number of different threads – an embryonic key montage. The climax begins when a scream leads Eun-young to Jung-sook’s body hanging from the walkway bridge. The site is significant because it is public: just as the ghost wanted the whole school to see Mrs Park’s hanging body, so Jung-sook wants everyone to see hers. In this sense, her suicide is a protest: look what the school drove me to do. Cut to Ji-oh in the storeroom. Under the floorboards she uncovers a sculpted bust Eun-young did of Jin-ju when they were students: Jin-ju painted Eun-young; Eun-young sculpted Jin-ju. This triggers a flashback to the primary traumatic event, the death of Jin-ju, revealing that this was not suicide, but an accident brought about by bullying. We see Jin-ju, locked in the art room, blunder around in the dark. She dislodges a shelf-load of busts, and also some chisels. She catches Eun-young’s bust of herself, but then a chisel falls and penetrates her heart. It is like a condensation of all the venom directed at her by the others. As the chisel heads towards Jin-ju’s heart, the film freezes on a close-up of her face: this is the moment where we are finally shown Jin-ju is Jae-yi. A dissolve from her face to the bust in Ji-oh’s hands makes another connection: the psychic Ji-oh has just ‘seen’ this past scene. This is quite a common ghost motif: a psychic character touches a significant artefact (or the body itself) and ‘sees’ the primary traumatic event: Ringu; Stir of Echoes; Dark Water (2002); The Ring. Equally, Ji-oh now knows who the murderous ghost is. Her attention is however caught by something else under the floorboards. She uncovers a human hand: a ring identifies it as Mr Oh’s. Ji-oh screams and recoils. Cut to Jung-sook’s body being carried through a group of girls. As the girls move past her, So-young turns, and we see she is crying. The structural linking of the deaths of the two girls strengthens the critique of the teachers and the educational system. Comforting the sobbing So-young, Eun-young learns it was Mrs Park who turned her against Jungsook – and so drove them apart. A number of parallels between past and present emerge. In both cases, Mrs Park’s favouritism towards a clever girl led her to break up an intense friendship between her favourite and a lonely girl. In both cases, the lonely girl then died, a victim of ostracism (Jin-ju) or her own sense of failure (Jung-sook). And in both cases, the friend who could have helped her is guilt-ridden. But the reason the friend failed to act was because her mind had been poisoned by the manipulations of Mrs Park.

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The yearbooks reveal to Eun-young that Jae-yi is the ghost (in fact, a revenant). The film has been scrupulous here: the same actress plays Jin-ju and Jae-yi, but Eun-young has not yet met the latter. The ensuing confrontation between Jae-yi/Jin-ju and Eun-young is complicated by the fact that, to Eun-young, this is her old friend Jin-ju, and to Jin-ju, this is an older version of the Eun-young she knew. Jin-ju says, rather plaintively, ‘you should never have returned’. It was not simply Mrs Park’s curiosity, but also Eun-young’s return to the school that brought out Jin-ju’s murderousness. The image of Jin-ju in death, clutching Eun-young’s bust of her, her heart pierced, hints at the lesbian feelings that never quite surface in the film. When Jin-ju explains to Eun-young her motives for continuing to enrol as a student – ‘At first, I just wanted to have a yearbook. Then I needed a friend who understood and cared about me’ – it’s as though she has been trying to find another girl to love as she had loved Eun-young. Moreover, it would seem she has now met her: she gives the same gift – a pair of tinkling bells – to both Eun-young and Ji-oh. But Eun-young, nine years older and a teacher, is now an obstacle – like Mrs Park, she knows who Jae-yi is and so threatens her project. As Jin-ju advances on Eun-young with a chisel, Ji-oh enters the classroom. It is her intervention that proves crucial, and she and Eun-young persuade Jin-ju to leave. Ji-ju’s parting words are then quite touching: ‘I never intended to hurt anyone. All I wanted was to have friends in school and leave with good memories’. She drops the chisel and fades away. It’s as though Eun-young returns to the school in order to confront her own past demons, and Jin-ju’s ghost, still haunting the school, is like the residue of that past in the present. When Eun-young comforts So-young and, here, Ji-oh, this suggests compensation for her own schoolgirl failure: she cares for them as she had neglected to care for Jin-ju. To Jin-ju’s ghost, she also vows to do her best to combat the seemingly ubiquitous bullying. Although this may seem an impossibly huge task, Eun-young is not the only teacher to show kindness. When Ji-oh, banned from the art room, moves to the storeroom, a male art teacher provides her with materials and encourages her. Although Jin-ju as ghost has served to get rid of some unpleasant teachers, this was not her primary aim. Indeed, the implication is that, for nine years, she did not harm anyone, but kept coming to school in hope: to try and find the sense of acceptance and belonging denied to her in life; to meet another close friend. She is not really a vengeful ghost; she represents rather all those isolated, lonely girls who are picked on because they are ‘different’. Like other ghosts who are not vengeful (Fleur in Rouge, Melissa in Lady in

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White, the parents in The Discarnates, Malcolm in The Sixth Sense), Jin-ju returns as a ghost to make up for a past loss. She is, ultimately, a poignant ghost. Whispering Corridors ends with two horror tropes, both unsatisfactory. After Jin-ju has vanished, there is a cut to Eun-young’s bust of her: a crack appears down one cheek and ‘bleeds’, suggesting the statue is weeping blood. But this delicate intimation is promptly swamped by excess. As Eun-young cradles and comforts Ji-oh on the classroom floor, the room itself bleeds: blood pours down the walls, drips from the ceiling (primarily onto Jin-ju’s old desk) and covers the floor. Bells toll; a heavenly choir is heard. This is both grotesque and baffling; as though seeking to suggest transcendence through horror-movie rhetoric: the room itself ‘cries blood’ at the passing of the ghost. When a schoolgirl looks into the classroom the next day, the blood has gone, but Eun-young remains with the now sleeping Ji-oh. But in the corridor, the girl turns round, and now she has become Jung-sook. The hauntings will continue. This is, unfortunately, an entirely formulaic horror ending. The later Yeogo goedam films largely eschew such tropes. Nevertheless, setting aside such horror elements, Whispering Corridors is incisive about the schoolgirl world it depicts. Here the ghost is like the girls’ collective alter ego. As the revenant Jae-yi, she crystallises the yearnings of the girls to belong; as the ghost Jin-ju, she attacks those perpetuating the cruelties of the system. Voice (Choi Equan 2005) Scripted by its director and Sol Joon-seok, Voice is an excellent addition to the Yeogo goedam series. From its first scene, the film has a gripping intensity, and its approach to the generic material is rich and complex. The title refers to a thematic nexus around which the film’s narrative is organised. The film is about a music teacher and her students, about singing, and about the presence and absence of the human voice. As the girls leave school at night, music student Young-eon (Kim Ok-vin) stays behind, rehearsing a version of ‘Sacrum convivium’. Her best friend Sun-min (Seo Ji-hye) watches and records her. The tune is one of two that, repeated throughout the film, connect the characters in a variety of ways. But, after Sun-min has left, Young-eon is spooked by a schoolgirl ghost. She flees, but a leaf of sheet music supernaturally propelled by the ghost flies at her and slits her throat. As she is dying, Young-eon looks at the ghost

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girl and wonders, ‘Who is she? Why did she?’, questions that will drive the film’s narrative. The next day, Young-eon discovers that she herself has become an invisible, disembodied ghost. Here the film is similar to Ghost (1990): we share the point of view of the ghost, visible only to us and to other ghosts, as it tries to make contact with the living. However, Young-eon has one advantage over Sam: although no-one can see her, Sun-min can hear her. Once Sun-min has recovered from the shock of hearing Young-eon’s disembodied voice, this speeds up the narrative development. Like Whispering Corridors, Voice focuses on a small group of girls in one particular class. Here, however, apart from the long school hours, there is less concern with the academic pressures of the system, and the film is more relaxed about the school as an institution. The girls are involved in productive extra-curricular activities – e.g. Sun-min presents a lunchtime broadcast to the school – and the teachers in general seem markedly less repressive than in either Whispering Corridors or Memento Mori. Again, one girl in the class, Cho-ah (Cha Ye-ryun), is psychic, and she explains to Sun-min the film’s premise about ghosts: ‘A ghost can have a voice where there’s a strong attachment. So it can talk to the living… But, if forgotten, the ghost loses its voice… [and becomes] unseen and unheard’. The unseen Young-eon hears this. She thus has a double project: to keep Sun-min thinking of and communicating with her, and to find out why she was killed. This is the film in the series which is most like a detective story, but since my concern is with the ghosts rather than the murder mystery, I will clear away the latter first. Due to cancer of the larynx, the music teacher (Kim Seo-hyung) lost her singing voice. She has been privileging Young-eon as a student because the latter’s singing voice is like the one she lost. However, the ghost girl who killed Young-eon, Hyo-jung (Lim Hyeon-kyeong), also had this singing voice, and had also been the teacher’s favourite. And this favouritism resulted in Hyo-jung developing a passion for the young, attractive teacher: a flashback shows her make a sexual advance in the shower. But this was observed, and led to the other girls bullying Hyo-jung. She committed suicide. Yet again, a girl in these films died and became a ghost because of her lesbian feelings. But the music teacher was clearly to blame – for failing to control the situation. In the shower, one senses she only pushed Hyo-jung away when she saw they were being observed. When other girls then dumped a bucket of water over Hyo-jung in class, the music teacher simply looked on. In addition, her favouritism towards girls who enable her vicariously

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to compensate for the loss of her voice is not only narcissistic but divisive, and results not simply in Hyo-jung’s death, but also Young-eon’s. The music teacher had been the one person who enabled Hyo-jung as ghost to continue to have a voice. With the arrival of Young-eon, Hyo-jung was being displaced in the teacher’s affections and was thereby losing her voice – that is why she killed Young-eon. The film’s underlying premise is in fact anticipated in a curious Hollywood melodrama, A Woman’s Secret (Nicholas Ray 1949). When Marion (Maureen O’Hara) loses her singing voice, she adopts a young protégée, Susan (Gloria Grahame) to sing in her stead. Marion repeatedly says, ‘Susan is me’, foregrounding the vicariousness of the arrangement. Moreover, their relationship is charged with suppressed lesbian overtones, at least on Marion’s side. The two women live together, and in their first scene as a couple enact what seems like a lover’s squabble. At the end of the row, Susan ends in hospital and Marion in jail, which forcibly separates them – until the mysteries of their relationship can be investigated. Because of the problems of dealing with such explosive material under the Production Code, A Woman’s Secret is an ‘incoherent text’; nevertheless, it includes crucial material echoed in Voice. The complexities of Voice lie in the ways the ghost-centred plot is developed. Now that Young-eon is a ghost, for her the whole school has become a ghost world, and this world is imaginatively realised. First, Young-eon discovers that she cannot leave the school: when she tries to exit, the décor around her changes, and she finds herself back in the foyer – an impressive ghost effect. Second, as she wanders the school corridors, a transparent shimmering curtain occasionally appears in front of her. Created digitally, looking (in part) like rising drops of water, this is a more elaborate version of the curtain of water that marks off the ghost worlds in Kokkuri and Dark Water (2002). When Young-eon steps through the curtain, she enters her own past. As though in a time-slip, she looks on at a vignette of herself, usually with either her mother or the music teacher. She is led into these vignettes by the ghost girl Hyo-jung, who thereby functions, in a manner typical of a ghost, as a figure who knows about Young-eon’s past life, elements of which Young-eon herself has repressed. This unusual feature of the ghost world – its ability to show Young-eon scenes from her past – is used didactically, to enlighten Young-eon, both about her true nature and about Hyo-jung. About halfway through the film, Young-eon as ghost observes, again as in a time-slip, a past music class. She sees herself, in front of the class, sing a Spanish song called ‘Romance’. This was where the music teacher became aware both of Young-eon’s singing

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talent and of the nature of her voice. But Young-eon now sees that her singing had also attracted Hyo-jung’s ghost. Moreover, Hyo-jung’s ghost in the past looks across at the observing ghost of Young-eon in the present. ‘Romance’ is the second tune that circulates through the narrative. The tune itself is an old Spanish melody, made famous as the main theme plucked out on a guitar in Jeux interdits (René Clément, France, 1951). Here words have been added. In the past, Hyo-jung had sung this song for the teacher; now Young-eon is in effect usurping her. Hyo-jung is showing Young-eon this scene because she wants Young-eon to know this, and her look is charged. A later vignette is more explicit. Young-eon’s ghost watches her past self rehearse ‘Sacrum convivium’ alone at the piano. Again, Hyo-jung’s ghost appears in the past scene, and here she appeals to Young-eon not to sing for the music teacher and so take the latter away from her: ‘She’s all I have’. Young-eon’s ghost is shocked to discover that, in the past, she had actually heard Hyo-jung’s appeal, but had rejected it: ‘Why should I care?’ Hyo-jung in the past again looks at Young-eon’s ghost in the present, as if to say: ‘This is what you did’. This is both a striking communication between two ghosts and a telling melodramatic moment: someone suddenly seeing themselves, through another’s eyes, as completely selfish. After Young-eon’s murder, as in Ringu, successive days are marked off on the screen. During the first the day, as Sun-min tries to cope with the problem that her best friend has become a disembodied voice, the music teacher hovers in the background. It’s as though she realises what is going on: that Hyo-jung’s ghost has killed Young-eon, and the latter’s ghost is now trying to communicate with Sun-min. And so when, that night, Young-eon and Sun-min – who has returned to the school to be with her friend – find the music teacher’s hanging body, it is assumed she committed suicide out of guilt. Although we will later discover that the teacher was in fact murdered, nevertheless yet another lesbian character here suffers a violent death (see Fig. 34). With Dark Water (2002), Voice is the ghost melodrama that makes the fullest use of the generic motif of the lift. Young-eon is killed in front of the lift and, as she dies, the lift doors open behind her. Then, on the second night, there is a genuinely scary lift scene. Young-eon and Sun-min – who has again returned to the school – are drawn into the lift by a strange voice; the lift is then supernaturally transported to an unknown zone. The doors open on a black space, whereupon the flickering red outline of the transparent figure of a schoolgirl is shown moving slowly towards the two girls through this space. Even though she cannot see anything, Sun-min faints from fear; Young-eon screams and collapses on the lift floor.

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Such a concentration of ghostly forces suggests that, as in Dark Water (2002), the lift is some sort of portal. This is supported by later developments, which enable us to identify the flickering figure heading towards the girls as Young-eon’s alter ego. Cho-ah warns Sun-min, ‘A ghost remembers only what it wants to’. For Young-eon, the flickering figure is the return of the repressed, emerging from the darkness to confront her with revelations about her past. There are further ghost incidents associated with the lift: Hyo-jung committed suicide in the lift; Young-eon’s body is belatedly discovered on top of the lift. Cho-ah now advises Sun-min to stop communicating with Young-eon: ‘What’s holding her back is you. It’s time to let her go so she can rest in peace’. However, Young-eon herself wishes to continue the communication. When, on the evening of the fourth day, Sun-min does try to say goodbye to Young-eon, the latter’s refusal to accept this triggers another crisis at the lift. Whilst the girls are still in school for ‘voluntary’ (evening) study, the main lights suddenly go out; only the emergency red lighting remains. Cho-ah and Sun-min flee from a ghost girl towards the lift, but do not see its outer doors open. Sun-min falls into the lift shaft; Cho-ah catches her. In the classroom, a voice booms over the school’s loudspeaker system: ‘Don’t do it, Hyo-jung! Leave her out of this. It’s me you want!’ Recognising Young-eon’s voice, the girls flee screaming, past Cho-ah and the rescued Sun-min at the lift shaft, and out of the school. The sequence echoes the climactic haunting in Memento Mori, but the film is working to a different aesthetic. Its concern is less with bravura visual effects than introspection: Young-eon is now confronted with darker issues from her past. She is led through the panicking girls by a figure who starts out as Hyo-jung, then changes into herself. She is taken to witness a scene from her past where, on a hospital roof, she had encouraged her sick mother to jump to her death. Again, her observing ghost self is shocked, and here it is her own past self who turns to look accusingly at her. The two figures are transported back to the school corridor, where her alter ego openly accuses her: ‘You killed Mom’. Young-eon protests, but her alter ego continues with further accusations of cruelty, shown in flashbacks to events both before and after Young-eon’s death. Aware of her power over the music teacher, on one occasion Youngeon reduced her to tears by forcing the teacher to sing for her. During this, Hyo-jung’s unheard ghost protested helplessly. The flashbacks climax with the revelation that Young-eon killed the music teacher. We see her use her ghost’s powers – as in equivalent scenes in Whispering Corridors – to

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orchestrate the death: cello strings wrap themselves round the teacher’s throat, and suspend her from the ceiling. The alter ego tells Young-eon what she has repressed: ‘You killed her to seek revenge on Hyo-jung. You knew she’d disappear if the teacher died’. The lift doors open to reveal Hyo-jung in a white space, mouthing words we cannot hear. Again this suggests the lift is a portal, here to the oblivion of the afterlife. Hyo-jung rushes to assault Young-eon, but passes through her and disintegrates into a shower of digital fragments. The alter ego warns Young-eon: ‘When Sun-min forgets you, you’ll end up like her’. Young-eon is left alone in the corridor. The revelation of a malevolent side to Young-eon is compelling. Until now we have shared Sun-min’s generous attitude towards her friend. We are familiar with the heartlessness of ghosts, but here we learn of Young-eon’s cruelty during her lifetime. That it is her own alter ego who accuses her lends weight to Cho-ah’s comment that a ghost remembers only what it wants to. The music teacher is killed just one day after Young-eon, before the backstory of Hyo-jung and the music teacher has emerged. But as the flashbacks prompted by the alter ego reveal, Young-eon knew from an early stage why she had been killed. Equally, it was not Hyo-jung who threatened Cho-ah and Sun-min at the lift shaft; it was Young-eon herself. The full extent of Young-eon’s ruthlessness emerges on the fifth and final day. As Young-eon’s desk is taken out of the classroom, her portable CD player falls out, a gift from Sun-min. Listening to the player later, Sun-min hears Young-eon sing the ‘Sacrum convivium’ she recorded in the first scene. Flashback memories of their scenes together as friends overwhelm Sun-min. She rushes down to the boiler room, where they have been meeting. But her appeals are ignored, even though we see (as Sun-min cannot) that Young-eon is present. After Sun-min has left, Young-eon’s alter ego emerges once more to challenge her – this time with her darkest desires. She asks Young-eon what she really wants. When Young-eon says she wants her voice back so she can talk to Sun-min, the alter ego contradicts her: ‘You want to live’. Acting with ruthless speed, Young-eon uses her ghost’s powers to kill Cho-ah and then, when Sun-min sees the body and goes into a state of shock, possess the latter. A cut to black masks the possession, but it is revealed in an epilogue one month later. Sun-min, who has been absent sick, comes to the school with her mother. At her locker, we hear ‘her’ thoughts – that is, the thoughts of the Young-eon inside her – as she looks at her mirror reflection: ‘It’s been a while. Sun-min, I love you’. Confirming the possession, she then repeats to her mother something Young-eon earlier said to hers.

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In The Dark, too, a character contrives to return from the dead by possessing someone living. Both films were released in 2005, and so it is unlikely either influenced the other. However, because the films end with the revelation of the possession, its nature is not clarified – we do not know what the implications are for the possessed girl. Each girl is last seen with a parent who seems to have no inkling that the daughter is ‘really’ someone else. Nevertheless, even though the films fail to elaborate, there is little doubt the possession is a sinister development: a dark force has invaded and triumphed over the daughter. Voice is the only film of the Yeogo goedam series to deal with an ‘inappropriate’ relationship between a female teacher and a student. The music teacher is undoubtedly the point of disturbance within the melodramatic configuration: it is her actions that cause the emotional tensions and conflict. She is an enigmatic figure: an inspirational teacher, but otherwise quiet and withdrawn, revealing little of her own feelings. But just as she was sufficiently charismatic for Hyo-jung to fall for her, so she is vulnerable to the manipulations of the more calculating Young-eon. At one point, the music teacher looks in a mirror at the scar on her throat. The scar is a visual signifier of the loss of her singing voice; it is thus like ‘the mark of castration’ that lies at the heart of the melodrama. When Young-eon is killed, her throat is slit in precisely the same place. Symbolically, her rival attacks her voice; moreover, the weapon is the sheet music for ‘Romance’. In one flashback, as a voiceless Hyo-sung tries to appeal to an unheeding music teacher, the latter ‘accidentally’ drops this particular sheet of music. This looks like a Freudian slip. Young-eon has just humiliated the teacher by forcing her to sing, and then coldly told her: ‘I’ll never sing for you again’. The music itself reminds Hyo-sung of Young-eon’s ‘betrayal’. It is as though the teacher is unconsciously giving Hyo-sung permission to attack Young-eon. It is that very sheet Hyo-sung uses as a weapon to kill Young-eon. Young-eon’s experiences as a ghost are also like a heightened version of the schoolgirl world, with its cliques and petty cruelties. When she has not yet grasped what has happened to her, Young-eon talks anxiously to a group of her classmates who, neither seeing nor hearing her, show no reaction. But because we can see her, the scene is exactly like the one in Some Kind of Wonderful where Amanda (Lea Thompson) is suddenly ostracised by the rich girls she had previously been friends with. She, too, talks desperately to them and they act as if she is simply not there. After Young-eon’s body has been found, the same group of girls gossip about her, speculating that she and the music teacher killed themselves because of a lesbian relationship. This angers Sun-min, but the drama played out in the ghost world between

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Hyo-jung and Young-eon over the music teacher nevertheless echoes, in a displaced form, elements of the gossip. It can thus be seen that the introduction of ghost elements heightens the melodrama. The film’s use of music takes this further. Diegetic music is used evocatively in a number of the film’s key scenes, and its associations can be very powerful – as when Sun-min is reminded of her past friendship with Young-eon. Another equally affecting sequence occurs on the fourth day. As part of her attempt to let go of Young-eon, Sun-min uses her lunchtime broadcast to present a tribute to her friend. This includes playing a recording of Young-eon singing ‘Romance’. But here the loss is registered on both Sun-min and Young-eon: when the song is played, Sun-min weeps in the broadcast booth; but Young-eon, sitting on some stairs, also weeps. Her voice lives on, but only in a recording. The poignancy of Young-eon’s loss is enhanced by her incorporeal state: as she sits on the stairs, girls, quite unwittingly, walk through her. The film actually ends with the ghost of Cho-ah. Seen inside the school through a window, she is speaking to us, but we can hear nothing. The credits come up alongside her face; the camera tracks in slowly to frame her in tight close-up. The shot lasts a full two minutes, the music shifting from a mournful violin and cello to a girl soloist (Hyo-sung) in a choir singing ‘Greensleeves’. In its quiet understatement – Cho-ah is now a ghost, but there’s no-one to hear her – it is in fact a very moving ending. Filmed with a concentrated intensity in muted browns and reds, Voice is a remarkable achievement. The music, the melodrama, and the ghost elements all work together, resulting in a film of nuance and subtlety. At the same time, the film explores the emotional world of the teenage girl ‘in all its complexities and dark self-conceits’, to appropriate Leslie Fiedler’s term ([1967] 1970: 101). A Blood Pledge (Lee Jong-yong 2009) Scripted by its director, A Blood Pledge is often stylishly directed, and the schoolgirl world, with its cliques, jealousies, cruelties and anxieties, is vividly drawn. The ghost, however, is of little interest. I shall merely mention one thread in the movie: the lesbian subtext. The film A Blood Pledge mainly references is Ryeong, discussed in Chapter 16. Set in a Catholic girls’ high school, A Blood Pledge, too, begins with three schoolgirls conducting a ritual with candles. In a Catholic church, Yoo-jin (Oh Yeon-seo), Eun-yeong (Song Min-jeong) and Soy (Son Eun-seo) take an oath (the blood pledge) to commit suicide together. When, only

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six minutes into the film, we learn the one suicide that then occurred (jumping from the roof of the students’ hall) was of a fourth girl, Eon-ju (Jang Kyoung-ah), who was not involved in the pledge, an enigma is set up which takes most of the film to unravel. The enigma does however take us to the heart of the film’s concerns. As in Ryeong, the backstory involves a schoolgirl betrayal of friendship. Soy and Eon-ju were once best friends, but Soy sought the more exciting company of Yoo-jin and Eun-jeong, who socialise with boys. This, however, led to disaster: Soy is now pregnant by the slippery Ki-ho (Choi Min-sung), previously Yoo-jin’s boyfriend. After Ki-ho’s mother has tried to force her to have an abortion, Soy decides the only solution is suicide. Yoo-jin plots with Eun-jeong to use this to get rid of Soy as a sexual rival. She and Eun-yeong will pretend they want to commit suicide with Soy, but at the last moment will let her jump alone. However, Soy feels the need to say goodbye to Eon-ju, and Eon-ju, who loves Soy, decides to die with her. But when the four stand on the roof parapet, only Eon-ju jumps. Soy is devastated. Soy’s pregnancy is the problem that initiates the chain of events leading to Eon-ju’s death. It is thus like her punishment. Insofar as there is a lesbian subtext, it is mainly positive. Although the implicitly lesbian Eon-ju dies, she is an entirely sympathetic figure and, moreover, the cleverest girl in the school. Her death is tragic. By contrast, the most avowedly heterosexual girl in the group, Yoo-jin, is the murderous villain – in a late scene, she tries openly to kill Soy. Unlike any of the earlier Yeogo goedam films, A Blood Pledge could be seen to fit Steve Neale’s summary of melodrama in a heterosexual sense, but the ‘eruption’ of heterosexuality in this ‘social order’ is catastrophic. Eon-ju’s bloody ghost haunts the school selectively, and she seems ambivalent about Soy. Her one apparently aggressive appearance in relation to Soy occurs whilst Soy is on a swing. Sitting on an adjacent swing, the unseen Eon-ju’s ghost glares at her. Immediately, Soy jumps off the swing, falling heavily and clutching her stomach. The jump is evidently an attempt to cause a miscarriage, but whether Soy intended this or whether the ghost provoked it is unclear. However, the jump itself suggests a link to Eon-ju’s death, and the bloodiness of her appearance here emphasises she died in place of the fetus. This is the tragedy, in lesbian terms, the film seeks to resolve. A Blood Pledge effects a resolution when, after the deaths of both Eun-yeong and Yoo-jin, it returns to the rooftop. Two further films are now referenced: Memento Mori, where the rooftop is also the place from which the lesbian lovers jump, and Inner Senses – there, too, protagonist and ghost return at the climax to the rooftop which was the site of the primary

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traumatic event. Moreover, as in that movie, the ghost in A Blood Pledge changes from a bloody spectre to look like her old self. This so moves Soy that she prepares to jump off the roof to be with Eon-ju. She is stopped by Eon-ju’s younger sister, Jeong-eon (Yu Shin-ae). Throughout the film, Jeong-eon has been the person most traumatised by Eon-ju’s death, but here she steps in as the heroine’s saviour. Final scenes on rooftops typically bring clarity to the characters who go there, and here the ghost finds a way to give the heroine a reason for living: ‘Please take care of my sister’. The female friendship will be reconstituted with Eon-ju’s surrogate. For the three major Yeogo goedam films, the ghosts serve in part to highlight fault lines in the system: in Whispering Corridors, bullying teachers and the alienation of lonely girls; in Memento Mori, the fear and intolerance of the intensities of lesbianism; in Voice, the dangers of a teacher’s favouritism. But all five films include, to a greater or lesser extent, lesbian elements, which thus emerge as a key feature that links the films. After Memento Mori, A Blood Pledge is the most intriguing of the films from this point of view. Moreover, it has a ‘lesbian revenge’ epilogue. Ki-ho exits from a classroom caressing a girl whose face is unseen. As they enter a lift, the girl turns, and we see she is Eon-ju. We also know how dangerous lifts are in East Asian movies.

The Department Store Geoul sokeru/Into the Mirror (Kim Sung-ho 2003) Another representative institution that has been used as the setting for a South Korean ghost movie is the department store. In Into the Mirror – both scripted and directed by Kim Sung-ho – a female ghost haunts Dreampia, a Seoul department store that is shortly to reopen after refurbishment following a fire. Here the institution is a symbol of capitalism, and it is capitalist greed that lies behind the primary traumatic event. On the surface, the department store – in the words of the film’s director – is constructed as a ‘woman’s space’, offering ‘to fulfil passions, fantasies and desires’ (Kim 2004). But in the background, a power struggle is going on between men who have different agendas for the store. And since most of the events take place before the store actually reopens, the male world of business and power conflicts dominates. The film begins with a very unusual (ghost) murder. In a pre-credits sequence, Dreampia employee Choi Mi-jeong (Lee Young-jin) steals two

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objects (a pizza cutter and a Walkman) at night from the store’s displays. In front of a washroom mirror, she takes the cutter from her bag. Her reflection in the mirror now moves independently of Mi-jeong, and draws the cutter across its own neck. This action inside the mirror actually causes the neck of the real Mi-jeong to be slit. Mi-jeong bleeds to death on the floor; cut to the credits sequence. The mirror is the film’s master image, extending to all its elements. As an aspect of its role as a seller of fantasies, Dreampia is full of mirrors. In addition, the hero, Dreampia security chief Woo Young-min (Yoo Ji-tae), is introduced through a dream sequence involving mirrors. The dream shows a stylised representation of an incident from Woo’s past: when his partner Young-ho was being held hostage in a night club of mirrors, Woo, then a policeman, shot at the gunman and missed, resulting in Young-ho’s death. This is Woo’s personal past traumatic event; it not only haunts his dreams, but disturbs him in other ways: for example, he cannot bear to look at his own mirror reflection. But not until halfway through the film do we learn why Woo, an expert marksman, missed: he shot the gunman’s mirror reflection. Into the Mirror goes further than other ghost movies that use mirrors: it suggests that there really is a mirror world. The ghost exists primarily in this mirror world and, as the opening sequence suggests, possesses unusual supernatural properties in relation to mirror reflections. But the mirror motif extends across all areas of the film, and I will also consider the ways in which the film uses mirrors, doubles and alter egos to explore issues around personality and the psyche. After a second murder – tellingly, involving a male employee’s reflection in a lift mirror – Inspector Ha Hyun-su (Kim Hyung-min) of Seoul violent crimes division arrives at Dreampia to investigate. Ha’s arrival disturbs Woo: Ha was with Woo in the original hostage incident, and had indeed attempted to prevent Woo from shooting. Young-ho was a friend of both men, and Ha blames his death on Woo’s recklessness. Woo, it seems, was seeking to prove himself in the tough world of the police, and his disastrous failure has symbolically unmanned him. Not only is he now working in the feminised environment of the department store, but the job itself is a favour: although employed by a private security firm SecuZone, Woo works at Dreampia because its chairman, Jeon Il-sung (Ki Ju-bong), is his uncle. In addition, Woo no longer carries a gun, and when the SecuZone director Choi Sang-ki (Kim Myung-su) notices this, he immediately relates it to ‘last year’s incident’: ‘How long are you going to hide from yourself?’ He then rather pointedly provides him with a gun.

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Just as Woo cannot bear to look at his own reflection, which reminds him of his past failure, so Ha, a tough police officer, represents what he might have become. Both are doubles that confront him with his own weakness. Woo seeks refuge from his anxieties about his masculinity in drink, and admits to his psychiatrist friend Lee Dong-ha (Park Hyung-jae) that, when drunk, he cannot remember what happened. A gash on his left hand that arose during one such period of oblivion is like Woo’s ‘mark of castration’, another reminder of his weakness. There are rumours that the department store is haunted, and Woo himself keeps seeing an elusive female figure in the store’s many mirrors. But when he raises the possibility of a murderous ghost within the mirrors, Ha unsurprisingly ridicules the idea. A third murder then occurs in the store car park. On this occasion, a ghost woman appears in the man’s rear-view mirror, but is not there when he turns to look – a familiar trope. The man’s hand, pressed against a window, is then pinioned by its own reflection, and his fingers are broken. We do not see how he is killed. The murders arise when the ghost ‘takes over’ mirror reflections, and manipulates them so they destroy their subjects. The reflections thus turn into malevolent alter egos, a literalisation of the notion of a split, schizoid self. The ghost targets these three individuals because they helped cover up her murder, and so there is a sense in which the ghost is reflecting their murderousness back at them. But also, within the mirror, lurk intimations of insanity. An early reference to capitalist greed is implied by demonstrators outside the store. Since they are demanding money on behalf of the victims of the fire, we assume Chairman Jeon has failed to provide adequate compensation. Moreover, someone has been secretly videoing both the murder scenes and the demonstrations, and the footage turns up in TV news reports critical of the store. This also undermines Woo as security chief: he says to Dong-ha, ‘I’ll catch that arsehole and put my life back in order’. Cut to a second dream version of Woo’s past traumatic event: here the gunman removes his gun from Young-ho’s head and so allows Woo to shoot him. But, although Woo shoots the man’s reflection, the man is killed. As he lies dead on the floor, cut to Woo lying in bed in the same position. The dream stresses why Woo’s life is not in order. Not only is he still haunted by his past traumatic event, he has also repressed the nature of the mistake he made. A later dream re-emphasises this. This dream moves closer to showing what really happened – Woo shoots the mirror reflection of the gunman and does not kill him – but still fails to show the gunman shoot Young-ho. As Woo’s dreams rework the material of his past trauma, they avoid the core link: his blunder killed his friend.

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It is Ha who explains the blunder – to his partner Inspector Park (Oh Jung-se). But Woo is in denial. When Dong-ha suggests Woo ‘let go of his mistakes’, a drunken Woo becomes very aggressive: ‘Who says I made a mistake?’ Dong-ha is silenced. The camera tracks laterally away from the two men and we now see they were being filmed in a mirror. Given the distinction the film draws between the real world and the mirror world, it’s as though it is Woo’s mirror self that here represents his hostile, defensive persona. After the third murder, Woo apprehends the person who has been secretly videoing the events at Dreampia, a woman. However, she is the ghost, and when she vanishes, Woo finds both her name, Lee Jeong-hyun, and address in her camcorder. Evidently, she wanted Woo to learn who she was. At her apartment, Woo finds (a) a room full of mirrors and (b) her identical twin sister Ji-hyun (both sisters are played by Kim Hye-na). We deduce that Jeong-hyun, who was falsely reported killed in the fire, wants Woo and her sister to work together to help unmask her murderer. The introduction of a twin sister adds another element to the mirror motif. Ji-hyun tells Woo that her mirror reflection is not herself, but her sister. However, until recently she was in a mental hospital, suffering from a breakdown deriving from separation from her sister. Her assertion is thus problematised: in the hospital, she would console herself with her mirror reflection, which she would fantasise was her sister. Nevertheless, Woo now sees Ji-hyun’s mirror image move independently of her, which would seem to confirm Ji-hyun’s assertion. Moreover, it also suggests that Jeong-hyun can appear in mirror spaces outside the store. This is reinforced when Ha and Park visit the home of another prospective victim, Im Jun-seok, and find he has been driven crazy. Terrified that a woman is coming to get him, he has removed all the mirrors in his room, and is now jigging up and down with fear. In a sense, the crime plot – an investigation into a series of murders in which the killer turns out to be a ghost – is a cover for a more complex narrative about mirror images. Dong-ha tells Woo that, ‘self-hatred, triggered by a mental shock, causes a personality to split: you perceive two worlds, inside and outside the mirror’. The film develops this idea. Ji-hyun’s fantasy that her mirror reflection was her sister has become a ghostly reality. Woo, by contrast, still seemingly clings to fantasy: he tells Dong-ha the image he sees in the mirror is not himself, but someone else. This notion is taken further. Thinking Chairman Jeon knows what happened to her sister, Ji-hyun tries to stab him, but is intercepted by the police. Jeon blames Woo for not capturing her himself, and sacks him. Woo gets

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drunk and attacks his own reflection in a sheet of metal. Then, in a strangely moving scene, he slumps down against the metal and cries at the failure of his life. He now seemingly accepts responsibility for Young-ho’s death: he repeatedly sobs, ‘I’m sorry’. At this point, his mirror image, unobserved, stands and looks down at him – as though disowning the weak, sobbing Woo. Literalising Woo’s sense that his mirror image is someone else, this integrates him more firmly into the film’s schema of mirror images and doubles. Although Jeong-hyun appears in the mirror to Ji-hyun, typically of a ghost, she only communicates with her obliquely. On one occasion, she frightens Ji-hyun by suddenly breaking mirrors in the apartment. This has a double meaning. It is mainly a warning: Ha and Park are at that moment driving to see Ji-hyun and, in the omniscient way of ghosts, Jeong-hyun knows this. Ji-hyun leaves the apartment and goes to seek Woo’s help. But smashing mirrors is also what Ji-hyun will need to do to find her sister’s body, which has been hidden by the killer behind one of the store’s many mirrors. Since she is now a mirror ghost, Jeong-hyun also provides mirror clues. The first, given to both Ji-hyun and Woo, is simple: ‘805’ written on the inside of a mirror is 208 in mirror writing and refers to a locker in the mental hospital where Ji-hyun had been a patient. Inside the locker Woo finds an accounts book, and inside the book is a photograph of Jan van Eyck’s untitled painting known as The Arnolfini Marriage (1434). When Dong-ha outlines his theory about mirror images, he shows Woo around a dozen examples of famous paintings that include mirrors, beginning with Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656) and ending with Georges de la Tour’s The Penitent Magdalen (circa 1640). The examples illustrate the many ways in which mirrors have been incorporated into art, but the van Eyck painting has other resonances. Over the mirror van Eyck wrote, in Latin, ‘Jan van Eyck was here’ – emphasising his presence in the mirror reflection. The photograph of the painting, intended for Ji-hyun, is a more allusive (ghost) clue. A photograph of the twins in their kitchen includes a microwave oven whose convex door echoes the shape and positioning of the convex mirror in the painting. The door reflects both the light flash from the camera and a shadowy shape. This is a (ghostly) trace of the person who took the photograph, and Woo realises why Jeong-hyun wished to direct her sister to the painting and thus, by association, to this figure in the photograph: he was her murderer. From Ji-hyun, now in jail, arrested for the murders, Woo learns that the photographer was Director Choi. We will learn at the climax that he

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killed Jeong-hyun because she threatened to expose his secret takeover of Dreampia, which he had facilitated by bribing certain employees. Here capitalist greed led to murder. The revelation that the film’s villain is the hero’s boss further undermines Woo. At the climax, Choi actually tells Woo he employed him because he ‘had a failed life’ and would follow orders. The implication is Choi has been using Woo all along. But Choi does not stop there. The film cuts from the scene where Woo’s mirror image detaches itself from him to the terrified Im Jun-seok in his room. A figure in a SecuZone uniform shoots him through the door. This is in fact Choi, framing Woo by using the very gun he gave him – and leaving the gun for the police to find. But the cut links this figure to Woo’s mirror image. Choi, like Ha, is another double of the hero, one whose toughness again emphasises Woo’s weakness. Following The Devil’s Backbone and Ju-on, Into the Mirror also has an opening/credits sequence which depicts an elliptical version of the primary traumatic event. During the credits, in a stylised, fragmented representation of the department store, we see shadowy figures – a man is assaulting a woman. Typically, the sequence is too allusive and blurred to make out the details, but it climaxes with murder and then ends as the man slinks off into the depths of the store. The sense that the killer has disappeared into the store prepares the way for Choi’s remarkable first official appearance in the film. In the early scenes, Choi’s name is mentioned, but we do not see him. Then, about 25 minutes in, Woo goes down to the car park to meet Chairman Jeon coming out of a lift. As Woo stands in front of the lift, he says to himself (referring to the first two murders and their aftermath), ‘How the hell did this happen?’ He is filmed in reflection in the metal of the lift doors, with the line where the two doors meet neatly bisecting his face. As the lift doors open, Woo’s image is split and wiped away: we are now seeing through the doors into the lift. And for the instant the shot is held, Choi’s face appears in the gap created. Woo’s reflection is erased; Choi appears in its place. Metaphorically, Choi comes through one of the store’s mirrors and splits the hero in two. Echoing this entrance, Choi later frames the hero by shooting Im Jun-seok through another door opening. The police arrest Woo for Im Jun-seok’s murder. With Ji-hyun also under arrest, Chairman Jeon persuades himself that the murderer of his employees has been caught: Dreampia reopens on schedule. The store is now shown unambiguously as a ‘woman’s space’: a fashion show is mounted. But Jeonghyun has not been appeased and she interrupts the show, appearing once more in a mirror and terrifying the models into flight. This prompts a mass

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panic and exit from the store which echoes the climactic mass panic in Memento Mori. It seems relevant that Jeong-hyun appears publicly during a fashion show: an arena where capitalism seeks to seduce its customers into spending their money. The ghost ruptures the glamorous façade. But the casualty here is not Choi but Chairman Jeon. Humiliated by the success of Choi’s takeover and the failure of his own reopening, Jeon commits suicide. The climax takes place in the department store. Released from custody, Woo and Ji-hyun smash mirrors in the store and find Jeong-hyun’s body (see Fig. 35). The discovery prompts Choi to appear with a gun. The scene that ensues, also involving Ha, has an astonishing number of twists and turns. I shall merely summarise the points relevant to the issues under discussion. 1) Ha’s arrest of Choi is interrupted by Ji-hyun, who attacks the latter, enabling him to seize Ha’s gun. Woo picks up Choi’s gun but hesitates, and so Choi coolly shoots him in the stomach. Blasted through a mirror, Woo finds himself in another world. There he encounters his (unwounded) mirror self, and points his gun at it. His alter ego taunts him with his weakness – ‘This is your image: the image of someone living in fear’ – but Woo, denying the image represents himself, shoots it, putting a bullet in its stomach. Unfortunately, as the many narratives about tormenting doubles testify, to harm your double is to harm yourself (see Rank [1914] 1971). His stomach wound now critical, Woo is blasted back into the ‘real world’. 2) As though in response to having shot his own mirror image, Woo is confronted with a recreation of his past traumatic event. With a gun at Ha’s head, Choi backs the two of them into a corner of mirrors: once again, Woo is confused between reality and reflection. Identifying the correct target from the SecuZone logo on the sleeve of Choi’s uniform, Woo shoots the logo, symbolically attacking the corrupt organisation that had employed him. 3) Although himself now wounded, Choi fights back with such ferocity he stuns Ha and manages to get a gun on Woo. With a shard of glass from a broken mirror, Ji-hyun stabs Choi in the eye. Blinded in one eye, Choi nevertheless reacts with animal rage, violently attacking Ji-hyun. Too badly wounded to intervene, Woo watches, and the film cross-cuts Choi’s attack with his past assault on Jeong-hyun at the same place. It’s as though, through a time-slip, Woo is actually seeing the primary traumatic event as well – each sister is subjected to exactly the same frenzied attack. However, Choi does not kill Ji-hyun – Woo’s yell checks him. 4) Ji-hyun lies unconscious on the floor; Choi holds a gun on Woo and Ha. Inside the mirror beside Choi, Ji-hyun’s reflection – Jeong-hyun as ghost – stands and walks forward. Stepping through the mirror, she terrifies Choi,

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pushing his head through a mirror into a nothingness on the other side – a curious moment that perhaps suggests there is a different sort of mirror world for each character. Choi is now captured by Ha and handcuffed to a metal frame. Suspended high in the frame is a mirror. Trying to break free, Choi dislodges the mirror and is sliced in two from head to crotch. Jeonghyun caresses her unconscious sister and then returns to the mirror world. Even here, at the climax, Woo’s weakness as action hero is exposed: it is his hesitation over handling a gun that repeatedly allows Choi to get the better of him. Ha, too, is swept aside by Choi’s frenzied assaults, so Choi emerges as the most powerful male, defeated only after the supernatural intervention of a ghost. At the same time, mirrors and mirror images, symmetry and asymmetry, play through the sequence, which ends with Choi divided by a mirror so that, from the mirror side, it looks as if he is blinded in both eyes. Also bloodily sliced by the mirror, his corpse is like a heightened image of the slaughtered, castrated villain. The image also answers the moment when Choi on his first appearance split Woo’s image in two. Woo’s encounter with his own alter ego functions as a dramatisation of his inner world. As he holds a gun on – and shoots – his alter ego, again we can see it is his own weakness he fears. Moreover, in this scene he again denies he made a mistake (in the hostage incident), implying he has regressed from his earlier apparent acceptance of his failure. We can now see part of Woo’s weakness is his refusal to admit to himself that he made a mistake. A further complication is that, throughout the film, there is also the hint of a homosexual subtext. Ha keeps a photograph of himself, Young-ho and Woo in his desk drawer, and abruptly shuts the drawer when Park shows an interest. Whereas Young-ho was married, neither Woo nor Ha shows any sexual interest in women. It is entirely possible that both men were strongly attracted to an unresponsive Young-ho, or even that there was a triangle: for example, Ha loved Young-ho, but Woo loved Ha. In which case, Woo’s past traumatic event would have other overtones: the violent death of Young-ho would have satisfied his unconscious wish to eliminate his ‘rival’. And in this replaying of the hostage scene, first Woo shoots what he thinks is his weak (‘feminine’) side; then he saves Ha – and so demonstrates his masculinity. An additional detail is Ha gave Woo a key so he could free himself from jail, and Woo makes a point of returning the key, now bloody, before he is taken off in an ambulance. It is as though the key, circulating between the men, speaks of unacknowledged desires. This whole sequence may be linked to a structure found in What Lies Beneath, Phone and Gothika. In those films, an entrance into a house at roughly the beginning of the last act leads to a restaging, either of the

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protagonist’s own past traumatic event (Gothika) or the primary traumatic event (the other two films). In all three films, the woman/girl making the entrance is linked in some significant way – most particularly by her dress – with the ghost. In Into the Mirror, two figures enter the building, and one is linked to the ghost as her twin. Moreover, in the action that follows, both the hero’s past traumatic event and the primary traumatic event are restaged. Again, we could speak of a compulsion to repeat and the death drive, particularly in the light of Woo’s recklessly induced injuries. In the epilogue, a recovering Woo is visited in hospital by Ji-hyun, but we gradually realise there is something amiss. In an award ceremony for Ha and Park on TV, the men shake with their left hands. The photograph of the two sisters has now reversed, so they face the other way. When Woo signs a release form, he writes his name backwards. Outside the hospital, Woo realises all the signs around him are in mirror writing. The gash is now on his right hand. In voice-over, we hear Dong-ha’s words about a shock causing a personality to split. We also hear what he went on to say: that it was possible to be killed outside the mirror, but to carry on living within it. Flashbacks indicate that Woo died in the ambulance to the hospital, but his mirror image survived. Woo goes to a large window and looks through it at the world outside. On that side, a little girl is admiring her reflection in the window-as-mirror, and she is puzzled to see this man who is only on the inside of the window. Woo now exists solely in the mirror world. Since a mirror world which is as detailed as the real world is only introduced in this last sequence, it is difficult to know how, ontologically, to view it. What are the implications for Woo, now he exists solely in this world? Equally, who visited him in hospital? Logically, it is Jeong-hyun, come to thank Woo on behalf of her sister. But that would not only leave the matter of Ji-hyun’s fate in the real world unresolved, but also suggest the mirror world really is a world of ghosts. In which case, what do we make of other people in the mirror world, such as the hospital nurses? Into the Mirror is a rich and complex movie, dealing with such issues as identity, guilt, the hero’s anxieties about his masculinity, and conflicts around power and status. As a melodrama, it has links with Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk 1956): the hero’s neuroses; his heavy drinking; his castration anxieties (see Mulvey 1977/78: 54). The Sirk movie even has a scene where Kyle (Robert Stack) obliterates his hated mirror reflection (with whisky). The links suggest that Into the Mirror, like Below, is perhaps more accurately viewed as a male ghost melodrama. The film also has connections with film noir. The hero’s flawed investigation, his battles with authority figures more powerful than himself, his crisis over

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his masculinity – all these are characteristic of a number of key film noirs (see Krutnik 1991). The department store thus emerges less as a ‘woman’s space’ than as a space that confronts Woo with his demons: his anxieties about mirrors; his status in his new job – both of which are challenged by the murders. The ‘disorder’ produced by the ghost is like a reflection of his own lack of control over events. However, it is not just Woo who is a casualty of the ghost’s activities: a woman and five other men who work at the store die. Indeed, when we last see Chairman Jeon, he, too, is a ghost, wandering around the store. Mirrors (Alexandre Aja 2008), the Hollywood remake of Into the Mirror, has nothing of its predecessor’s nuances and complexity. Equally, it is not a ghost film: what haunts the mirrors in the (here derelict) New York department store is a demon and the souls it has ensnared through murder. The result is a crude horror film. Having been suspended from the NYPD after accidentally shooting a colleague, Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) takes a job as a night security guard at the Mayflower, a once luxurious department store still in a state of ruin after a fire five years ago. He finds the mirrors in the store not only show him scenes of people in flames, but also seem to have a malevolent power: he himself is enveloped by a fire which can only be seen in a mirror reflection but which nevertheless burns him. The violent images and the malevolence also transfer to mirrors in homes Ben visits. In the case of his sister Angie (Amy Smart), her reflection in the bathroom mirror rips off its own jaw (a horror motif from The Grudge), causing her to die horribly from the same fate. During the climax in the store, Ben battles with and finally kills the demon. He then emerges to discover that, like Woo at the end of Into the Mirror, he is in a mirror world. However, inside this world, he is also invisible. This suggests that Ben has been killed in the real world, and is now a ghost, but a ghost that exists purely in the mirror world. Again, this raises issues about the puzzling nature of the mirror world. In the final shot, as in Into the Mirror, the camera returns to the real world. But here all we see of Ben, left behind in the mirror world, is his handprint on a shop window.

14. Ghosts and Institutions 2: The West The Hospital Hospitals are institutions that are peculiarly suited to ghostly activity. First, within them matters of life and death are permanently pressing issues; they are also places where people go to die. Inevitably, some will die with a grievance – a basic starting point for ghosts. Second, hospitals have morgues with dead bodies. In Into the Mirror, a pathologist says they removed all the mirrors from the morgue because the staff kept being spooked by the ‘dead people’ they saw in them. Third, hospitals also have histories and secrets, preserved in archives. Such hospital records may well include troubling details: signs of mistakes, of malpractice, even of more sinister actions. The medical past tends to be seen as less enlightened and more primitive than the present, and its practices may seem disturbing from a modern perspective, e.g. the electric shocks given to the teenage Vivian in In Dreams. Barry Curtis notes that, as characters seek to uncover ‘the trauma that initiated the haunting’, there are often scenes of ‘delving in archives, discovering news reports or documentary or photographic evidence which is metaphorically “buried” somewhere’ (2008: 84). Hospital archives are investigated in In Dreams and The Ring as well as the two films in this section. Fourth, patients in hospitals tend to be vulnerable: in particular, those on the cusp between life and death may be more sensitive to the paranormal, as with the children in Dragonfly. Fifth, hospitals tend to occupy the sort of premises favoured by ghosts: old hospitals in large Gothic buildings; modern hospitals in labyrinthine complexes with basements, lift shafts and wards with lots of beds. Hospitals, like prisons, orphanages and boarding schools, are institutions where people sleep, so there are plenty of subjects available to be haunted. Sixth, there can be something inherently spooky about a hospital ward at night. It is when Cole in The Sixth Sense is in hospital that he finally confides in Malcolm: ‘I see dead people’. Seventh, hospital technology is readily amenable to supernatural manipulation. The scenes in Ringu 2 in which Masami causes a monitor to show fragments of the curse video are extreme examples of this. In one scene, she is wired up like a patient undergoing medical tests, but the supernatural elements simply take over. Nevertheless, there are relatively few scary ghost movies that are primarily based in a hospital setting. The two works discussed in this chapter are contrasting examples: Riget is a Danish television mini-series, written

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and directed by a now famous director; Fragile is a little-known Spanish/ UK production. Riget did in fact achieve sufficient status to be released theatrically in some countries; it was also remade as a thirteen-episode US mini-series, scripted by Stephen King, and titled Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital (2004). NB Riget exists on DVD in the UK in two versions, only one of which is complete. When shown on BBC2 in April 1997, the series was cut and re-edited into five episodes, with a total running time of approximately 240 minutes. That was the version put out by ICA Projects in 2002. In 2011, Second Sight released, together with Riget II, the four-episode complete Danish version, which runs for approximately 278 minutes – the version I shall be discussing. Riget/The Kingdom (4-part TV series) (Lars von Trier & Morten Arnfred, Denmark, 1994) Riget is an unusual hybrid. The title, which translates as The Kingdom, is the nickname of the Copenhagen hospital, Rigshospitalet, in which the narrative is almost exclusively set. The hospital is haunted by a ghost girl Mary (Annevig Schelde Ebbe), who is both unhappy – she is confused about why she is there – but also kindly, occasionally appearing to the seriously ill to soothe them. However, the ghost story is only one of a number of plotlines to the series. Lars von Trier both co-authored (with Niels Vørsel on the story and Tómas Gislason on the screenplay) and co-directed the series, which may be seen as a von Trier version of a hospital soap opera, populated with very strange characters and bizarre incidents. Whereas the generic mode for a typical TV hospital soap is melodrama, here the melodrama is frequently shifted towards absurdist black comedy. Self-consciously emulating Alfred Hitchcock on his 1950s TV series, at the end of each episode von Trier comes on and makes jokey remarks about the latest developments. Nevertheless, under the quirky comedy surface, a ghost melodrama simmers. The premise of this thread is illustrated in the pre-credits sequence to each episode. As a voice-over intones, ‘The Kingdom Hospital rests on ancient marshland’, the camera tracks past a medieval scene of bleachers plunging cloth into water; it then moves down through the water to the earth below, where hands emerge through the soil. The voice-over continues over these shots, concluding: ‘For it is as if the cold and damp have returned. Tiny signs of fatigue are appearing in the solid, modern edifice. No living soul knows it yet, but the portals of the Kingdom are reopening’. The camera descent echoes that at the beginning of Blue Velvet (David Lynch 1986),

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and the quirkiness of the overall series suggests perhaps Lynch’s Twin Peaks TV series (1990-1991). My concern here however is with the ghosts. A ghost ambulance is heard calling on the short-wave radio at the same time every night; it arrives outside the hospital and then disappears. Although rarely seen, Mary wanders the hospital; a ghost dog makes an occasional appearance. These incidents are infrequent at first, but increase as the series continues. The supernatural thread runs like a dark undercurrent to the main narrative, and each episode ends with a ghostly encounter. The spookiness is also enhanced by the visual look of the series: colour is drained from the imagery, so whites and browns dominate. An investigation into the ghost girl is conducted by an elderly psychic patient Mrs Drusse (Kirsten Rolffes) who, since there is nothing wrong with her, has to fake symptoms in order to remain in the hospital. She is aided by her son Bulder (Jens Okking), who is a hospital orderly. Assisted by other psychics in the hospital, both patients and staff, Mrs Drusse slowly uncovers Mary’s history. Mary as ghost makes her first appearance at the end of Episode 1 in a lift shaft: an early example of the use of the lift (shaft) as a site of ghostly activity. Her appearance is also linked to signs of subsidence in the hospital: water is seeping up from below. Throughout the series, two Down’s syndrome dishwashers (Vita Jensen and Morten Rotne Leffers) provide a running commentary on events, and some of their observations tie in with ghost folklore: Mrs Drusse is trying to help Mary because the latter is unhappy; Mary never sleeps. They also invoke the uncanny. At the end of Episode 2, there is a little cluster of developments. Mrs Drusse discovers a very elderly patient, Ellen Krüger (Solveig Sunborg), who knew Mary as a child. From Ellen, she obtains a newspaper clipping from 1919, showing Mary in a photograph with Ellen’s father, Åge Krüger (Udo Kier), who treated her at the hospital. As Mrs Drusse and Bulder discuss this, two scenes from the ongoing ‘hospital soap opera’ occur: the Swedish neurosurgeon Dr Helmer (Ernst Hugo Järegård) goes to the hospital roof for his nightly rant against the Danes; although pregnant by her previous boyfriend, Dr Judith Petersen (Birgitte Raaberg) begins an affair with Dr Jørgen Krogshøj (Søren Pilmark), the junior registrar. There is then a cut to the ghost ambulance en route to the hospital: a child’s bloody hand appears at the back window. Cut back to the hospital, where three events occur in quick succession: the porter Hansen (Otto Brandenburg) finds Bongo, the mastiff he had adopted, dead in the hospital basement; grainy CCTV footage shows the arrival of the ambulance outside the hospital; and a crack appears next to Helmer in the hospital roof. Mrs Drusse now realises Bongo is the

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dog in the photograph with Mary and Krüger. As Hansen approaches Bongo, the latter ‘resurrects’ as a ghost dog with glowing red eyes. The mix of material is characteristic of the ghost elements in the series. Mrs Drusse eventually discovers Mary was the illegitimate child of Krüger who, under the pretext of treating her for TB, poisoned her at the hospital to protect his reputation. Mary is now compulsively repeating the last day of her life. The ghost ambulance re-enacts her final trip to the hospital before her murder; the dog was Mary’s, killed trying to protect her. The crack in the roof is another sign of the subsidence affecting the structure of the building. These signs link the ghostly events to the intimation, in the pre-credits sequence, of a return of the world ‘repressed’ under the hospital: a world of superstition and spirits. The doctors in the hospital insist science has expelled such beliefs, but, through their absurd rituals and ridiculous behaviour, they themselves are implicitly helping to re-admit elements of that world. The ideological fault lines here are also finding physical metaphorical expression in the crumbling state of the building. Mary is also the ‘ghost double’ of Mona (Laura Christensen), a little girl left brain-damaged by the incompetence of Helmer, the blustering villain of the series. Just as Mrs Drusse breaks into the hospital archive to find evidence of how Mary died, so Helmer breaks in to destroy evidence of his bungled operation on Mona. Mary seems to establish a delicate communication with Mona, and Bongo treats Helmer as another villain, chasing him through the basement corridors. When, in Episode 3, Helmer is trapped in the archive, unable to move because of the sensors of the security system, the ghosts of both Mary and Bongo visit him. Episode 3 ends with Mrs Drusse realising from the archival notes that Mary was not buried; she then notices her embalmed body on display in a glass case in the office of the head of pathology. This is the disturbing image on the DVD covers of both versions released in the UK. In effect, the image condenses the sinister ghost elements of the series. It shows the preserved body of a little girl who, horribly murdered in the hospital, is now a ghost. Her mouth is open as though she were gasping for breath; during Episode 3 we see her ghost scream, expelling the chlorine gas that killed her. Her body has been preserved because she had spondylitis, a disorder of the spine. But there is something both macabre and troubling about her naked corpse being displayed in this manner, as though she were the medical equivalent of a ‘circus freak’. Her presence at the heart of the hospital is like an unrecognised guilt image: this was what was done to a child by a doctor in an earlier generation.

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Nevertheless, the fate of Mona shows little has changed: Helmer is not brought to justice for his negligence. The medical authorities are investigating the case, but the head of neurosurgery Dr Moesgaard (Holger Juul Hansen) keeps Helmer informed of developments – which enables the latter to take steps to cover himself – and when Krogshøj gets hold of evidence that would expose Helmer, he simply uses it to blackmail him. Following the usual thinking about ghosts, Mrs Drusse assumes Mary will find peace if she is given a proper internment, and she, Bulder and Hansen proceed to bury the body in its case on the site of the previous hospital chapel. This, however, proves insufficient. Mrs Drusse manages to summon up the ghost of Mary’s mother (Lea Bragge) as well as Mary, and discovers the real problem is nobody has testified to Åge Krüger’s crime. She concludes the ghost equivalent of an exorcism is required, in which Mary must be persuaded to enter the ‘other world’ by people who tell her they testify to her murder by Krüger. Following a ritual described in an ancient religious tome, she, Bulder and Krogshøj enact this. However, von Trier also mixes in another ghostly thread, which moves the series into grotesque horror. Judith’s fetus is growing far too quickly, and on one occasion, Krogshøj sees her in a transparent, spectral form. Mrs Drusse deduces the fetus is the problem, and photographs reveal the father of Judith’s child was Åge Krüger. Mary’s ghost appears to Judith, and tells her that, even though the fetus is her baby brother, she does not think he should live. The series ends with an attempted abortion that goes wrong, and the monstrous baby that emerges has the full-grown head of Åge Krüger. This tumble into gross-out horror is compounded by the emergence, in the basement, of a whole range of ghosts from the past. Mrs Drusse assumes they made a slip with the ‘exorcism’, which served to release the ghosts. The shift into horror continues throughout Riget II, where the supernatural thread to the narrative becomes focused on the issue of devil worshipping, and the ghost elements are almost entirely abandoned. It would seem as though von Trier saw the ghost story as the anchoring element to the plot threads of Riget, and although the absurd foibles of the members of staff sometimes take over, this remains substantially the case. Links may be drawn between Mary and a number of the other main characters. At the same time, the ghost backstory has a certain poignancy. Mary was murdered by her father because her illegitimacy threatened his status as a respectable doctor. When Mrs Drusse finds Ellen Krüger, the latter is in a swimming pool, having regressed to 1919 when she was nine. She is washing Mary’s doll, which her father gave her just before killing

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Mary. It’s as though she is trying to wash away the sins of her father (Mary’s name is on the doll), a symbolic act of atonement that is inevitably futile. Although all four combinations of parent-child relationship occur in Riget, it is the parent-daughter relationships that are the most troubling. The mothers of both Mary and Mona bear witness to the suffering of their abused daughters. The two father-daughter relationships are even more disturbing. We do not know the history of Ellen’s relationship with Krüger, but her regression to age nine is at least suggestive: as though this were the last time she was happy. And the father-daughter relationship between Krüger and Mary is sadistic and murderous. As usual in melodrama, it is the daughters who carry the burden of suffering. Fragile/Frágiles (Jaume Balagueró, Spain/UK, 2005) Like The Others, Fragile (scripted by Balagueró and Jordi Galcerán) is an English-language movie made by a Spanish writer-director and with a Spanish crew. The film is likewise set on an island – here the Isle of Wight which, according to Roger Clarke, is an area of England with a rich history of ghost legends (2012: 7-11) – and most of the action takes place in an isolated building, here Mercy Falls Children’s Hospital. A large Gothic edifice, the hospital is the sort of setting familiar from numerous horror and hauntedhouse narratives. It is also about to close: only eight children and a skeleton staff remain. This is a very different sort of hospital setting from Riget: a Gothic building in a remote area, with only a few patients and staff. Although Von Trier satirises mercilessly, Riget is in part concerned with the hospital as an institution, complete with staff meetings, hospital politics and a visit from powerful dignitaries. By contrast, in Fragile there is only the vestige of an institution; instead the hospital is, rather, the setting for an isolated group of people under threat. In Riget, the ghost remains in the background; here the ghost is a crucial narrative agent throughout, creating a whole series of calamities. Yet the ghosts are similar in that each comes from many years in the past and is the consequence of a hushed-up scandal in the hospital’s history. They may be seen as the hospital’s repressed. In Fragile, a pre-credits sequence begins with a 3 a.m. TV news report of a train crash on the island. When, late in the film, the ghost’s agenda becomes clear, even this accident would seem to be down to its activities. The crash results in the other hospital on the island being overcrowded, and so delays the closure of Mercy Falls, which is what the ghost wants. Mercy Falls has long been thought by some of the children to be haunted, but most adults have dismissed their stories of ‘Charlotte’, who inhabits

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the derelict second floor. We now see a more direct sign of Charlotte’s destructiveness. A girl, Maggie (Yasmin Murphy), cryptically warns a nurse, Susan (Susie Trayling), that, ‘she’s coming’, but Susan doesn’t want to talk about it. The femur of a boy, Simon (Lloyd F. Booth Shankley), is inexplicably broken as he lies in bed; it is broken again as he is being X-rayed. Dr Robert Kerry (Richard Roxburgh) is baffled; Susan is frightened. We subsequently learn that, like Maggie, she has actually seen Charlotte. As Maggie hears Simon’s second scream, we move into the credits sequence. The opening credits are set against dense, allusive imagery that can only be partly grasped. We see objects, e.g. old surgical instruments; children’s lettered blocks; a music-box ballerina; a girl’s photograph; a filed stamped ‘Deceased’; butterfly cut-outs, all degraded from years of neglect. There are also glimpses of activity: a girl’s hand strokes a paper butterfly; does a drawing. Shown in overlapping superimpositions, the sequence evokes a past complexly mediated through the patina of some forty-odd years. Although the sort of impressionistic, elliptical credits sequence now commonly found in ghost melodramas, the montage does not refer to the primary traumatic event, but to the film’s ghost zone – the hospital’s second floor, sealed off since 1959 – and the girl whose suffering in the past gave rise to it. There is also a sense that, in keeping with the setting, these are Gothic traces from the past. As the credits continue, we move forward two days: the heroine Amy (Calista Flockhart) arrives on the ferry from the mainland. Susan has taken sick leave, and Amy is her replacement as night nurse. In a familiar development, Amy, the new arrival, becomes the investigative figure – the person who seeks to make sense of the mysterious happenings at the hospital. Like Susan before her, she establishes a close relationship with Maggie, who is terminally ill from cystic f ibrosis. Gradually Amy realises that Charlotte is not simply a figment of Maggie’s imagination. Her acceptance of a supernatural presence is also prompted by her own experiences. When Simon is being transferred, the lift he and Amy take assumes a life of its own, going up to the second floor, then down to the basement. Deducing Susan left because she was afraid, Amy goes to her home to talk to her, but learns she has been killed in a car accident. Amy then witnesses an overtly ghostly phenomenon: a sheet on Simon’s empty bed rises of its own accord. Amy also has a dream in which a child calls her name, followed by flash shots of a bloody operation on a broken leg. Later it is confirmed that the images are ghost-induced – they thus suggest a cry for help. Over an internal phone, Amy then hears a child whisper, ‘I know you; what you’ve done’. Referring to an incident in Amy’s recent past for which she blames herself

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and in which we deduce a child died, the comment is like the voice of her conscience. Here and in the dream, it’s as though the ghost elements have invaded Amy’s unconscious. Fragile is a film in which detail is unusually important: motifs echo through the narrative; images set up resonances; the editing links events in suggestive ways. By this stage, a number of crucial ghost elements have been introduced. From the moment Amy arrives at the hospital, a storm is brewing, and it rains repeatedly over the next few days. Maggie explains to Amy that the lettered blocks in the playroom are not for playing, but for talking to Charlotte, whom she describes as a ‘mechanical girl’. This is a motif from Riget II, where the brain-damaged Mona spells out messages with such blocks, messages that are implicitly from the ghost world. The lift as a danger zone occurs in several East Asian movies. We are also familiar with the idea that messages from the ghost world can invade a character’s dreams. And a sheet or bedcover rising through ghostly activity is also a motif from earlier movies, e.g. The Legend of Hell House (John Hough, GB, 1973). Now, however, such references become more focused. Amy goes to consult two (unnamed) elderly ladies (Freda Dowie and Matyelok Gibbs) to whom Susan had confided her fears. In their house is an autistic boy, Adam (Max Batista), who seems to be a reference to a brain-damaged boy in the house of Dr Grasnik in The Ring. As in The Ring, this is where the heroine learns about the nature of the problem confronting her and, in keeping with the thrust of the films, it is (elderly) women who guide her. The old ladies warn Amy there is ‘something in the hospital from the other world’, and tell her those close to death, like Susan and Maggie, can glimpse this world, ‘the world of the dead’. They also suggest why a ghost would haunt a particular place: ‘It’s not where they died, not even where they lived... They simply stay near what they loved’. This information will become crucial to Amy realising what Charlotte wants. As the ladies are talking, there are two cuts to Adam, linking him to their story as though he, too, is aware of ‘the other world’. He then gives Amy his painting of a butterfly. When Amy later steels herself to explore the hospital’s second floor, a butterfly drawing on the door identifies Charlotte’s room. Here the familiar notion of the autistic savant is extended into the supernatural realm: as though Adam knows Amy will find his painting helpful. As in Dragonfly, (sick) children serve as crucial guides through the ghost elements. Maggie’s intelligence about the lettered blocks is violently confirmed when Roy (Colin McFarlane), the maintenance man, is packing

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them up. They assemble to spell two peremptory phrases: ‘Don’t touch’ and ‘Not yours’. Roy’s nose starts to bleed; cracks appear in the ceiling. Collapsing on the floor, Roy sees a figure in callipers walking towards him, and his bones begin to break. He is then hurled backwards through a window to his death. Here the film evokes both the ghost murder of Natsumi in Chakushin ari (the broken bones) and the possessed Father Karras’s leap backwards through the window in The Exorcist. This emphasises that Charlotte is a ghost monster, seeking to harm those who displease her. Although this places Fragile in the horror strand of the scary ghost movie, there are at the same time strong melodrama elements, which emerge as Amy uncovers the backstory. Typically of these narratives, the heroine’s concerns are mocked by the figures of authority. Amy has already raised with the senior nurse Mrs Folder (Gemma Jones) the possibility of a malevolent ghost, but the latter has reacted with scorn. Enraged that even Roy’s death does not cause Folder to take the idea seriously, Amy herself goes to investigate the second floor. This is indeed a typical ghost zone, the whole floor degraded through the years of isolation. In the room identified by a butterfly, Amy finds no less than three ancient toys that become animated as she touches them, including the music box and ballerina from the credits. As in many other ghost movies, eeriness resides in the sense of an uncanny animation. Amy is then guided by a swinging cabinet door to two crucial items: a photograph of a nurse with a girl in a wheelchair, labelled ‘Charlotte and Mandy 1959’, and a 16 mm film roll in a container marked ‘osteogenesis’. She then sees a terrifying figure standing at the end of the corridor. Shown at a distance in silhouette, the figure looks armoured, as though encased in some sort of metal. Amy seems mesmerised by the vision, but Maggie arrives and prompts her to flee. Furthering the sense that the ghost zone on the second floor hints at the Gothic, Charlotte at first sight seems rather like a female Frankenstein’s monster, a humanoid creature bolted together. However, the photograph at first misleads Amy and Robert; it is only later they realise that Charlotte is the nurse (Karmeta Cervera) and Mandy the girl (Ivana Baquero). Mandy had osteogenesis imperfecta, brittle bone disease, and the 16 mm film records her suffering and the attempts to alleviate her condition. It is here we are shown that Amy’s early dream was indeed ghost-induced: the imagery appears in an operation on Mandy. But, as Amy and Robert watch the film, cracks again appear in the ceiling – Charlotte is once more showing her anger. They decide to move the children immediately.

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This initiates the film’s extended climax. A raging thunderstorm has disrupted communications: the mobile phone network fails, obliging Amy to drive to Folder’s house to phone for ambulances. On the drive back, Amy learns that Folder – in 1959, already a nurse at the hospital – has always known the backstory of ‘the glass girl’ and her nurse. Again following Chakushin ari, the founding trauma involved a girl/woman pointedly harming a girl in her care. Charlotte became so obsessed with Mandy that, when the girl started to improve, she fractured her bones to keep her in the hospital. Sacked, she reacted by suffocating Mandy; then, wearing the girl’s orthopaedic limbs, threw herself down the lift shaft. As Folder tells Amy the story, Robert watches the 16 mm film, looking for a vital clue. Balagueró cuts between Amy and Folder in the car, and Robert and the film at the hospital, but Folder’s account continues throughout. Certain images from the 16 mm film are thus accompanied by Folder’s voice-over, which serves to clarify them. Moreover, as Folder reaches the climax of her story – the murder of Mandy and the suicide of Charlotte – these incidents are shown as flashbacks. The montage – not just the cross-cutting in the present, but the incorporation of flashbacks linked to Folder’s account and the events in 16 mm film – seems modelled with some skill on the equivalent sequence in Chakushin ari. This is another example of a key montage. It lacks the supernatural elements of Chakushin ari – the way the haunting of Yumi is integrated into the montage – but it is still charged with meaning. One shot will serve to illustrate its sophistication: the flashback of Charlotte suffocating Mandy under a sheet. The shape formed by Mandy’s suffocating face is the same as that on the sheet that rises of its own accord on Simon’s bed. Now, the motif of sheets (or bedclothes) rising through the activity of an otherwise invisible ghost takes two basic forms. The more familiar is to be found at the climax of M.R. James’s famous 1903 short story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”: here the bedclothes move around the room as though someone were inside them (James [1931] 1949). Although this derives from the traditional, indeed cliché, idea of ghosts haunting in sheets, it is undeniably spooky, and is brilliantly caught in a BBC TV adaptation of the story, Whistle and I’ll Come to You (Jonathan Miller 1968). The Legend of Hell House offers a more unusual intimation. When the bedclothes rise up in front of Florence (Pamela Franklin), this suggests a ghostly sexual erection. And although ghosts are rarely sexual, in this case Florence is subsequently ravished by the ghost in that very bed. In Fragile, the intimation is different again. Because the image echoes Mandy’s death throes, it warns of Charlotte’s murderousness. Also as in

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Chakushin ari, the key montage finally explains that the ghost was not a past victim, but someone who harmed others. Like Mandy’s, Simon’s bones were broken to keep him in the hospital. And now Charlotte is not just causing structural collapses in the hospital, she is also injuring the children. Amy and Robert now realise that Charlotte is harming the children because she does not want them to be taken away – here we see a revelatory montage of past scenes as Amy puts the elements together. With melodramatic logic, their realisation coincides with the arrival of the ambulances to effect the removal, leading to a chaotic scene where Amy and Robert try to stop the evacuation. However, the supernatural events – injuring the children; damaging the hospital – suddenly cease. Charlotte has been appeased: she has captured Maggie. In Chakushin ari, it is in the derelict hospital that the heroine finally confronts her inner demons. It is much the same here. Amy returns to the derelict second floor to rescue Maggie from a ghost that has a supernatural ability to thwart this. Again, there are overtones of the heroine having to confront a monstrous mother figure: we now see Charlotte more clearly and, encased in orthopaedic limbs, she is like a hideous ghost cyborg. And although Amy does manage to carry Maggie through the collapsing masonry back to the first floor, she is seriously injured with a leg wound, and Maggie dies in her arms. Moreover, since she herself has seen Charlotte, Amy assumes she is dying. By the time Robert gets her to an ambulance, she is flatlining. Robert’s attempts to restart her heart with a defibrillator fail. Amy is saved by Maggie’s ghost. Earlier, Roy showed the children an animated Sleeping Beauty. Maggie was particularly taken by the film, explaining to Amy that the Prince was able to save Rose because he gave her a ‘love kiss’ – a kiss on the mouth. This is how Maggie’s ghost saves Amy: materialising above her to kiss her mouth (see Fig. 36). Amy dies, but, thanks to the love of a child, she is resurrected – a moment that seals her redemption from her past mistake. In the epilogue, the f ilm takes this further. As Amy recuperates in (another) hospital, Robert reassures her she did all she could for Maggie, and Maggie knew it. As he walks away, a dying man is wheeled past Amy’s room. He turns to see Maggie’s ghost at her bedside, and in voice-over we hear the words of the old ladies, ending with, ‘They simply stay near what they loved’. Realising the old man has seen her, Maggie smiles. There is another implication. Playing through the film in a number of details is a lesbian subtext: the old ladies living together; a moment when Amy rejects Robert’s threatened kiss with a firm, ‘No!’; the fact that, Sleeping Beauty aside, the only kiss in the film is Maggie’s ghost kissing Amy.

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Moreover, in the epilogue, the old ladies come to visit Amy, as though the film wanted to reaffirm the importance and harmony of their relationship. Fragile may thus be included as another ghost melodrama which includes a lesbian theme, and here the lesbian kiss is redemptive. The fairy-tale elements also spread across the rest of the film. Charlotte is like the wicked witch, holding the children under a curse – in a sort of captivity. The film stresses the parallel during the screening of Sleeping Beauty. The scene where the witch gets Rose to prick her finger is crosscut with Amy telling another nurse, Helen (Elena Anaya), about Susan’s death, which we assume has been orchestrated by Charlotte. Charlotte also causes potentially fatal bleeding: Roy’s nosebleed; Amy’s wound. When the children are being hastily evacuated, a needle breaks as Helen is removing a drip from a boy’s arm and blood comes gushing out. Because she knew about the past scandal, Folder now seems more implicated than she admits. On both occasions when Amy raises with her the possibility of a ghost, Folder reacts by referring to the slur on Amy’s record, i.e. warding off the suggestion by reminding Amy of her own mistake. This suggests perhaps Folder, too, made a bad mistake – she noticed what Charlotte was doing in 1959, but, as a new nurse, kept quiet. If so, her guilt has been sealed away on the second floor for over forty years, and she is the person for whom Charlotte represents the return of the repressed. Charlotte could even be seen as Folder’s alter ego. It seems highly likely Folder doesn’t want the hospital to close either: she has been there (we assume) all her working life; she lives nearby. It’s as though Charlotte is acting out her resentment at the closure. The melodrama in Fragile emerges obliquely: in Amy’s guilt; in the touching surrogate mother-daughter relationship she establishes with Maggie; in the emotionally fraught world of caring for sick children. A further complication is Mandy, too, could be haunting the hospital. In particular, the (simulation of a) suffocating face under the elevating sheets on Simon’s bed would seem to stem from Mandy: it recreates her death throes; it warns about Charlotte. Similarly, the brief shots of a leg operation in Amy’s dream are like an appeal from Mandy – both a sign of her suffering and another warning about Charlotte, the broken leg signalling that this is what she does. Even the voice on the phone, which is threatening, seemingly stems from Mandy. It occurs after we have seen Susan driving on what will be her last journey. The film fades to black, then cuts to a close-up of a butterfly on TV. Part of a nature documentary, the image keeps fading out. Amy phones for technical help; this is where the voice whispers to her. Now, Mandy is associated with butterflies as early as the credits sequence, and in the 16 mm

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film, there are drawings of butterflies on her bedroom wall. The butterfly on the TV is Mandy’s motif, strengthening the sense that the voice on the phone is hers. Susan dies, and Mandy makes her presence felt in a slightly aggressive way. She could be obliquely signalling her anger that Charlotte has killed again. There is also a butterfly collection on Mrs Folder’s study wall. This serves to incorporate her more firmly into the hospital melodrama: as though, consciously or unconsciously, the butterflies are in remembrance of Mandy – and are perhaps a sign of Folder’s (implied) guilt at her death. It is even hinted that Maggie, too, has been contacted by Mandy. When Maggie first tells Amy about Charlotte, she says, ‘I think she’s a girl’. But, even at a distance, Charlotte is unmistakably adult. Perhaps Mandy has sought Maggie’s company, but has kept her identity secret. There is also the implicit connection with the closeness of the equivalent names in Riget: there Mary is like Mona’s ghost double; perhaps here Mandy is like Maggie’s. The possibility of a second, invisible, ghost in the hospital is suggestive. It seems a little extraordinary that, for over forty years, Charlotte has remained as a ghost on the second floor but has seemingly controlled her hostile impulses. Mandy’s presence could explain this. Perhaps, since her death in 1959, Mandy has, until now, been able to appease Charlotte and stop her harming the children. In other words, she has served as the children’s ‘guardian angel ghost’, just as Maggie, ultimately, becomes Amy’s. The butterfly on the door in the ghost zone is really signalling this is Charlotte and Mandy’s room. Another object in the room is Mandy’s wheelchair. According to Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, Fragile was well received by Spanish critics, but not by Variety or Screen International (2012: 254). Nor did it receive a theatrical release in either the US or the UK. Nevertheless, Fragile is one of the more impressive films in the current ghost melodrama cycle: intelligently scripted, well crafted, and showing a commendable grasp of the generic material. It is another ghost film testifying to the exemplary contribution of Spanish writers and directors to the cycle.

The Prison Gothika (Mathieu Kassovitz, US, 2003) The cinema has long recognised that prisons can be violent and repressive institutions. From Brute Force (Jules Dassin 1947) to Alien3 (David Fincher 1992) and The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont 1994) there have

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been any number of movies depicting harsh and brutal prison regimes. Psychiatric hospitals, by contrast, are normally viewed as less repressive, although there are exceptions, such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman 1975). Gothika combines these two institutions: here the prison is a psychiatric penitentiary, which is, moreover, for women. Scripted by Sebastian Gutierrez, the film begins by viewing the institution from the point of view of key staff, who give every impression of being caring. But there is then a striking narrative volte-face, after which we see matters from the point of view of the inmates. A very different picture now emerges. Gothika also reinforces the sense that the preferred genre for a Hollywood scary ghost movie is the thriller. Here the ghost not only provides a whole series of shocks, its activities drive the plot kinetically. Complementing this, Gothika is filmed – like Kassovitz’s previous movie, a police thriller, Les Rivières pourpres/The Crimson Rivers (France, 2000) – in a dynamic style that aims for visceral effect. The title refers primarily to the prison, which is a Gothic labyrinth of corridors, staircases and cells – all filmed in steely grey. Locked gates, wire-mesh partitions and glass walls compound the sense of being both caged in and under observation. This heightens the potential for melodrama, as inmates fight against the restrictions imposed on them. At the same time, the prison environment also becomes the setting for a fast-moving psychological thriller. Dr Miranda Grey (Halle Berry) is a psychiatrist in a woman’s psychiatric penitentiary in Connecticut. Her husband Doug (Charles S. Dutton) is the prison director. The film opens with an intensely filmed scene between Miranda and Chloë (Penélope Cruz), an inmate who killed her stepfather to stop him raping her. Chloë now maintains that ‘the Devil’ has been coming to her cell to rape her; unsurprisingly, Miranda considers she is fantasising. However, Chloë also accuses Miranda of not really listening. When Miranda protests, Chloë elaborates: ‘You’re not listening with your heart. Just your brain. Your brain is the problem’. A major project of the film will be to teach Miranda to listen in this deeper sense. As Miranda drives home during a storm, an injured teenage girl appears in the road near a bridge; swerving to avoid her, Miranda crashes. She goes to help the girl, whereupon flames explode out of the girl and envelop Miranda herself. She wakes in a cell in the penitentiary three days later, incarcerated for her husband’s murder. The remainder of the film constitutes Miranda’s desperate attempts to understand what has happened to her and why. Robert Zemeckis was a producer on Gothika, and What Lies Beneath can be seen as one influence on the film. In Gothika, as in What Lies Beneath, the ghost girl – the girl in the road – was murdered by the heroine’s

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husband. Both ghosts wish the heroine to learn this, but in Gothika, the ghost also seeks revenge. The flames bursting out of the girl signal her possession of Miranda; Miranda then returned home and slaughtered Doug with an axe. And Miranda now has partial amnesia: she has no recollection of the last three days. Possession and partial amnesia also occur in What Lies Beneath, but the ghost in Gothika is much more ruthless. Not only does the possession here cause Miranda’s amnesia, but, thanks to the ghost, sixteen minutes into the film, Miranda’s life is turned upside down. She is now an inmate in the very prison where she had been working as a doctor. Moreover, Miranda is as powerless as the other inmates. As Chloë points out, no-one will believe you if they think you are crazy. Miranda in her cell is now a captive audience, and the ghost is quick to take advantage. Miranda has a fragmented, bloody nightmare of Doug’s murder. She wakes in her cell as the lights flicker – a standard signifier of ghostly activity. As she sits looking towards the glass wall to the outside corridor, the camera, positioned behind her, effects the famous visual trope from Vertigo: a simultaneous zoom out and track in. The intimation here is that Miranda senses something uncanny. Condensation forms on the outside of the glass wall, and the words, ‘Not alone’, appear in what is, from Miranda’s point of view, mirror writing. Just as the language of the hotel in The Shining is in mirror writing, so ghosts – e.g. in Into the Mirror, also 2003 – occasionally use mirror writing to communicate with the living. This links them, literally or metaphorically, to a mirror world. In this case, as we will discover at the climax, the significance is that the message is on the outside of the glass. The words ‘Not alone’ crop up repeatedly in the film, but here they seem designed to reassure Miranda that she herself is not alone. Miranda is now subjected to a haunting: she senses an invisible presence in the cell moving around her; an effect conveyed by the camera simulating ghostly movements. Miranda is so disturbed by this she insists she’s dreaming: ‘Dream logic; primary process – that’s what this is’. A ghostly hand reaches out to her; cut to day, when she’s roused by a nurse. Because she does not believe in ghosts, Miranda denies to herself that she is being haunted. Nevertheless, her reference to the logic of dreams – ‘primary process’ – also chimes with my thesis that the actions of ghosts may be likened to the workings of the unconscious. As with her first appearance in the rain, water empowers and emboldens the ghost. Appearing in the showers, she slashes Miranda’s arm. But no-one else sees her, so it is assumed Miranda is self-harming. Then, when Miranda

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is in a meeting with her lawyer, Sheriff Ryan (John Carroll Lynch) arrives and demands to know why she killed Doug, his friend. He shows her photographs of the crime scene; at that moment Miranda’s wounded arm starts to bleed. Only now do we see the ghost had carved the same words, ‘Not alone’, into the arm. Moreover, Miranda also sees, from the photographs, that ‘Not alone’ had been written in blood on the bedroom door. This is an excellent example of the confusion a ghost can create when its message is misunderstood. To the onlookers, including Pete Graham (Robert Downey Jr), the psychiatrist supervising Miranda, it looks as though her body is involuntarily signalling her guilt. In fact, the ghost is striving to tell Miranda something. Like Madison in What Lies Beneath, the ghost in Gothika does not speak, and her means of communication are primitive. The ‘Not alone’ at the murder site and the ‘Not alone’ she carves into Miranda’s arm will turn out to be her way of signalling – in an example of condensation – that Doug was not the only killer, and she herself was not the only victim. The film is also a serial-killer movie. The ghost makes the wound bleed at this point because in front of Miranda is the second killer – Ryan himself. He is the person referred to by (one meaning of) ‘Not alone’. In the shower, the ghost girl is in fact using the ‘language’ of the serial killer: terror and pain. She is doing to Miranda what was done to her. The association is strengthened by Miranda’s reaction to seeing ‘Not alone’ both on her arm and in the photographs. She backs away from the men in the room, repeating, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Again, it is as though she is speaking for the ghost: this is precisely what we would expect the killers’ victims to have said. The phrase is indeed sufficiently familiar generically to provide the heading for the chapter on torture movies in Kim Newman’s Nightmare Movies (2011: 466). After another nightmare about the night of Doug’s murder, in this case leading her back to the possession by the bridge, Miranda accepts that she was involved, but realises the girl she encountered was also in some sense implicated. She goes to talk to Doug’s replacement as director, Phil Parsons (Bernard Hill), telling him ‘Not alone’ refers to the girl’s involvement. Only later will she realise the more significant connotations of the words. But in Phil’s study, she sees a photograph of the girl. She was Phil’s daughter Rachel (Kathleen Mackey); he tells Miranda she died four years ago. Now realising that she must be dealing with a ghost, Miranda shows her flexibility – and her new willingness to listen – by enlisting its aid: she asks Rachel to open her cell door. Rachel obliges; Miranda escapes. In Pete’s office, his computer switches on, showing Miranda the local newspaper report of Rachel’s death. The report notes that Rachel’s body was found

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by the bridge where Miranda encountered her ghost, but claims that her death was suicide. Again as in What Lies Beneath, the ghost uses a computer to communicate with the heroine: Rachel seeks to draw Miranda’s attention to the lies in the official account of her death. But she also wishes to alert Miranda to something else: by actually appearing on the computer screen, she leads Miranda to the solitary wing, where Chloë is incarcerated. There Miranda witnesses Chloë being assaulted by a man with an anima sola (a chained woman in flames) tattoo on his chest. This revelation draws together two threads. Rachel has brought Miranda to Chloë’s cell because the man raping Chloë is again her other murderer. Miranda is not able to recognise him, but the man will turn out to be Sheriff Ryan. Equally, however, the scene reveals Chloë’s opening account was not really fantasy. With his anima sola tattoo, to Chloë Ryan personified the Devil. Exemplifying the corruption of Doug’s prison regime, Ryan was allowed into the cells to rape the female prisoners. Miranda is recaptured, but her understanding of past events is now in conflict with the official version. A violent row between her and Pete ensues, in which he dismisses her account of Chloë being raped, and refuses to listen to her claims that Rachel was murdered. The clash becomes so heated because Miranda accepts that the girl she encountered was a ghost, and Pete is disturbed by this threat to his scientific rationalism. The argument climaxes with Pete affecting incredulity: ‘The police, the newspapers, the coroner – they’re all wrong? Let’s reopen the case!’. Miranda shouts back: ‘Yes, maybe they are! Maybe they should!’ Although making Pete so hostile here is part of the film’s strategy to keep him in play as a murder suspect, Miranda is also threatening to expose corruption in the community. Unlike Lady in White or The Gift, Gothika shows nothing of the small-town community, but the late revelation that Doug and Ryan have been abducting and killing local girls for years raises the question of how this could have continued. Miranda is not only saying that Rachel’s death was murder, but also that there was a cover-up. It seems highly likely Ryan had a tame pathologist (and coroner?) who delivered the findings about the body Ryan wanted. If so, the series of murders by two powerful men are merely the most extreme instances of the evil in the community; other individuals are also implicated. Rachel’s invisibility to everyone except Miranda leads to another misperception by the authorities: as Rachel, with superhuman strength, hurls Miranda around in her cell, the prison guards assume Miranda is trying to kill herself. However, Rachel is also facilitating Miranda’s escape, since

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when the staff go to check, Miranda breaks out of her cell. The prison is now used for a memorable chase sequence: although the layout is indeed like a labyrinth, Miranda knows her way through it, and she is repeatedly able to keep ahead of her pursuers. Nevertheless, Rachel continues her relentless harassment. As Miranda hides in the depths of the prison swimming pool, Rachel appears before her, frightening her back into action – a minor example of immersion leading to a glimpse of the ghost world. With the help of a benevolent guard, Miranda is able to escape in a car. Rachel now appears – through the rear-view mirror – in the back of the car, but also takes control, almost causing a crash. It is here Miranda utters the despairing cry of the ghost’s victim in a number of these movies: ‘What do you want from me?’ But she shouts this to an empty back seat: Rachel has disappeared. In another example of the f ilm’s inventiveness with ghost movie tropes, when Miranda returns home, she not only enters a time-slip, but a time-slip presented as theatre. As she draws up outside the house, the porch and house lights switch on, like a theatre being illuminated for a performance. Inside the house, she hears Doug calling from upstairs. With the thunder and lightning of the night of the murder in the background, she finds him badly maimed on the landing, pleading with her to stop. She then sees herself come out of the bedroom (from offstage) and chop him with an axe (see Fig. 37). Miranda screams: the past scene vanishes. It’s as though Rachel has restaged the murder scene for her: to make her see what happened. Throughout the prison pursuit, Miranda remains barefoot, and she enters the house both barefoot and wet from her immersion in the pool. Nevertheless, like Claire during the last act of What Lies Beneath, she does not seek out dry clothes. Since this trope is also found at a similar point in Phone, it would seem there is a strong narrative imperative at work. In each of the three films, the female figure who enters the house is following a route more or less mapped out for her by the ghost, and this includes her being in some sense identified with the ghost – Rachel first appeared to Miranda barefoot and soaked from the rain. In addition, the last time Miranda entered the house, she was possessed by the ghost and was thus like the little girl in Phone. She is now seeking to understand the possession. In What Lies Beneath and Phone, the ensuing sequence is like an echo of the primary traumatic event. Here, the sequence includes a literal re-enactment of Doug’s murder. But, as in the other films, this again suggests a powerful narrative compulsion to repeat. And here what is repeated is Miranda’s repressed.

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The time-slip continues: Miranda sees her past self in the bath, washing off the blood. Whereas in What Lies Beneath the climactic bath sequence threatens the heroine with murder, here it includes a rebirth: the ghost frees Miranda to return to her ‘normal self’. As Miranda looks in a mirror, her face becomes anguished, and begins to oscillate with Rachel’s – a visual dramatisation of the possession. When the oscillation ceases, she is no longer the Miranda of the past, but the Miranda of the present. But, even as Rachel liberates Miranda from the possession, it is implied, through the mirror, she had been a part of Miranda, like her dark side. This, too, evokes What Lies Beneath, hinting that Miranda, like Claire, had unconscious doubts about her husband, doubts which the ghost has served to bring out. In Phone, too, there is a scene in which the heroine looks into a mirror and her face oscillates with that of the ghost girl. But there the trope seems to signal little more than the ghost is striving to make her presence known, whereas here there is a mirror motif running through the film. In an early scene, Miranda tells Doug about Chloë’s ‘rape fantasy’. Since Doug must be aware of Ryan’s role in this, he proceeds to bamboozle Miranda. He gets her to throw water over a mirror, so the image she sees of herself is blurred. From behind her, like the Devil whispering in her ear, Doug then guides Miranda to misread what she is seeing. Whereas Miranda is in fact seeing a blurred image of herself, Doug encourages her to see this as a reflection of how Chloë sees the world – with Miranda herself as the distorting mirror. Miranda turns to Doug: ‘If I’m the mirror and she’s the image, who are you?’ Doug: ‘I can see both of you, so I’m God’. Although Doug is obviously joking, this is a telling comment, and the film returns to it later. Nevertheless, Doug has cleverly reinforced Miranda’s view that Chloë’s perception is distorted. At the same time, the scene shows what is really going on: Doug is in fact distorting Miranda’s point of view. Again guided by Rachel – this time through a photograph – Miranda is led to Willow Creek, the couple’s unoccupied farm. Just as the prison setting lends a Gothic flavour to the scenes set there, so the film now shifts to an example of modern rural Gothic: the serial killers’ lair. At Willow Creek, under a barn, Miranda finds the cellar where the killers tortured and filmed their victims. A video camera points at a bed on which there are chains and bloody sheets. On the video in the camera, Miranda sees a young woman, naked apart from her panties, chained to the bed. Doug enters the shot and grabs her. The girl struggles and screams. Doug then comes to the camera, adjusts his tie, smiles and says, ‘It’s good to be God. I love you’. Referring back to their early mirror scene, Doug on the video – as the tie adjusting reveals – is addressing Miranda as though she really were the mirror. The

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film’s mirror imagery reaches a neat conclusion: it was Doug, not Chloë, whose view of the world was distorted. The blurred mirror image of Miranda in the early scene was how Doug saw her. This is the crucial revelation. First, Miranda now realises her husband was a monster. Although the video evidently does not show the full horror of what happened to the girl, it is apparent that brutal sexual and physical abuse took place on the bed. Second, the girl also stands in for Rachel herself; another stage in Rachel’s education of Miranda about her husband. Third, the use of the video suggests Miranda is seeing into her own repressed: like a projection of her unconscious suspicions about Doug. Fourth, the girl in chains echoes the way the women in prison – including Miranda herself – are put under restraint. It’s as though the cellar is also like the repressed of the prison: a world where sadistic violence against women can proceed unchecked. Fifth, the cellar is also like the repressed of the marital bedroom. The two beds are quite closely matched; in particular, an oblong piece of wood over the headboard of the cellar bed echoes a red oblong light over the marital bed. The abused girl on the video may thus also be seen as representing Doug’s fantasy of what he would like to do to Miranda. The video enables Miranda to see into her husband’s sick and perverted mind. This idea goes back to Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, GB, 1960), but whereas Mark (Carl Boehm) is aware of himself as sick, Doug would seem to lack such self-awareness. Behind him is a chained and tortured young woman who is his helpless victim, and he’s pleased with his power over her: ‘It’s good to be God’. Miranda’s horror at what she’s seeing is surely compounded by the realisation of her own blindness: how could she not have seen what Doug was really like? When the police arrive, the terrified girl from the video turns up in person in the cellar. She clutches Miranda, and her appeal, ‘Help me!’, again positions her as Rachel’s embodiment in the present. Rachel has succeeded in her next aim: to free the latest victim. The narrative shifts to the sheriff’s office which, with its glass partitions and basement cells, is like a miniature version of the prison – Ryan’s fiefdom echoing Doug’s. Phil Parsons now tells Miranda that, after Rachel’s death, he had nightmares of her enveloped in flames, the very image Rachel presented to Miranda when she first met her. Again this is a striking example of the reasoning of a ghost. The Catholic meaning of the anima sola – a representation of a woman suffering in purgatory – is a red herring. Rachel recreates the anima sola as a way of identifying her murderer. Her ‘logic’ is indeed like that of the unconscious: in an example of both

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displacement and condensation, she uses her own body to recreate the image on his body because that is how his violation made her feel – like a woman in flames. Nevertheless, Miranda is slow to realise Ryan is the other killer. In her cell, she talks openly to him about her suspicions concerning the second killer before realising – in an all-too-familiar scene – she is confiding in the killer himself. Fleeing into the offices, Miranda finds herself trapped behind a glass partition. She cannot get out. It is Rachel who rescues Miranda – who frees her from behind the imprisoning glass. Finally making good the ‘not alone’ she traced on the other side of the glass of Miranda’s cell, she appears on the other side of the glass partition and makes herself look like Miranda. When Ryan shoots, Rachel supernaturally returns his bullet to engulf him in an inferno of fire – finally projecting her (ghost) body in flames onto her killer. Echoing the tattoo on his chest, Ryan is enveloped in flames. Miranda shoots him to stop his suffering. The film now forgets about Rachel, which is a structural weakness. Ghost films in which the ghost succeeds in her mission usually end with her achieving a sense of peace: Stir of Echoes and What Lies Beneath are typical examples. Here Rachel has driven Miranda to expose the evil under the surface of the local community. Her means have often been brutal, but the community is the better for it. One would have thought she merited a final scene. Instead, in part answering the claustrophobic intensity of the opening scene, the ending concentrates on Miranda and Chloë. In an epilogue set a year later in a New York City street, both are free, but although Chloë has a job, she still has nightmares. Miranda tries to reassure her, and thanks Chloë for teaching her to listen. But she is deliberately being cheerful for Chloë’s sake. After they have parted, we are shown that Miranda is still seeing ghosts. Strong on mood and atmosphere, and with a superb prison setting, Gothika is an effective addition to the ghost melodrama cycle. Although the ghost is a murder victim, she also arises out of repressed tensions in the heroine’s marriage: Miranda’s failure to realise her husband was secretly a monster. But once Miranda has been incarcerated in the prison, the ghost can also be seen to embody the resentment of the female prisoners. In the attack in the shower, it is perhaps Miranda as doctor who is being targeted, a doctor who was possibly not as helpful to her patients as they would have liked. In this scene, the faces of all the other women become distorted as they look at Miranda, a visual expression of the hostility they feel towards

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her. It’s as though this hostility also fuels the ghost’s rage. The film’s ghost may thus be seen as determined by a multiplicity of factors. ‘Not alone’ perhaps has yet another meaning: the ghost is expressing solidarity with these lonely, isolated women prisoners.

15. National Variations Hong Kong Inner Senses (Lo Chi-leung 2002) An observation in Encyclopedia of Chinese Film summarises the ghost movie tradition in the Hong Kong cinema: Hong Kong has remained a major production site for ghost stories, some of which are often remade. A few recent titles will suffice to illustrate the appeal of this genre to a broad range of audiences: Mr Vampire (Ricky Lau 1985) for fans of mystery film, Rouge (Stanley Kwan 1987) for fans of melodrama, A Chinese Ghost Story (Ching Siu Tung 1987) for fans of martial arts film, and Ming Ghost (Qui Gangjian 1990) for fans of art film. (Yingjin Zhang & Zhiwei Xiao 1998: 175)

Inner Senses belongs in this tradition as a ghost melodrama, like Rouge. In addition, Leslie Cheung plays the hero, as he does in both Rouge and A Chinese Ghost Story. Cheung was a top Hong Kong star, and Inner Senses was his last film before his suicide at the age of 46. The script of Inner Senses was a collaborative effort: Yeung Sin-ling wrote the story; Yeung, Lo and the film’s producer Derek Yee wrote the screenplay. And although Lo Chi-leung has in fact said, ‘Rouge never crossed my mind’ (Lee 2002: 81), Rouge is such a well-known film, it is entirely possible that it unconsciously influenced the filmmakers. Inner Senses is like Rouge not just as a ghost melodrama, but also because it refers both to the period when it was made and to Hong Kong’s history – unlike most Hong Kong scary ghost movies which are set in a mythical past. A brief look at Rouge would accordingly be useful. Rouge begins in the Hong Kong of 1934, with a doomed love affair between an elegant courtesan Fleur (Anita Mui) and Chen-Pang (Cheung), the son of a wealthy family. Chen-Pang’s family refuse to let him marry Fleur, and so Fleur persuades a somewhat reluctant Chen-Pang to commit double suicide. Fleur as a ghost then turns up in the Hong Kong of 1987: she is seeking Chen-Pang, whom she has been unable to find in the afterlife. Two young journalists, Yuen (Alex Man) and his girlfriend Ah Chor (Emily Chu), assist Fleur in her search, and eventually they discover that, despite taking the same drugs as Fleur, Chen-Pang did not die. More significantly,

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he then chose not to kill himself and join Fleur in the afterlife. Learning that Chen-Pang is still alive, the three track him down to a movie studio, where he works as an extra and dosses at night on the sets. In an ironic self-referential touch, they arrive during the filming of a martial arts ghost movie, and a flying female ghost warrior can be glimpsed occasionally in the background. They find the aged Chen-Pang, and in an exceptionally fine final scene, Fleur confronts this relic of the man she once loved, and returns the compact he gave her: ‘I’ve kept this rouge box for 53 years. Take it; I won’t wait anymore’. She then walks away through the arc lights of the studio, with the decrepit Chen-Pang staggering after her, calling her name. As she goes through a gate, she vanishes, and Chen-Pang is left mumbling to himself. The last shot is emblematic: on what we assume is the threshold to the underworld, Fleur turns to look at the camera – the look of a woman who has chosen her own destiny. Rouge is mentioned in the Introduction as a rare example of a film with a tragic rather than a scary ghost. Fleur merely seeks to find and confront Cheng-Pang: she wishes him no harm. But her search bears testament to her loss and unhappiness: she is a ghost who has suffered. Rouge balances its representations of its two contrasting time periods. The scenes set in 1934 (mainly in the pleasure quarters of brothel and opera house) have a sensuousness and opulence that contrast sharply with the drab, functional Hong Kong of 1987. Yet the relaxed romance of Yuen and Ah Chor, living together but unmarried, has a naturalness lacking in the hierarchical, class-bound society of 1934, with its exploitation of women as sexual objects. However, it is the story of a ghost, searching for her lost love, which has resonances for Inner Senses. Inner Senses also includes flashbacks to an earlier Hong Kong, but these merely go back twenty years, when the hero, Jim Law, was a schoolboy (Hugo Chim) and had a romance with Siu Yu (Maggie Poon). Nevertheless, the film also refers to Hong Kong’s political history: the occupation of the territory by the Japanese during World War II. In his first scene, Jim (Cheung), a psychiatrist, delivers a lecture about the psychological phenomenon of ‘seeing ghosts’. He observes that the lecture hall was once the site of a mass grave: ‘the Japanese executed hundreds here’. But when he mentions that he once saw a man sitting here with a bullet wound in his head, he insists this was not a ghost, just his imagination conjuring up a ghost. This points to the film’s strategy. Lo has commented that the ghosts in the film can be read in two ways, as either ghosts or hallucinations: ‘The film does not draw any conclusions about the existence of ghosts’ (Lee 2002: 82).

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In fact, I am inclined to read the ghosts as both ghosts and manifestations produced by the neuroses of the characters. This duality enriches the film. The heroine Yan (Karena Lam), a translator of screenplays, also sees ghosts. Here the main figures are the wife and son of her landlord Mr Chu (Tsui Siu-Keung). They were killed in a landslide several years ago, but Mr Chu confidently awaits their return. Unfortunately, it is in his old apartment, now occupied by Yan, that they appear. Again, however, the ghosts refer to a specific feature of Hong Kong: deforestation has resulted in geological instability – landslides can be a problem. In The World of Suzie Wong (Richard Quine 1960), set in Hong Kong, a landslide kills the heroine’s child. In referring to real (wartime) history and to man-made geological problems, the ghosts in Inner Senses serve to comment on the Hong Kong of today. Hong Kong has been an astonishing capitalist success, but the ghosts speak of a traumatic past, and of disturbing side effects to this success. Also relevant is that Jim is a workaholic, who has two jobs (in a hospital and in private practice) and who continues to work at home, often late into the night. This urge to succeed through sheer hard work is again an aspect of the Hong Kong ethos, and in Jim’s case drives him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Inner Senses has an unusual structure: it seems to be two stories dovetailed into one. In the first half, Yan sees ghosts, and she consults Jim professionally – he suggests the ghosts are all in her mind. But after a crisis and suicide attempt, Yan declares herself cured, and now that she and Jim are no longer patient and doctor, they begin an affair. Then in the second half, it is Jim who is haunted: he keeps seeing the ghost of a teenage girl, her face – as with the ghosts in The Sixth Sense – bearing the wound that occurred when she died. This ghost will turn out to be Siu Yu, who committed suicide whilst she and Jim were at school. However, Jim has repressed all memory of her. Siu Yu’s haunting becomes steadily more insistent, and eventually she drives Jim back to the rooftop from which she jumped twenty years ago. We learn that Yan only sees ghosts when she’s under stress – specifically, when her boyfriends break up with her – but they so upset her she reacts by cutting her wrists. As Kevin Heffernan has noted, when she consults Jim, the film would seem to be consciously echoing The Sixth Sense, with its similarly troubled psychiatrist and a patient who tells him that he/she sees ghosts (2009: 60). But Inner Senses relates these ghosts more closely to tensions in the patient’s life: here seeing them is more like a neurotic symptom that can potentially be worked through. The ghosts Yan sees are

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thus also aligned with melodramatic elements in the film: specifically, her difficulties with her love life. However, Yan’s ghosts also serve to bring her and Jim together. As a thunderstorm hints at imminent ghostly activities, the film begins to crosscut between Yan in her apartment, spooked by strange voices and electrical disturbances, and Jim in his, reviewing her case. In a desperate attempt to keep the ghosts out, Yan has covered all the reflecting surfaces in the apartment with newspaper. It doesn’t help: a muddy foot appears round the bathroom door; then a muddy hand. Yan opens the bathroom cabinet door, and the ghoulish faces of Mrs Chu and her son, covered in mud from the landslide, thrust out at her. Her scream cues a cut to Jim; his own lights flicker and the phone rings – Yan is summoning him. Here the film utilises the rhetoric of the ghost melodrama – rain; thunder and lighting; electrical disturbances; voices – to set the scene for the dramatic appearances of the ghosts. But, as with a number of other such storm sequences, more is going on. Yan is also being maddened by a dripping tap, and this opens up a psychoanalytical reading. In general, sexual symbols are conspicuous by their absence in ghost melodramas, but the tap may clearly be read as a phallic symbol, a troubling reminder to Yan of being dumped by her boyfriend. And during the sequence, she attacks the tap with a wrench, ripping its top off. Immediately, the ghosts start to appear. It’s as though the symbolic castration produces the ghosts: as in other ghost melodramas, the displaced sexual energies prompt the return of the death instincts, embodied by the ghosts. The f ilm also begins to establish links between Yan’s neuroses and Jim’s. Jim’s voice-over says of Yan, ‘There must be something her memory is repressing’. This is one of a number of observations we will realise refer equally to him. In Yan’s apartment, Jim then discovers the words, ‘I will always follow you’, written in red (lipstick?) on the bathroom cabinet mirror. Since the same words cropped up earlier in a screenplay Yan was translating, we assume they are addressed by the ghosts to her. But subsequent events will in fact link them to Jim. To learn more about Yan, Jim begins to read her diaries. During this, we see fragmentary flashbacks to a teenage romance. But this was Jim’s teenage romance, and the girl in the flashbacks is Siu Yu. It’s as though, when Jim starts to investigate Yan’s past, this conjures up his own. The film is linking the personal histories of the heroine and hero in an allusive way. The sense that the ghosts are also driving the narrative is even more in evidence in their next appearance. Yan begins to show a romantic interest in Jim, but he pushes her away: ‘There must be a distance between doctor

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and patient’. Upset, Yan compulsively types out ‘Help me!’ on her computer. As though by way of response, supernatural forces take over the computer, and it shows a digital image of Yan’s face in foreground with the ghosts of Mrs Chu and her son coming up behind her (see Fig. 38). As Mrs Chu puts her hand on Yan’s shoulder, there is a cut to black, and again Yan’s scream cues a cut to Jim. But here he wakes in bed, as though we have just witnessed his dream. As he looks out of his window, he sees a teenage girl sitting on a rooftop parapet, observing him. When he looks again, she has vanished. This seems like a highly unconventional example of transference. First, only the psychiatrist, not the patient, experiences the transference. Second, it is the ghosts (the neurotic symptoms) that have transferred from Yan to Jim. The teenage girl Jim sees is Siu Yu, the girl in the earlier flashbacks, and this is her ghost. Although, in those flashbacks, there is no sense Jim is remembering, he will do so later, so these ‘memories’ are in his unconscious. The film thus links the inner worlds of Yan and Jim through the latter’s unconscious – this, too, suggests a form of transference. Now Jim sees a ghost, but that it is a ghost is repressed. Equally, the significance of this – Jim is as neurotic as Yan – is something he similarly represses. Repeating her own pattern of behaviour (her repetition-compulsion) Yan reacts to the ghosts by again slitting her wrists, and she ends up in hospital. Jim’s solution to Yan’s recurrent psychological problems is to contact her estranged parents. Because they divorced when Yan was twelve, and both then emigrated, they are guilt-ridden about having abandoned her. They return to Hong Kong to see her, and after initial hostility from Yan, there is a family reconciliation. This seems to cure Yan – she is no longer haunted. In Yan’s case, the ghosts relate to her feelings of abandonment, which may be traced back to her adolescent abandonment by her parents. As in What Lies Beneath, the ghost(s) may be seen to embody the return of the heroine’s repressed death drive, here prompting her to attempt suicide. But Yan also wants to live, and she only ever attempts suicide. When, after her reconciliation with her parents, she pronounces herself cured, she is acknowledging a coming to terms with her self-destructive side: she no longer feels the urge to kill herself. Equally, however, the ghosts have helped bring this about. It is they who precipitated the crisis that resulted in Yan’s suicide attempt, which then, through Jim’s intervention, led to her cure. The ghosts Yan had been seeing appear no more; it is the hero who is now haunted. When a middle-aged couple attack Jim in a café, crying ‘Why aren’t you dead yet?’, we see the extent of Jim’s repression of his memories of Siu Yu. They are her parents, but he does not remember them. But he then has a

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dream that shows their anger at him during Siu Yu’s funeral – again in his unconscious Jim does indeed know who they are. It is thus possible to see that both Siu Yu’s ghost and her parents embody for Jim the same function as Yan’s ghosts did for her. They, too, imply the return of Jim’s repressed death drive: his adolescent wish to have joined Siu Yu in death. It is indeed this ‘wish’ Siu Yu’s parents hurl at him in his dream: ‘You two should have died together!’ Jim’s unconscious realisation who his attackers were triggers a striking development. He begins sleepwalking, searching the apartment for something. During this, we again see Jim’s unconscious is aware what is happening: speaking for Siu Yu, he echoes the phrase on Yan’s mirror, ‘I will follow you to the end of your life’. The sleepwalking is the equivalent of a ghost invading a character’s dreams, but here Siu Yu seeks to direct Jim: she wants him to remember her. But it is also possible to interpret Jim’s sleepwalking psychologically, as his own unconscious directing his actions. This is also highly appropriate to Jim’s ‘repressed’ psyche. Eventually, Jim f inds what he’s looking for: letters and photographs from the time of his romance with Siu Yu. When Yan now wakes him, flashbacks reveal his memories have f inally returned: he remembers Siu Yu’s funeral; then her suicide. She threatened to jump from a roof unless the teenage Jim was brought to her, but the police led him away, reassuring him she would be all right. Jim was then a horrified witness to her death fall onto a car. With this flooding back of Jim’s repressed memories, he realises it is Siu Yu who is haunting him. He becomes distraught: now he begs, ‘Somebody help me!’ Yan offers herself, but the appeal, like Yan’s, cues the arrival of the ghost: Siu Yu appears in Jim’s apartment, terrifying both him and Yan. The film is saying that she is the one who will help him. Although Jim flees from the apartment, wherever he goes, Siu Yu appears. Eventually he finds himself back on the rooftop from which Siu Yu had jumped. This leads to the film’s most powerful scene: the confrontation between the middle-aged hero and the ghost of his teenage girlfriend. Standing on the edge of the roof, Jim surmises that Siu Yu wants him to jump, so they can be reunited in death. But he launches into a moving monologue about his life: ‘I’ve never been happy all those years. I’ve never been able to accept another girl because of you’. At first, Siu Yu is dismissive, but as Jim continues, her expression becomes more serious. Jim prompts her to remember their romance, again shown in flashbacks. These fill in more details, such as Siu Yu’s distress when she saw Jim with another girl. The flashbacks don’t end with her suicide, but return to an earlier scene when

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she and Jim mourned the deaths of her pet birds. When Jim said that, if Siu Yu died, he would die too, she insisted she wouldn’t let him. Back on the roof, Jim tells Siu Yu: ‘We’ve been happy together and sad together and I’ll always remember both. I won’t forget like I did before’. Now looking very concerned, Siu Yu comes forward and takes hold of Jim’s tearful face. Although unsure what she intends, Jim kisses her. It is this that releases both of them from the past. Siu Yu reverts to her unwounded self, and as a ghost speaks for the first time: ‘I don’t love you now. I don’t need you anymore’. She vanishes, and Yan appears in her place. She leads Jim away from the roof edge and they embrace. In this confrontation between the hero and the ghost of his lost love, we can see crucial melodramatic material repressed in Rouge. The focus on Fleur enables the earlier film to avoid dealing with Chen-Pang’s loss: we do see the pathetic failure of his life, but only at its end. By the time Fleur re-meets him, Chen-Pang has become a down-and-out, consoling himself with opium, a husk of his former self. There is poignance in Fleur’s final rejection of him, and in her resolute walk through the studio, but the film allows Chen-Pang no voice. Fleur does not stop to find out what happened to the hero after her death; Siu Yu does. Siu Yu haunts Jim because she is unhappy: he had forgotten her, and had tried to get rid of all the mementoes of their past together. When he wakes to discover he has found them, he is at first appalled: ‘What happened? I threw them away; I know I did!’ It is important for a ghost to be remembered: when Fleur re-meets Chen-Pang, her first words are, ‘Thank you for remembering me’. Siu Yu is embittered that Jim would want to forget her, and this makes her haunting aggressive. However, Jim’s appeal to her on the roof transforms her: her wounds vanish, and she gives up her haunting – like Fleur, she can now go her own way. Also at stake is the need for a bereaved character to mourn properly, which includes not just remembering the dead person but also coming to terms with the loss. Here, Siu Yu’s parents, too, are indicted. They haven’t mourned properly either, since after twenty years they still blame Jim for Siu Yu’s death. They may be contrasted with Yan’s parents, who show humility and compassion in their approach to Yan. Inner Senses not only draws from earlier ghost melodramas, it also includes elements that anticipate future films. The opening sequence of Yan moving into her new (haunted) apartment and the sleepwalking are echoed in Bhoot. Jim’s amnesia – specifically, his repression of the memory of Siu Yu’s death – anticipates Ryeong. Yan’s off-screen covering of all the reflective surfaces in her apartment becomes, in Mirrors, a frenzied extended

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sequence. And this is I think the first film where the protagonist, a keen swimmer, is spooked by a ghost in a swimming pool, which happens in both Gothika and Ryeong. The most remarkable connection with other ghost films is however a variation. During Jim’s sleepwalking phase, Yan wakes to find him apparently addressing her: ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ But as she moves aside, he continues to speak to the now empty bed: ‘Why do you have to be so cruel? You’re already dead. Why are you following me?’ It is Siu Yu’s ghost that Jim is really addressing, and the comment is the equivalent of the cry of anguish (‘What do you want from me?’) that echoes through the ghost melodramas. The variation is as important as the connection. In his unconscious, Jim knows who the ghost is, but he cannot understand her motives. But her motives (she wants Jim to die, too) are an expression of what Jim himself unconsciously wishes. It is this unconscious wish Jim finally makes conscious and confronts in the climactic rooftop scene. This links the two halves of the film thematically: at the climax, Jim works through much the same neurotic material as Yan. By appeasing the ghost, he, too, resolves his repressed death drive, which frees him for a happy ending with Yan.

India Bhoot/Ghost (Ram Gopal Varma, 2003) In classical Indian cinema, ghosts do appear – e.g. in Madhumati (Bimal Roy 1958) – but they are not particularly scary; they tend to be integrated into the familiar generic narratives of lost love. Scripted by Sameer Sharma and Lalit Marathe, Bhoot is quite different: it is a film about a ghost, and it belongs to the contemporary ghost melodrama cycle. But it is also uneven – not all the elements are successfully worked through. Vishal (Ajay Devgan), a stockbroker, and his wife Swati (Urmila Matondkar) move into a twelfth-floor duplex in a modern Mumbai apartment block. They acquire the maid Kamla (Seema Biswas) from Manjeet, the previous tenant, but Vishal keeps from Swati that Manjeet died falling from the apartment balcony in a presumed suicide. However, when Swati learns this, she sees the ghost of Manjeet (Barkha Madan) in a mirror left behind from Manjeet’s tenancy. This is the beginning of a haunting that becomes a possession, as Manjeet gradually takes control of Swati. The ghost of Manjeet’s young son also haunts the apartment, but the f ilm

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does not know what to do with him. Nobody sees him; he just appears from time to time. Only towards the end do we learn he died at the same time as Manjeet. Two contrasting ghost episodes outside the apartment will serve to illustrate the film’s unevenness. In the first, Vishal and Swati are watching Spider-Man (Sam Raimi 2002) in a cinema. Suddenly, Swati finds herself in a nightmare. Everyone in the auditorium turns to look at her; Manjeet is sitting in Vishal’s place. Swati finds herself with Manjeet in the aisle; Kamla appears, and the audience now advances on Swati like the dead in Carnival of Souls. She flees into the foyer, where she encounters the little boy. She wakes up in her own bed. This ghost-induced dream is just a jumble of events, without any clear pattern of meaning. Usually such dreams tell us something about the desires of the ghost, or the vulnerabilities of the dreamer. It is difficult to see any such elements here. By contrast, a later beach episode is genuinely spooky. The surrounding crowds vanish, and Swati finds herself alone with a Manjeet who hovers ominously on the now deserted beach. When Manjeet unnervingly jumps closer, the scene evokes the ghost encounters on M.R. James’s East Anglia beaches. Swati flees from the apparition, runs into Vishal, and is returned to everyday reality. Here Manjeet’s ability to project Swati – at least in her mind – into an alternative, psychic space is a powerful ghost effect, going back to The Shining. The early scenes in Bhoot suggest the influence of Inner Senses: the move into an apartment haunted by the ghosts of a mother and son; the proximity of the landlord, here Mr Thakker (Amar Talwar), who lives next door. The link is strengthened when Swati, under the influence of Manjeet, begins sleepwalking. But in Bhoot the sleepwalking develops into a powerful ghost possession. This becomes serious when a somnambulist Swati descends to the ground floor and kills the watchman (Sabir Masani), twisting his head with the superhuman strength given to ghosts – and people possessed by ghosts. Although we don’t see the murder, when Vishal retraces Swati’s steps and finds the body, it is clear she is the killer. Concerned that Swati could be having a mental breakdown, Vishal consults a psychiatrist, Dr Rajan (Victor Banerjee). Since no-one else can see Manjeet, Dr Rajan assumes Swati is hallucinating. Later, when the possessed Swati is so violent she has to be tied to the bed, Dr Rajan says she is suffering from multiple personality disorder. This diagnosis pleases Inspector Qureshi (Nana Patekar), brought in to investigate the murder: it means Swati could be the watchman’s killer.

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It is Kamla who breaks the deadlock: she tells Vishal that Swati is possessed by the ghost of Manjeet, whose voice she recognises. A simultaneous zoom in and track out on Vishal – who at this point is standing on the balcony – gives great weight to his moment of realisation. On Kamla’s advice, he consults a spiritualist, Sarita (Rekha). With the arrival of Sarita, the conflict over the source of Swati’s ‘illness’ becomes polarised along gender lines. On one side are Qureshi and Dr Rajan, insisting on a rational, scientific explanation – one which will indict Swati for murder. On the other are Sarita and Kamla, who recognise the signs of possession. Vishal is caught uncomfortably in the middle. The gender division is heightened when Manjeet’s mother, Mrs Khosla (Tanuja), is brought in to talk to the possessed Swati. She learns the backstory: Manjeet did not commit suicide but was killed by Sanjay, Mr Thakker’s son. Vishal uses a trick to summon Sanjay (Fardeen Khan) and get him and his father into the duplex bedroom. This sets up the film’s outstanding scene. A shot from behind Swati’s bedhead shows three women in the foreground on or beside the bed – Swati is out of sight – matching the three men entering in the background. In a reverse angle shot from behind the men, we now see all four women (Kamla, the possessed Swati, Mrs Khosla and Sarita) gathered either on or around the bed in the background. Three of the women are looking directly at the men, but Swati, no longer tied up, is faced away. This is the crucial establishing shot, not just showing the placing of the seven people, but splitting the room into two camps, female and male. Before turning, the possessed Swati calls out Sanjay’s name – in the imperious address of a ghost who knows without looking her enemy is present. A cut to a close shot of Sanjay then initiates a striking découpage, which is structured exclusively along gender lines. In one group of shots are the women, in various combinations and from different angles; as Swati turns, all look accusingly at Sanjay. The other group focuses on the baffled and terrified Sanjay. The innocent Mr Thakker is excluded completely from this découpage; Vishal appears in two shots, but purely as an onlooker. All the weight is on the clash between the accusing women and Sanjay. Sarita now speaks, telling Sanjay that it is Manjeet who is on the bed accusing him. Then, using the rhetorical language of a prosecuting counsel, Sarita builds to the revelation of Sanjay’s murder of Manjeet. The inventiveness and intensity of the shots which accompany Sarita’s monologue may be illustrated by just one example. When she says, ‘The same Manjeet who used to stay here with her son’, the shot shows Sarita in the foreground and Sarita and the possessed Swati slightly out of focus in a mirror in the background.

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As Sarita adds, ‘It’s her’, the focus delicately shifts, so Swati in the mirror, staring intently towards Sanjay, becomes more sharply visible. Bevelling on the mirror duplicates part of her face. It’s as though the ghost inside Sarita gains power not just from the rhetoric, but also the mirror (see Fig. 39). The scene is a superb example of heightened melodrama. Unfortunately, it lasts only 64 seconds. Moreover, when it is interrupted by flashbacks to the primary traumatic event, these are marred by clumsy overlapping shots, dissipating the tension. The flashbacks show Manjeet’s death, falling over the balcony when Sanjay assaulted her; then the murder of her son, thrown over the balcony by the watchman, bribed by Sanjay. When the film returns to the present, for a brief period the charged découpage continues. Sanjay tries to protest his innocence, but is soon fleeing from the room. As he exits, a shot matching the opening shot shows the men in the background leave: Sanjay, his father, then Vishal. The Indian cinema has traditionally shown great sensitivity to women’s issues, and the dominant generic mode for many generations of Bollywood films has undoubtedly been melodrama. Apart from the skill with which this sequence is composed and edited, also relevant is the array of women accusing the degenerate man. The victim may only be present by proxy, but gathered around her are her mother, her maid and her extremely eloquent spokeswoman: different generations and classes, but all united in gender solidarity. Nor should Swati be excluded from this gathering: possessed by Manjeet, she is a much more forceful figure than the stay-at-home wife of the early scenes. Father and son flee to Mr Thakker’s, but Vishal is waylaid on the way out by Qureshi and Dr Rajan, who have arrived to commit Swati to a mental institution. As Vishal pleads for more time, Mr Thakker tries to get Sanjay to talk to him, but the latter is being haunted by flashback images from the night of the murders. Eventually, he flees. The climax occurs in the apartment block car park, where all the main characters are brought together, as in the last act of a play, to resolve the various narrative strands. Sanjay’s escape is frustrated by the possessed Swati, whizzing his car supernaturally round the car park. Then, as the terrified Sanjay flees on foot, Qureshi and Dr Rajan appear. When Swati starts to strangle Sanjay, Qureshi draws his gun to shoot her. This cues the arrival of Vishal, who wrestles Qureshi to the ground. The arrival of the other three women completes the gathering. Again, Sarita immediately takes charge, addressing Manjeet in Swati: ‘Don’t punish Swati for what Sanjay has done to you’ – that is, don’t make Swati look like a killer. This prompts Manjeet to display her ghost’s powers and levitate

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Sanjay, holding him over a concrete block with lethally protruding wires until he confesses to her murder. Sarita thus resolves the crime plot; Mrs Khosla proceeds to resolve the possession plot. She, too, addresses her daughter, telling her that now she has had her revenge she should leave these people alone: ‘This is not your world’. This leads to a very unusual scene: an emotional farewell between mother and daughter in which Swati acts on Manjeet’s behalf the sadness of the parting. As Manjeet leaves her, Swati returns to her normal self and is reunited with Vishal. Qureshi arrests Sanjay. Although this climax has nothing of the intensity of the bedroom scene, it serves to resolve the film’s various problems. The parallel with the last act of a play is made more self-reflexive by the sense that characters are not just arriving onstage to play out their various parts, but are also shifting in and out of the roles of participant and spectator. This is especially in evidence when Swati as Manjeet ‘puts on a show’ and levitates Sanjay, turning everyone else into spectators – it is this action that demonstrates to the foolish male figures of authority the truth of Swati’s possession. And again it is the women who orchestrate all the crucial developments. In another example of the film’s uncertainty with its material, Manjeet’s powers in this sequence make the whole possession plot seem redundant: she could evidently have dealt with Sanjay on her own. However, ghosts are not necessarily rational, and Manjeet may only have discovered the extent of her powers as a ghost gradually. In 2002-2003, there was a little clutch of films from a number of different countries showing possession by ghosts. In Inner Senses, the possession also takes the form of sleepwalking, but its purpose is relatively benign: the childhood sweetheart of the hero wants him to remember her. In Phone, the possession is aggressively sexualised: the ghost of a man’s jilted mistress possesses his young daughter and thereby prompts the daughter into some highly inappropriate behaviour. In Gothika, the vengeful ghost of a young woman possesses the heroine in order to slaughter the man who killed her – the heroine’s husband. In Wishing Stairs, a schoolgirl is possessed by the ghost of a girl she had unrequitedly loved. Only in Bhoot is the possession not tied into a history that in some sense links the possessed and possessing figures. Bhoot actually begins, during the credits, with an I-camera sequence in which Manjeet’s ghost travels from her funeral pyre, through the Mumbai streets, to the apartment block. The imagery is distorted and unstable, suggesting the point of view of a ghost. Manjeet is thus already in the apartment as an invisible ghost when Vishal and Swati move in. It is possible

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she possesses Swati simply because Swati is there, but more is intimated. We see Manjeet as a ghost before Swati does, and her initial appearance is suggestive. On their first night in the apartment, Vishal and Swati have passionate sex on the stairs. During this rapidly edited scene, two shots show the couple through Manjeet’s mirror. Later that night, Manjeet’s unseen ghost glowers at Swati when she goes upstairs. The mirror is not the only object left from Manjeet’s tenancy. Swati also finds a rag doll, and this discovery conjures up the boy ghost. It’s as though the sex shown in the mirror similarly serves to conjure up Manjeet; as though, to Manjeet, the sex ‘violates’ the ghost space of the mirror, and she appears to signal her disapproval. When she glares at Swati, she is standing very close to the place where the sex occurred. Another factor is the film’s use of rain. Bhoot makes all the usual links between ghosts and rain: there was a storm on the night of the past murders; Vishal first sees the apartment block through a curtain of rain on a car windscreen; it is raining when the possessed Swati kills the watchman; Sanjay arrives in the rain. Likewise, there is a thunderstorm during the sex scene. In the Introduction, I suggest that thunderstorms can be associated with the tempestuousness of female ghosts. Equally, they can serve to suggest a ghost’s anger. Perhaps Manjeet is hostile to sex – a superego ghost. But we also assume she wants revenge on her (and her son’s) killers, so she could be angry because the couple is blissfully ignorant of anything amiss. This suggests the familiar tunnel vision of a ghost, seeing matters from its own extremely narrow point of view. The possession may also be seen in such a double light. The possessed Swati becomes very aggressive, striking Vishal and then shaking and shrieking frenziedly. Her body, controlled by Manjeet, fights off all physical contact. It is this that obliges Vishal and Kamla to tie her to the bed. On the one hand, Swati’s demented state evidently curtails sex. But equally it puts pressure on Vishal to find an explanation for her state, which leads him, eventually, to identify Manjeet’s killer. Another subtextual intimation is more difficult to place. Vishal is watching the BBC World News on television when Swati lures him away for sex, and although we see no footage, the English commentary is clearly audible. As we hear phrases like, ‘This is violence and chaos spinning out of control. Everywhere the fires rage’, it is evident that this is a news report of a major outbreak of violence. It seems likely the report refers to the Gujarat violence of 2002, communal violence perpetrated mainly by Hindu nationalists on Muslims that led to hundreds of deaths. But as the sex begins, the rapid

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editing also fragments the television commentary, so the sex in effect displaces the reported violence. Nevertheless, although the yuppie couple is safe, the film at least acknowledges unrest in the world outside. Perhaps Manjeet as ghost could also be seen as introducing a trace of that unrest into the domestic space. There is a later reference to this violence, and here it is linked more directly to the marital relationship. All we hear are the words, ‘violence in India spreads’ before Vishal turns off the television. A disturbed Swati comes downstairs and suddenly plunges a knife into him; he wakes, terrified, from a dream. Swati is now crouching in front of him, telling him she can see Manjeet. It is here that Vishal contacts Dr Rajan. This could of course be a ghost-induced dream in which Manjeet uses Swati again to express her exasperation that still nothing is being done to find her murderer. Equally, however, it could hint at buried tensions in the marriage, tensions which Manjeet could also be serving to reveal. Although Swati does not seem to mind being left at home all day with little to do but cook and channel-surf, Vishal may fear she is frustrated, and the dream could well be a violent expression of his fears. They are probably newly-wed, but they never discuss matters such as children, or Swati’s hopes for the future. Equally, their prosperous lifestyle isolates them from the violence occurring elsewhere. If we connect ‘violence in India spreads’ with the stabbing, this could be seen as another instance where Manjeet as ghost dramatically introduces the outside unrest into the home. Bhoot begins with the ghost ‘going home’; it ends with the ghost in another guise. The final scene shows Qureshi locking Sanjay in a cell, wishing him a worse punishment than the death he can now expect. When Sanjay is alone, Manjeet’s ghost appears. But this is not the frenzied, aggressive haunting we see in the prison cell at the end of In Dreams. Manjeet now seems tender, and reaches out to caress the terrified Sanjay. He is, finally, in her power.

France Histoire de Marie et Julien (Jacques Rivette 2003) In Bez Końka/ No End (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland, 1984), Jerzy Radziwilowicz plays the ghost of a lawyer, Antek, who hangs around invisibly after his death, keeping an eye on his wife Ula (Graźyna Szapolowska) and on the development of his last legal case. But for all the incisiveness of the

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political perspective in the film, Kieslowski does not know what to do with the ghost, and there is absolutely no charge to Antek’s occasional appearances. Ula does realise her husband is still there – whilst under hypnosis, she sees him – but this prompts an entirely negative development: at the end she commits suicide in order be with him. Earlier, Antek had used his ghost’s powers to stall Ula’s car and so keep her from a nasty traffic accident, but now it’s as though, like Death, he is just waiting for her to die. In the last shot, when husband and wife go off together into the world of the dead, Kieslowski seems to acknowledge this: they walk side by side like the Princess and Heurtebise (François Périer) being escorted into the underworld at the end of Orphée. In Histoire de Marie et Julien, Radziwilowicz plays Julien, and Marie (Emmanuelle Béart) is the character who finds herself still in the world after she has died. Like Kieslowski, Rivette is a highly respected European art-movie auteur, and here the ghost movie narrative is developed with some sophistication. But in one respect the situation is quite different from No End: Marie is a revenant, and so seems to be alive. Moreover, Julien does not know about her suicide six months ago. It is not until two hours into the 150-minute film (at the beginning of the fifth and final act) that he realises Marie really is dead. Nevertheless, completely reversing the bleak conclusion of No End, Marie then repeatedly prevents Julien from killing himself in order to join her. Instead, Rivette and his co-scriptwriters, Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, come up with a much more satisfactory ending. The plot of Histoire de Marie et Julien can be succinctly summarised. Julien lives with his cat Nevermore in a large Paris house where he restores antique clocks. He re-meets Marie, whom he knew briefly in the past, they become lovers, and she moves in with him. As a revenant, Marie behaves strangely at times, but she and Julien fall in love. Julien is blackmailing a woman, Madame X (Anne Brochet), over some fake antique silk she has been selling; Madame X’s sister Adrienne (Bettina Kee) is also a revenant. Both Marie and Adrienne have only a limited time in which to resolve their status as revenants, and this problem becomes the primary focus of the narrative development. Histoire de Marie et Julien is rather different from other ghost melodramas. Marie is not scary: as a revenant, she is more human than ghostly. Rivette himself insists that ghosts and revenants should not be confused: ‘ghosts belong to… another conception of the world. You can’t mix the two; the space-time continuum is quite different’ (Rivette 2004). In fact, the conception of the world here is Celtic. Rivette told Emmanuelle Béart that Marie became a revenant because she killed herself in a way that sought

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to lay the blame on someone else: ‘This violated Celtic religion: she had no right to be at peace in death’ (Béart 2004). We can take the Celtic religion here as the equivalent of the ‘magic realm’ that is found in a number of Rivette movies: the house with its ‘ghosts’ perpetually repeating a stylised melodrama in Céline et Julie vont en bateau; the Goddesses that return to Earth in Duelle (1976). Introducing such a realm frees the director to move into fantasy, to explore the supernatural and the paranormal. In fact, Celtic mythology made an earlier appearance in Rivette’s movies. He says of Duelle, ‘I swiped it all from [Jean Markale’s] book on Celtic myths’ (Wiles 2012: 143). Marie’s status as revenant is only gradually revealed. We learn she doesn’t bleed, and later that she can’t cry. Sometimes, she withdraws from Julien into a trance, before emerging with no memory of what has just happened – rather like a sleepwalker. She spends much of her time in the house refurnishing an attic room with close attention to detail, but she tells Julien she has no idea why. At one point, she sits on some steps in the room and speaks an incantation in a mysterious language. In another Celtic link, the language is in fact Gaelic, and Marie is uttering what Rivette calls a geis, a magic spell (Rivette 2004). In a trance, Marie then pronounces the geis to Julien in French: ‘Now I am yours, you are mine/Where I must go, you will accompany me/For what I must do, you will help me/Don’t fail me, or you will lose the very memory of me’. It would seem the geis is designed to bind Julien to Marie, but it is unclear what she expects from him. Marie’s problematic status as revenant can be clarified by comparing her with Adrienne. Adrienne perpetrated the same sin as Marie: she also committed suicide, but in her final letter to her sister, she accused the latter of murdering her. Moreover, the letter, which Adrienne gives to Marie, ends: ‘Even dead, I shall not disappear, but will follow you forever’ – the same ghost’s threat as in Inner Senses. Adrienne tells Marie she is ‘bound by this letter’, and ‘only one person can free me’. If she can reconcile with her sister, she will be free to ‘die properly’. Both Madame X and Adrienne accept the situation, and they are working to achieve a reconciliation. Marie’s situation is very different. The person she tried to frame for her murder – her then lover Simon – is now dead, and so there is no possibility of reconciling with him. She is in limbo. More crucially, as she says to Adrienne: ‘I don’t want to be freed’. Now that she and Julien are in love, Marie wants to live. There is little sense here of anyone being haunted by a ghost. Even Madame X’s shock when she first saw Adrienne return from the dead is

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only mentioned in retrospect. Moreover, Marie is anxious to conceal from Julien that she is a revenant. Nevertheless, elements in the film relate it to other ghost melodramas. In the middle of the fourth act, Madame X tells Julien that Adrienne and Marie are ‘really dead’, but he refuses to believe her. However, when he investigates Marie’s previous life, he is shown the room where she hanged herself, and is shocked to discover it looks just like the refurnished attic room. Marie has been unconsciously recreating a crucial detail of the primary traumatic event: the room where it occurred. This is a powerful example of the compulsion to repeat that echoes through these movies, and here it is unambiguously a manifestation of the death drive. When Julien returns home, Marie tells him: ‘Every time I fall asleep, I have a dream; an order which I must obey’. Her next dream reveals the order: in the recreated room, Marie once again hangs herself. The only way Marie can ‘complete’ her death is by re-enacting it. Histoire de Marie et Julien was made from the raw material of a project, Marie et Julien, Rivette began in 1975 but had to abandon through nervous exhaustion. Mary M. Wiles summarises: ‘The film scripted by [Eduardo de] Gregorio, Marilù Parolini and Claire Denis was to have featured Albert Finney in the role of a solitary man who is haunted by the memory of a woman whose identical double, played by Leslie Caron, seduces him’ (Wiles 2012: 63). But if this suggests Vertigo, the Hollywood film that seems to lie behind Histoire de Marie et Julien like a palimpsest is another James Stewart/Kim Novak movie, Bell Book and Candle (Richard Quine 1958). In Bell Book and Candle, Gil (Novak) is a witch, and she uses her cat Pyewacket to cast a spell on Shep (Stewart), a spell that makes him fall in love with her. As a witch, Gil is different in kind from ordinary mortals: she can’t blush, or cry, or fall in love. When she does fall in love with Shep, she loses her witch’s powers, and Pyewacket deserts her. Shep begins to realise what has happened to her when he sees her blush. In one of the most moving lines in the Hollywood cinema, Gil describes her newly discovered humanity: ‘You gave me something wonderful: you made me unhappy’. She then cries. Although Marie’s geis is by no means as potent as Gil’s spell, the links are there. The cat Nevermore haunts the attic room as though assessing what Marie is doing; earlier it showed her where Julien had hidden the blackmail material. Here, too, we have a special cat with a magical name (from Poe’s raven), a cat that forms a close bond with the heroine. Marie being unable to bleed is the equivalent of Gil being unable to blush, and Marie, too, cannot cry. But the most compelling connection with the earlier movie occurs at the very end of Histoire de Marie et Julien.

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When Julien accepts that Marie is dead, he tries to kill himself. Marie finds him setting up a noose in the attic room; he tells her, ‘I want to be with you; like you’. She interrupts: ‘You can’t be like me... we obey laws which are beyond us. If you die, you will not return’. His response echoes the despair of the bereaved in other movies: ‘What do I care about not coming back, if you disappear forever?’ In the kitchen, Marie then fights to stop him slashing his wrists with a knife, and both are cut in the struggle. Referring to the geis, Marie appeals to him: ‘If you fail me, you’ll lose all memory of me’. She decides the only way she can stop his suicidal behaviour is by performing the ‘forbidden gesture’ Adrienne told her to use ‘if all else fails’. This involves passing her hands over her face in a way that echoes the peekaboo gesture Danny uses in The Shining to make the ghost sisters vanish. Here it is Marie herself who vanishes, and Julien simultaneously loses all memory of her. The cut to his hand now baffles him. Sitting at the table, he muses to Nevermore: ‘What’s wrong with me?’ We are now shown these last 60 seconds of action again. Marie, invisible to Julien, is present, but time has slowed down. The same sequence of events – from Marie making the gesture to Julien sitting at the table, musing – lasts over 90 seconds. Marie is now really like a ghost, bound to Julien by her love for him, but both invisible to and forgotten by him. And in this ghost world, time is different: events move more slowly. When Madame X comes to ask Julien for Adrienne’s letter, she mentions ‘l’autre personne’ (as Marie had identified herself to Madame X), but he has no idea what she’s talking about. As he insists, ‘There never was another person’, the camera dollies back to show Marie, invisible to both, sitting between them. Here, too, the film captures the poignancy of Marie’s status. Nevertheless, the scene also suggests that Julien has changed. The film fails to confront his nastiness as a blackmailer – more disturbingly, Marie assists him – but by this stage he seems to have reformed: he does not demand money, but gives the letter to Madame X. Leaving the house, she burns it – ‘Adieu, Adrienne, ma chérie’ – thereby freeing Adrienne to move on to a ‘better world’. Marie, by contrast, is still in limbo, and a more painful limbo than before, because the man she loves no longer has any memory of her. Later, as Marie watches Julien sleep, she starts to cry. Her tears fall on the wound that occurred in the struggle over the knife: it starts to bleed, and when Julien wakes, he can see her. He doesn’t know who she is, and he disputes Marie’s explanation that she is, ‘Marie, the one you loved’. But Marie is no longer troubled: ‘Give me a little time’. The vital connection with the happy ending of Bell Book and Candle lies in the import of the heroine’s tears. Just as they revealed Gil’s new-found

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humanity, so they show that Marie has returned to the world of the living. But what the tears are really signalling in both cases is the heroine’s love. It is a transformative love: it changes the very nature of her being. In other films in this book, a ghost is only able to return from the dead by possession, as in The Dark and Voice. Histoire de Marie et Julien offers a far more optimistic resolution. The film may also be seen as one in which the protagonist is given a ‘second chance’, as in The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel Coen 1994) or Femme Fatale (Brian de Palma 2002). In Histoire de Marie et Julien, the mechanism enabling the second chance is magic. For Rivette, there is hope in magic – as in the rescue of the little girl from the haunted house at the end of Céline et Julie. Although Histoire de Marie et Julien is only obliquely a ghost movie, it is a melodrama. Throughout the f ilm, Marie and Julien selfconsciously enact a l’amour fou, punctuating their extensive lovemaking with sadomasochistic fantasies they recount to one another. Since Marie is the prime initiator of the lovemaking, it’s as though she needs both the sex and the fantasies in order to feel alive. Supporting this, the sex scenes invariably follow conversations or moments that touch in some way on the issue of death: Marie’s mentioning that Simon died in a car crash; her comment, when looking at a photograph of Madame X and Adrienne, that ‘one is dead, the other alive’; her showing Julien the refurnished attic room. It is even possible that Marie’s revenant status heightens the sex, that she throws herself into these scenes with such abandon because she is aware of herself as doomed. This would suggest the film is also about the devouring sexual appetite of a female revenant, also found in Ghost Story and The Discarnates. The violent sex in those films hints at the ghost’s implicit agenda: that the man die in her arms. Marie, too, may be aware that this could be a consequence: on two occasions after the sex, she flees from Julien, as if frightened by what’s happening. It is perhaps because Histoire de Marie et Julien is French that it fits eccentrically into the ghost melodrama cycle. According to Roger Clarke, ‘The French, who have also firmly separated the secular and the religious, consistently score as the most cynical among Europeans about ghosts’ (2012: 303). In other words, the French don’t really believe in ghosts, and there are indeed relatively few French ghost movies. Nevertheless, even as the film concentrates on some of the familiar ingredients of the French cinema – casual criminality; energetic sex; self-destructive relationships (Madame X and Adrienne; Marie and Simon) – it tells the story of the redemption of a ghost through love.

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Italy: Three Films Another country whose f ilms have a different take on ghosts is Italy. Ghosts occur in Italian movies, but they tend not to be scary. Their role can be clarified by looking at three films released in 2004: Non ti muovere, L’amore ritorna and Ovunque sei. In the first two, a ghost has a minor role; Ovunque sei is a fully developed ghost melodrama. Coincidentally, all three films are directed by actors who subsequently became directors. Non ti muovere/ Don’t Move (Sergio Castellitto, Italy/Spain/UK, 2004) Non ti muovere was adapted from Margaret Mazzantini’s international bestseller of the same name, published in Italian in 2001; the English translation is Don’t Move (2004). Castellitto is married to Mazzantini, and they adapted the screenplay together. The novel has an unusual mode of address: as his fifteen year-old daughter Angela is being operated on to save her life after a traffic accident, Timoteo, a surgeon, imagines he is talking to her – telling her about his doomed affair, before she was born, with Italia, a prostitute living on the outskirts of Rome. The film begins with Angela being rushed to hospital, and Timoteo (Castellitto) being summoned to her bedside, but because there is no voice-over to the ensuing flashbacks, the novel’s mode of address is lost. In the film, Italia (Penélope Cruz) is not a prostitute, but otherwise the flashbacks to the love affair tell much the same story. But here they are triggered by something more remarkable. As Timoteo anxiously waits in the corridor outside the operating theatre, Italia’s ghost appears on the walkway outside and sits – as though in vigil. At first, we do not know she is dead and so this must be her ghost, but Timoteo knows. Shaken by her appearance, he does not go to her, but just checks, from time to time, that she is still there. Here it is as though he is remembering the affair in order to explain who she is. And throughout the hours that he waits, and recalls their past together, Italia’s ghost continues to sit in the pouring rain. That, however, is the extent of the ghost elements in the film. Italia’s ghost remains sitting in the rain until the operation has been successfully completed; she then smiles to herself and vanishes – only her chair remains. Nevertheless, it is a threat to the life of Timoteo’s daughter that prompts Italia’s ghost to make an appearance, fifteen years after her death, and sit until the crisis has passed. Although Timoteo’s colleagues are conducting the operation, he is otherwise alone during his wait: his wife does not manage

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to return from abroad until after Angela’s condition has been stabilised. And so, Italia’s presence gives Timoteo heart: she is telling him she still cares for him; she is signalling that there is an afterlife, which Timoteo, an atheist, had refused to believe. L’amore ritorna (Sergio Rubini 2004) In L’amore ritorna (‘Love returns’) the ghost’s appearances are more substantial. Since the film – story by Domenico Starnone and Rubini; script by Starnone, Rubini and Carla Cavalluzzi – was released in Italy on 17 March 2004, only a week after Non ti muovere, the two films must have been in production at much the same time. Nevertheless, each has a surprisingly similar ghost premise. The ghost in L’a more ritorna is Sisina (Giorgia Pranzo), who died as a teenager fifty years ago: the film begins with her funeral, a sequence which is then identified as the dream of the now elderly Antonietta (Dina Valente), Sisina’s cousin and childhood friend. Antonietta’s son Luca (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) is a movie star currently making a film in Milan, and most of L’a more ritorna deals with the crisis that occurs (both for the film-makers and for Luca himself) when Luca coughs up blood and is taken to hospital. Again, however, this personal crisis to the child of someone she had loved prompts the ghost’s return. When Luca first coughs up blood, the film cuts to Sisina as ghost, wearing the white dress she was buried in, running across the fields to the village where she and Antonietta grew up. At first she cannot understand why Antonietta no longer lives at her old address – even a ghost can be disorientated – but Antonietta subsequently learns through a neighbour about Sisina’s return. In this case, her return fulfils a death-bed promise: Sisina had told Antonietta she would come back if the latter ever needed her. We assume Sisina quickly learns the ways of ghosts, because she next turns up in Luca’s hospital room, smiling encouragingly at him, but visible to no one else. Until the end, he is the only person now to see her. When Luca’s childhood friend Giacomo (Rubini), a doctor, disagrees with the Milanese doctors’ diagnosis of – and therefore treatment for – Luca’s condition, he kidnaps Luca on a gurney, and rushes him away from the hospital through the streets of Milan. Here Sisina in her white dress turns up to assist, helping Giacomo manoeuvre the gurney through the traffic. Sisina makes a later appearance to Luca in hospital, leading him in a playful ghost’s manner – appearing one moment; disappearing the next – back to his room where Antonietta is waiting for him. But it is only after

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Luca has been cured and Antonietta has returned to her village, that Sisina finally appears to her. The last sequence shows the two of them walking back through the fields where Sisina as ghost first appeared, and the film ends with Sisina telling Antonietta she has to leave and running off. The film also features a music box, given to Antonietta by Sisina when the latter was dying. Given in turn by Antonietta to her daughter Clara (Emanuela Macchniz), the music box functions as a sort of magical agent, providing the hitherto neurotic Clara with a happy ending with a nice young man. Thus even a music box, normally used in ghost movies for its eeriness, is here used entirely benignly. Rich in character and incident, L’a more ritorna is the sort of comedydrama the Italian cinema does so well. Here, too, the ghost is rather like a guardian angel, assisting the hero through a medical crisis. Her structural importance is emphasised by beginning and ending the film with her, but her activities as ghost are strictly benevolent. Indeed, Luca seems to enjoy her appearances as a manifestation of life’s quirkiness, smiling happily at Sisina as she expertly guides his gurney through the Milan traffic. The ghost thus seems essentially an additional figure within the tapestry of Italian family life, making her presence felt at moments when she can encourage and help the characters. Ovunque sei (Michele Placido 2004) In L’a more ritorna, Michele Placido plays a famous surgeon, Professor Bianco, who is referred to at one point as a ‘demigod’, and who sweeps into the film by helicopter to rescue Luca and take him off to Rome, away from the unreliable, mercenary Milanese doctors. This star entrance is a sign of Placido’s status as a movie star. It is a status which has enabled him to direct a range of movies over the last twenty-odd years, and in some cases to take risks with ‘difficult’ projects. Directed from an original screenplay by Umberto Contarello, Francesco Piccolo, Domenico Starnone and Placido himself, Ovunque sei (‘Wherever you are’) is a case in point. The film was released in Italy in October 2004 but, panned by the critics, was shown hardly anywhere else. Nevertheless, it is an unusual and impressive contribution to the ghost melodrama cycle. Matteo (Stefano Accorsi) and Emma (Barbora Bobulova), married with a young daughter Ada (Giulia De Leonardi), both work at the same Rome hospital. Matteo is a doctor who goes out with the ambulances; Emma a neurosurgeon. Their marriage seems happy, but there are slight tensions: Emma is concerned about Matteo’s apparent interest in Elena (Violante

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Placido, Michele’s daughter), one of his students, and Emma herself is being openly pursued by Leonardo (Stefano Dionisi), a fellow neurosurgeon. The film begins on New Year’s Eve; the crucial events take place the following evening. Matteo finds that on this evening Elena has decided to accompany him on his ambulance shift. Their journey through the typical casualties of Roman night-time life is cross-cut with Leonardo and Emma conducting an operation. At the end of this, Emma retires to her office; Leonardo follows and sexually assaults her. She fights him off by kicking him in the testicles, but then allows him to have sex with her. In the meantime, Matteo’s shift has finished, and he is driving with Elena back to the hospital. By now driving home, Leonardo phones Emma on her cell phone. In her car, Emma at first declines the call, then phones back. But she doesn’t speak. As Leonardo barks ‘Pronto!’ into the phone, he ignores the road ahead. He drifts out of his lane; Matteo in the oncoming ambulance swerves, loses control and the ambulance plunges through a bridge parapet into the Tiber. However, it seems at first as though Matteo and Elena survive the accident. Although Matteo becomes trapped in the sinking ambulance, Elena manages to pull him out. We next see them at dawn being assisted by some immigrants living in a makeshift camp on a bank of the Tiber. They travel with the immigrants to a building site; Matteo phones home. But Emma is with the police who are searching for the ambulance in the river. And so, Matteo returns by bus to his apartment. He remains there for some time, but when he sees Emma, Ada and Emma’s mother returning, he leaves. At this point, it seems as though Ovunque sei is developing into a ‘second life’ film: the hero, believed dead, is taking advantage of this to start a new life – here with another, younger woman. The famous version of this story is Luigi Pirandello’s novel Il fu Mattia Pascal/The Late Mattia Pascal (1904), memorably filmed as Feu Mathias Pascal (Marcel L’Herbier, France, 1925). Hollywood films with the same basic premise include The Whispering Chorus (Cecil B. De Mille 1918), Nora Prentiss (Vincent Sherman 1947), The Judge Steps Out (Boris Ingster 1949) and September Affair (William Dieterle 1950). We are encouraged to read the narrative of Ovunque sei this way not only by Matteo’s name, which evokes Pirandello’s hero, but also by a remark Matteo makes to Elena moments before the accident: ‘Sometimes I wish I had a different life; a new one’. It’s as though the accident has enabled this wish to come true. Also relevant to this reading is Emma’s unwitting responsibility for the accident: there is melodramatic logic to the idea that Matteo has been freed from his marriage by a chain of events resulting from Emma’s own sexual infidelity. However, it gradually becomes apparent that there is something

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odd about Matteo’s current relationship to the world. He is repeatedly drawn back to his old apartment, which is not the typical behaviour of someone who has begun a second life. On one occasion, he is greeted by Ada’s dog Spina; on another he ‘hides’ in the apartment as Leonardo, still obsessively pursuing Emma, comes to visit. Mysterious incidents occur: in a scene with Elena, Matteo puts a daisy in a medical textbook and offers the book to her; as Leonardo moves around the apartment, he takes the same book from the shelves and a (the?) daisy falls out. It emerges that Matteo must be a ghost, a ghost visible only to Spina. But this does not explain the daisy in the textbook, which implies another narrative thread. Matteo’s post-mortem scenes with Elena seem to exist in a different diegetic space: she is now a university student, and Matteo is irritated by the interest her professor Carlo (Massimo De Francovich) shows in her. But we have already seen Carlo in a photograph with Matteo and Emma; Ada asked her mother who the other man was, but Emma declined to reply. The incident with the daisy suggests Matteo is also existing in (or dreaming of) his own personal ghost world, in which he is in some sense recreating with Elena his past with Emma. Early in his romance with Emma he had offered her a medical book with a daisy inside; he now replays this vignette with Elena. But the original daisy has remained in the book over the years. Matteo’s post-mortem world is, accordingly, complex. On the one hand, he moves as a ghost through the real world, visible (it would seem) only to animals, and merely observes events: he does not attempt to intervene, or to signal his presence in any way. On the other, he is enmeshed in a fantasy world in which tensions relating to his earlier life – specifically, his jealousy concerning Emma’s past relationship with her professor – are re-enacted with Elena in place of Emma. In this narrative, Elena is therefore not a ghost, but a figment of Matteo’s imagination. Late in the film, when Matteo finally reveals he knows that he is a ghost, he says to Elena: ‘You’re a nostalgia of mine and I carried you with me to the bottom of the river’. He then adds, ‘I hope you never got into that ambulance and that you’re alive and happy somewhere’. It will be apparent that this thread of the film suggests a key plot device in Abre los ojos/Open Your Eyes and its remake Vanilla Sky. Indeed, in a scene in Carlo’s house, an actor Giovanni gives Matteo a mask which suggests the mask worn by the hero in those films. Matteo then wears it as he jealously observes Elena talking to Carlo. This narrative thread culminates in a later scene in Carlo’s house when, in front of Carlo and a group of students, Giovanni delivers a monologue about the intensity of memories. At the end of the monologue, Elena emerges from behind a curtain and Matteo comes up and kisses her. Photographs

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reveal that this recreates a moment in Matteo’s past when he leapt on stage and kissed Emma: the same red curtains are in the background; Elena is even wearing the same costume. Emma has told Ada about this moment, which was important to her as their first kiss. With this recreation, Matteo in his fantasy ghost world disposes of Carlo as his ‘rival’. He has already remembered that Carlo is in fact dead, and now the Carlo in his fantasy world likewise ‘dies’ – we don’t see him again. It is nevertheless striking that the material from Matteo’s past life that resurfaces to be worked through should be so Oedipal. This is by no means a familiar ghost preoccupation. Even the sequence with the immigrants must be Matteo’s fantasy. Two details support this. First, the immigrants do not speak Italian. The trope of a character finding himself, after an accident, in a strange world where the people speak a mysterious language goes back to Un Soir, Un Train (André Delvaux, France/Belgium, 1968). Although the hero in that film, also called Mathias (Yves Montand), survives the train accident, his wife does not, and the extended sequence of Mathias wandering in a strange world stands in for a near-death experience. The intimations are similar here. Second, in the sequence on the riverbank, Elena is seen purely as a silhouette on a tent wall. This anticipates how she appears on stage during Giovanni’s monologue, and suggests an insubstantiality to her presence that in retrospect makes sense. In this first scene in Matteo’s fantasy ghost world, he has not yet generated a fully convincing representation of Elena. This lack continues for several sequences: at first, she just sleeps; then she doesn’t speak. Her later appearance as a shadow on a curtain then signals what lies behind these partly formed representations: Elena’s role in Matteo’s ghost world is to be a recreation of the youthful Emma. In parallel with Matteo’s post-mortem world, the film continues to show Emma’s life. Because no bodies are found, there is uncertainty over what has happened to Matteo; this, together with her guilt at having had sex that night with Leonardo, means Emma is unable to mourn properly. Moreover, Leonardo still pursues her relentlessly, which lends an uncomfortable undertow to these scenes. Emma resists Leonardo for some time, but late in the film, when Matteo is watching her in the apartment, Emma seems to sense his presence – she may even see him. It’s as though she now realises her husband will never come back, and she goes to Leonardo’s house for sex. This scene seems modelled on the ending of Trois couleurs: bleu, but whereas Olivier (Benôit Régent) – to whom Julie turns for comfort – seems a decent man, Leonardo is a rapist and a creep. Even the way he seeks, during the film, to make friends with Ada seems creepy. He is also directly

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responsible for Matteo and Elena’s deaths. Accordingly, this thread to the film is oddly disturbing. The scenes where Matteo as ghost moves through the real world are filmed naturalistically, but those in his fantasy ghost world with Elena become increasingly oneiric. In one sequence, Matteo and Elena lie together in a grassy area covered in daisies. It is here Matteo remembers that Carlo is dead. Elena protests that they were at his house yesterday. Matteo looks over Elena’s shoulder and sees Carlo descending some steps and collapsing with dizziness. Elena runs up the steps to see if Carlo is all right, but in the next shot, she is back with Matteo on the grass – as though she hadn’t really moved. The logic is that of a dream. Certain limitations to the ghost world only gradually become apparent. On one occasion, Elena says to Matteo, ‘Take me!’, but he backs away, as though her request were impossible to fulfil. Then, towards the end, after Matteo has explained to Elena that she is an imaginary part of his world, the two of them are shown naked together. This scene is cross-cut with the vigorous sex scene between Emma and Leonardo, a cross-cutting which emphasises that Matteo and Elena are not indulging in sex, they’re just lying together. It would seem that, in the ghost world, sex cannot occur. The film ends with a question mark. As Emma, her mother and Leonardo walk with Ada and Spina in a park, Ada climbs a ruin. Whilst he was with the immigrants, Matteo climbed the same ruin – he wanted to see where he was. When Ada reaches the top, she sees Spina is with somebody – and she recognises her father. But she doesn’t call out, and although Matteo looks at her, he doesn’t wave. The moment is their secret. Matteo releases Spina to return to Ada and walks off. Cut to black. In Ghost, the hero grasps very quickly that he has become a ghost. In The Sixth Sense and The Others, it takes most of the film before the hero/ heroine realises. Ovunque sei is different again. Although Matteo does not reveal for some time that he knows he is a ghost, it is implied that his personal moment of realisation occurs on the evening after the accident – at the midpoint of the 85-minute film. After his first visit to his apartment, Matteo stands at the accident site and contemplates the hole in the parapet. A bus passes, and as he looks at the passengers, the film conveys, rather well, that he is strangely cut off from them. Implicitly, Matteo now understands what has happened to him, and so realises why he was unable to face his family. But he then sees Elena on the other side of the road. This is like a gift: he may be dead, but Elena offers him a future – he joins her and the two go off happily together.

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Ovunque sei offers a distinctive take on the afterlife. Matteo not only moves through the real world as an unseen ghost, but simultaneously experiences another, oneiric world, in which fragments from his past life are reworked and thereby recycled. This is an unusual variation on the typically compulsive behaviour of a ghost. The Oedipal aspects of the reworking through are also unusual. In a lecture, Carlo says to Elena: ‘When we love something, in reality we love the ghost of something else’ – an oblique reference to the Oedipal legacy in our adult life. Matteo’s love affair with Elena literalises that concept. In Non ti muovere and L’a more ritorna, the (female) ghosts would seem to be motivated by compassion, which is not a typical ghost characteristic. However, given such a motivation, it is logical they should appear in a hospital, and on occasions when matters of life and death are at stake. Ovunque sei is rather different: the issue here is not so much the (male) ghost’s concern for the living as his understanding of the ghost world he finds himself in. Moreover, although the film begins in a medical environment – both the hospital itself and Matteo’s ambulance duties – this vanishes the moment the ambulance disappears into the river. We never return to the hospital. It’s as though this brutal inversion in the role of an ambulance – from a life-saving vehicle to a hearse – shifts the whole rhetoric of the film, which thereafter becomes imbued with intimations of death and a coming to terms with death. Nevertheless, the film’s rendering of the afterlife is rich and compelling.

16. Anatomy of the Ghost Melodrama Two films can serve to highlight typical features of the ghost melodramas: the South Korean Ryeong (2004) in terms of themes and motifs; the Japanese Sakebi (2006) in terms of narrative structure. By the time these films were made, the cycle was well established, and there was a history of generic features on which to draw. The films also represent contrasting types of ghost movie: Ryeong has a female protagonist and is largely confined to the world of education; Sakebi has a male protagonist who is a police detective. Between them, the two films cover a representative range of generic elements, elements which are typically inflected by the melodramatic mode.

Themes and Motifs Ryeong/The Ghost/Dead Friend (Kim Tae-kyoung, South Korea, 2004) Written as well as directed by Kim Tae-kyoung, Ryeong centres on a group of girls and the shifting dynamic of their relationships. It begins with the girls at university, but flashbacks return to their high-school days. Unlike in the Yeogo goedam films, however, we also see something of their lives outside education, particularly for the heroine Min Ji-won (Kim Ha-neul), who lives with her widowed mother Mrs Min (Kim Hae-suk). 1. Primary and past traumatic events. Ryeong is a relatively unusual example of a ghost melodrama where the protagonist’s own past traumatic event was also the primary traumatic event; that is, Ji-won was a horrified witness to the death that produced the film’s ghost. Although, as usual, the incident is only revealed in flashbacks late in the film, it is the core of the narrative: the incident from which events in the present all stem. The incident occurred a year ago. Ji-won and the three other girls in her clique went for a day in the country, taking with them Su-in (Nam Sang-mi), an outsider whom they could tease and exploit. At a pool in some woods, Ji-won casually pushed Su-in into the water; the other girls then did the same to Ji-won. But, whereas Su-in could swim, Ji-won could not, and she started to sink. Su-in went to her rescue, but as she pushed Ji-won back to the surface, her foot became stuck in some underwater rocks. On the bank, two of the other girls were distracted: Mi-kyeong (Shin Yi) had a bad asthma

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attack and Yu-jeong (Jeon Hie-ju) went to her aid. However, the third girl, Eun-seo (Jeon Hye-bin), pointedly did nothing. She simply watched, with a smirk, as Ji-won surfaced, and Su-in drowned. For convenience, I shall refer to the incident simply as the past traumatic event, but its dual function is nevertheless potent. It is the same in Ghost Story: there, too, the drowning is the group’s guilty secret; there, too, the ghost of the drowned young woman returns to seek revenge. However, for Ji-won, as for Jim in Inner Senses, the incident was so traumatic she lost her memory. This connection highlights the repressed guilt that Ji-won’s amnesia implies. In Ji-won’s case, she has forgotten all her past before the traumatic event. But, as Su-in’s ghost haunts the girls, Ji-won starts to recall her past: as in Inner Senses, the appearances of the ghost trigger the return of the repressed memories. These emerge in fragments, through Ji-won’s dreams of her childhood and flashes of recollection of herself as a teenage schoolgirl. They reveal just how appallingly she and the other girls had treated Su-in. The hauntings of the ghost thus prompt a journey of selfdiscovery of the protagonist. 2. Water. Water functions in the film in two distinct ways, both familiar from other ghost melodramas. First, Su-in returns as a watery ghost: water drips from her and, like Samara in The Ring, she trails it behind her. Moreover, also like Samara and the ghost girl in Dark Water (2002), she can manipulate water. In the film’s prologue, she haunts Eun-seo, a haunting that includes a number of supernatural incidents: the kitchen sink fills with water; water creeps up Eun-seo’s body. Then, in a striking effect, Eun-seo vomits what seems like gallons of water. This signals the ghost’s method of killing her victims: she supernaturally drowns them. This is a motif from Kokkuri, where the ghost girl kills two of her victims by drowning them on land. But here there is a vengeful edge in the method of killing: Su-in makes Eun-seo suffer as she herself did when she died. Second, water symbolises Ji-won’s unconscious. As in a number of the South Korean ghost films, the credits of Ryeong are split into two parts. The main credits are followed by the prologue, which ends with Eun-seo’s scream at the sight of the unseen ghost. A cut to gliding exterior underwater shots heralds the final credit: the title of the film, which translates as ‘The Ghost’ and so highlights the source of Eun-seo’s terror. These shots also refer to the opening of What Lies Beneath: here, too, there is a shock cut to a BCU of the eyes of an underwater female corpse, followed by an abrupt cut to the heroine, who wakes up.

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Ji-won does not appear in the prologue; this is her introduction. As in What Lies Beneath, where Claire also suffers from (partial) amnesia, the heroine is first seen linked to the film’s corpse/ghost. Implicitly, the corpse figures the repressed in Ji-won’s unconscious. 3. Swimming pool and immersion in water. From Ji-won waking up, the film cuts to an underwater shot in an indoor pool, where Ji-won is swimming. According to her (rather hesitant) boyfriend Jun-ho (Ryu Jin), Ji-won swims more than she studies. Again Ji-won’s repressed guilt is registered. By becoming a strong swimmer, she is unconsciously making amends for her earlier inability to swim. In both Inner Senses and Gothika the protagonist is spooked by a ghost appearing in a swimming pool. Here Ryeong effects a striking variation. In one scene, hands emerge from the water to touch Ji-won, and she then finds herself being pulled down into the pool by an invisible figure. It looks as though the ghost is trying to drown her, but, as we see at the climax, the choreography of Ji-won’s body into the depths and then back up to the surface precisely echoes her movements during the past traumatic event. This suggests a very different reading of the incident: it is as though the ghost is trying to shock Ji-won into remembering. At the same time, this is another example of immersion in water leading to contact with the ghost world. In a sense, by its actions, the ghost is also saying Ji-won needs to go down into the depths to find her body. The ‘attack’ is also preparing Ji-won for the climax. 4. Séance. The prologue begins with a match being struck to light a candle. This is an explicit reference to Memento Mori, which opens with the same shot. In Memento Mori, a schoolgirl is constructing the film’s ornate diary; in Ryeong, a schoolgirl is conducting a séance. The lighting of the candle in both cases suggests a ritual. In Ryeong, Eun-jeong (Lee Yoon-ji) then chants in an unknown language, using some sort of magic board, to summon a ghost. She is with two friends, so the scene echoes the Kokkuri game in Kokkuri. But in Ryeong the scene is also cross-cut with another girl thrashing around in bed, suggesting that Eun-Jeong’s incantation is simultaneously disturbing the girl’s sleep. This girl will turn out to be Eun-seo, Eun-jeong’s older sister, and, although Eun-jeong is staging the séance – she manipulates the stone that vibrates on the board – we learn later that she hates Eun-seo, and she really would like a ghost to come and harm her. Eun-jeong’s secret wish comes true: Su-in’s ghost is indeed summoned and, in the next scene, Eun-seo is killed.

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Although séances in some ghost melodramas (The Changeling; The Others) are helpful, both Kokkuri and Ryeong demonstrate the dangers of summoning the spirits: they can take over events. Later, talking to Ji-won, Eun-jeong is very upset that her ‘game’ may have led to her sister’s death. At the same time, the hatred she felt for Eun-seo points to the melodramatic tensions of the girls’ world. This comes out most strongly in the bullying of Su-in. 5. Class. Ghosts tend to haunt within their own class; Ryeong is an exception. When Ji-won and Su-in were young, both came from poor families and they were friends. However, Ji-won’s father subsequently became wealthy, and when we see Ji-won as a teenager, it is the rich girls she is with – Su-in is the outsider. Moreover, Su-in is now tormented and bullied explicitly because of her working-class background; for example, because Su-in’s mother works at a fish stall in the market, the other girls pretend Su-in smells of fish. Class is the fault line that lies at the heart of the film: becoming wealthy turned Ji-won into a heartless snob. Here Ryeong uses the trope of amnesia in an entirely familiar manner (the Jason Bourne films are a classic example): the amnesiac character discovers to their horror the person they used to be was a monster. Moreover, we can now see that Su-in’s is a class haunting: she is taking revenge on the rich girls who made her life a misery. 6. Photograph. Although Ji-won does not remember her group of girlfriends, about 22 minutes into the film, Yu-jeong makes contact and shows her a photograph of the four rich girls: Ji-won, Eun-seo, Mi-kyeong and Yujeong herself. Yu-jeong tells Ji-won that Eun-seo is now dead, but she saw ‘something odd’ before dying – Yu-jeong is concerned it might have been a ghost. Then, shortly afterwards, we see Yu-jeong, too, killed by the ghost. Ji-won learns from the police that both Eun-seo and Yu-jeong died from drowning. Both drowned indoors – Yu-jeong in a darkroom – and it now begins to look as though the ghost is killing the girls in the photograph, one by one. We will discover that the photograph was taken during the day in the woods; moreover, the photographer was Su-in. This suggests another allusion to Ghost Story. There, too, a crucial photograph shows the group who will be involved in the young woman’s death: in Ghost Story four young men; in Ryeong, four young women. In Ghost Story, the future victim is in the photograph, but her face is blurred; in Ryeong, she took the photograph – and so is an invisible presence behind the camera. And in Ghost Story, too, those in the photograph are killed off, one by one, until the body of the drowned woman is recovered.

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Photographs are usually troubling objects in ghost melodramas. The Shining ends with the mysterious photograph of Jack in 1921. In The Discarnates, Harada finds his parents are invisible in a photograph he took of them. In Ringu, the faces of those under the threat of death from Sadako are distorted. In Whispering Corridors, Jin-ju’s photograph in the yearbooks reveals she is a ghost. The Others features photographs of the dead, and these reveal to Grace that her servants are ghosts. In Into the Mirror, the photograph of the sisters was taken by the man who murders one of them. In Histoire de Marie et Julien, Marie knows from a photograph of the two sisters that one is dead. Ryeong also includes a more dramatic photographic effect: as Yu-jeong develops a photograph she recently took of Ji-won, she is terrified to see, behind Ji-won, a ghostly female figure with long black hair, a figure that moves in the still photograph – a trope likewise found in The Ring Two. In all these examples, the photographs are haunted by death, but in the last two, the dead are animated – the essence of ghostliness. 7. Sadako. As Yu-jeong develops the photograph of Ji-won, the lights in the darkroom go out, and she finds herself haunted by a ghost that bears an uncanny resemblance to Sadako, with one eye peering malevolently from behind her hair. A BCU of the eye is followed by a cut to black. This is the first of a number of shots in which Su-in’s ghost is imaged, crudely, as like Sadako, which is the film’s one overtly clumsy effect. It suggests the potency of Ringu is such that even films with no need to make use of its tropes nevertheless include them. 8. Schoolgirl world. Following the Yeogo goedam films, Ryeong shows the cruelty of the girls’ world. As a teenager, Su-in continues to seek Jiwon’s friendship, but the rich girls mercilessly taunt and bully her. At one point, Ji-won informs Su-in that if she, Su-in, takes the university entrance examinations for Eun-seo, then she will be her friend. But in the next scene Ji-won is brutal, telling Su-in: ‘You’re not my friend. If you show up again, I’ll kill you’. When Ji-won remembers this, she smashes her reflection in a mirror – a melodramatic gesture of disgust at oneself that occurs in dozens of films, going back (at least) to The Song of the Scarlet Flower (Mauritz Stiller, Sweden, 1919). Su-in did take the entrance examinations for Eun-seo, and this explains the latter’s refusal to help when Su-in was drowning. With Su-in dead, the secret of how she got into university illegally could be kept. The climactic flashbacks to the past traumatic event actually end with Ji-won still in the water, looking venomously at the smirking Eun-seo on the bank. In this

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locking of the two looks, the power relationship of the girls’ little group is summarised. Ji-won, too, is really an outsider, and she has been put in her place. Eun-seo has won. After the death of Yu-jeong, Ji-won goes to see the only other survivor in the group, Mi-kyeong, who is in a mental hospital, driven crazy by what a doctor calls ‘a water demon’. Here, too, Ji-won’s status within the group is clarified. Mi-kyeong tells her: ‘Do you think we liked you? We took advantage because you were rich’. It is apparent that the one authentic relationship in Ji-won’s past was with Su-in, and so her amnesia is also symbolising her profound psychological loss of what was important to her. During the film, Ji-won puzzles over some mysterious scars on her wrist; they are explained in the climactic flashbacks. Whilst underwater, Su-in had first pushed up the sinking Ji-won, but when she realised she herself was stuck, she desperately clutched at Ji-won’s arm for help. Her nails scoured Ji-won’s wrist, leaving the scars. They look like the scars of a suicide attempt, and the allusion is apt: given that her bullying of Su-in led to the latter’s death, it’s as though Ji-won did indeed kill the best part of herself. 9. The oneiric. As with Jim in Inner Senses, Ji-won’s memories begin to return through her dreams. One shows a childhood incident: a group of girls reject her; another girl plays hide-and-seek with her. As the young Ji-won hides, a hand on her shoulder tells her she has been found. Cut to the adult Ji-won waking to discover her shoulder is wet. As Ji-won will later realise, the other girl in her dream was Su-in, and Su-in’s ghost is now signalling she has arrived in Ji-won’s house. Not until the denouement after the climactic flashbacks does the ghost actually appear as Su-in in the house, but there are a number of suggestive earlier moments. Ji-won has another dream in which she sees her own self lying beside her on the bed: her alter ego turns to look at her challengingly. This puzzling moment will only make sense when we learn of Su-in’s schoolgirl wish to be Ji-won. Su-in’s ghost is threatening to usurp her. A detail furthering the sense that Su-in is an unseen presence in the house is the mise en scène. The interiors in the night scenes are almost all filmed in murky lighting and with green filters, suggesting an underwater look. The effect is furthered by the presence of an aquarium, which stands out because brightly lit. Aquariums occur in a number of East Asian ghost melodramas, e.g. Kokkuri, Memento Mori, Chakushin ari and Into the Mirror, but they are usually minor props. Here the aquarium is linked thematically into the film: it is like a condensed representation of the world of Ji-won’s repressed.

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In another scene at the swimming pool, Ji-won discovers the girl from her dream hiding in her locker. The girl says she is playing hide-and-seek, and tells Ji-won to shut the door. When Ji-won looks again, the girl has vanished. Whether a ghost – Su-in making herself look like her childhood self – or a hallucination, the scene again suggests Memento Mori, where Min-ah looks into Hyo-shin’s locker and ‘sees’ her bloody head. In Memento Mori, this seems like a guilt image for Min-ah, and it is similar here. Su-in’s oneiric manifestations suggest, once more, Ji-won’s unresolved guilt about her. 10. Bath. Dozing in the bath, Ji-won dreams again of the childhood Su-in, and now the girl has acquired some of the attributes of Su-in as ghost, leaving behind her a trail of water. The adult Ji-won follows the trail and is led to the (dream) park where she played with the young Su-in. Again a game of hide-and-seek is in progress, a game in which Ji-won’s childhood self appears and shows her adult self she has to hide. But they ‘hide’ beside a water trough, in a place perfectly visible to Su-in, and the game climaxes with the young Su-in throttling the adult Ji-won. As she does so, she transforms into the cliché ghost, her hair covering her face. Ji-won wakes in the bath. There are quite a few scenes in which heroines bathe in these films, and they are almost invariably linked to some sort of ghostly activity. When, as here, she falls asleep and dreams, a watery ghost dream is only to be expected, as also in What Lies Beneath. But the throttling in the dream would also seem to have a specific purpose. As in the scene in the swimming pool, the ghost seems to be shaking Ji-won to make her remember. At the end of the scene in the hospital with Mi-kyeong, the latter becomes deranged, and tries to throttle Ji-won, translating the suppressed tensions between the girls into overt violence. And each throttling does indeed trigger memories: it prompts Ji-won’s flashback recollections of herself as a schoolgirl bully. 11. Hide-and-seek. The dreams and hallucination also highlight hide-andseek as a key motif. Ji-won links the motif to amnesia: she tells Jun-ho that being amnesiac is like playing hide-and-seek and not knowing who ‘it’ is. In her dreams, Su-in is ‘it’: implicitly, she is the person Ji-won needs to find to recover her memory. It is similar when the young Su-in appears in Ji-won’s locker: there she is hiding, which articulates the same idea another way. Referring to Hide and Seek (John Polson 2005), a film about a killer with a split personality, Barry Curtis writes: ‘The theme of “hide and seek” is a metaphor for the labyrinthine quest that lies at the heart of all hauntedhouse films in which the search for the hidden identity of what is haunting is accompanied by a desire to hide from the consequences of the confrontation’

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(2008: 178). It is both similar and different in Ryeong. On the one hand, the motif of hide-and-seek suggests Ji-won’s anxiety at what the recovery of her memory will reveal. This is reinforced in an otherwise strange scene when Ji-won goes to the cinema with Jun-ho. Su-in’s ghost suddenly appears peering at her with one eye from the seat in front, and then stretches out a watery hand towards her. At that moment, Jun-ho touches Ji-won’s shoulder – Ji-won screams. In effect, Su-in is once more ‘playing’ hide-and-seek with Ji-won, and the watery hand signals that she has found her. On the other hand, as in the childhood game itself, Su-in herself wants to be found. In effect, Su-in, using the language of a ghost, is here telling Ji-won what she must do: look for Su-in’s (watery) body. This inflection of the motif may also be inferred in Chakushin ari from the behaviour of Marie’s ghost, which twice vanishes into cupboards. Using an element of hide-and-seek itself, it’s as though she, too, is signalling that she wants her body to be found. A scene in Dark Water (2002) is also implicitly invoked. When Ikuko plays hide-and-seek at school, the ghost girl Mitsuko comes to find her, and Mitsuko’s footsteps, too, leave a trail of water. Dark Water is a potent point of reference in the ghost melodramas because of the nature of Mitsuko’s haunting: she symbolises the heroine’s own childhood past returning to torment her. It is similar in Ryeong. 12 Rain. Rain is a minor motif in Ryeong: a storm does not arrive until the sequence in which the ghost drowns the distraught Mi-kyeong in hospital, a sequence cross-cut with Ji-won and Jun-ho racing to the hospital, only to arrive too late. Nevertheless, in keeping with ghost melodrama rhetoric, the film evidently felt the need for a storm scene. This suitably heightens the surreal effect when, as her hands in restraints remain untouched by it, water envelops the helpless Mi-kyeong’s face. 13. Police investigation. After Mi-kyeong’s death, Ji-won contacts the police. Earlier, the officers gave the impression that they were investigating the girls’ deaths by drowning, now they pass them off as from natural causes. In fact, this scene in the police station is almost identical to one in Ghost where Molly tries to convince two officers she has received information about Sam’s murder from his ghost. In both cases, mention of a ghost produces a mocking reaction of comic credulity from one of the officers. The refusal of the police to take the supernatural seriously is standard. Whatever the country, the police force as an institution never accepts the existence of ghosts. Individual police officers may be convinced, but either

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(a) the investigating officer is silenced (as in Ringu 2) or killed (as in Ju-on), or (b) from a police point of view, the films end by ignoring the matter of the ghost’s agency. What the police actually wrote in their reports about the ghost murders in, for example, Into the Mirror and Chakushin ari is simply not revealed. 14. The ghost’s bedroom. In What Lies Beneath, Phone and Ryeong, the ghost’s room belongs to a young woman, and her mother, who does not know she is dead, keeps it for her return. There is thus great poignancy in the heroine’s entry into these rooms. They contain memorabilia and artefacts that were precious to the occupants: thus it is in Jin-hee’s room in Phone that Ji-won finds her hidden diary. Ji-won looks into Su-in’s room when, about an hour into the film and as a first step towards seeking atonement for her past behaviour, she goes to visit Su-in’s mother Mrs Han (Choi Ran). The latter’s kindness towards her as Su-in’s best friend heightens Ji-won’s sense of guilt. And here the memorabilia recall the two stages in Ji-won’s relationship with Su-in: childhood photographs of the two of them remind her of those in her own family album; an artefact – a plaster angel – leads her to remember a scene when, at high school, she and Su-in created the angels. In this scene, Su-in expresses a schoolgirl wish to be Ji-won when she grows up. But when she then goes on to remind Ji-won how things changed for Ji-won when she became wealthy, Ji-won icily denies it. She is still being nasty to Su-in. 15. Sexuality. Jun-ho gives Ji-won an identical plaster angel, which makes her realise he must have known her in the past – something he has been keeping from her. He tells her she gave him the angel (which he calls ‘a good luck charm’, a sign of the sublimation of Christian iconography) when he went for his military service. This and other details suggest Ji-won probably had tender feelings for Jun-ho in the past, but because she did not recognise him when he returned home, he remained silent about having known her. His reticence is in fact typical of the heterosexual relationships in the East Asian ghost melodramas focusing on teenage girls. It’s as though a passionate heterosexual romance would disturb the films’ dynamic. Accordingly, all the most intense relationships are between the girls themselves. Jun-ho never seems to be other than a good friend. 16. The ghost’s corpse. With Jun-ho, Ji-won returns to the pool in the woods where she lost her memory. Details at the site trigger recall; flashbacks show the past traumatic event. Ji-won dives in to look for Su-in’s body.

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Symbolically, it is as though she is diving into her own unconscious. Miraculously, the body has somehow been preserved (we will hear this is due to arsenic in the water), and it is in the same position, upright and with Su-in’s foot still trapped (see Fig. 40). As Ji-won seizes hold of the body to shake it free, Su-in seems to turn and look at her, and shows the trace of a smile. Ji-won embraces her friend. At this point, she herself seems to be surrendering to the death drive, but Jun-ho appears and pulls her to the surface. Here there is perhaps a fleeting reference to Dragonfly: when Joe is in the sunken bus, Emily’s ghost appears, and he seems on the point of drowning to join her in the afterlife. However, Victor pulls him back up to the surface. Despite the temptation of joining the loved one in death, both protagonists are forced by someone else to go on living. Back on the bank, a tearful Ji-won apologises to Su-in. The authorities are notified; Su-in’s mother identifies the body. We assume the ghost is now appeased but, as in Ringu, there is a final twist. 17. Possession. The film actually begins with voices. During the opening credits, with the background still black, we hear the nursery song later associated with the hide-and-seek game, and then Eun-jeong warning her friends: ‘Pull yourselves together. Otherwise the ghost might get into your bodies. It needs a body to live in’. Possession is then held in abeyance until the film’s denouement. In several scenes, Mrs Min behaves oddly – on one occasion, cooking an elaborate, unappreciated fish meal for Ji-won – but Ji-won has not noticed a pattern to this. Now when she returns home, she is confronted with a dramatic explanation. She discovers that not only is her mother possessed by the ghost of Su-in, but the possession has taken a startling form. The possessed Mrs Min insists that she herself is Ji-won and Ji-won is Su-in. But because the possessing ghost can see that the person in front of her looks like Ji-won, she also insists that the Su-in she is projecting into Ji-won has stolen Ji-won’s body. This extraordinary phantasy leads to a confrontation between the possessed mother and Ji-won that is dizzying in its implications. Initially, Ji-won starts to have doubts. She remembers Su-in saying, ‘I want to be you’. Voice-over recollections and flashbacks show her recalling moments when, seemingly unconsciously, she did behave like Su-in; in particular, biting her nails – a detail of the ghost’s influence also seen in Phone. It is only now that a flashback shows the moment when she lost her memory: as Ji-won staggers ashore from the pool, Eun-seo leans over her and insists, ‘Don’t remember. Take it to your grave’. These words

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have echoed, like a curse, throughout the film. It’s as though, since that moment, Ji-won has been, in effect, a tabula rasa, vulnerable to ‘psychic invasion’. After further flashbacks, now suggesting that Mrs Min has long been possessed by Su-in, Ji-won collapses on the floor. In its structure, this is the equivalent of a key montage but, unlike any of the other examples, it dramatises a frightening threatened loss of identity. Ji-won suddenly seems uncertain who she is. But now, as the possessed Mrs Min’s demands become more insistent – ‘I want my body back!’ – Su-in’s destructive power takes over, and like Eun-seo in the prologue, Mrs Min vomits water and collapses. At this point, freed from Mrs Min’s body, Su-in returns to her Sadako guise, and she comes up out of the puddle of water on the floorboards like Sadako out of the television. She advances on Ji-won. In a moment of inspiration, Ji-won pretends to succumb to her phantasy: she addresses the ghost as though it were Ji-won, apologises for being so weak in wanting to be like her, and slits her wrist. Confronted with this confounding of her plans, the ghost screams. The scream reaches Jun-ho, who conveniently is still hanging around outside the house. This is undoubtedly the most bizarre ghost scene in all the films in this book. The two figures, ghost and heroine, play out a hysterical phantasy drama, which alludes to what Melanie Klein calls ‘projective identification’. First, the mother’s body, the object of childhood phantasies of projective identification, is sadistically invaded in order to be controlled (see Laplanche & Pontalis 1973: 356). Then in a further stage, Su-in projects herself into Ji-won. Summarising W.R. Bion on projective identification, Elizabeth Bott Spillius writes: ‘Bion shows […] that in many cases the person doing the projecting acts in such a way as to get the […] recipient of the projection to have the feelings appropriate to the projector’s phantasy’ (1988: 83). Jiwon begins to feel the powerful effects of Su-in’s projection, and becomes uncertain about her own identity. 18. Epilogue. The epilogue has three scenes. The first, as in Chakushin ari, takes place in a hospital. Ji-won is recovering from her slit wrist; Jun-ho is attentive; Mrs Min is in a coma in another bed. But, as in Chakushin ari, we do not know what has happened to the ghost girl. In the second scene, Ji-won returns home. Now, in the daytime, the house is sunny; as though the ghost has gone. However, the third scene suggests that Su-in has not been appeased. In the market, Ji-won secretly watches Su-in’s mother at her stall. But Mrs Han has seen her. As she walks away, Mrs Han violently chops off the head of a fish and glares in Ji-won’s direction.

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In fact, it seems Chakushin ari is being overtly referenced: as though the troubling knife brought to the hospital there has been transferred to Mrs Han – and it could still do harm. But, as with the earlier movie, this seems an unnecessarily enigmatic ending. Is Su-in now possessing her own mother? Or was she successful in the climactic confrontation, and she is instead possessing Ji-won herself (again, Ji-won here bites her nails)? Or is Mrs Han now holding Ji-won responsible for Su-in’s death? Although the ending of Ryeong seem needlessly puzzling, most of the film is a compelling portrait of a corrupted schoolgirl world, where authentic feelings are crushed by bullying and cruelty. The appearances of the ghost have served a double function: to force the heroine to remember her repressed past, which enables her to recover her humanity, and to expose the heartlessness of the group of rich girls. At the same time, the film includes a remarkable number of ghost melodrama themes and motifs, drawing these from the films of several different countries. It illustrates the steadily increasing density of generic material characterising the films of the cycle.

Narrative structure Sakebi/Retribution (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2006) The famous Kiyoshi Kurosawa ghost film is Kairo/Pulse. It is Kairo which has a cult following and which prompted a Hollywood remake, Pulse (Jim Sonzero 2006). However, Kairo is essentially an apocalypse film in which the ghosts are a generalised expression of people’s despair. Ghosts seep out from their own world – initially into the Internet; then through portals into our world – and fill everyone they encounter with such ennui they die. This is adolescent angst at its most absurd: the whole world is taken over by the ghosts, and ‘everyone’ dies. At the end, the heroine is on a ship, alone but for a few crew members. These are the survivors, and they are fleeing to South America, from where signals have been heard. The ghosts in Kairo are of little interest. Seen first as disembodied figures on the Internet, some of them rather pathetically appeal for help. As the young people in the film begin to die, they sometimes make feeble attempts to become ghosts, but even that seems too much effort and they vanish into walls, leaving behind a black smudge. Occasionally a character enters a ‘forbidden room’ and encounters a rather spookier ghost, but this merely leads to the character becoming infected with terminal gloom and

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then dying. As an apocalypse film, Kairo has its moments, but as a ghost film, it is rather dull. Sakebi is far more rich and complex. Both written and directed by Kurosawa, it is in fact a generic hybrid: part ghost movie; part detective film. In using it as the second paradigmatic example to illustrate the anatomy of the ghost melodrama, I will focus mainly on the film’s narrative. In addition, however, I will make reference to the film’s historical resonances and to a major motif not considered in the discussion of Ryeong. At 100 minutes, Sakebi divides, atypically, into five acts plus an epilogue, the acts between 18 and 20 minutes each. Each act includes both crime and ghost elements, but the ratio between these shifts steadily, as the ghost elements take over. In effect, the narrative is structured like a series of Chinese boxes, in which we are led down into the ghost melodrama material under the surface of a police murder investigation. The Outer Box: The Police Investigation Sakebi begins with murder: a man drowns a young woman in a red dress in a puddle of salt water on some waste ground. Cut to detective Yoshioka (Koji Yakusho) being awoken on his couch by an earthquake tremor. His girlfriend Harue (Manami Konishi) comments on the earthquake and leaves. Earthquakes recur throughout the film: this one is blamed for liquefying the wasteland terrain and destroying crime scene evidence. Alongside an inlet off Tokyo Bay, the waste ground is a landfill – hence the saltwater puddles – and the site of an abandoned building project. Much of the film takes place on and around this wasteland – both Ariake police station and Yoshioka’s apartment are close by – which functions as a metaphor for urban decay. This area of Tokyo was also the setting for Kokkuri, where the derelict apartment block functioned in a rather similar way. As Yoshioka investigates the murder, two unexpected developments occur. He attracts the attention of a woman in a red dress (Riona Hazuki) who appears briefly on the wasteland at night, but then vanishes, delivering a high-pitched scream. And details keep cropping up that seem to link him to the murder: in a saltwater puddle he finds a trench-coat button matching one missing from his own coat; his fingerprint is found on the corpse (labelled F18). Yoshioka becomes unnerved by these intimations of his possible guilt. When the police computer identifies the fingerprint and his face pops up onscreen, this is like a silent accusation. At the beginning of Act Two, another murder with the same M.O. occurs: Dr Sakuma (Ikuji Nakamura) takes his delinquent teenage son to the

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waterfront and drowns him in a sink of salt water. In yet another saltwater puddle, Yoshioka then finds another clue: yellow wiring of the kind used to tie up F18. Since this matches the wiring in his own apartment, it potentially incriminates Yoshioka further. Apprehending Sakuma on the wasteland, Yoshioka beats him up, accusing Sakuma of framing him. Under interrogation, Sakuma admits killing his son: ‘I wanted to wipe out the burden of responsibility’. But when he denies knowing F18, again Yoshioka assaults him, prompting another policeman to step in and warn Yoshioka. It is becoming apparent that Yoshioka has a violently disturbed personality. His partner Miyaji (Tsuyoshi Ihara) advises him to see a police counsellor. It is at this point the ghost begins to haunt Yoshioka. The Middle Box: The First Ghost – Haunting as Theatre At the beginning of Act Three, woken in his bed by an earthquake tremor, Yoshioka is frightened to see a woman in red forcing her way through a crack in the apartment wall. He wakes again, and realises this was a dream: the wall is no longer cracked. But when he gets up, there is another tremor. As though signalling the start of a theatrical performance, the lights in the apartment dim. But the light returns in a mirror reflection – another example in these films of the otherness of the mirror world. Puzzled, Yoshioka looks into the mirror, whereupon the woman in red comes up behind him screaming (Sakebi means ‘scream’ or ‘cry’). As he cowers by the bed, the woman advances slowly towards him, her hair blowing spookily. Using stylised theatrical gestures, and speaking in a deep, haunting voice, she says she is pleased to see him again. Yoshioka is both terrified and baffled (see Fig. 41). Later, the woman appears to Yoshioka beside some abandoned building materials on the wasteland. Again she presents herself theatrically: floating in the air, she accuses Yoshioka of drowning her in salt water. When he vehemently denies it, again she screams. Then, staring fixedly at him with just one eye round a corner – a ghost trope from Ringu 2 – she elaborates: ‘I was stuck there forever, and lonely for so long. All my senses and memories, and my emotions disappeared… leaving only despair’. Yoshioka utters the cry of anguish of these movies: ‘I don’t understand! What do you want?’ As if by way of response, we see brief shots of Yoshioka himself drowning a woman in red in a bowl of water, followed by two quick shots of a derelict building on the water’s edge. We assume these are images the ghost has forced Yoshioka to see. But he is still completely bewildered. In keeping with their spooky status, most ghosts speak rarely, if at all. The woman in red does speak, but she uses an allusive phraseology that

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suggests her other-worldly sensibility and perspective. Equally, she has the power to project images into Yoshioka’s mind. Nevertheless, typically of a ghost, her communications are cryptic. As though doubting his own sanity, Yoshioka asks Harue what he has done. She deflects the question: ‘What difference does it make? That has nothing to do with us now. The past is all an illusion’. As Harue now cradles Yoshioka, she turns to look directly at the camera. This is in fact a mirror shot, showing Harue’s point of view – in the same mirror as earlier – as she looks at herself. But the effect is of her communing directly with the audience. The Inner Box: The Second Ghost – An Absence of Haunting This striking moment alludes to the story in the innermost Chinese box, a twist only revealed towards the end of the film. Harue is in fact a revenant, killed by Yoshioka before the film began. But she is reluctant to leave him; hence her evasive response to his question. Yoshioka has repressed all memory of the murder, but, unlike Siu Yu in Inner Senses, Harue does not want the hero to remember her death. Her look to the camera is troubled, hinting at her secret knowledge of Yoshioka’s past. Behind a closed door in the apartment, like a repressed part of Yoshioka’s mind, lies her body. Only after the revelation of this primary traumatic event can we understand crucial earlier moments. Yoshioka’s outbursts of violence, as well as other details, now make sense. Although there are two ghost women in the film, and thus two primary traumatic events, it is the murder of Harue that echoes and re-echoes through the narrative in the murders that we see. Both murders thus far are by drowning in salt water – which is how Yoshioka killed Harue. Other elements that now make sense are (a) the clues that keep suggesting Yoshioka is the murderer of F18 (his repressed guilt returns), (b) Sakuma’s appearance to him on the wasteland (caught, Sakuma can be blamed for two murders and Yoshioka’s guilt thus re-repressed), and (c) the persistent haunting by the woman in red (his guilt is still unacknowledged). More specifically, the woman in red shows Yoshioka – with herself in place of Harue – the murder he has repressed. The murder investigation and the haunting of Yoshioka are linked: the murders are also echoes of the (repressed) murder of Harue; the haunting is forcing Yoshioka to accept that he himself is a murderer. His violence bears testament to his warding off such a thought but, through these murders, Yoshioka is also investigating himself.

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Oneiric Narrative Although Sakebi possesses a fundamental weakness in that Yoshioka’s killing of Harue is never explained – except as an act of madness – the film nevertheless invites a reading in expressionist terms: as the nightmare of a policeman on the verge of insanity. This also helps account for the film’s oneiric feel, with elements uncannily repeating, echoing and referring to one another. One aspect of this is the way the saltwater puddles keep yielding up clues. The puddles may be seen as examples of the return of the repressed nature – the sea – and they point to the folly of the enterprise of reclaiming land in an earthquake zone. But they also function symbolically, containing secrets about the violence enacted in and around them. Another relevant feature is the film’s overtly back-projected car journeys, which give the impression of characters not actually going anywhere. This trope is used in Kairo to suggest the dislocation of the characters from the world, but in Sakebi the images can be seen as heightened markers of the oneiric narrative. At such moments, we really do seem to be visually in a dream. After the woman in red has appeared in his apartment, Yoshioka visits the police counsellor (Jo Odagiri). Here, too, it is as though he needs reassurance about his sanity. He is silent about his own ghost experiences, but then sees a traffic policeman thrashing around in bed, traumatised by the ghost of a car accident victim. The man is like a hysterical version of himself. The encounter prompts Yoshioka to ask the counsellor if a ghost might haunt the wrong person. But the counsellor considers ghosts only appear in dreams, and so derive from the subject’s own doubts about himself. He calls them ‘the voice of truth’. Ghosts may not only appear in dreams, but the notion of them as ‘the voice of truth’ is supported by the film. Sakuma’s interrogation has to be terminated when he is seemingly haunted by his son’s (invisible) ghost. The notion also applies to Yoshioka. Again we have an implied link to the unconscious: it’s as though the woman in red emerges from Yoshioka’s unconscious to speak about his guilt in oblique ways, specifically through displacement. It is thus not surprising that her first appearance in his apartment is in a dream, and she is forcing her way through a crack in the wall – as though through a rupture in the border of the unconscious. Gender Issues and Mirrors At the beginning of the fourth act, another saltwater murder occurs: Miyuki (Kaoru Okunuki), the mistress of her married boss, Onoda (Hironobu

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Nomura), fills a bath with salt water and then strikes him and drowns him in it. After the murder, we see the woman in red in a mirror; it’s as though she has supervised the murder. When Yoshioka later catches Miyuki, he questions her aggressively about the woman in red. Miyuki explains: ‘She was in the mirror… Her emotions poured into me: “Nobody notices me”; “The world’s forgotten me”; “The people closest to me don’t see me at all”. Onoda was like that. All his future plans were just for himself: I didn’t exist. I wanted to wipe everything out. That’s why I killed him’. There are two points here. First, Miyuki’s phrasing echoes Dr Sakuma’s, as though the only way to rid oneself of a troublesome relationship is by murder. Ghosts often deal in extremes, and here the woman in red is prompting others to see the world with her own despair. Second, and more importantly, Miyuki’s action may be read from a feminist point of view as that of a woman driven beyond endurance by a man’s treating her as no more than an adjunct to his life. When Onoda outlines his idea of their future together, he barely even looks at Miyuki: ‘You don’t need to think; just relax and follow me’. It is here Miyuki comes up behind him and begins her murderous attack. There is also a direct visual link between Harue and Miyuki. Before Onoda’s murder, Miyuki is in his bathroom. An earthquake tremor occurs; after it, she looks directly at the camera, which is in the place of the bathroom mirror. This is evidently the moment when she first sees the woman in red – and is prompted to think of murder. Her gaze echoes the moment when Harue looks at the camera in an actual mirror shot. This suggests that perhaps Harue, too, is aware of the woman in red, and is concerned about her interest in Yoshioka. After all, the woman in red wants Yoshioka to remember, whereas Harue wants him to continue to forget. A key ghost melodrama motif not discussed under Ryeong, the mirror plays a major role in Sakebi. Here the mirror is not just a place where the ghost reveals herself, it is also where she communicates with at least one of the women in the film, revealing the woman’s repressed thoughts. Although it is difficult to integrate Miyuki’s murder of Onoda into Yoshioka’s oneiric-expressionist narrative, Yoshioka certainly takes Miyuki’s confession personally. When she has finished, he starts to drown her in a handy puddle of water, as though punishing her. But he releases her and tells her to go. Since this attack also echoes his drowning of Harue, in allowing Miyuki to escape, he is symbolically letting himself off the hook: the victim (Miyuki as a stand-in for Harue) goes free; the murderer (Miyuki as a stand-in for himself) goes free.

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In the meantime, F18 has been identified as Reiko Shibata, and when Yoshioka and Miyaji visit her mother, Reiko’s killer, her ex-boyfriend Ichikawa (Ryo Tanaka), conveniently turns up. Again, it’s as though the murderer presents himself to be caught. This also suggests oneiric logic: Ichikawa’s arrest, too, enables Yoshioka to re-repress his own guilt – Ichikawa is the killer. And here the film takes the parallels between the killer and the hero further: like Yoshioka, Ichikawa uses yellow electrical wiring and possesses a trench coat bought from City Mart with a button missing. The opening murder, too, can now be seen to stand in for Yoshioka’s murder of Harue. The Ghost World and Japanese History Yoshioka has discovered that the derelict building in the vision imparted to him by the woman in red was a mental hospital, which closed shortly after the war. A police archivist also tells him that some of the inmates refused to leave, and those who transgressed were punished by being held in a bowl of salt water ‘until they suffocated’. The film now links the building to the woman in red. Although she wears the same red dress as Reiko, the woman in red is not, as Yoshioka has assumed, her ghost. Turning up again in his apartment, she makes him remember a time when, fifteen years ago, he took the ferry along the inlet and past the derelict mental hospital. In flashbacks we see, at a window, the woman in red looking out. In the apartment, the woman maternally holds Yoshioka’s head to her shoulder: ‘A long time ago, you found me, and I found you’. We now see the ferry from inside the building, looking over the woman’s shoulder. She assumes Yoshioka was aware at the time of her plight: ‘You saw it; you knew it’. In fact, fifteen years ago the woman in red would have already been a ghost: the ferry scene must have taken place some forty-odd years after the closure of the hospital. It seems likely that she was an inmate during the war – and had herself suffered the ‘suffocating-in-salt-water’ torture. She may even have been among the last survivors who remained in the building – a domestic echo of the real-life Japanese soldiers who stayed on for many years in the jungles of Pacific islands after the war was over. This would account for her loneliness and isolation: watching the rest of the world go by. In the story she now tells Yoshioka, the woman speaks as though she had been alive when he was on the ferry: ‘There were things you could have done… I stayed there for years and years, waiting and waiting, forgotten by everyone. Then I died’. However, like the unconscious, ghosts have no sense

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of time – we cannot trust her account. She screams, driving Yoshioka out of the apartment. She then flies away over the rooftops, and in an echo of the apocalyptic imagery of the last shot of Ringu, darkens the clouds over the city. The woman considers those on the ferry should have done something about her plight. Both Sakuma and Ichikawa also used to take the ferry. Here the tunnel vision of a ghost is linked to psychosis – the building was, after all, a mental hospital. This also chimes with the sense that much of the narrative is inflected by Yoshioka’s own incipient psychosis – as though the woman in red, shut away in the derelict hospital, represents a version of the hero’s repressed. Such a notion is also in evidence when Yoshioka visits the derelict mental hospital. With crumbling walls, broken windows, the rooms partly flooded and cluttered with the debris of the past, this is a ghost zone shading into a ghost world. Here we have a more precise link to Kokkuri: like that film’s derelict apartment block, the derelict hospital is both the site of the primary traumatic event and the ghost’s home. Equally, just as the farmhouse in the land of the dead in The Dark is like an underworld version of the real farmhouse, so parts of the derelict building suggest a ghost version – a dream displacement – of Yoshioka’s own apartment. The layout of a degraded kitchen, together with a small table against an adjacent wall, is like a distorted version of Yoshioka’s own kitchen. An empty bowl on the floor refers to the past ‘punishments’. And there is an identical bowl in Yoshioka’s own apartment, with the dead Harue’s head in it. The woman in red is at the same window, still looking out. She says, ‘Finally, you came. I forgive you, only you’. She then vanishes; on the floor are her bones. A nearby cracked mirror fractures Yoshioka’s image, visualising his split mind. Here, too, the ghost world symbolises Yoshioka’s repressed, revealing clues to his ‘true self’. Below the mirror is an old photograph of a young woman with a baby. Cut-ins to the baby suggest this is the future woman in red. A dark human shape imprinted on the wall echoes the black smudges that register the supernatural deaths in Kairo. The imagery also makes reference to Japanese history. Writing of Kairo, Kit Hughes notes, ‘it evokes the WWII bombing of Japan. The city in ruins, the bomber plane, the room filled with nuclear ash, the black smudges that marked characters’ deaths, and the charred bodies… visually echo photographs and popular representations of the bombings’ (2011-2012: 35). The black smudges on the walls are the most distinctively Japanese feature

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here: such shapes were often the only remaining traces of the victims of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – bombings which were the primal trauma for modern Japan. In Sakebi, the shape on the wall is an emblematic signifier of civilian victims of the war. The woman in red’s silent appeal to the outside world can be seen to have other resonances: it’s as though she represents the millions of Japanese civilians killed in the war – civilians who were perhaps insufficiently memorialised in the economic drive for a modern Japan. Civilians are not included amongst the millions of war dead honoured in the notorious Yasukuni shrine. Discussing the effect of the trauma of the A-bomb on representations in the Japanese cinema, Adam Lowenstein in Shocking Representation notes a shift, ‘that covers over Japan’s pre-Hiroshima imperial aggressions in favor of post-Hiroshima national victimhood, where […] iconic images of the militarized male are replaced with images of the blameless, selfsacrificing maternal female’ (2005: 86). In addition, ‘traditional gender roles are deployed not only to provide a source of stability in the face of trauma, but also to displace Japanese national responsibility for the trauma itself. In this sense the figure of woman enables a historical narrative of forgetting, where victimization replaces responsibility for aggression’ (86). Lowenstein draws upon theories from trauma studies to offer allegorical readings of certain horror films, presenting them as subversive of conventional ideological norms. Thus he suggests that Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo 1964) explodes traditional gender roles in Japanese cinema by combining the male and female stereotypes in the figure of the heroine (83-94). She is both an aggressor, murdering samurai, and a victim: her son was killed in the war; at the climax she bears the ravaged face of a hibakusha (atom-bomb affected person) (87). The woman in red is similar. She, too, is both victim – her past as an inmate in the hospital – and aggressor: she erupts from the now derelict hospital to prompt murders in modern Japan. Here it’s as though the repressed she embodies as a ghost refers to Japanese aggression, itself ‘repressed’ by the conditions imposed at the end of World War II, conditions which included Article 9, banning the Japanese forever from conducting war (Dower 1999: 394). Although she only unleashes this against other Japanese, the ghost would seem to think murderous aggression is appropriate. The flashbacks to the woman making her appeal to those on the ferry are set in 1991. John Dower notes that it was in 1991 the Japanese were ‘derided for offering money but not troops for the attack on Iraq’ (563). The Japanese were humiliated by the very restrictions the US had imposed on them in the post-war constitution the Americans themselves had drafted. Although such a reading of

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the film is necessarily tentative, it is striking that when we later see the woman in red herself kill someone – Miyaji, Yoshioka’s partner – her attack, zooming down on him from above, powerfully suggests a kamikaze pilot. Ending and Atonement The visit to the derelict hospital would seem to unlock Yoshioka’s mind. In his apartment, he finds a plastic container of the sort used by Miyuki to fetch salt water. And now the closed door is open. Through it, we see into another room, where Harue’s badly decomposed body lies. The staging emphasises yet again the oneiric nature of the film: the door is open because Yoshioka now remembers. Harue as revenant is still present, but she refuses to hate Yoshioka for what he did. When he goes to shoot himself, she stops him. Saying she’s leaving, she changes from revenant to ghost – her face turns white and her hair blows spookily (see Fig. 42). Yoshioka rushes to embrace her, and asks her to stay, but we see from another angle he is in fact holding nobody. He sits and howls. Then he collects her bones and puts them in his bag. This is the revenant revelation scene: a man discovers his girlfriend is really a ghost. It occurs rarely, but it typically involves rhetoric around death and self-destruction: both Harada in The Discarnates and Julien in Histoire de Marie et Julien want to join their beloveds in death. In fact, Sakebi would seem to acknowledge The Discarnates, since the next scene is Miyaji arriving at the apartment looking for Yoshioka, echoing Mamiya arriving to look for Harada. But whereas Mamiya saves Harada from the ghost, Miyaji becomes her victim. As Miyaji searches the empty apartment, the woman in red hovers outside. The bowl in which Harue was drowned mysteriously fills with salt water. When a puzzled Mamiya contemplates this, the woman in red swoops down on him from above: both pass through the bowl and vanish. Although shocking in its suddenness and force, the murder suggests the ghost is now ensuring the hero stays free to carry out his responsibilities towards the two dead women. She also checks an official police investigation into her activities. Yoshioka has kept quiet about her, but Harada may not have proved so discreet. In the derelict mental hospital, Yoshioka adds the bones of the woman to his bag. Her red dress hovers, a trace of her haunting. Over a shot of it, we hear her voice-over: ‘I died, so please could everyone else die, too’. Cut to Yoshioka, carrying his bag, crossing deserted city streets in which papers blow in the wind. Since the ending of On the Beach (Stanley Kramer

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1959), such imagery has been used to suggest the apocalypse – Kairo uses similar imagery. Over the deserted urban landscape, the woman’s voice-over repeatedly intones the same phrase. The voice-over is interrupted by a sudden cut to a silent shot of Harue, in what looks like the wasteland, crying out in anguish. As her hand goes to her mouth, a cut to black signals the end of the film. In Kairo, the apocalyptic ending is a part of the film’s message. Here it’s more like a warning: what the woman in red threatens – if she is not appeased. But we assume Yoshioka is seeking to appease her: for example, he is on his way to give the bones of the two ghost women an appropriate ceremony and burial. Harue’s scream is more enigmatic. However, it is suggestive, since it is another reference to the title of the film. We take it that ‘Sakebi’ refers primarily to the shattering scream of the woman in red – a scream so important to the film that another woman, Yoshina Makino, delivers it. The scream of Harue at the end is more like a howl of anguish. But this final cry, too, seems relevant: it even evokes Edvard Munch’s painting ‘The scream’, one of the most famous depictions of extreme anguish. Both screams suggest the torment felt by the ghosts, a torment that echoes through the film and includes, for example, Yoshioka’s own howl of distress at the loss of Harue. Przypadek/Blind Chance (Krzystof Kieslowski, Poland, 1982) opens with the hero’s scream, a scream then explained by what happens at the very end. It’s as though the scream has been displaced from the end to the beginning of the film. I would suggest Sakebi does the reverse: Harue’s scream at the end is displaced from the beginning, where it marked the moment when she realised she was a ghost. The words in the voice-over that cue this shot – the last words in the film – are ‘I died’. Equally, however, the ending could simply follow on from Harue’s movement from revenant to ghost. She finds, to her distress, that she is now expelled from the apartment to the waste ground – and she’s alone. Melodramatic Narrative and Alienation Much of the film is inflected by the melodramatic mode. In Miyuki’s account of how the woman in red affected her, there is a strong sense of buried resentments being brought to the surface; the same could be said of Sakuma’s feelings about his son. Both characters seem to have reached breaking point in their relationships with the person they killed. This is the province of melodrama: the breakdown of personal and family relationships, breakdowns that here lead to murder. As in a number of ghost melodramas,

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it is as though the woman in red acts as a catalyst, translating the emotional frustrations of the characters into action – the very essence of melodrama. The film also has the structure of a certain sort of melodramatic narrative. Using Orphans of the Storm and The Searchers as my main examples, I have argued elsewhere that, where a past traumatic event echoes and re-echoes through the narrative – until a new set of conditions arise which ‘heal’ the initial trauma – this is the essence of melodramatic narrative (Walker 1993). In this structure, it’s as though the narrative is registering the return of the repressed, and it is the compulsiveness that marks the melodramatic form. This is similar to Peter Brooks’ model for narrative, but the compulsion to repeat a founding trauma seems, in many examples at least, less a symptom of the death drive working through the text than a narrative attempt to master the trauma. In the ghost melodramas, there are a number of examples where a past traumatic event echoes through narrative, e.g. Shizuko’s demonstration in the Ringu movies. However, in that case, Peter Brooks’ theory does indeed apply: the echoes allude primarily to Sadako’s ability to keep her curse going, i.e. to the threat of death. It is similar in Sakebi. In the series of murders with the same M.O., it is death that echoes through the film. Nevertheless, there is another series of events which suggest a compulsion to repeat: Yoshioka’s returns to the wasteland. Here the film is moving in a different direction: in returning to the wasteland and finding clues that help penetrate the mystery, Yoshioka is also working to master the trauma. Twice, the narrative moves through the same three stages: Yoshioka sees the counsellor; then goes to a meeting with Harue that is oddly inconclusive; then to the wasteland and talks to the skipper (Ryo Kase) of a passing barge. On the first occasion, he declines the skipper’s offer to accompany him, ‘to see scenes you don’t want to remember’ – implicitly, to visit the places of Yoshioka’s past. Instead, Yoshioka stays on the wasteland, where he is haunted by the woman in red. But on the second occasion, he takes up the skipper’s offer, and goes on the barge to the derelict hospital – echoing the past journeys on the ferry. Here, the skipper is like a guide into Yoshioka’s past, a guide who, in keeping with the film’s oneiric structure, knows where he needs to go. Finally, when Yoshioka takes the bones of the two ghost women to atone in some sense for their deaths, the narrative moves to a healing of both primary traumatic events. Also relevant to melodrama are the scenes where we see characters tormented by ghosts: Dr Sakuma during his interrogation; the traffic policeman. Here the ghosts are the externalisation of these characters’ guilt. Equally, there is the sense throughout that Yoshioka is a man on the edge

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of insanity. Insanity lurks in the background of much of the film, as a brutal wartime method of punishment in a mental hospital becomes a modern means of murder. Whereas Kairo is slow moving, gloomy and despairing, Sakebi is punctuated with heightened, melodramatic moments and scenes. Finally, within the film’s murders is another narrative, one which stresses the loneliness, yearning and finally the vengefulness of the woman in red. In the opening scene, Reiko’s red dress makes her murder seem like an echo of the woman’s own death. Reiko’s body, abandoned on waste ground, has a plangent appeal. The second murder is carried out by a heartless doctor on a young person whom he has failed to care for. This is like a re-enactment of the brutal punishments in the mental hospital. The third murder shown is the fantasy which stands in for the killing of Harue – and here the woman in red casts herself as the victim. These murders are all ‘directed at’ Yoshioka by the ghost: consistent with her theatrical haunting, they present him with violent tableaux of death which he can only fully understand when he traces them back to her. Then, with Miyuki’s murder of Onoda, the woman in red identifies with the killer, and the victim is someone who can be blamed for inflicting the sort of alienation she herself feels. Here, it would seem, the ghost turns avenger. This is continued in her last appearance, where she brutally exterminates Miyaji. Just as the murders are like the return of the repressed for Yoshioka, so they are also telling us, again obliquely, about the agenda of the woman in red. The murders motivated by the ghost can be seen as an extreme solution to a certain sort of alienation and despair: troublesome personal relationships are simply ‘wiped out’. The ghost comes from the past – perhaps all the way from World War II – but she forces into the open specific examples of the malaise of contemporary Japanese society. Personal relationships are not just breaking down, but leading to murder. The unstable, earthquake-prone physical world could be seen as a metaphor for urban disintegration. This is a bleak portrait of modern Japan. In contrast to Ryeong, Sakebi only draws occasionally from earlier ghost melodramas. There are a few familiar motifs, but the film is more concerned with articulating its own distinctive story than in following existing templates. Nevertheless, Sakebi has the oneiric density of many of the other films, as the hero moves through a landscape that seems like an expressionist representation of his own inner world. There are also two neat substitutions: earthquakes here function in much the same way as rain in the other movies – they herald the appearance of the ghost – and salt water replaces conventional water as an even more brutal medium for drowning.

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As a narrative, however, Sakebi is an archetypal ghost melodrama, with two developed representative features. The first is the gradual revelation of the film’s repressed: the primary traumatic event that, as in Ryeong, has been completely forgotten (repressed) by the guilty protagonist. The second is the way in which this past trauma echoes through the narrative, an echoing that can be seen to suggest the repetition-compulsion of melodramatic narrative.

17. Spain and History 2: The Franco Legacy and the Catholic Church Whereas The Devil’s Backbone and The Others are set in the past, El orfanato and No-Do are set in the present but refer to the past. In these films, it is the ghosts – significantly, all children – who come from the past, a past Spain is still seeking to come to terms with. In making their presence felt, the ghosts thus literalise the sense, noted apropos The Devil’s Backbone, of Spain as a country of metaphorical ghosts. They raise issues about the relatively recent past that are still pressing.

Lost Children El orfanato/The Orphanage (J.A. Bayona 2006) Produced by Guillermo del Toro, the first feature of both Juan Antonio Bayona and scriptwriter Sergio G. Sánchez, El orfanato is probably the most richly satisfying of the films discussed in this book. Its basic premise is straightforward: a family moves into an old orphanage building that turns out to be haunted by the ghosts of children who once lived there. But the film has an exceptional density of themes, motifs and poetic connections. Collectively, its scenes form a tapestry: links to other scenes; references to other ghost films; cultural references (to Spanish history; to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan); echoes of the past in the present – all are interwoven. In Spain, El orfanato was also the top box-office film for 2007. Maria Delgado suggests perhaps part of its appeal to the Spanish lay in its allusion to the horrors of the Franco regime – with its multitude of (hidden, unacknowledged) murder victims (2008: 44-45). In fact, as a date on a newspaper report shows, the film locates its primary traumatic event in May 1976, six months after General Franco had died. This was during a transitional period, lasting until July 1976, when Carlos Arias Navarro endeavoured to perpetuate the Francoist legacy. Setting the backstory during that period is like a warning: the monstrous legacy of the fascist state – symbolised not just by the past murders, but also by the apparently successful covering up of the murders – did not end with Franco’s death. In a short pre-credits sequence, seven-year-old Laura (Mireia Renau) plays the game known in England as ‘Grandmother’s footsteps’ with five other

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children in the grounds of an orphanage. She is about to be adopted. After the credits, the narrative moves forward thirty years. Laura (Belén Rueda), her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo), a doctor, and their seven-year-old son Simón (Roger Princep) have moved into the orphanage building. Laura is woken at night by Simón calling – he is being disturbed by something we realise later must be the ghost children. Laura reassures him by telling him about the lighthouse which shone in the past and now, she says, shines invisibly: ‘It protects us’. Using a clock, she reflects the moonlight to create a trompe l’oeil and make the lighthouse beam seem to shine. Simón is pleased, but raises another concern. Laura plans to use the orphanage as a home for special needs children, and he’s not keen on the idea of other children moving into the house. Finally, he gets to the real point: ‘Can I sleep with you tonight?’ This first scene between mother and son establishes their closeness: the Oedipal overtones are indeed quite explicit. It is this closeness which Simón feels will be threatened if other children move in. In this respect, the ghost children may seem like allies – they probably don’t want other children in the house either. Accordingly, it’s as though Simón conjures them up, although, as is usual with ghosts, they will turn out to have their own agenda. In the early scenes, two strangers enter the house; one seen, one unseen. The latter is a ghost boy, whom Simón encounters in a cave on the beach and invites to visit, leaving a trail of shells for him to follow. The former is the elderly Benigna Escobedo (Montserrat Carula), who presents herself to Laura as a social worker. She has a file on Simón, which reveals he was adopted, and is HIV-positive. Because Simón has not yet been told about this, Laura locks the file away. Laura then disturbs Benigna at night, skulking in an outhouse. She chases her off, but this, too, prompts her to sleep (here protectively) with Simón. The next day, Laura discovers Simón’s shells gathered on the doorstep. We infer this is when the ghost boy from the cave, Tomás, invisibly enters the house: the bathroom door slams shut. The significance of these intrusions emerges later. Benigna and Tomás are in fact mother and son, and not only do they have a past relating to the old orphanage, they may also be structurally related to Laura and Simón. Tomás befriends and manipulates Simón, but also functions as his alter ego. Benigna will turn out to have had an excessive devotion to Tomás, which anticipates Laura’s own later obsessive behaviour. One of the film’s key organising motifs is Peter Pan. Simón is reading the novel, and he identifies his mother with the grown-up Wendy, asking her: ‘If Peter Pan came to get me, would you come, too?’ He means to Neverland,

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and Laura protests she’s too old. This leads into a discussion about ageing and dying, and Simón announces that he isn’t going to grow any older. Laura assumes he means like Peter Pan, but he means like his ‘new friends’, who ‘can’t get older’. This is a clear sign he is talking about ghosts, but it is also disturbing. It’s as though the children have told him about his illness. Like Anne in The Others, Simón draws the ghosts he alone can see: six children, all dressed in the period school tunics worn in the opening scene. It will be some time before Laura can accept this, but five of them will indeed turn out to be her childhood playmates. The sixth is Tomás, who in the drawing stands out because he is wearing a sack mask. The mask was to conceal a severe disfigurement, and it was this that triggered the chain of events that led to the children’s deaths. Playing in the cave, the other children removed Tomás’s mask and, too ashamed to come out, he drowned. Benigna, who worked at the orphanage, took revenge: she poisoned the five other children. The primary traumatic event in El orfanato is thus the murder of orphans, a murder carried out by their carer. However, the ghost children are not seeking revenge. They do want their terrible story to be told, but they befriend Simón for another purpose: they want a mother to look after them. How they go about achieving this is the subject of the remainder of the film. Another organising motif is children’s games. The ghost children have taught Simón a game: a treasure hunt in which a ‘treasure’ is stolen, but clues are left to help you find it. If you do, they grant you a wish. Declaring that the children have stolen his special coins, Simón leads Laura into the game. Beginning with the objects (milk teeth) found where the coins had been kept, objects are relocated to their original place, where there is another object which has to be similarly relocated. It is typical of the density of the film that the objects in the game make reference both to Peter Pan (milk teeth; a sewing box) and to maternity (a babushka doll). The final object is the key to the drawer containing Simón’s file. Well briefed by the children, Simón knows instantly where the key goes and so finds his file; inside it are the coins. But the real point of the game is to clarify what has been going on between Simón and the children. Simón now turns on Laura, calling her a liar: Tomás has told him she is not his mother and he’s going to die. Laura and Carlos assume Simón overheard the conversation with Benigna and then found the file, but this is unlikely. Nevertheless, although Tomás, in the omniscient way of ghosts, surely knows about Simón’s situation, there is a more sinister reading. Simón is not going to die from his illness; Tomás is going to kill him. Laura is then sure to look for him, and the children hope this will lead her into their world. Hence Simón’s question about whether

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Laura would follow him to Neverland – it’s as if he’s asking on behalf of the children. Subsequent events make perfect sense when seen from the point of view of the ghost children’s agenda. On the day when the special needs children arrive with their carers for a garden party, Simón becomes uncharacteristically difficult. He wants Laura to come and see ‘Tomás’s little house’, and when she says she’ll do it tomorrow, he turns violent, provoking her to slap him. The slap is like the one in The Dark – it ruptures the relationship between mother and child. Simón goes missing. As Laura searches for him, she is approached by a boy in a sack mask. This is Tomás (Oscar Casas), and when Laura starts to look under the mask, he pushes her aggressively into the bathroom and slams the door, breaking off a fingernail – a curiously common wound to women in ghost films: Ringu, Stir of Echoes, Phone, The Ring. As Laura falls in agony back into the bath, Tomás locks the door and disappears. Tomás functions here as Simón’s angry alter ego. Simón resents having been kept in ignorance of his illness, and resents the idea of other children coming to live in the house. He’s also upset by his mother’s slap. Tomás acts out his rage. As so often, a ghost serves to express tensions within and between the characters. Laura’s hand slapped Simón; Tomás wounds her in the same hand. Although we never see Tomás in the bathroom, the slamming of its door would seem to be his (childish) way of signalling either his presence in the house, or, like Joseph in The Changeling, his displeasure. The bathroom door is one of a number in the house that, in their opening and closing, locking and unlocking, refer to the secrets of the ghost world. Laura’s desperate search for Simón amongst the children at the party echoes Claire’s when Rebecca goes missing in In Dreams. Laura then runs down to the beach, where she sees a boy in the mouth of the cave, but she falls and breaks her leg. In the ensuing police search for Simón, The Dark is (again) evoked: here, too, boats are mobilised. But, although dressed in Simón’s clothes, the boy in the cave must have been Tomás, and no-one but Laura saw him. When Carlos visits her in hospital, he is with Pilar (Mabel Rivera), a police psychologist. Signalling her prejudices, Pilar’s first comment is to tell Laura she must have imagined seeing someone in the cave. That this sequence in El orfanato evokes scenes from both In Dreams and The Dark is a little surprising. Moreover, there are further links: like Claire, Laura ends in hospital; like Adelle, she remains convinced, despite the passage of time, that her child is still alive and can be rescued. It’s as though the film-makers were aware of both films as predecessors.

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When Laura returns to the house, initially in a wheelchair, Carlos gives her a St Antony medal for luck; he asks her to return it when they find Simón. Since we know such objects are introduced in order to be brought back into the narrative later, this implies Laura will indeed find Simón. Laura hangs the medal round her neck. Tomás, by contrast, wears a whistle round his neck; a sign, we assume, he had difficulties with speech. Tomás whistles to attract attention. Laura has a dream one night of swimming underwater, which suggests condensation: a ghost-induced reference to Tomás’s death; an oneiric representation of her search for Simón; and another evocation of The Dark (Adelle’s swim to Annwyn). Woken from the dream by the sound of a whistle, Laura goes to investigate. Creaks and bangs signal ghostly phenomena; a loud crash leads her to Simón’s room. In his bed, she finds an old-fashioned doll. Since the doll is where Simón should have been, the children are inviting Laura to play the treasure hunt. She needs to go to the place where the doll came from, and follow the chain of clues to Simón. However, Laura does not yet realise this. The next day, the bathroom door again slams shut. Like Sakebi, El orfanato has short acts: at 105 minutes, it breaks down into five acts plus a prologue and epilogue. The first door slam occurs after twenty minutes; this slam after forty minutes. The ghostly slams thus neatly mark the ends of the first two acts. At this point, the narrative moves forward six months. It is significant that this jump – which signifies stasis in the search for Simón – occurs immediately after Laura has failed to read a clear sign from the ghost children that they want to play with her. The treasure hunt established the children’s priorities, but Laura has not yet entered their mindset. And so, the children wait. Pursuing possible sightings of Simón, Laura and Carlos accidentally encounter Benigna crossing a street. Laura calls out to her; Benigna stops and is hit by a speeding ambulance. She dies from her injuries, but her death releases evidence from the past: Pilar brings photographs and home movies from Benigna’s house which explain crucial aspects of the backstory. The photographs and movies show the children and staff at the orphanage thirty years ago; Laura identifies herself and her five childhood playmates. We now learn that Benigna worked at the orphanage, and hear the story of the childhood prank that led to Tomás’s drowning. In one of the home movies, we also see Tomás in his den without his mask. But when Laura insists he was the boy she saw during the party, Pilar says no-one else noticed him. As noted in the discussion of Ryeong, photographs in ghost melodramas almost invariably carry the charge of death. It is the same with home movies.

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The wedding video in The Sixth Sense is played so often because Malcolm is dead, something he himself does not realise; Kyra’s video identifies her murderer. The video in Gothika reveals to Miranda that her dead husband was a rapist and a murderer. The video in Chakushin ari actually shows the primary traumatic event. The 16 mm hospital film in Fragile shows the suffering of Mandy, who would soon be murdered. In El orfanato, the home movies concentrate on Benigna and Tomás, the son she lost. But we also see the other five children – whom she murdered. Nevertheless, we do not yet learn about these murders. This is distinctly suspicious, and takes us to the heart of one of the film’s implicit concerns. When the children were murdered in 1976, there must have been a coverup – five children could not just disappear without questions being asked. Yet, even if Benigna was suspected of murder, the bodies were not found. It is as though the authorities did not want to find them. Moreover, it is possible the police are still covering up. How Benigna obtained Simón’s file is never explained. Benigna is killed pushing a pram containing a doll with a sack mask, as though in remembrance of the son who died thirty years ago. She even wears a whistle round her neck, as she does in the home movies, when Tomás was alive. But her extraordinary behaviour elicits no comment. It is here she begins to seem like an exaggerated version of Laura: in her obsession with her dead son, she represents what Laura could become. From the children’s point of view, however, just as Laura is the good mother, Benigna is the bad mother, and her death is an important step towards releasing the secrets of the past. Their story is beginning to be told. Through a parapsychologist, Leo Bálában (Edgar Vivar), Laura is led to Aurora (Geraldine Chaplin), a medium. This sets up a high-tech version of the séances in The Changeling and The Others. Leo and Aurora arrive at the house with a technician, Enrique (Andrés Gertrúdix), night cameras, monitors and sound recording devices. As Aurora, hypnotised, regresses to the past, Laura, Carlos, Leo and Pilar watch her through Enrique’s monitors. Aurora’s psychic movement into the past – she says afterwards the lighthouse beam was shining – is shown in low-resolution monochrome, which makes it seem distinctly ghost-like. This is also like another game. Aurora is searching for the children, who are ‘hidden’ in the house – and she finds them. Although we don’t see them, we hear their cries for help; they say they are being poisoned. But when Laura gets Aurora to ask the children about Simón, the monitors start to fail. Unwilling or unable to answer, the children signal their resistance in a manner typical of ghosts: they disrupt technology.

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Bayona has said he wanted the film to sustain a certain ambiguity: ‘You can read this film in a realist way, not as a ghost story but as a portrait of a woman who loses her mind’ (2008: 45). Up to this scene, such a reading is indeed possible – after all, Laura is the only person to see Tomás. But during Aurora’s regression into the past, everyone hears the children’s voices. The ambiguity ceases: the house really is haunted. Aurora explains to Laura why she is able to connect with events from the past: ‘When something terrible happens, sometimes it leaves a trace, a wound that acts as a knot between two time-lines. It’s like an echo, repeated over and over, waiting to be heard’. This sense of something repeating compulsively is like a neurotic symptom, a concept noted in the discussion of Lady in White. But it also suggests melodrama: the past events were ‘repressed’ (the cover-up), and now they are seeking to return. Aurora shows Laura her diseased arm: ‘We who are close to death are more receptive to these messages’ – a motif from Fragile. But, when Laura links this to Simón: ‘You mean, my son could see these children because…’, Carlos angrily interrupts, and insists Aurora and her team leave the house. Pilar supports him: ‘Laura, this is a farce, a sideshow trick.’ Conflicts between those accepting and those rejecting the supernatural are standard in ghost melodramas, but here the conflicting positions are also opening up fissures in the marriage. Having accepted that Simón is almost certainly dead, Carlos wants to leave the house. Saying, ‘The children are here’, and, ‘I want to be with Simón’, Laura wants to stay. Although she is still trying to convince herself that Simón is still alive, we sense that, even if he were dead, she would rather be with him. Like a number of other protagonists in these films, Laura can be seen to be under the sway of the death drive. Laura assumes the ghost children have kidnapped Simón but, like Adelle in The Dark, she can find and rescue him. However, like Ebrill in The Dark, the children are seeking a different outcome. By supernaturally shattering a window, they draw Laura’s attention to a window seat. Inside Laura finds old-fashioned dolls, each labelled as belonging to one of the children. But one doll is missing. Realising the significance of the doll in Simón’s bed, Laura returns it to the window seat. Amidst the dolls, a photograph of herself and Simón appears. Holding this, she calls out: ‘Are you playing with me?’ Here the creaks of the house signal the children’s response. The second treasure hunt has begun. In this case, the objects in the game make repeated reference to Simón: the photograph; a quilt Laura was making for him; a treasured ice-cream wrapper. As for the doll, we deduce it was Laura’s in the past. Although

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Laura herself seems not to realise this, the children would be aware of it. Here the objects suggest the emotional direction in which they seek to steer Laura: not just to Simón, but also to the past. However, the final object, a doorknob, confounds her: she cannot find where it belongs. Instead, in the outhouse where she disturbed her, Laura finds Benigna’s brooch. This makes her suspicious, and she forces her way (through another door) into an old fuel hold from the kitchen. Inside are sacks of cremated children’s bodies. Laura actually climbs into the hold (which looks like an oven) to get the sacks out, and at one point emerges from it head first. The scene thus seems like an inversion of the immersion (in water) scene that echoes through the ghost melodramas. In the immersion scene, the protagonist is given a glimpse of the ghost world. In this scene, Laura emerges with what remains of the bodies of those who became ghosts. The immersion scene, even when traumatic, is cleansing, and there may even be overtones of rebirth. In this scene, Laura is contaminated by the horror of what she has unearthed. As she sits, exhausted, on the floor, she is covered with ash – the ashes of her childhood friends. Only now does Laura accept her friends really are all dead. As she tells Carlos it was Benigna who poisoned them, she is watching a home movie of the children at supper – symbolically, their last supper. There is something very haunting about seeing this faded super-8 film – as if the children were already ghosts. Once again, Carlos wants Laura to leave the house; once again, she refuses: ‘There are too many memories; I have to say goodbye’. Here Laura seems compelled to make contact with the ghost children, suggesting once more the death drive. Symptomatically, this takes the form of recreating the past. Laura returns the children’s dormitory to the way it was thirty years ago. She puts on a period orphanage uniform. Following the details in the home movie, she prepares a meal for the children; their dolls sit in their places. But ghosts do not eat and Laura is unthinkingly restaging how the children were killed – of course they do not come. It is here we hear the cry of frustration that echoes through these movies: ‘What else do you want? What more must I do?’ Laura finally realises: the children want to play. Laura begins a game of ‘Grandmother’s footsteps’. This is all filmed in one two-minute take, showing Laura as she faces the wall and chants the refrain, then panning right to show behind her as she turns to look. The pattern is then repeated: we only see behind Laura when she herself looks. After several chants, she hears a noise, and when she next turns, a door at the end of the room has opened. The next time, a child has appeared; then more children. Because the children are playing the game, each time Laura turns

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they stand absolutely still. In a ghost-like effect, their movement forward is unseen. Played out in semi-darkness, it’s a thrilling scene, in which we share Laura’s mounting excitement as the children move steadily closer. After a child has touched Laura, the children scatter. But a girl leads Laura to a cupboard under the stairs. There, behind some scaffolding which she had carelessly thrust back inside whilst looking for Simón, Laura finds a hidden door – which the knob opens. Steps lead down into the basement – ‘Tomás’s house’. It is no accident the basement and the attic feature so often as the ghost zones of these movies: they are where the secrets of the past are typically hidden away. In the basement, Laura finds Tomás’s den and his pinned-up drawings. But she has already seen these – in one of the home movies. And so Laura knew what ‘Tomás’s house’ looked like, but she failed to investigate this, just as she failed to realise the old orphanage probably had a basement. In fact, the home movie suggests this: Tomás is introduced in his den in a shot moving down towards him – it was filmed whilst walking down the stairs. Once again, these oversights suggest the unconscious: it is known to exist, but is so successfully repressed we forget about it. Laura’s ‘careless’ past gesture with the scaffolding adds to this: that she had completely overlooked it (despite, we assume, searching the house many times) suggests a repressed meaning. The scaffolding was in the house because of the renovations for the special needs children, Laura’s priority at the time. But symbolically this clutter was blocking her from Simón, who was trapped behind it. In the basement, Laura does find Simón, but he turns out to be a ghost. In an echo of the scene in Sakebi where Harue transforms into a ghost, the Simón Laura is holding in her arms simply vanishes. Laura then discovers his body, dressed in Tomás’s clothes, lying below a broken banister. (That the two boys seemingly exchanged clothes strengthens the links between them.) This is Laura’s moment of despair, and her cries of grief echo through the house. She carries the body upstairs to the children’s dormitory. She now surrenders completely to the death drive and swallows pills. Just before dying, she tears the St Antony medal from her neck. Again, the house begins to creak: it’s as though the building itself is in some sense changing. Laura makes her wish: ‘I want Simón back’. Immediately, a light beam passes across her face. She is now in a ghost world of the past, and the lighthouse is again working. Its light also suggests benevolence: Laura will be granted her wish. In the garden below, she sees a little girl: her childhood herself. In a lecture Laura attended, Leo Bálában referred to the doppelgänger as a herald of death. Just as Tomás’s appearance

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heralded Simón’s death, now, at the moment of her own death, Laura sees herself as a child. The young Laura runs away. In the ghost world, Laura and Simón both possess the same reality: the corpse in her arms seems to come alive. Since this world is also timeless, Simón speaks of the first treasure hunt as though they have just played it: ‘I found the special coins. Now I just have to make a wish. I wish you’d stay and look after all of us’. This makes the children’s project explicit. We see five of them sitting on their beds, watching. Tomás enters the dormitory, without his mask. He leads Alicia (Carmen López), who is blind, up to Laura. Alicia feels Laura’s face and then announces: ‘It’s Laura!’ Immediately the other children delightedly gather round. One says she’s grown old, ‘Like Wendy in the story’. Since Laura is still wearing the period uniform, she harmonises with the children’s world. Following a formula we saw earlier, Simón provides her with three motifs (‘The house; the beach; the lost children’), and she uses them to make up a story. The camera tracks back from this universal scene: children gathered round an adult who is telling them a story. Because Laura dies, this may be considered a sad ending, but it is not presented that way. During the film, it becomes apparent she is more committed to caring for children than to the marriage. Despite her excuse to Carlos, she cannot say goodbye. Finding Simón completes the treasure hunt, but Laura wants him alive, not dead. And although his death cannot be reversed, she can join him as a ghost, so both their wishes are granted. When the other children then recognise her as their childhood playmate, it’s as if Laura has achieved her deepest desires: she has both found Simón and ‘come home’ to the other children as the mother figure they never had. It is possible the earlier ghostly acts around Laura were orchestrated by Tomás alone, as part of a personal project. If he could lure Laura into the children’s world, he would both atone for his mother’s murders and gain the other children’s acceptance – which would enable him to relinquish his isolation (the cave; his den). His violent attack on Laura attests to his ruthlessness, and could indeed be seen as standing in for the implied attack where he knocked Simón down the basement stairs. Equally, his sense of isolation is strongly conveyed. Amongst Tomás’s drawings are those he did of the other children. Alicia is privileged, her blindness making her special because she cannot see his disfigurement – a motif from movies such as The Man who Laughs (Paul Leni 1928), Mask (Peter Bogdanovich 1985) and Manhunter (Michael Mann 1986). This would explain why Tomás is initially outside the dormitory. He enters in order to show the other children what he has done – he has brought them Laura – and Alicia confirms this.

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He is thus structurally the Peter Pan figure, and by finding a mother for them, he has become one of them. In the epilogue, Carlos places flowers at a memorial in the garden to Laura and the seven children; we then see him in the old dormitory. The beds have gone, implying the building will, once more, be left to the ghosts. In a crack between two floorboards, Carlos finds the St Antony medal. As he picks it up, the doors to the dormitory swing open. The final example of the doors motif in the film, this is the most eloquent (see Fig. 43). Carlos smiles; he knows Laura as a ghost is telling him she and Simón are now together. Two of the other elements woven into the film can now be fully grasped. First, Peter Pan. In this ghost version of Barrie’s story, the Wendy figure goes as an adult to Neverland (the ghost world) to become the mother and storyteller the lost children (no longer just boys) had always wanted. A crucial connection is none of them will grow older. It is true the children’s desire to bring Laura into their world is entirely selfish: to be with them, she has to die. But Barrie, too, recognised the selfish nature of children. The last words of Peter Pan are, ‘thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless’ (Barrie [1911] 1967: 220). The children’s selfishness again suggests the workings of the unconscious, where morality does not exist. Nevertheless, when at the end we enter the ghost world with Laura, tenderness prevails. El orfanato departs strongly from the representations of ghost worlds in other films, such as the hospital in Chakushin ari or Annwyn in The Dark: here mother and children are bound together in a realm of harmony. Second, the lighthouse. The lighthouse as a setting for ghostly activity is discussed under Half Light. Although an evocative signifier of the ghost world, the lighthouse in El orfanato functions rather differently from other examples. A lighthouse is inherently a male symbol, but here it is desexualised. Nevertheless, its light serves to make those in the house feel safe: ‘It protects us’. That is the male function here: silently to stand guard over the inner world of mother and children. The phallic symbols associated with the ghost children, especially Tomás, during the film (whistle, key, doorknob), have by the end vanished – or perhaps, symbolically, they have been displaced and condensed in the lighthouse. El orfanato also varies the classic Oedipal narrative. It is not the father who is killed, but mother and son. Moreover, the effect of the deaths is to freeze both in a desexualised, pre-Oedipal world. This movement is prepared for by earlier events. The potentially troubling instances of Laura and Simón ending up in bed together are later replaced by overtly nonsexual substitutes: Laura’s doll in Simón’s bed; a scene where an unseen

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ghost ‘replaces’ Carlos beside Laura in bed. The final scene of mother and children depicts a world of pre-Oedipal plenitude, and it will go on forever. The film is likewise steeped in references to earlier (ghost) narratives – a number have already been mentioned. The haunted house close to the sea goes back to The Uninvited (1944), and ghosts appearing on beaches further back to M.R. James. The significance of the closet in haunted houses is mentioned in the discussion of The Changeling, and here it gives access, briefly, to a genuine ghost world: when Laura first enters the basement, the banister is repaired, the cobwebs are gone and Simón seems to be alive. Aurora advises Laura in terms very similar to those used by Sister Madeleine to Joe in Dragonfly: ‘Believe and you will see’. As soon as the first treasure hunt begins, it starts to rain, and there are some elaborate mirror shots as Laura quizzes Simón over the sand that has replaced the milk teeth. The last shot of Fragile, too, focuses on a wonderful smile, there the smile of a ghost. And both smiles signal a recognition, by someone outside it, of the ghost world. It also seems likely Laura is named after Laura (Julie Christie) in Don’t Look Now, a film whose influence on the modern ghost melodrama has already been noted. As well as thematic and narrative links, one scene is particularly close to a moment in Don’t Look Now. When Alicia feels Laura’s face, she is mentally matching it with its youthful equivalent. It is the same in Don’t Look Now when the blind seer (Hilary Mason) feels Laura’s face and tells her the little girl she had psychically ‘seen’ sitting next to Laura had similar features. I would like to conclude by returning to Maria Delgado’s observations. In Spain, uncovering the hidden crimes of the fascist past is in itself insufficient; equally relevant is the attitude of the current authorities towards such crimes. Perhaps the police were not only aware there had been a cover-up at the orphanage many years ago, but Pilar was delegated to monitor whatever now emerged – and thereby contain anything too damaging. Hence her hostility to Aurora’s session, with its implication that in the past children had been poisoned. In the row that ensues at this point, Laura accuses her: ‘Pilar, how many similar cases have you had in this damned village?’ Pilar is silent. Now, Laura’s question is admittedly ambiguous, but she could well be asking whether similar crimes to these murders occurred – and were, by implication, similarly kept secret. Ultimately, El orfanato draws back from confronting these matters: the nature of the past police investigation; how much they know today. However, in all other respects it is a superb film, one in which all the elements work together to create a compelling aesthetic whole. Again, as in

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The Devil’s Backbone and The Others, the haunted building is finally left to the ghosts. This is a crucial point about these three Spanish films, and one which distinguishes them from most of the other ghost melodramas. At the end, the ghosts remain in the building, a troubling reminder of unresolved issues, issues which, directly or indirectly, speak of the crimes of the wartime and/or fascist past.

Unwilling Martyrs No-Do/ The Haunting/ The Beckoning (Elio Quiroga 2009). Although No-Do is by no means as complex and resonant as El orfanato, scripted by its director, it is nevertheless an intriguing Spanish ghost film that, like Fragile, deserves to be better known. The title No-Do (short for Noticiario y Documentales) refers to actual documentaries made in Spain, mainly during the fascist era, to promulgate the official version of events, that is, as propaganda. After introducing these documentaries, the film shifts to a densely textured narrative, which mixes period footage and snatches of degraded 16 mm with more conventional imagery. Three main threads emerge. A woman, discovered unconscious and taken to hospital by priests, wakes sixty years later in the Spain of today. Now an old woman, Blanca (Alfonsa Rosso), she returns to her derelict house, looking in vain for her husband Senel. A priest, Miguel de Azpeitia (Héctor Colomé), meets Blanca and then visits Canon Gabriel (Francisco Casares). The relationship between the two priests is edgy: in the past, both investigated alleged miracles on behalf of the Catholic Church, and Miguel now thinks a prostitute whose claim they rejected was in fact genuinely ‘blessed’ with supernatural powers. Gabriel takes a different view: ‘Whores don’t make miracles’. The heroine Francesca (Ana Torrent) is introduced in a maternity hospital with her friend Jean (Rocio Muñoz), a psychiatrist. Francesca has recently given birth to a baby, Pablo, but she also seems to be under the supervision of Jean, presumably for postnatal depression. There are tensions here, too: Jean seems concerned Francesca may not be in a fit state to care for Pablo. Francesca and her husband Pedro (Francisco Boira), a doctor, move with Pablo into their new home, a large house outside Madrid that belonged to Bishop Prada, who has recently died. A girl of ten, Rosa (Miriam Cepa), also moves in with them. Francesca treats Rosa as her daughter, but Pedro cannot see her. Since Francesca and Pedro did have a daughter called Rosa who died in infancy ten years ago, we assume Rosa is Francesca’s hallucination,

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a fantasy of her daughter had she lived – and a symptom both of her past loss and her current anxieties. In each of the threads – Blanca; the priests; Francesca, her family and Jean – there is a past which has, to a greater or lesser extent, a bearing on the present. In Francesca’s case, the past concerns her lost child. Otherwise the past is focused mainly in two places: the house the family moves into and an archive of material next to Gabriel’s office. Like the house, the office and archive used to be the bishop’s. In this archive, the Catholic Church has locked away its secrets, notably ‘No-Dos secretos’, 16 mm documentaries with a skull-and-keys logo. Such ‘forbidden’ films could only be viewed by senior members of the Church. One trace of the past is the house is haunted. Here we are in familiar territory: the heroine is subjected to ghostly experiences in her new home, experiences which her husband does not share and is therefore sceptical about. Francesca’s anxieties focus on Pablo: she senses that something in the house is disturbing him. One night, as a storm rages outside, Francesca is woken by Pablo crying. She takes him out of his cot, but then drops him. She wakes with a shock: she had been dreaming. (As Pablo falls, he becomes a doll – the dream quickly modifies Francesca’s clumsiness.) Francesca tries to wake Pedro, but the face that turns to her is dead, with dry skin over its eyes, nose and mouth. She’s still dreaming, and finds herself standing beside the bed. A ghost girl appears on the bed, then two more standing in front of her. Accompanied by flashes of light, these are unstable, monochrome, digital ghosts. The girls suddenly look upwards. Francesca wakes up. This is an example of a double dream, used rarely in films, and usually for the shock effect of someone waking only to find that they’re still dreaming. But here the dream also suggests levels of anxiety. At a deep level, it registers Francesca’s worries about her competence as a mother: perhaps Jean’s fears are justified. At the next level, the dream expresses the way she sees Pedro, as ‘dead’ to her concerns. It is here that the ghost girls make their presence known, as though conjured up by Francesca’s anxieties. But Francesca and Pedro have just had sex, so the girl on the bed, sitting like an incubus, is also a silent accusation. Equally, in the dream, Francesca has been expelled from the bed. And so, the bed itself has become a site of disturbance, a reflection of the tensions in the marriage, and the ghost girls would seem to be in some sense an expression of such tensions. The ghost girls are also haunting the house because this is where they were killed. They subsequently make actual appearances to Francesca, and twice one leads her up to the attic, which had been sealed off by the bishop. There Francesca finds a room full of votive offerings – plastic body

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parts hang spookily from the ceiling. The three ghost girls appear, kneeling at an altar. It is here Francesca utters the appeal of the ghost melodramas: ‘What do you want from me?’ We see one of the girls in close shot, a red gash across her throat eerily standing out against her monochrome appearance. The gash is not just a mark of the ghost girl’s inability to speak, but also of her murder: their throats were cut. But Francesca does receive an answer of sorts to her question: a spectral apparition comes up behind her, and votive objects rapidly assemble into a spider-like monster, plastic human body parts joined incongruously with children’s dolls. The monster scuttles towards Francesca, then disappears. Although the monster seems primarily an ingenious way to deliver a sudden shock, that it is formed from votive offerings is suggestive. Representing the parts of the body people wished to be cured, these objects are symbols of their hopes of supernatural benevolence. It is slowly emerging that there is something much more sinister than ghosts in the house, a presence that is hostile to the Church. Here it is mocking the people’s religious hopes. The presence of a malevolent entity is confirmed when a message, ‘The lady is bad’, appears in blood on a wall. Angry that Jean blames her for the message, Francesca insists the blood be analysed. This reveals it belongs to no known creature. It is Miguel, brought in by Francesca to help, who identifies the entity – as a formidable demon known as a ‘third supposition’, an elemental presence so powerful it can only be removed by an act of martyrdom. Bishop Prada had grasped its nature, and had tried in vain to get rid of it. At one point, Gabriel shows Miguel a painting of an elemental that had appeared in Toledo centuries ago. It manifested itself as a Marian apparition (looking like the Virgin Mary), and hundreds died whilst in adoration. The introduction of an elemental shifts No-Do into the territory of a supernatural religious horror film, and this threatens to usurp the ghost melodrama elements. The ghost girls now seem as much projections of the elemental as ‘independent’ ghosts. It seems likely they haunt the house because the elemental wishes to draw attention to the iniquities of the Catholic Church. As we will learn at the climax, the three girls were murdered by the Church – the primary traumatic event. Blanca’s past is linked to this. In the 1940s, she and Senel were 16 mm documentary film-makers. Because Senel had managed to recreate a special (‘Ferren’) emulsion that registered the spectral presence of the supernatural, the couple were used by the Church to make the No-Dos secretos, which concerned such matters as alleged miracles, both good and bad.

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When Francesca asks Miguel to investigate the manifestations in the house, he at first turns her down. Then he sees Rosa, who says, ‘Help her’. This guarantees Miguel’s interest, but his ability to see Rosa makes the nature of her identity even more puzzling. Not until the climax do we discover that she, too, has been produced by the elemental and is under its control. When Miguel begins his investigation, No-Do, like most of the films in this book, becomes an inquiry into the source of the ghostly phenomena. But, more unusually, the primary means of investigation is films: the NoDos secretos themselves. In the bishop’s archive, Miguel finds one of the films made by Senel and Blanca, and shows it to Francesca and Pedro. It reveals that in 1947, when the house was a school for orphans, three girls claimed to have visions of the Virgin Mary. As word spread, people arrived, hoping for miracles. But, rather than improving, the pilgrims became sicker. Some stayed in the school, bedridden. The Ferren emulsion revealed the presence of an elemental. But although Bishop Prada was called in to resolve the matter, the documentary ends. It is also interrupted by an angry Gabriel. As the bishop’s representative in the present, Gabriel is extremely hostile to this intrusion into the archive. He is even angrier when Blanca subsequently turns up with another 16 mm film – he now threatens Miguel with ex-communication. Suppressed by the bishop, this second film reveals the horrific end of the story. Blanca and Senel each filmed with a separate camera, and this is footage from hers. As Miguel and Blanca watch the footage in the archive, Francesca pursues Rosa to the attic of the house, where she experiences a time-slip. She finds herself in a monochrome world, eerily witnessing the very events Blanca and Miguel are simultaneously watching on film. In a brilliant piece of découpage, the events on the 16 mm film and those seen by Francesca are edited together as a seamless whole. We now see the murders that have been suppressed for sixty years (see Fig. 44). This is another example of a key montage. In its use of a film within the film, and its cross-cutting between the heroine at one location and a professional expert (or the hero) at another, the sequence evokes those in both Chakushin ari and Fragile. It lacks the supernatural overtones of Chakushin ari, but it contrives a remarkable narrative coup: the heroine at one of the film’s key sites and the professional at the other simultaneously witness the primary traumatic event. The sequence shows the bishop arrive in the attic and supervise the murders of the girls and the bedridden pilgrims. Nuns are also present, soothing the latter as they are killed. The girls are taken from their prayers at the altar by three masked priests, who then proceed, impassively, to

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slit their throats. Senel appears in a number of shots, filming, and when the murders occur, we see him protest wildly, whereupon a priest slits his throat, too. Blanca’s camera falls to the floor, but runs long enough to show her rush over to Senel. As a spectral presence appears over both of them, the sequence ends. The early scene of priests finding Blanca’s unconscious body can now be seen as the aftermath to this sequence: the moment when the Church tried to erase all traces of its crime. Blanca was allowed to live only because she was in a coma, a coma that was like a magic spell – she did not wake up until the bishop died. Only now does Blanca discover the appalling truth about what happened to her husband. Bishop Prada hoped killing the innocents would create martyrs and the elemental would be driven from the house. However, as both Blanca and Miguel point out, to be a true martyr you have to want to be one. Those killed were unwilling victims, and the elemental remained. ‘The lady is bad’ refers to its triumph. Because of the success of the elemental’s apparition as the Virgin Mary, the pilgrims blamed the Virgin herself for their illnesses. Miguel realises this when he records ghostly voices in the attic also chanting, ‘The lady is bad’ – the lamentation of the victims. Although this is partly masked by the time-slip, for the first time in a ghost melodrama a film viewed within the film is, in effect, a snuff movie, as in Peeping Tom. That the murders were carried out by the Church makes this even more shocking. In effect, Miguel now assumes the guilt of the Church. His sense of personal responsibility is enhanced by another No-Do secreto he finds in the archive: the report about the prostitute he and Gabriel investigated in 1955. He learns the Vatican interrogated her with such severity she killed herself, but the authorities also concluded that she had indeed been responsible for genuine miracles. No-Do has a series of locked or hidden rooms, all containing in some sense the sinister secrets of the Catholic Church. Behind a wall in the basement of the house there is a final such room. Again, it is Rosa who leads Francesca to this room, and inside it Francesca, Pablo, Miguel and Blanca find the bodies of the three girls and Senel. But the room also contains the elemental inhabiting the house. Rosa’s role is now clarified. As an avatar of the elemental in a human guise, it was she who persuaded Miguel to visit the house, and who led Francesca to the attic to ‘see’ the evil enacted by the Church. She now invites Miguel to confront the elemental. It seems as though the elemental draws sustenance from proximity to the victims of the Church’s murderousness. Appearing elsewhere in the house in a diffuse, spectral form, here it is a roaring demonic presence. Nevertheless,

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the film resolves the conflict between honourable priest and supernatural demon in an entirely conventional way. Miguel sends the other three away, then atones in part for the Church by offering himself as a willing martyr to the demon that has emerged in place of Rosa. As the priest confronts the elemental, the house bursts into flames. Francesca, Pedro and Blanca escape; Miguel is sacrificed. No-Do ends with an official No-Do documentary about the little girls and their alleged sighting of the Virgin Mary. This is the version that would have been shown throughout Spain in 1947. It says the girls were chastised for their foolish imagining and sent back to their studies. The last words of the voice-over (and No-Do) are, ‘Hopefully they will use fantasy for better things when they grow up’. The film burns in the projector. Although its monster in the basement places No-Do in the horror strand of the cycle, as a melodrama, the film nevertheless condenses a number of issues. First, the ghostly manifestations register tensions within the marriage, tensions which have seemingly existed since Francesca and Pedro’s first child died, and which are now exacerbated by the arrival of another child. Both Pedro and Jean have great difficulty in trusting Francesca with Pablo, and Rosa could also be seen as her response to this, conjured up as a confidante she can talk to. After ‘The lady is bad’ has appeared on the wall, Jean, with Pedro’s approval, insists that Pablo be taken from Francesca, and he is sent to Pedro’s parents. As in El orfanato, the heroine feels herself more isolated when her husband aligns himself with another woman whose field of expertise is used to criticise her own convictions and behaviour. Second, the f ilm includes a compelling indictment of the Catholic Church. Here, in contrast to El orfanato, it was the Church not the state that covered up the past murders. The activities of the elemental may thus be seen as the return of the Catholic repressed. However, the fascist state is also implicitly indicted. An early No-Do documentary shows General Franco attend a service given by Monsignor Prada, linking the two men. As the final example shows, the No-Do documentaries were produced to mystify the populace. And the fascist state evidently acted in collusion with the Church, helping to preserve the façade that the Church always acted for the best. In the first No-Do secreto, the three little girls walk across the forecourt of the school looking up, as if ‘seeing’ something elevated above them – as would be appropriate for a vision of the Virgin Mary. These shots are repeated in the official documentary shown at the end. It’s as if the girls’ posture suggests their saintliness. When Francesca first sees them in her dream, again they look up. But here the gesture suggests something else:

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the girls are registering the moment when their heads were held back and their throats slit. It is a chilling contrast: from a childlike belief that they had been blessed by the Mother of God to murder by the Catholic Church.

18. The Return of the British Ghost Film Despite a rich tradition of ghost sightings over the centuries (see Clarke 2012), and indeed a rich tradition of ghost literature, going back to Charles Dickens, and including writers such as Henry James and M.R. James, Britain has until recently produced only a handful of memorable scary ghost films. The Innocents, The Haunting (1963) (a Hollywood film made in Britain), The Shining (a British film that seems American), Haunted, Half Light (a German/US co-production made in Britain) and The Dark do not exactly constitute a major corpus of ghost movies. British ghost stories from the late 1960s onwards were in fact primarily made as television dramas. It is possible to see many of these dramas on DVD, but most are the equivalent of ghost short stories – several are, for example, adaptations of M.R. James’s own short stories – and inevitably they lack the development and dramatic possibilities of a feature film. The Disappeared (Johnny Kevorkian, UK, 2008) Nevertheless, The Dark is a very fine ghost melodrama, and it heralded what may now be seen as something of a renaissance of the British ghost film. The first two notable examples date from 2008. Scripted by Kevorkian and Neil Murphy, The Disappeared is a promising first feature. Set on a London council estate, the f ilm focuses on the teenage Matthew (Harry Treadaway), just out of psychiatric hospital following treatment after his young brother Tommy disappeared when Matthew was supposed to be caring for him. Matthew keeps hearing Tommy’s voice and catching glimpses of him – he thinks his brother is still alive. But Tommy is a ghost, trying to communicate with Matthew in the typically oblique, fragmented manner of ghosts. For example, Matthew records Tommy’s voice saying, ‘It’s dark in here; I’m really scared’, and has a recurring dream of being buried alive – which we will learn was Tommy’s fate. Matthew is assisted in his attempts to make sense of these happenings by the teenage Amy (Ros Leeming), who recommends a psychic, Shelley (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Both Amy and Shelley will turn out to be revenants but, together with Tommy’s elusive ghost, they serve to guide Matthew to Tommy’s murderer, a serial killer of children. It is Shelley who makes Matthew realise why Tommy is trying to reach him: ‘Ghosts are about the unresolved. They never rest until they find an answer’. This well-known feature of ghosts may indeed be traced back to the earliest films of the cycle. Then, when

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Matthew himself is buried alive, Amy appears to him in a dream to wake and so save him. Both bereaved and guilty, Matthew is a typical (male) protagonist in a ghost melodrama. At first there is a familiar but resonant ambiguity: are the communications from Tommy ‘real’ or purely subjective, a manifestation of Matthew’s guilt? Matthew’s confused attempts to take the ghostly happenings seriously are well caught; everyday problems – an unsympathetic father; local bullies – complicate matters. The film’s only major weakness is that it makes its serial killer, a local social worker, supernatural, a shift to horror representation that means he cannot be captured or killed – at the end, he simply disappears. Nevertheless, in other respects the film shows a commendable grasp of the generic material. Matthew first meets Amy when she is, it would seem, re-enacting the last day of her life; Shelley’s flat is a genuine ghost world; Tommy’s abrupt appearances are suitably unsettling. Again, the serial killer has a labyrinthine lair – a maze of tunnels under a church – which here contains both the bodies of his victims and a girl he has recently kidnapped. In his quest, Matthew is led into this maze, and he manages to rescue the girl. The final scene is also therapeutic. Retrieved from the lair, Tommy’s body is given a funeral, and at the end, father and son are brought together at Tommy’s grave. Then, in a gesture that acknowledges Amy’s importance, Matthew pays his respects at her own grave. Genova (Michael Winterbottom, UK/Cayman Islands, 2008) The Disappeared introduces a ghost story into an unusual setting and, despite budget limitations, does so with a fair degree of insight. Made by a well-established British director, Genova, scripted by Winterbottom and Laurence Coriat, is a very different sort of ghost film. It seems to be a reworking of Cria Cuervos (Carlos Saura, Spain, 1975). In Cria Cuervos, three sisters are orphaned after the deaths of their mother Maria (Geraldine Chaplin) from cancer and their father from a heart attack. Maria’s sister Paulina (Mónica Randall) takes over their upbringing. The film concentrates on the middle sister, nine-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent), who, because she mixed what she mistakenly thought was poison into her hated father’s drink, thinks she herself killed him. Cria Cuervos begins with the death of the father; Genova with the death of the mother Marianne (Hope Davis). But in this case ten-year-old Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) really is responsible: she thoughtlessly covers her mother’s eyes as Marianne is driving Mary and her sixteen year-old sister Kelly (Willa Holland) on an icy road. The sisters

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survive the crash. Here the father Joe (Colin Firth) is entirely supportive, moving the family that summer from Chicago to Genova to help cope with the bereavement. In both films, the daughter aged nine/ten is visited by the ghost of her mother. In Cria Cuervos, the ghost is more like a fantasy, since Maria appears to Ana when the latter is in need of maternal affection. In Genova, Marianne’s ghost status is at first ambiguous – Mary could be conjuring her up out of a sense of loss – but she soon shows the independence of action of a ghost, and eventually reveals that she has her own agenda. Both mothers were musical, and piano playing is used to connect mother and daughter. Both films are set over the summer holidays, and the final scene is the girls going (back) to school. Genova eliminates the ambiguity of Cria Cuervos: here the bereaved preadolescent daughter really is being secretly visited by the ghost of her mother. The first person Mary talks to about Marianne’s visits is Barbara (Christine Keener), a friend of Joe’s. As Mary lights a candle for Marianne in a monastery, she tells Barbara, ‘She comes to forgive me’. She resists Barbara’s attempt to tell her the death was an accident, and shoots off. We now see Marianne as a ghost for the first time. Wearing white, she leads Mary by the hand through some neighbouring woods. Significantly, this is away from the family – Joe finds Mary on a railway station in the next village. Nevertheless, as her appearances become more frequent, Marianne seems benevolent: like Maria in Cria Cuervos, she reassures her daughter and tells her she loves her. Mary draws her, and when Joe sees the drawings, she tells him, too, about her mother’s visits, but he doesn’t really pursue this. Matters come to a head when Mary has to find her own way home one day through the labyrinthine streets of Genova’s old town. Wearing black, Marianne appears in front of her and leads her into a church. Mary lights another candle to her mother, and prays: ‘I wish you could be with me forever’. With a ghost’s selfishness, Marianne sets out to make the prayer come true. She leads Mary to a dangerous road crossing and waits for her on the other side of the road. In fact, Mary does manage to cross safely, but she causes cars to crash. When Mary makes it to safety, Kelly and then Joe, who have been independently looking for her, rush up, and they form a tight family huddle together. This is the third such moment in these movies, and in the other examples it is also a bereaved family that forms the huddle: Angelo and his sons at the end of Lady in White; Annie and her sons at the end of The Gift. The huddle signals that the bereaved family is finally reunited, and in Genova it also marks the moment when the troublesome ghost of the dead parent is implicitly expelled.

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In Cria Cuervos, although the mother’s ‘ghost’ remains benevolent, Ana finds that, after she has attempted to poison Paulina, too, she can no longer summon her mother. She has crossed a line, and it is as though the ghost is punishing her by withdrawing. In Genova, now Marianne has revealed her dangerousness, it is the family whose concern for one another shuts out the ghost. Although a relatively minor ghost film, Genova is quite compelling as another film about bereavement and how it affects the different members of a family. Mary’s guilt is compounded by the fact that Kelly blames her for their mother’s death, and until the climax the relationship between the sisters is edgy. But in the final scene, it is Kelly who takes Mary’s hand as she leads her into their new school. She is now the person guiding Mary. These two films were followed by three major British ghost productions: The Awakening (2011), The Woman in Black (2011) and the TV miniseries The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012). All are highly effective ghost narratives, and all show an intelligent awareness of the generic tradition to which they belong. The Awakening (Nick Murphy, UK/France, 2011) Nick Murphy scripted The Awakening – his f irst feature f ilm – with Stephen Volk, who wrote the BBC’s Ghostwatch (Lesley Manning, 1992). With its simulation of a live TV broadcast that becomes increasingly spooky, Ghostwatch apparently made quite an impact when broadcast on Halloween, 1992, but as a free-standing drama, it fatally lacks atmosphere. The Awakening is a very different matter. Its main reference point, during the early scenes at least, is Haunted, but in all respects it is a massive improvement on that film. As in Haunted, the period is the 1920s, when spiritualism flourished in the wake of the appalling mortality of World War I and the ensuing influenza pandemic. Like David, Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) has suffered a loss – here her fiancé in the war – which has turned her into a crusader against the fake séances of the era, and she, too, has written a book debunking ghosts. Equally, like David, her rationalism would seem to mask a deeper desire that ghosts and the afterlife exist. In the opening shots of the film, as she arrives at a house incognito to expose a séance, the way she clutches the photograph of her dead fiancé suggests her yearning. Also like David, Florence receives a request to investigate an isolated country mansion which is held to be haunted. The mansion is now a boys’ prep boarding school, Rookford, but the request has been prompted by the

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school matron, Maud Hill (Imelda Staunton), an equivalent figure to Miss Webb. And Florence is actually approached by the history teacher Robert Mallory (Dominic West), whose name explicitly echoes Robert Mariell’s. The Devil’s Backbone is also referenced. Here, too, the ghost is a schoolboy, and Robert tells Florence that, at Rookford, ‘most of the boys are as good as orphans’. This is an exaggeration, but the year is 1921, and he means most have lost fathers – as in The Devil’s Backbone. Robert traces the ghost to a time when the mansion was a private dwelling: he refers to a scandal, subsequently hushed up, in which a child was killed. But it is not only the ghost that has prompted his visit to Florence. A boy, Walter, who claimed to have seen the ghost, has recently mysteriously died. Florence arrives at the school with the same sort of 1920s’ ghost-hunting equipment as David in Haunted. Whilst setting this up, she spies through a peephole between a boys’ dormitory and a bathroom on Robert taking a bath. However, this inversion of the familiar scene of a man spying on a naked woman shifts away from the erotic. Robert bears a wartime leg wound that makes him limp, and Florence sees him cut the wound and apply a chemical, making it worse. She deduces he is so guilty for having survived the conflict he is stopping himself healing. Like herself, he has been psychologically damaged by the war. During her first 24 hours on the premises, Florence proves to be an excellent detective. She exposes a schoolboy prankster; she identifies Malcolm McNair (Shaun Dooley), another master, as the person responsible for Walter’s death. Here, too, the film refers back to the war. McNair returned from combat with a chronic chest condition. He reacts by bullying the boys: ‘These boys must be strong. Stronger than us’. Finding Walter crying with fear at the sight of the ghost, McNair shut him outside, ‘to toughen him up’. Walter panicked and died of an asthma attack. Damaged by the war, McNair so fears his own weakness he terrorises the boys in his charge. However, again like David, Florence is less impressive as a ghost hunter. During her investigation, she also experiences some eerie moments, and although some of these – hearing a man shouting; f inding a game of Hangman drawn on the floor – are not obviously ghostly, others are. In an otherwise empty room, she finds a doll’s house. It is empty, but as Florence looks inside, she glimpses a schoolboy ghost beside her. She then sees a man with a shotgun turn and walk away down the corridor. But because, the next day, she is able to identify a boy as the source of some of the night’s ghostly activities, she dismisses these other incidents. Only now, almost halfway through the film, do events take a decisive ghostly turn. As a memento of her fiancé, Florence carries his cigarette

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case. While staff and pupils depart for half-term, she wanders down to the school lake where, in a bizarre (ghost-induced?) accident, the case is knocked from the jetty into the lake. Florence reaches for it, whereupon a hand emerges from the depths to grab at her. Florence is shaken, but as she stares at her reflection in the water, she reassures herself: ‘There’s nothing’. Then, abruptly, she rolls off the jetty into the water. Rescued by Robert, Florence maintains this was an accident. Nevertheless, it looks like a sudden suicide attempt – as though she impulsively decides to join her fiancé in death. The cigarette case also embodies her guilt: shortly before her fiancé’s death, she wrote to him breaking off their engagement. This helps clarify why she should be such an assiduous ghost hunter: if she can make contact with her fiancé in the afterlife, she can try and make amends. Here it’s as though Florence suddenly despairs of achieving that aim and, like so many of the protagonists in these films, she surrenders to the death drive. Echoing David’s ducking in Haunted, the scene is also another variation on the motif of immersion in water. Here it is after the ghostly hand has reached for her that Florence rolls off the jetty and is immersed but, as with Joe in the bus in Dragonfly, it is contact with the ghost world that seemingly prompts the suicidal impulse. Another ghost incident is more forceful. As Florence takes a bath, she hears a noise from the other side of the peephole. She assumes Robert is spying on her – an idea that attracts her. But when she looks through the peephole, she is terrified by the abrupt appearance of a visually distorted ghost. This is a generic displacement: the potentially erotic is usurped by the ghost – an image of death. Pursuing the ghost, Florence is led to a room upstairs where, again, she finds the doll’s house. But now its rooms are furnished, and within them are figurines of people. Looking into the doll’s house, Florence sees a series of representations of her own recent experiences. In one room, figurines show her being greeted by the headmaster; in another, entering McNair’s classroom to talk to the boys. She also sees herself spying through the peephole on Robert in the bathroom. Finally, in an upper room, she sees a representation of the very scene happening in front of us: her figurine is peering into the doll’s house. The camera pans away from her figurine to reveal, behind her, one of a schoolboy. Florence whips round; no-one is there. This is a stunning scene. Florence is presented with tableaux which not only illustrate her own recent past, but do this from the ghost’s point of view. She becomes aware of herself as a voyeur: spying on the naked

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Robert; peering into the doll’s house. But the ghost is also telling her it can anticipate what she will do. The only staff now left in the school are Robert, Maud and Judd (Joseph Mawle), a rather sinister caretaker, who prowls the woods in the school grounds carrying a shotgun. Robert resents Judd who, he claims, avoided conscription by faking disability. One boy, Tom (Isaac Hempstead Wright) also remains. Florence has befriended Tom, and told him the little she remembers of her childhood. Her parents were killed by a lion in Africa, an incident in which she, too, was mauled – she shows Tom the scars on her shoulder. The African chief who saved her gave her the name ‘Mowa-zee’ (‘White doll’). We will discover that this rather improbable story is in fact a screen memory, a compromise formation that arises when an experience that was too disturbing is repressed (see Laplanche & Pontalis 1973: 410-411). In fact, Tom knows Florence is misremembering. He is the film’s ghost and, when Florence was a child, the two of them were friends. Florence’s ghost hunting is unwittingly leading her into her own (repressed) past. Although the ghost incidents prompt Florence to continue her investigation, she refuses at first to accept them as ghostly: she thinks Maud and Tom are enacting pranks. Events come to a head after another encounter with the man with the shotgun. The man walks towards her, pointing the shotgun and, as Florence backs away terrified, she breaks a whole series of tripwires, triggering photographs from her strategically placed cameras. But when she and Robert develop the photographs, they discover the man has not registered. Instead, in a corner, there is a fuzzy image of a schoolboy. Assuming The Awakening is following ghost movie conventions, this indicates the man is neither real nor a ghost, but Florence’s hallucination. We will learn he is in fact a hallucination of her dead father, the memory of whom she has repressed. His appearance is thus a striking example of a personal return of the repressed. Feeling vulnerable, Florence turns to Robert for comfort, and they make love. It is this that initiates the escalating events of the film’s last act. First, Robert is lured away from Florence by a room bell, rung from his own bedroom. Going to his room, he is locked in. Second, a cushion on Florence’s bed thrusts upwards, momentarily revealing the outline of a face. I discuss this trope in relation to Fragile, where it seems like a warning of death. Here it suggests the ghost’s rage (see Fig. 45). Florence assaults the cushion, bursting it open, and amongst the feathers discovers her fiancé’s cigarette case. Since this had been lost in the lake, its return is decidedly unnerving. Third, as though fearful of remaining in the school, Florence goes outside.

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There she is assaulted by Judd, who stuns her with his shotgun and starts to rape her. She is saved by the ghost, which appears in its distorted, spooky guise and scares Judd off her. Florence strikes Judd with the shotgun – and hits him with such force she seemingly kills him. When Florence turns to Robert for help, she learns he cannot see Tom. She thus realises Tom is the ghost, visible only to Maud and herself. Tom’s hand as ghost would also seem to lie behind some of the recent events. Robert being lured away from Florence’s bed and shut in his room; the intimation of rage at the sex; the return of the cigarette lighter – it’s as though Tom is insisting Florence remain faithful to her dead lover. We might expect a ghost would privilege a relationship involving fidelity to the dead, and Florence has revealed to Tom how much she loved her fiancé. The revelation that Tom is the ghost means he is rather like Jin-ju in Whispering Corridors: a school pupil during the day; a spooky ghost at night. But here the other boys cannot see Tom, and so he is denied the satisfaction Jin-ju receives from being able to make friends. Tom’s loneliness is a crucial motivator of the subsequent events. Now that Florence knows he is the ghost, Tom himself, in the way of ghosts, knows she knows. He calls out ‘Mow-zee’, and Florence discovers that she can find her way through hidden passageways to the basement where, once again, she finds the doll’s house – and Tom. He says he didn’t intend to frighten Walter – indeed, he was surprised Walter could see him. Florence surmises that Walter ‘needed a friend’. Tom comments, ‘So do I’, and the observation applies equally to Florence herself. Hinting that he and Florence knew each other in the past, Tom tells her to look into the doll’s house. The doll’s house now contains another series of representations: scenes from Florence’s own childhood, when she and Tom were friends. The school was once Florence’s home, and the past scandal involved her own parents. Figurines in the house represent her parents, and Tom and herself as a child, but their main function is to trigger Florence’s memories of what happened: an incident so traumatic she repressed it and masked it behind a screen memory. As Florence looks into the doll’s house, the film cuts between three distinct time periods and sets of events. In the present are the representations inside the doll’s house and Florence’s shocked reaction to them. These trigger memories of the past events to which they refer, which are shown as fragmented flashbacks. But there are also flashbacks to the recent instances in which traces of these events showed up in Florence’s experiences, e.g. seeing the man with the shotgun; encountering the game of Hangman.

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This is a revelatory montage, as Florence pieces together recent happenings and recalled memories. Representing the return of Florence’s repressed memories, the montage generates a powerful narrative energy as it reveals where the whole film has been heading. Whilst playing Hangman, the young Florence (Molly Lewis) and Tom overhear a row between Florence’s parents, Freddie (Cal Macaninch) and Constance (Lucy Cohu) – Freddie stalks off, having knocked Constance to the floor. In the present, Florence now hears her parents rowing in a room upstairs. She makes her way through the hidden passageways to a cupboard in that room. The row is now happening in front of her, and the Florence watching from the cupboard alternates between her childhood and adult selves. This is not, strictly speaking, a flashback. Florence is actually re-experiencing her past traumatic event. During the row, two sources of contention emerge: Freddie’s treatment of Florence (he resents her not being a boy), and the fact that Tom is his illegitimate son. Without warning, Freddie shoots Constance with a shotgun. The young Florence, distraught, runs out of the cupboard and places herself between the shotgun and her injured mother. Freddie yells at her: ‘You can’t help Mummy now. Move out of the way!’ The adult Florence runs across the room and opens a door. In the room in front of her is exactly the same scene: her father pointing the shotgun; her childhood self blocking his aim at her mother. Freddie shouts the same words at the young Florence. Behind the adult Florence we can still see this scene in the first room; Florence herself turns to look at it. She then runs to a door in the second room, opens it, and in the next room the scene is once more enacted in front of her, and is at the same time occurring in the room behind her (see Fig. 46). This is another extraordinary sequence. Writing on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper 1974), Robin Wood suggests the film dramatises a familiar nightmare: one is running from a threat into a place of apparent safety, but then finds the people one is fleeing from are already inside (1979: 20). It is essentially the same nightmarish experience that is so powerfully dramatised here. The whole sequence constitutes the return of the repressed for the adult Florence, but the key moment within it, the moment registered in her hallucinations of her father with his shotgun, is dramatised as like a recurring nightmare: she was unable to save her mother from her murderous father. As the adult Florence slumps to the floor, we now see the culmination of the violent family scene. Calling her ‘Mousie’, Constance begs her daughter to run; Freddie knocks the young Florence aside and shoots his wife again. The young Florence flees back into the safety of the cupboard.

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As the young Florence runs through the hidden passageways, Freddie stalks her, firing into the passageways from different rooms of the house. He, too, calls her ‘Mousie’, the appellation she converted into ‘Mowa-zee’. Here a ‘game’ of hide-and-seek becomes a matter of life and death. Eventually, Florence finds her way to the cupboard where Tom is hiding (see Fig. 47). Florence picks up a rabbit doll for comfort, but it starts to play a tune. This reveals her hiding place, and Freddie shoots into the cupboard. Florence is grazed – hence the scars on her shoulder – but Tom is shot dead. Through a peephole, the young Florence now witnesses her father’s suicide. As he shoots himself, he drops out of sight, and visible on the wall is a painting: George Stubbs’s Horse Attacked by a Lion (1769). The final ingredient of Florence’s screen memory falls into place. The motif of the peephole is traditionally associated with voyeurism: Baby Doll (Elia Kazan 1956); Psycho; Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, France/ Italy, 1967). But in ghost movies, it receives a different inflection. Including the keyhole through which Carlos sees the eye of the ghost Santi in The Devil’s Backbone, and the spyholes through which young women falsely see their dead brothers in Ju-on and The Grudge, the motif is invariably linked to death. Before The Awakening, the motif receives its fullest elaboration in Chakushin ari, where it is associated with the heroine’s childhood trauma: the sight of her grandmother’s hanging body. The Awakening picks up on that association, and likewise its echo in the present, when the heroine sees the ghost through a peephole – like a harbinger of death. The Awakening is another ghost melodrama in which the protagonist’s own past traumatic event was also the primary traumatic event. Moreover, as in Inner Senses, Ryeong and The Marsh, the shock of the death of the childhood friend/sibling caused the protagonist’s amnesia. Here, too, the ghost’s appearances register a personal return of the repressed. At the same time, all this has been set up by Maud, Tom’s mother and Florence’s childhood nanny. Maud had hoped the adult Florence would remember her. Although Florence did not, Maud was heartened to discover that she could see Tom. However, Maud will also turn out to have a hidden agenda. Judd’s role may now be seen to have additional import. Since he carries a shotgun, it’s as though he represents a distorted version of Florence’s father. On Florence’s first evening in the school, she twice hears a man shout, ‘You’ll be quiet or so help me!’ This was the beginning of the return of Florence’s repressed memories: Freddie shouted these words at Constance during the murderous row. And on the second occasion, the film cuts to Judd outside – as though linking him to the comment.

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The link between Judd and Freddie adds another charge to the violence of the past scenes, hinting that perhaps Freddie also sexually assaulted his daughter. The scars on Florence’s shoulder are suggestive, and in the bath she caresses them, as though they retain a vestigial erotic charge. The violent parental row may be seen from one point of view as a perverted version of the primal scene, but the way her father points his shotgun at the young Florence is no less suggestive. We note Judd’s assault immediately precedes Florence’s uncovering of her past, and, throughout this climactic sequence, her face and blouse are bloody from his attack, a bloodiness that echoes her mother’s. Moreover, whilst Florence is experiencing the catharsis of remembering her past, Robert is in the woods burying Judd’s body – an act that could be seen as ‘repressing’ the troubling intimations Judd’s assault has opened up. The function of the doll’s house can now be clarified. At first empty, like a tabula rasa, then depicting recent events in Florence’s life, it emerges finally as the mechanism to trigger her repressed childhood memories. Designed to suggest the school building, the doll’s house serves to lead Florence, by stages, into her past. It becomes the crucial means whereby Tom as ghost communicates with her and, as in dreams, this is done visually. The faces of the figurines in the doll’s house are masked, so they can only be identified by their clothing, a typically oneiric feature. In Haunted, when David looks in through a window at the kiss between Christina and Robert, I suggest it is as though he is seeing a projection of his repressed inner world. Here what Florence finally sees in the doll’s house is explicitly a representation of her repressed inner world. And just as David was led to witness the kiss by the ghost of his sister Juliet, so the scenes in the doll’s house are ‘produced by’ Tom. Although the role of the ghost and its significance for the heroine have now been established, as in most ghost melodramas, there is a final twist. Maud reveals her secret agenda: so they can be with Tom forever, she poisons both Florence and herself. Realising what is going on, Florence appeals to Tom, and her words, remarkably, echo those spoken by Jim to Siu Yu during the rooftop climax of Inner Senses. In both cases, the ghost is waiting, but with a degree of anxiety, for the protagonist to die so they can be together. Siu Yu is waiting for Jim to jump off the roof, but he makes a moving speech: ‘I’ve never been happy all those years. I’ve never been able to accept another girl because of you’. Lying on the floor, Florence says to Tom: ‘My whole life I’ve never been happy. Not one second since you left me’. Both protagonists then make the ghosts realise they cannot join them. And in The Awakening, it is Tom who saves Florence: with a ghost’s speed, he fetches her an emetic.

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Even though they are spoken in different languages, the comments seem too closely matched for the link to be coincidence. The link feeds back into the past relationship between Florence and Tom, and makes us realise they, too, were like childhood sweethearts. Moreover, this scene between Florence and Tom is filmed with the same tight close-ups of the couple – Florence lying on her back; Tom over her – as were used in the love scene with Robert. These overtones resonate in turn with Haunted: we can now see Florence and Tom are the equivalents of David and Juliet, who were also siblings. Whether Florence and Tom had known all along about his paternity is not revealed. It seems likely they did not find out until the climactic parental row. In which case yet another factor lying behind Florence’s repression of the memory of this scene would be that she had just learned the boy she loved was her brother. It will be apparent this material is typical of melodrama: a lost sweetheart-brother; a bloody family murder and suicide; a servant scheming to compensate for the loss of her illegitimate child. The prep-school setting, with its hidden passageways like portals, is essentially a gateway to the past family melodrama. The film is primarily Florence’s story: she is the one who is ‘awakened’. The ghost is the mechanism whereby this is achieved. Robert also sees ghosts – those of his comrades killed in the war. Although we don’t see them, there is a moment, puzzling at the time, when we hear Robert talk to them. Their presence, whether real or hallucinated, is the reason why Robert continues to harm himself – they thus function as a collective superego, making Robert feel guilty for having survived. Judd also belongs in this dynamic. As a working-class equivalent of the violent, sexually threatening father, Judd is ‘dealt with’ in the first instance by Tom (as ghost), then Florence. But he is buried by Robert, who thereby both protects Florence and helps bury his own ghosts. When Judd assaults her, Florence drops her fiancé’s cigarette case; after burying the body, Robert returns it: ‘You needn’t worry: no-one will find Judd’s body’. He then adds, ‘I’ve buried better men than him’. This links Judd to his dead comrades at the front, but in a disparaging way. To Robert, Judd was a fraud and a coward, who served to remind him of all the ‘better men’ who had died. Burying him could thus be seen as a stage in Robert’s exorcising of his own ghosts. There are also more fleeting evocations of earlier ghost movies. In one scene, Florence sees a red ball come bouncing downstairs, a reference to The Changeling. The ball then reappears during the climactic parental row. The rabbit doll with its musical tune suggests both the music box in The Changeling and Nanako’s teddy bear in Chakushin ari; in all three cases the tune plays as the figure who will become a ghost dies.

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Finally, the film is evidently aware of El orfanato: the heroine – albeit here unwittingly – moving back into the building of her childhood; the use of the basement; another ghost called Thomas. The social background to The Awakening is a country in mourning after World War I. This is reflected in the film’s aesthetics: most of it is filmed in muted colours, through which Nick Murphy – quoting his Spanish DOP, Eduard Grau – sought to evoke ‘a nation mourning’ (Murphy 2012). Only two sequences have less sombre imagery: the flashbacks to Florence’s childhood – the colours here emphasising the vividness of these now-remembered scenes – and the ending. As staff and pupils return after half-term, Florence is leaving the school. Outside, she has a brief scene with Robert. This tells us their relationship will continue, and that she no longer sees Tom. Since the latter implies that Tom has ceased to haunt the school, both developments seem positive. The partial return of real-life hues to the film’s imagery emphasises this. In addition, for the first time, the sun is shining. The Awakening is an extremely fine first feature, its elements integrated together with sureness and sophistication. Like The Dark, it both uses and extends the generic material of the ghost melodrama – and thereby illustrates, yet again, the richness and potential of this material. The Woman in Black Susan Hill’s novella, The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story, was published in 1983. In 1987, Stephen Mallatratt adapted it into a phenomenally successful stage play: the play’s West End run began in 1989 and continues into 2016. A British television film, The Woman in Black, scripted by Nigel Kneale, was broadcast on ITV on 24 December 1989. There have also been two radio plays, broadcast on BBC Radio 5 in December 1993, and on BBC Radio 4 in October 2004. But only in 2011 was the novella made into a feature film. The novella establishes the core story. In it, the ageing Arthur Kipps recalls a traumatic sequence of events from his youth. As a young solicitor, he was sent by his employer to Crythin Gifford, a remote market town on the East Coast of England, to attend the funeral of Alice Drablow and to sort through her papers at Eel Marsh House. Attending the funeral with local solicitor Mr Jerome, Arthur noticed a sinister woman in black, first in the church, then the graveyard. But when he mentioned her, Mr Jerome denied seeing her and reacted with histrionic distress. Accordingly, when Arthur saw her again at Eel Marsh House – which was situated on an island at the end of a tidal causeway – he began to suspect she was a ghost. Further ghostly events followed: Arthur repeatedly heard the sounds of a pony

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and trap foundering, and a child crying out, in the marsh alongside the causeway; in the house itself a rhythmical sound drew him to the nursery, where a rocking chair seemed to rock of its own accord. It was local landowner Sam Daily who provided the backstory. The ghost was that of Jennet Humfrye, Alice Drablow’s sister. Alice and her husband had taken Jennet’s illegitimate son Nathaniel away from her, raising him as their own – although Jennet was eventually allowed to visit. But Nathaniel was killed, aged six, in an accident with his nurse in a pony and trap on the marshes, an accident Jennet witnessed and blamed on her sister. Unable to mourn, Jennet wasted away, and died herself twelve years later. But her ghost did not simply haunt the area, it also carried a curse. Whenever anyone saw it, a child subsequently died – in an accident or through a sudden illness. Having completed his duties, Arthur carried the curse home with him. He married and had a child. But when his wife and child were riding one day, Arthur saw their horse panicked by the sudden appearance of the woman in black. Both were killed. The Woman in Black (Herbert Wise, TVM, 1989) In general, ghost narratives work better when dramatised visually. The impact of ghosts on the living is visceral, and films can usually deliver the frissons involved with greater immediacy. Both film adaptations of The Woman in Black have this advantage over Susan Hill’s novella: they are more inherently gripping. Neither film version has a flashback structure: we only see Arthur as a young man. The novella is vague about the period when the events took place, but the TV film is set in the 1920s, which, as The Awakening notes, was ‘a time for ghosts’. Otherwise the TV film follows the novella quite closely, but gains markedly from atmospheric location filming in bleak, wintry, coastal landscapes. This is M.R. James territory, and just as Susan Hill stressed this (one chapter of the novella is entitled Whistle and I’ll Come to You), so the film-makers are fully aware of it. Although the narrative is that of a straightforward ghost story – albeit one with a particularly malevolent ghost – the appearances of the woman in black, here Janet Gosse (Pauline Moran), are highly effective. In her first materialisation on the windswept coastal grassland on the island, Arthur (Adrian Rawlins) reacts as though something has hit him on the back of the neck before he turns to see her. Later, he says to Sam (Bernard Hepton): ‘She wasn’t just looking, she was hating… like a hunger; a hunger turned to hate’.

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The woman in black went to her death hating her sister, and returned as a ghost hating and killing children. This makes her a monster, and The Woman in Black a ghost horror story, an inflection that is preserved in the various adaptations. At the same time, both film adaptations develop the melodrama. In the TV film, Nathaniel and his mother died together as Janet was trying to take him away from Eel Marsh House. The drowning was thus also the primary traumatic event, and the sounds and cries Arthur repeatedly hears from the marsh illustrate Aurora’s notion in El orfanato that a terrible event can leave a trace, ‘like an echo, repeated over and over’. In addition, Arthur also listens to Alice Drablow’s account of her sister’s haunting, recorded on 1920s’ wax discs. Her disembodied voice, stoically recording the nightly visitations, is itself an atmospheric ghostly touch, and it provides a narrative to elucidate the cries from the marsh. As in the novella, the major set piece is the night Arthur, accompanied by Sam’s terrier Spider, spends at Eel Marsh House. Again the main focus of the spooky activities is the nursery. The use of a nursery as a ghost zone goes back to The Uninvited (1944) and the Christmas party episode of Dead of Night (GB, 1945), directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. It is likewise found in The Haunting (1963). Since it is where children sleep, a nursery can be a resonant ghost zone, becoming charged with their dreams and fantasies: ‘parents in their white night clothes are the prototypes of the child’s conception of [ghosts]’ (Karl Abraham [1927] 1979: 220). A nursery is also a logical place for a child ghost to appear, and toys such as dolls and rocking horses can be animated in an uncanny manner. Susan Hill was evidently well aware of the potential of the nursery, and the various adaptations all make excellent use of the setting. Here the sound coming from the nursery is not from a rocking chair, but a child’s bouncing football. In addition, Nathaniel’s ghost haunts the room. He remains invisible, but Arthur hears a boy laugh and say, ‘Hello’, and discovers a toy soldier in his hand. But this communication between Nathaniel and Arthur seems to upset Janet. The house generator fails, plunging Arthur into darkness; then, when Arthur returns to the nursery later with Sam, the room has been ransacked. Arthur collapses, and Sam helps him back to the Gifford Arms. En route, Sam tells him about the curse. It is at the Gifford Arms that the TV film’s most famous scene occurs. Arthur wakes to find the toy soldier under his pillow; again he hears a boy say, ‘Hello’. He holds out the soldier; the boy responds: ‘It’s for you’. As Arthur asks, ‘Where are you? Who are you? Nathaniel?’, the face of the woman in black swoops down on him from the ceiling. As Arthur screams, Janet leers at him. He passes out.

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This is one of the most frightening of all ghost scares, and it conveys an unmistakably malevolent intent. It was outside the Gifford Arms that, early in his stay, Arthur saved the life of a gipsy girl, thus depriving the woman in black of one of her victims. Here it’s as though she is signalling her vengeful intent. When Arthur next wakes, he is at Sam’s, in bed with a high fever. His encounter with the ghost has literally made him ill. As he convalesces, his wife Stella (Clare Holman) is summoned. Sam tells him Eel Marsh House has burnt down, as though that settles the matter. But ghosts are not so readily appeased. When Arthur and Stella return to London, Arthur discovers not only that Mrs Drablow’s box of effects has followed him, but also a woman in black has been seen waiting in the street outside his office. Now seriously disturbed, he sets fire to the box of effects in his office. He’s sacked. The epilogue takes place on a wintry lake. As Arthur and Stella take their two children boating, Arthur sees the woman in black standing on the lake, looking directly at him. A heavy tree crashes down on the family in the boat, drowning them. A child’s football remains floating on the surface, as though signalling that Arthur and his family have been ‘punished’ because he was befriended by Nathaniel’s ghost. Although Janet’s venomous hatred seems as unmotivated here as in the novella, the TV film nevertheless hints at a political allegory. The woman in black, out there – at the back of the church, in the graveyard, on the marshes – suggests a monstrous version of Margaret Thatcher, exercising her baleful influence over the children of the community. Thatcher first achieved notoriety as an Education Secretary who ‘snatched’ children’s milk, and by 1989, she had been Prime Minister for ten years. This reading gains strength from the terrifying appearance of the woman in black swooping down on Arthur in bed. With a mad stare and Medusa-like locks, she looks like many cartoon representations of Margaret Thatcher. My evidence for this interpretation may seem flimsy, but there are perhaps supporting details. When Arthur is back in London, he is terrified by the sound in the night of horse’s hooves, even though Stella reassures him, ‘It’s only the milk cart’. More pertinently, as Arthur leaves Crythin Gifford, a sign over a building reads ‘H. Wise, Coal and Coke Merchant’. This would seem to be the director inserting himself surreptitiously into the film. But, given Thatcher’s devastation of the coal industry, it is a suggestive insertion. The Woman in Black (James Watkins, UK/US/Canada/Sweden, 2011) Jane Goldman’s script for the 2011 feature film offers another reworking of Susan Hill’s tale. The opening sequences summarise key changes. In

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a pre-credits sequence, three girls playing in an attic room are somehow impelled, by the sudden appearance of a woman in black, to jump out of the window. The woman in black is thus introduced as a supernatural monster, driving children to kill themselves. Since one of the film’s production companies was Hammer, and The Woman in Black was intended ‘as part of a relaunch of the Hammer brand’ (Mullen 2012: 78), a horror-movie opening was only to be expected. Equally, however, the audience now knows what to expect and, unlike in the earlier versions, is ahead of the hero. The second change is more important, but more nuanced. During the brief opening credits (production companies and title) hands exchange rings, then a young woman in white looks at the camera. A man’s hand feels her pregnant belly. The film then fades in on Arthur (Daniel Radcliffe), looking at himself in a mirror – evidently, these are his memories. He has a tense, unhappy expression, and holds an open razor to his throat. In the mirror, we see the woman in white behind him; she addresses him by name. But when he turns, she’s vanished. She is the ghost of Arthur’s wife Stella (Sophie Stuckey), who died in childbirth. Moreover, his gesture with the razor suggests that he is himself tempted to die. But he cannot: he has a four year-old son, Joseph (Misha Handley). The film thus establishes crucial details about Arthur from the beginning: he is in mourning, he is seeing the ghost of his dead wife, and he is tempted to join her. This changes the dynamic between Arthur and Jennet (Liz White); unlike his predecessors, he is already emotionally partly in her world. There is an intertextual link here that is curiously prescient. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Chris Columbus, US/UK, 2001), the first of the series, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) sees his dead parents for the first time in the mirror of erised (desire), which reveals one’s deepest desires. They respond to his presence with smiles, so they see him, too, and Harry feels his mother’s hand on his shoulder. The scene could have come from a ghost film. And Harry’s father is played by Adrian Rawlins, Arthur in the TV film. In the 2011 film, the period is Edwardian, but the narrative moves quickly through the same early stages: Arthur is despatched by his employer to Crythin Gifford, and en route meets Sam Daily (Ciarán Hinds). However, although Sam himself is friendly, the moment Arthur arrives at the Gifford Arms, he encounters hostility. This begins with the innkeeper Fisher (Shaun Dooley), who is reluctant to put him up, and continues the next day. Jerome (Tim McMullan), the local solicitor, can hardly bear to have Arthur in his house, hustling him out the door and insisting he return immediately to

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London. Almost everyone in Crythin Gifford (which here is no more than a village) seems to resent Arthur’s presence. This generalised hostility is unfortunately all too reminiscent of the negative representations of village life in earlier British films, such as The Reptile (John Gilling 1966) (another Hammer production), Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean 1970) and Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah 1971). There is little such hostility in the novella or the TV film. The feature film would seem to be resorting to cliché to set up an edgy atmosphere. There is a similar crudeness of effect after Arthur’s first visit to Eel Marsh House. Whilst in the house, he sees the woman in black outside, looking at him; going outside, he hears the echoes of the accident that killed Nathaniel in the marshes. Since he assumes both these are real, he reports the accident to the local constable. But, as soon as he mentions the woman in black, the constable leaves, whereupon three children enter the police station; one of them, Victoria Hardy, has drunk some lye. She collapses and dies in Arthur’s arms. Everyone in the village knows about the curse, and so realises it was Arthur’s sighting of the woman in black that caused Victoria’s death, but no-one tells him. This is a serious structural weakness. Most of the couples in the village have lost children, including Sam and his wife (Janet McTeer). Sam won’t tell Arthur because he refuses to accept the ‘superstition’, but everyone else believes it, and Arthur now has evidence of his own to support it. In the novella and the TV film, the deaths are all in the past, so there is not the same urgency for Arthur to learn about the curse. But in the feature film, children continue to die. Nevertheless, other developments in the f ilm show inventiveness. Although the death of their son Nicholas occurred many years ago, Mrs Daily is still deeply disturbed by it, and during dinner, she suddenly tells Arthur – now staying with the Dailys – that Nicholas wants to draw him a picture. Seemingly possessed, she scratches something on the table – it looks like a hanged woman. This introduces another thread: Nicholas can ‘speak’ through Mrs Daily – albeit only in the typically partial and cryptic manner of a ghost. Arthur is sympathetic to such a notion; he tells Sam that, since his wife died, he no longer rejects spiritualism: ‘I sometimes feel she’s still with me… trying to reach me’. Sam however is dismissive: ‘When we die, we go up there. We don’t stay down here’. At this point, there is a cut to Arthur’s fantasy of Stella. Still in her wedding veil, she looks at the camera, then turns to walk away through a graveyard. In the distance, barely visible, is the faint image of a woman in white. Suggesting Stella’s ghost, the figure seems to be waiting for her.

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In this version, the woman in black is balanced by the woman in white, but the latter is a much weaker figure. The only time Stella appears as a ghost to Arthur is at the beginning, and even in Arthur’s fantasy, she is moving away from him, as though pulled by her ghost persona. Later, Arthur has another fantasy of Stella in the graveyard. She is now in the distance, looking back, but she turns and continues to walk away. However, her ghost image is still present, and is now twice her size, floating over the gravestones. Although Arthur’s memory-image of Stella is receding, her ghost, looking straight at him, remains. Both fantasies take place in Arthur’s bedroom at the Dailys. After each, Arthur looks at a painting, intimating that the fantasy and painting are somehow linked. The painting, by Mrs Daily, illustrates Nicholas’s death. A woman in black stands on a beach in the foreground; two boys wade into the sea in the background. As with the girls in the opening scene, the woman is prompting the boys to die. Arthur is the only person to look at the painting, which suggests it has symbolic significance for him. It could be seen as a representation not just of Arthur’s death drive but also its possible consequences. In the sea, the boy in front wears a dark jacket; the white sailor suit of the boy behind identifies him as Nicholas. Since Arthur always wears black, and Joseph wears light colours, the painting hints that, if Arthur does die, his son will be impelled to follow him. Again the major set piece is Arthur’s night with Spider in the haunted house. After some minor ghost incidents – a shadowy figure behind glass; a ghostly eye in a zoetrope – Arthur is led by Spider to Jennet’s grave. On his return to the house he sees the woman in black at an upstairs window, and finally realises he is dealing with a ghost. In a window seat he finds letters and papers that explain the backstory. Just as earlier he uncovered evidence of Alice’s reaction to Jennet’s haunting – messages of hate scrawled in red ink on illustrations torn from a religious book – so he now reads Jennet’s letters to Alice. Similarly vitriolic, they vilify Alice, first for refusing to let Jennet see Nathaniel, then for failing to save him – in this version, Alice was with him in the trap, and whereas she saved herself, Nathaniel’s body still lies in the marsh, the site marked by a cross. The family melodrama between the two sisters was here conducted using overwrought religious imprecations, each seeking to consign the other to Hell. Arthur also discovers that, after Nathaniel’s death, Jennet hanged herself in the nursery – a room we have not yet entered. As Arthur dozes in front of the papers, Jennet hovers in the background, and he wakes to discover the eyes of Alice and her husband have been

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scratched out in a photograph. He then hears the rhythmical noise that leads him to the nursery. Following the novella, the noise is from a rocking chair – in which we glimpse the woman in black. Behind the wallpaper Arthur discovers, written in red, ‘You could have saved him’. The motif of a message hidden behind wallpaper is discussed in the chapter on The Ring, where I suggest it reveals the inner world of a troubled character. Here it is much more forceful – it accuses Alice. It’s as though Jennet wrote it like a curse, and then hanged herself, implying that the wallpaper was to cover it up. But it is in effect a message from a ghost, and Alice’s scrawls in red on the religious illustrations are like feverish attempts to ward off its import. The nursery is also filled with toy clockwork automata. As Arthur looks at the message on the wall, a monkey automaton springs to life, shaking its maracas. The power of the message is such that it animates the inanimate. The eeriness of a music box suddenly springing to life after many years has already been noted, but automata are arguably even more uncanny. In his paper ‘The Uncanny’, Freud comments on the eeriness of inanimate objects that seem to come to life (Freud [1919] 1985: 347-348). Since the hero of The Sandman, the E.T.A. Hoffmann story Freud uses to explore the uncanny, is called Nathaniel, it is possible that the film-makers were drawn to use automata as a tribute to Freud and his notion of the uncanny. Similarly with the scratched-out eyes in the photograph: if we see them as a threat directed towards Arthur as much as an attack on the couple in the photograph, then here, too, we have a reference to The Sandman and Freud’s analysis of the story in terms of castration anxiety. The spooky happenings become more intense. As a storm rages, Arthur looks outside, and sees a ghost boy (Nathaniel) emerge out of the mud beside the cross in the marsh. A woman’s screaming face replaces Arthur’s reflection in the window. Someone (we deduce Nathaniel) tries to get in the front door, but no-one is there when Arthur looks. However he does see the ghosts of numerous children standing on the edge of some woods, staring at him. Inside the house, muddy footprints lead him back to the nursery. Other automata are now working, and one is playing a music-box type tune. Switching it off, Arthur is startled by a child’s ghost whizzing across the room, and then shocked by a recreation of Jennet’s suicide: she hangs herself from the ceiling – the moment referred to in Nicholas’s ‘picture’. A boy’s muddy face screams at him. He flees into another room, but a muddy apparition now emerges out of a bed. Running from the house, he meets Sam at the front door. Although these incidents may seem to be little more than a series of ‘typical’ ghost scares, designed to frighten Arthur and spook the audience,

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there are some suggestive intimations. In this version, it is not just the cries from the accident that echo compulsively, but other elements. The woman’s screaming face in reflection is surely Jennet’s when she witnessed the accident from that very window. Similarly with her suicide: although Nathaniel’s ghost has returned to the nursery, Jennet is still compelled to re-enact her hanging. The muddy face that screams at Arthur – the scream echoing Jennet’s – could be seen as a ghost’s protest at the abandonment of its body in the marsh. Finally, the appearance of the children’s ghosts implies a distinctly perverse relationship between Jennet and her victims – as though she is not just killing children, but also enslaving them, turning them into mouthpieces for her own suffering. After Arthur has witnessed the death of another child, Lucy Jerome, he turns to Mrs Daily for an explanation. She tells Arthur about the curse, whereupon she is again possessed by Nicholas – speaking strangely, she says, ‘She makes us do it’. A flashback shows Nicholas and another boy playing on a beach; they look up, see the woman in black, and walk into the sea. Speaking through Mrs Daily, Nicholas is heard in voice-over: ‘They took her boy away, so now she takes us’. Further flashbacks emphasise the point by showing the girls in the opening scene, then Victoria Hardy’s death. Out of the flashbacks, Mrs Daily becomes more agitated, clutching Arthur and saying, ‘She saw you… she’s coming’. With a flint, she carves on the wall of the family mausoleum. Arthur is horrified to see that her sketch echoes a drawing Joseph had given him to signal their forthcoming reunion, due to take place at the station later that day. Arthur realises Nicholas is warning him. These flashbacks are presented as the return of the repressed: everything that has thus far been kept from Arthur. But there is nothing here that is new, and so the sequence lacks the impact of equivalent sequences in other ghost melodramas. However, the final revelation does lend urgency to the last act. With Joseph and his nanny already en route, Arthur decides to try and appease Jennet by reuniting her with Nathaniel. This necessitates his descending into the mud beside the cross to attach a rope to the trap, so Sam can use his car to haul it out of the swamp. During this, Arthur manages to recover Nathaniel’s body; the trap sinks back into the swamp. There is an epic quality to Arthur’s actions here. In mythical terms, he makes a descent into the underworld in order to retrieve an abandoned body. Scenes in two earlier ghost movies are evoked: in terms of the effort involved, the well scene in Ringu; in terms of symbolism, Laura’s excavation of the fuel hold in El orfanato – Arthur emerges covered in mud. Both these links emphasise the powerful drive to exhume the past in certain ghost melodramas.

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The film does however then vary the symbolic scene in which a character, usually the protagonist, enters the haunted house in a condition (soaking wet or muddy) which echoes that of the ghost itself. As noted in What Lies Beneath, Phone, Gothika and The Marsh, the remarkable feature of this recurring motif is that the character does not stop to change clothes. Here, first we do not see Arthur enter the house muddy, then, when we do see him, he is clean and is changing clothes. When a man is involved, the film allows him time to clean up before the climactic encounter. This emphasises just how odd the earlier examples all are. Arthur brings Nathaniel’s body back into the upper world in order to bury him with his mother, whose venomousness as ghost he has diagnosed as deriving from her separation from her son. First, however, he stages a reunion in the nursery, placing Nathaniel’s body on the bed and summoning Jennet by animating the automata. Nevertheless, Jennet’s appearance is aggressively witch-like: she flies at Arthur and he is confronted with her screaming, ravaged face. She does not seem grateful. But she then disappears, and Arthur concludes that she’s gone. In the meantime, elsewhere in the house, Sam sees the ghost of Nicholas – a scene that seems primarily designed to force Sam to accept the ‘reality’ of the supernatural elements. The two men then place Nathaniel’s body with Jennet’s in her grave. The imagery here – Arthur going into a grave in order to reunite two bodies – reverses the standard vampire iconography of entering a grave in order to drive a stake through the corpse. As in other examples, ghost movie imagery differs sharply from that found in vampire narratives. In this version, what happens in the final scene – here, on the station – is open to two contrasting interpretations. Once again, the curse is fulfilled: the woman in black turns up; Joseph slips away from his father and walks into the path of an oncoming train; Arthur leaps to rescue him but is also killed. However, their deaths are immediately followed by their reunion with Stella in the afterlife (see Fig. 48). It is entirely possible Jennet was giving them her idea of a happy ending. Reunited, the family walks away into the mist. The film ends with Jennet and, as she turns to look at the camera, she is almost smiling. The painting of the two boys in the sea and Arthur’s fantasies of Stella can now be integrated into the film’s aesthetic. What happens on the station varies the imagery in the painting: although the woman in black is similarly positioned, Arthur in black rushes from behind to try and save Joseph in light grey. But the outcome is the same: both of them die. It’s as though, despite all Arthur’s efforts, the subtextual intimations of the painting have

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been fulfilled. At the same time, Stella floats over the railway tracks as her ghost floated over the gravestones, and, again, she looks straight at Arthur. Out of the negative implications of the deaths of father and son there emerges a family reunion. Nevertheless, it is unlikely the malevolent activities of the woman in black will cease. Just before the last scene, the camera prowls through the empty Eel Marsh House, and Jennet’s voice can be heard repeating, ‘I will never forgive’. At the point when the train passes over Arthur and Joseph, through its carriage windows Sam sees the dead children, staring soulfully at him, and then the screaming Jennet. Joseph will be allowed to go with his parents to a better world, but the other children will remain trapped in the limbo created by Jennet’s vindictiveness. This is also a generic horror movie ending: the monster will continue to kill. The Woman in Black (2011) is uneven: rather obvious effects are mixed with elements that are more nuanced and complex. Nevertheless, its production values and its main performances are excellent, and the care with which it has been produced, together with its box-office success, suggests there is still mileage in the British ghost film. This notion was strengthened by the release, in December 1914, of The Woman in Black: Angel of Death (Tom Harper, UK/US/Canada, 2014). Set during World War II, the film returns to Eel Marsh House, to which two teachers, Eve (Phoebe Fox) and Jean (Helen McCrory) are evacuated with eight children. Scripted by Jon Croker from an idea by Susan Hill, the film is in fact a very satisfactory continuation of the story, as Eve and a local air-force pilot Harry (Jeremy Irvine) contrive to make sense, not just of the haunting of the woman in black, but also of the inexplicable deaths of first one, then another of the children. Using elements from both earlier film versions of The Woman in Black, the film constructs a compelling melodramatic narrative of trauma, loss and the return of the repressed for both heroine and hero. The Secret of Crickley Hall (Joe Ahearne 2012, 3-part BBC TV miniseries) James Herbert’s novel, The Secret of Crickley Hall (2006), was a bestseller, a success that suggests it might well have assisted the revival of the British ghost film. Although, as with Haunted, Herbert shades his ghost story towards horror, there is also a strong melodramatic thread to the events, which focus on a recently bereaved family moving into a building that is haunted. As in El orfanato, the building was once an orphanage, but since

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El orfanato, too, dates from 2006, it seems likely the link is coincidence. There are, however, links not in the novel between the TV series and El orfanato, indicating that the series itself was indeed influenced by the Spanish movie. The novel is much more complex and developed than Haunted, and the corresponding TV series markedly superior to the movie of Haunted. In restructuring and condensing Herbert’s 630-page story, Joe Ahearne, who scripted as well as directed, has done an excellent job. Unusually for a ghost melodrama, the series gives equal weight to the past – the incidents that led up to the primary traumatic event – as to the contemporary scenes of haunting. Early in the first episode, five-year-old Cam Caleigh disappears when his mother Eve (Suranne Jones) nods off in a London adventure playground. He is not found; Eve believes he is just missing; her husband Gabe (Tom Ellis) resigns himself to the likelihood that he is dead. The couple also have two girls, twelve-year-old Loren (Maisie Williams) and preschool Cally (Pixie Davies). Eleven months after Cam’s disappearance, the family relocate to the north, where Gabe, an engineer, has an assignment, and move into Crickley Hall. These contemporary scenes are cross-cut with scenes set in Crickley Hall in 1943, when it was an orphanage for evacuees run by Cribben (Douglas Henshall) and his sister Magda (Sarah Smart). A new teacher, Nancy (Olivia Cooke), is appalled at the way the Cribbens brutalise the children. Cribben canes them for the most minor misdeeds and is particularly vicious towards Stefan (Kian Parsiani), a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Nancy also quickly identifies the class sneak, Maurice (Bill Milner), a sinister figure of almost Dickensian creepiness, who, aged about sixteen, is the oldest of the children. In the novel, the 1943 backstory only emerges gradually, through the memories of three people from that time who are still alive. In the series, by contrast, structured cross-cutting between past and present generates much of the narrative density. The series actually begins with a brief sequence from 1943: Stefan hides from Cribben in a first-floor cupboard and is found – he screams. Cut to Eve waking from a dream, implicitly a dream of this past event. The sense that the heroine is already psychically in tune with the past at Crickley Hall is strengthened by a later sequence before the move up north. Shots of Eve sleeping are intercut with events from Crickley Hall’s past, exactly as if she is dreaming them. We will discover that most of these events occurred on the night the children and Cribben died. There are a lot of ghost-induced

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dreams in the ghost melodramas, but this is one of the most allusive and exciting. Stefan escaped that night, and his struggle and escape provide the dominant thread to the incidents here. However, unlike most of the other dreamers, Eve shows no sign she remembers the dream. It remains, suggestively, in her unconscious. After the Caleighs have moved into Crickley Hall, Eve finds pieces of an old children’s top, which she assembles and spins. It acts as a conduit for the ghosts. First, she hears Cam’s voice, telling her he is not dead, and the children know where he is. She and Cally then see the ghostly shapes of children, playing. But another ghost stalks the house, a cane-wielding man (Cribben), who is usually invisible but whose extremely painful cane strokes have already been felt by Eve and the girls. Despite this, Eve, heartened by what seems to her a genuine message from Cam, persuades the family to stay on in the house. Typically of the ghost melodramas, the heroine becomes the investigative figure. Reverend Andrew (Nick Sidi), the local vicar, tells Eve that the eleven children and Cribben died in the orphanage in the ‘great flood’ of 1943, when 68 people lost their lives. A local man, Percy (David Warner) fills in much of the backstory. As the orphanage groundsman in 1943 (Ian De Caestecker), Percy had a love affair with Nancy, and he knows about Cribben’s tyranny. Equally, he knows the building is now haunted, as Cribben continues to tyrannise the children in the ghost world. Even if they do know where Cam is, ‘Cribben won’t let them speak to you’. Percy tried ten years ago to help the orphans escape from Cribben’s persecution: he brought in a psychic, Lili (Susan Lynch), but ‘she nearly died’. Although the introduction of a psychic also suggests El orfanato, this is another detail from the novel. As a psychic, Lili is unusually vulnerable to supernatural forces, and Cribben reacted to her past attempt to contact the children by beating her so severely, she had a miscarriage – and can no longer have children. When Eve approaches her for help, she refuses. However, Lili, too, now has a dream that depicts events at Crickley Hall on the night of the deaths. With both these dreams, it’s as though the children are appealing, obliquely, for help. In Eve’s dream, the children, by displacement, convey their own longing to escape. Whereas in Lili’s dream, there is a sense of chaos and hysteria: twice we see Magda screaming – her reaction to the sight of the children’s bodies. Here it is much more the trauma of the evening’s events that is being conveyed. The only detail occurring in both dreams is the top, which the children seemingly wish to stress as a conduit to their world.

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Despite hostility from Gabe – who, like Carlos in El orfanato, is resistant to the possibility of ghosts – Lili now agrees to try and contact the children. On the first occasion, she hears a boy speak, but she also summons the ghost of Cribben, who again beats her so badly she ends in hospital. But she does not give up, and finally Cribben himself tells her where Cam’s body is. The police find a body; Gabe drives to London and confirms the identification. Cam drowned in a canal, apparently by accident, shortly after he disappeared. The late revelation that Cam really is dead means the family has been bereaved all along. Accordingly, this is another film in which a bereavement opens characters up to ghostly activities in a house where the ghosts seem to know the (family) background. The revelation also means the communication Eve ‘heard’ from Cam was misleading. Towards the end, Lili and Eve once more invoke the power of the top. As it spins, Lili speaks the words Eve heard, but we are now shown the source of the voice. In the basement, the boy seemingly sending the message is still under water; other children, now ghosts, observe him. The children are in their ghost world, seemingly re-enacting the primary traumatic event, and the boy is sending a message on their behalf. As in El orfanato, the children implicitly have a hidden agenda: that Eve will find a way to free them from Cribben’s tyranny. Hence, aware of Cam’s death, they deceive Eve because they hope this will make her investigate – and resolve – their plight. Furthering the links with El orfanato, it is even possible the children somehow cause Cam’s death. We learn at the beginning that Eve and Cam are psychically linked, and, for example, share each other’s dreams. Having found such receptive figures, the children may well have shown the same ruthlessness as Tomás in El orfanato. As Eve dozes off in the adventure playground, there is a cut to a shot of a protesting boy being carried by an adult male. This is in fact another image from Crickley Hall’s past – Stefan is being manhandled by Cribben – but the shot is so fleeting, it suggests Cam has been snatched. It’s as though the children ‘send’ Eve such a highly deceptive dream to intimate that Cam has been kidnapped. Although this dream, too, seemingly remains unconscious, it perhaps serves to strengthen Eve’s conviction that Cam is still alive. There are other elements in The Secret of Crickley Hall that recall earlier ghost melodramas. As in Empire of Passion, The Changeling and Ringu (and its successors), the series features a well containing a body. Here the well is in the basement of the house and the body is Nancy’s. Percy has told Eve about Nancy’s mysterious disappearance whilst he was away in the army; we now see what happened to her. A flashback shows her finding

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Magda and Maurice meeting in the basement for sex. Terrified that Nancy will tell Cribben, Magda orders Maurice to kill her. In vain, Nancy pleads, ‘Maurice, you don’t have to do this’. He beats her to death. The murder is not uncovered until seventy years later, when Lili visits the now (apparently) senile Magda in a nursing home, and an old photograph of the staff and children at Crickley enables her to have a psychic vision. Echoing equivalent psychic moments in Ringu and Stir of Echoes, Lili ‘sees’ the murder. Although we do not witness Nancy haunt Crickley Hall, her ghostly presence in the depths of the well is crucial to the series’ climax. The basement and well function as the ‘repressed’ of the house – the children, too, are killed in the basement. But Nancy’s absence as ghost is puzzling. It can perhaps be ‘explained’ by the presence of Cribben – not just in the basement, but also in the well. In the past, we first see Cribben in the basement, and it is from the basement his ghost ascends to haunt the house. And on one occasion, the I-camera that signals the ghost’s movement begins in the well. It is as though Cribben’s ghost occupies a psychic space in the well that in effect blocks Nancy’s. Cribben is also viciously anti-semitic. He victimises Stefan because he is Jewish; he and Magda maintain the Jews started the war. Here there are links with The Devil’s Backbone, with its fascist killer of children. In The Secret of Crickley Hall, the children did not drown, but were murdered by Cribben to protect his reputation. Moreover, in another reference to Nazi atrocities, he gassed them. The flood then covered up his crime. Past and present are linked further when, during the second episode, Gabe approaches a parapsychologist, Gordon Pyke (Donald Sumpter), who turns out to be the aged Maurice. Some years ago, Pyke maintained there were no ghosts in Crickley Hall, and Gabe brings him to the house to settle the ghost nonsense. No less malevolent as an old man than as a teenager, Maurice as Pyke plays to Gabe’s weakness: his scientific rationalism. In keeping with the gender politics of the ghost melodramas, Pyke enters Crickley Hall as a malignant alternative to Lili. On arrival, he immediately begins to make insinuations about Eve and Gabe’s relationship, insinuations that seem calculated to drive them apart. Lili then enters the room and tells Eve she knows where Cam’s body is. Acting, most untypically, with barely controlled rage, Gabe promptly bundles her out of the house. This violence would seem to be in response to Pyke’s insinuations. Pyke is also still under the sway of Cribben. Whipping Pyke into submission, the latter demands from him another victim: one of the Caleigh girls. It is now clear why Cribben informed Lili where Cam’s body was: he needed to get Gabe out of the house.

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The notion that a ghost could force someone to carry out the ghost’s murderous wishes goes back to The Shining. This heightens the sense of evil in Crickley Hall, and points to the horror thread emphasised in the novel, in which Cribben is an exceptionally malignant and powerful supernatural figure. Gabe phones from London and tells Eve it really is Cam’s body; he then begins the drive back up north. Eve is too dazed and upset to wonder what Pyke is still doing in the house, but Loren becomes suspicious. As Pyke drugs Eve, Loren realises what he is doing. She and Cally hide. Again the series evokes The Shining (Danny hiding from the insane Jack), but here more is going on. Pyke hunting for the girls is cross-cut with the later stages of the night of the 1943 murders. On both occasions, typical of such climaxes, it is pouring with rain. In the novel, Stefan, too, was brutally murdered, but here he has managed to escape, and as water begins to flood the house, Cribben is looking for him. Both the girls and Stefan hide in the same place: a secret room behind the first-floor cupboard shown in the opening scene. In Stefan’s case, the image of the Jew in hiding so potent in Nazi-occupied Europe during the war is clearly invoked. This climax also echoes the sequence in The Awakening, when her father hunts the young Florence through the hidden passageways of the house. Insane adults have driven the children into the ‘secret spaces’ of the house, where they hide like the ghosts they are threatened with becoming. In both films, a ‘game’ of hide-and-seek has become a matter of life and death. However, in The Secret of Crickley Hall, the child hiding in the cupboard fights back. Discovered, Stefan comes out and attacks Cribben, knocking him over the banisters into the hall. Unable to move, Cribben drowns in the flood. But that, in turn, turns him into a vengeful ghost. In the present, the girls foolishly leave their hiding place and, failing to rouse their mother, flee from the house. Cally escapes into the rain; Loren is carried by Pyke down into the basement to be thrown into the well. This thriller climax – Cally alerts the returning Gabe; Gabe races down to the basement, where Loren is still struggling with Pyke – now echoes yet another ghost melodrama. As the two men fight over the fate of Loren, hanging by Gabe’s hand inside the well, Nancy’s corpse emerges from the depths, repeating, ‘Maurice, you don’t have to do this’. Pyke is so mesmerised by the phenomenon, he allows the corpse to pull him into the well. This is exactly like Madison’s corpse coming up from the bottom of the lake to claim her killer – and save the heroine – at the climax of What Lies Beneath.

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Parents and children reunite at the foot of the stairs, and again a family huddle – as in Lady in White, The Gift and Genova – signals that the traumas are over. With the death of Maurice, and the emergence of Nancy as a protective figure, Cribben’s hold over the children now evaporates. The family, Percy and Lili witness Nancy as ghost lead the children out of Crickley Hall, implicitly to a better world. Although by doing this Nancy is fulfilling her wartime promise to rescue the children, this is one of the few scenes in the series that doesn’t really work – sentimentality creeps in, especially when Nancy invites Cribben to come with them: ‘You can change’. At least Cribben refuses, and returns instead to the basement. As in Ringu and other films with relentlessly vengeful ghosts, in The Secret of Crickley Hall the haunting will go on. The series actually ends, like What Lies Beneath, The Gift and The Disappeared, in a cemetery, or, more precisely, two cemeteries. Percy now tends Nancy’s grave along with those of the orphans in the local cemetery; in another cemetery, Eve and Gabe take flowers to two adjacent graves: those of Cam and Stefan; the latter, rescued by the young Percy, having lived happily to an old age. As in What Lies Beneath, leaving flowers at the graves is a way of honouring those whose deaths (or, in Stefan’s case, suffering) were a consequence of the evil the narratives have exposed. In Stir of Echoes and El orfanato, the cemetery/memorial scenes are the penultimate sequences, but the principle is the same. As Stefan hides in the secret room, he clutches the ledger in which Cribben kept a record of his punishments. Nancy has made him realise its importance, and it was as she tried to smuggle the ledger out of the house that she was killed. Like the rabbit doll in The Awakening, the ledger then remains over the decades hidden in the secret room. As a record of the past that explains the nature of the hauntings today, it may be linked with the archives searched in other ghost melodramas – all contain similar ‘secrets’ about the abuses of the past. There is however a more direct reference. The film The Secret of Crickley Hall most closely resembles thematically is in fact the remake of The Haunting (1999). There, too, a tyrannical patriarchal ghost, Hugh Crain, holds sway over the ghosts of children he murdered, and there, too, the tyrant kept a ledger of his real-life depravities – a ledger which records the children’s deaths and which Eleanor finds in a hidden room. In The Haunting, Eleanor likewise sets out to free the ghost children, and in calling his psychic Lili, Herbert may well have been acknowledging Lili Taylor’s role as Eleanor. In The Secret of Crickley Hall, Gabe finds the ledger when he and Cally investigate a knocking in the cupboard, a knocking which we deduce

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derives from the ghost children, who want the ledger to be found. The ledger is like a condensation of what was wrong in the past and, correspondingly, what is still wrong in the dynamic of the hauntings. As a sadist’s record of his sadism – over the months, hundreds of beatings are listed – it reveals to Eve just why the children need to be freed from Cribben’s cruelty. Despite its sadistic ghost, The Secret of Crickley Hall is structured as a melodrama, not a horror film. The way the family is put under stress, first by the disappearance of Cam, then by the activities of the ghosts, is given a typically melodramatic inflection. In fact, although the disagreements between Eve and Gabe are similar to those between Laura and Carlos in El orfanato – not least because both wives insist the missing son is not dead – the marriage here is never seriously jeopardised. Through all the tensions and stresses, a generally positive portrait of a family emerges, and there are excellent relations between both parents and the two girls. There are other melodramatic elements. In the past, Nancy is killed because she finds out about an illicit sexual relationship between a teacher and a pupil: a standard melodramatic ‘act of repression’. There are also scenes of typical melodramatic pathos: Lili looking at her mementoes of the child she never had, because of her brutalisation at Cribben’s hands; the old Percy rereading Nancy’s last letter to him. In fact, Percy is given the film’s most poignant sequence. Hoping, however forlornly, that Nancy might one day find her way back to him, he has remained in the same house since 1943. After Lili has informed him about Nancy’s murder, his lonely walk home and entrance into his empty house is extremely moving. Another thread to the film is a critique of the local Protestant clergy. In general, ghost movies avoid religion: the only film thus far discussed that deals directly with the issue is No-Do, in which the Catholic Church emerges as the villain. The Secret of Crickley Hall is more circumspect, but nevertheless damning. Because Cribben has cultivated a public ethos of stern piety, and the children have been cowed into submission, Rev. Horace (Craig Parkinson) supports him. Indeed, on his first appearance, Horace says to Cribben: ‘No one can doubt your devotion to those children and to God. You extend your compassion to the children of the enemy’. A cut to Stefan, looking at them, makes it clear to whom he is referring. It seems highly unlikely Horace does not know Stefan is Jewish, and so his comment demonstrates either staggering ignorance of the situation of the Jews in Europe or an unthinking anti-semitism. In addition, Horace must know Cribben beats the children. Prominent on Cribben’s study wall is a plaque with a quotation from Proverbs: ‘Train up a child in the way he

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should go and when he is old he will not depart from it’. Underneath the plaque is the cane. Horace’s conviction that Cribben is simply being ‘strict’ with the children leads him to reject both Nancy’s and Percy’s reports of the latter’s brutality. It is only when he accidentally sees Cribben’s punishment ledger that he realises their stories are true. Nevertheless, he still gives Cribben time to leave, which enables the latter to kill the children. In the present, Rev. Andrew – Horace’s grandson – is just as bad, threatening Percy for allegedly telling stories about Cribben, who, he insists, was ‘a good man’. It is also he who recommends Pyke to Gabe. Furthermore, in another melodramatic inflection, Cribben is identified with the Devil. His ability to bamboozle the representatives of the church, past and present, hints at devilish powers, but there are also stronger intimations. The immediate neighbourhood to Crickley Hall is called Devil’s Cleave, and local legend extends to seeing the devastating flood of 1943 as the Devil’s work. For the Devil, read Cribben, who would seem to summon up the rain and flood to cover his murders. At one point, Cribben holds Stefan over the well and warns him: ‘Hell is deeper than this pit and it goes on forever. And unless you change, this is where you’ll go’. He means both the well and Hell. But, as we discover at the end, it is Cribben who refuses to change, and who returns to the pit of the well. Moreover, as Cribben’s ghost prowls the house in the present, he leaves not just puddles of water – a familiar ghost association – but also a very unpleasant smell. This is yet another devilish feature: like Martin Luther’s Devil (see Brown [1959] 1968: 182-188), Cribben’s ghost smells of shit. The Dark, The Disappeared, The Awakening, The Woman in Black (2011) and The Secret of Crickley Hall (both novel and TV series) all feature violence – in some cases, extreme violence – by adults on children, as though this were an underlying source of disturbance in the works. It is possible this violence is a reflection of troubling elements in contemporary British society. Beginning in 2000 with Victoria Climbié’s torture and murder by the great-aunt who was supposed to be caring for her, there have been a whole series of high-profile cases in Britain involving the torture, physical abuse and murder by adults of children in their care. It’s as though the recent British ghost narratives, including Herbert’s novel, are all registering this social trauma, albeit by displacement to stories set in the past. Although made as a TV mini-series, The Secret of Crickley Hall serves as a fitting conclusion to the main body of films in this book. It shows an intelligent awareness of the tradition I have outlined, yet nevertheless forges its own distinctive story. Equally, one does not sense an undigested

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‘borrowing’ from the earlier movies. Ghost melodrama tropes and motifs are consistently handled with a genuine flair. A more recent BBC ghost mini-series, Remember Me, written by Gwyneth Hughes and directed by Ashley Pearce, was broadcast in late 2014. Here the elderly Tom Parfitt (Michael Palin) is in flight from the ghost of his childhood ayah, Isha, and although Isha will do him no harm, she is extremely dangerous to those who befriend or help him. With a powerful scary ghost who here comes from the sea, and a tenacious investigative teenage heroine, Hannah (Jodie Comer), Remember Me sustains interest for some time, and only the curiously low-key resolution disappoints. Screened in prime time on BBC1 to considerable critical acclaim, the series is another sign that the British ghost film/TV series is indeed still thriving. Remember Me also deserves mention as the first of these films/TV series to confront a problem which – as already noted – ghost movies traditionally avoid: writing a police report that mentions ghost murders. The detective in the case, Rob Fairholme (Mark Addy) knows his boss will refuse to accept such a report, so he tells Tom that the tapes telling the story will go into a cupboard for seven years, after which they will be thrown out. In other words, the story will be buried.

19. Recent US developments and conclusion Film cycles tend to follow a pattern: an initial burst of productions with certain common features; a period of innovation and expansion as new avenues are explored; then a waning of the films and/or a consolidation of their characteristic elements into a narrower range of movies. It is perhaps too early to tell whether the ghost melodrama cycle has definitively run its course, especially since Britain has contributed some relatively recent impressive examples. But the primary development in the US in recent years has been mostly retrogressive.

Return to Haunted-house Horror Between The Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes in 1999, and Half Light in 2006, there were a number of promising developments in American scary ghost movies. Ghosts turned up in cities (The Sixth Sense) and  small  towns  (The Gift); in working-class houses (Stir of Echoes) and those of the wealthy (What Lies Beneath); in hospitals (Dragonfly) and prisons (Gothika); and in a number of genres: thrillers, melodramas, the woman’s film, even a war movie (Below). Equally, remakes such as The Ring and The Grudge ensured the horror thread to the cycle was kept in play. However, after this burst of diversification, with just a few exceptions the American scary ghost film has returned to the ­low-budget haunted-house territory where it had traditionally found a place. There are a substantial number of these films; I shall mention just a few. The Messengers (Danny & Oxide Pang 2006), the first English-language film by the directors of the stylish Hong Kong horror movie The Eye (2002), at first seems promising. Again the pre-credits sequence shows an elliptical version of the primary traumatic event: a deranged farmer murders his wife and two children. The crime remains hidden and, several years later, a family whose structure replicates the earlier family moves into the farm. This family is damaged by its own past traumatic event: teenage Jess (Kristen Stewart) crashed a car whilst drunk, and her four-year-old brother Ben was badly injured – their savings were spent on Ben’s hospital bills and he is still too traumatised to talk.

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As the ghosts of mother and children haunt the newcomers, they focus on Jess and Ben. There is perhaps a sense that Jess’s guilt for her past recklessness summons the ghosts – they attack her, but merely ‘entertain’ Ben. Unfortunately, the film now becomes both overwrought and stereotyped, throwing together a whole series of undigested ghost horror tropes: psychic disturbances as in Poltergeist; a spreading stain on the wall as in Dark Water; ghosts prowling on the ceiling as in Chakushin ari; and the imprint of a ghost clasp on Jess as in Ringu – to say nothing of importing the malevolent crows from The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock 1963). At the climax, with the beleaguered family trapped in the cellar by the deranged farmer, the ghosts belatedly realise he is the villain, and pull him down into the swamp-like mud they have conveniently provided for the purpose. Although The Messengers is a hotchpotch, it does have effective scary moments, and so perhaps fulfils its limited horror brief. The film is mainly held together by a characteristically intense performance from Kristen Stewart. As to my knowledge the first American film of its kind since The Watcher in the Woods to feature a teenage heroine, the movie might have opened up possibilities. Instead, Stewart was cast as the heroine in the Twilight series of films, and vampires proved more suitable for satisfying American teenage girls’ fantasies. With The Haunting in Connecticut (Peter Cornwell 2009), the shift towards horror is even more pronounced. The story derives from a 1987 case in the files of real-life psychic investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. Here the film’s central family moves into what was once a funeral parlour, but one which has a sinister history of body tampering and dangerous séances. The teenage Matt (Kyle Gallner), seriously ill with cancer, keeps seeing ghosts covered with ‘spells’ carved into their bodies. He also finds himself projected into the past, where he views events through the eyes of a teenage medium, Jonah. However, rather than focus on the idea that Matt conjures up Jonah as a way of confronting his cancer, the film repeatedly and bloodily emphasises the horror, both in the present – Matt has hallucinations of disgusting images of death and decay – and the past, with flashbacks to the carving of dead flesh and a séance with ectoplasm that bursts into flames. Again, the film repeatedly ramps up the excess. Neither The Messengers nor The Haunting in Connecticut is negligible, but both are crude: horror shocks substitute for complexity. In The Innkeepers (Ti West 2011), the problem is rather different. The Yankee Pedlar hotel in Connecticut is allegedly haunted by the ghost of Madeline O’Malley, a jilted bride who committed suicide in the honeymoon suite. The hotel is closing down but, in the almost empty building, the maid

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Claire (Sarah Paxton) – the sixth heroine called Claire in the films in this book – ghost hunts, prowling at night with recording equipment. One current guest is a psychic healer, Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis). Becoming concerned about Claire’s quest, she tells her not to go into the basement. Unfortunately, after an encounter with Madeline’s ghost, that is what Claire does. Events escalate to the point where she is spooked by two ghosts: Madeline’s and that of an elderly man who has just committed suicide in the hotel. Claire flees in panic through the basement, and dies from an asthma attack. The ghosts here are just not interesting: there is no dynamic between them and the heroine. Their function seems simply to spook Claire until she behaves so stupidly she dies. The film does have a certain atmosphere, and some of its ghost moments are quite well handled. In the last shot, the camera begins to enter Claire’s hotel room, but is firmly shut out. Implicitly, Claire has become the third ghost Leanne referred to. Here the film raises the possibility that this was Claire’s unconscious wish all along. But the twist does seem a little arbitrary. In The Innkeepers, the ghosts have no agenda; they’re just ghosts. This illustrates another crucial point about these films: unless a ghost wants something, or can be seen to have a relationship with the inner world of the protagonist, there is nothing to drive the narrative forward. These are, after all, genre films, supported by conventions of narrative, structure and dramatic conflict. Without these, they are inert. This absence of a generic dynamic applies particularly to a ‘found footage’ ghost film such as the Australian Muirhouse (Tanzeal Rahim 2012), which shows nothing more than an investigator being spooked in a haunted house. A return to full-blooded haunted-house horror, The Conjuring (James Wan 2013) represents, to date, the most frenzied example of this generic subgroup. Taken from another Ed and Lorraine Warren case, the f ilm depicts the effect of a centuries-old curse on a family (parents and five daughters) which moves into a house in Rhode Island in 1971. Ghosts make fleeting appearances, but, as in The Amityville Horror (1979; 2005), also based on a case of the Warrens, the film is much more interested in possession. Wife and mother Carolyn Perron (Lili Taylor) is demonically possessed by the evil spirit of a witch who haunts the house, a possession that presents the Warrens, who are here represented in the movie, with a major challenge. Ultimately, Ed (Patrick Wilson) has to carry out an exorcism in order to free Carolyn. The film does have a little cluster of relevant motifs: a ghost boy glimpsed solely in the mirror of a music box and in photographs; ghostly interference on recording equipment; clocks that stop at the same

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time each night. And when Carolyn is finally exorcised, the Perron family do form a recuperative huddle on the lawn. But the energy of the film is focused in hysterical supernatural attacks on mother and daughters. With the witch performing much the same role as the demon in The Exorcist, The Conjuring piles on the scares and shocks, and it was a huge box-office hit. Given this success, future American scary ghost movies are most likely to stick to the haunted-house horror format.

Broken Families and Mourning The return to haunted-house horror was not, however, the only development in recent US ghost melodramas. Another involved only a few f ilms, but in two cases the f ilms were preceded by bestselling novels. In chronological order, the works are: Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones (2002), Ben Sherwood’s novel The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud (2004), then the films The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson 2009), Charlie St. Cloud (Burr Steers 2010) and Dream House (Jim Sheridan 2011). In all these works, a violent death or deaths within a family leads to a period in which those killed ‘hang around’ as ghosts. The Lovely Bones tells this story from the point of view of the murder victim, fourteen-year-old Susie (Saoirse Ronan in the film). The intermediate heaven in which Susie finds herself after death allows her to watch and come close to those on Earth but, with one exception towards the end, they cannot see her. At key points, some of the living sense her presence, but Susie is in effect a ghost who cannot haunt. The other works adopt the more conventional point of view of the living. In Charlie St. Cloud, Charlie (Zac Efron) and his eleven-year-old brother Sam (Charlie Tahan) are both killed by a drunk driver in a traffic accident, but Charlie is brought back to life by a paramedic, Florio (Ray Liotta), who believes in miracles. As in Hideaway, Charlie’s experience endows him with supernatural abilities: he can now see and talk to ghosts, including Sam’s. He proceeds to keep his last promise to his brother: that he will play ball with him each day at sunset. In Dream House, although Peter Ward (Daniel Craig) does not realise this for some time, the home he shares with his wife Libby (Rachel Weisz) and their young daughters Trish and Dee Dee is a ghost world – his family was murdered five years ago. Since he is currently in a psychotic state, believing himself to be Will Atenton, editor of a publishing house, the film implies at first that Libby and the girls are his hallucinations. And although they eventually show the independence of genuine ghosts,

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there are occasions when they make more sense as hallucinations, as though the film is hesitating over the question of their status. The two source novels establish the ideological role of these works: they are essentially reassuring about ghosts and the afterlife. Whereas most ghost melodramas are uneasy about ghosts, here the ghosts are benevolent, a feature heightened by their familial relationships with the living. In addition, the afterlife that Susie goes to in The Lovely Bones, tinged with teenage-girl whimsy, is comforting. Nevertheless, unlike the novel, the film of The Lovely Bones does introduce darker elements into this world, and on occasions these interact with events on Earth in a dramatic manner. In particular, a lighthouse here functions as disturbing symbol in the other world, revealing to Susie the many previous victims of her murderer, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci). And the film also includes a particularly horrifying example of a bathroom scene, when Susie as ghost, thinking she is entering the bathroom in her family home, finds that the man in the bath is Harvey, still surrounded by the bloody traces of her murder. Despite the reassuring thrust of the films, they are all still melodramas, in which the ghost elements serve to heighten the melodramatic tensions. And these tensions reside in unresolved issues between the living and the dead. In this respect, the films may be linked to some already discussed: those in which the dead cannot give up the living (as in Ghost, The Sixth Sense and Genova), or the living the dead (as in The Disappeared and The Woman in Black 2011). Indeed in The Lovely Bones, Charlie St. Cloud and Dream House, it is as though both the living and the dead cannot give up each other. It is there where the melodramatic core of the films lies. Thus in The Lovely Bones, Susie watches, helplessly, as those she loves experience the trauma of her death whereas Harvey continues his life undisturbed. Eventually, her father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) realises that Harvey is the killer, and sets out to take revenge. Watching, Susie’s ghost is willing him to do this, so it is as if Jack is carrying out her wishes. But the attack backfires, and Jack himself is very severely beaten. We experience this through Susie’s distraught reaction, and afterwards she concludes of her father that, for both their sakes, ‘I had to let him go’. In Charlie St. Cloud, Charlie’s commitment to Sam, which derives initially from guilt – he was driving at the time of the accident – freezes his development. In order to keep his promise to Sam, he gives up his scholarship to Stanford and a potentially brilliant career as a yachtsman to become the caretaker in the local cemetery. Here we can see the workings of the death drive, also registered in the repetition-compulsion of the daily bouts of play, which go on for five years (in the novel, alarmingly, for thirteen years).

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Five years is also the time Peter in Dream House spends in a psychiatric hospital, where everyone believes it was he who murdered his family. His new identity as Will is a psychotic construction to help him cope with his trauma. But although the backstory of the initiating murders is weak – in a contract killing, Libby and the girls were shot by mistake – the ghost world of the ‘dream house’ is complex. This world would seem to be sustained by the fantasies of both Peter and Libby: when Peter realises it is a fantasy, their joint unconscious control over the mechanics of the world breaks down, and the girls start to re-enact their deaths from bullet wounds. At the film’s climax, however, when the murderers return and threaten Peter as well, Libby is able to appear as a ghost in the real world and save him. All these films raise the issue of mourning in the ghost melodramas. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud notes that mourning entails, ‘a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity’ ([1917] 1984: 252). This characterises Matthew in The Disappeared, Arthur in The Woman in Black, Charlie in Charlie St. Cloud, and the families in Genova and The Lovely Bones. (A more complicated case, The Sixth Sense has been discussed from this point of view by Marguerite La Caze: 2002.) Freud also notes that withdrawal of libido from the lost love object is a long and painful process, and psychic opposition to this can be so strong that, ‘a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of hallucinatory wishful psychosis’ (253). This suggests Peter in Dream House. However, in most cases, the long process of mourning will succeed, and ‘when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ (253). The problem in ghost melodramas is that the ghost prolongs the mourning. As long as the ghost continues to appear, it is impossible to give him or her up. In Genova, this is finally resolved with a traumatic event which echoes the primary traumatic event but which simultaneously expels the dangerous ghost. This is like the climax of a working through of the trauma, and the ensuing tight huddle of father and daughters emphasises that the family has come through this. In The Disappeared, it is resolved more traditionally, with the killer identified and Tommy’s recovered body being given a proper burial. Here it is the epilogue that is family-centred: Matthew and his father pay their respects at Tommy’s graveside. In The Woman in Black, there is a family reunion in the afterlife. In The Lovely Bones, as in The Sixth Sense, it is up to the ghost to move on, and in the former the camera sweeping over the countryside expresses not just the release of

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Susie’s soul but also the new sense of freedom she leaves behind. In Dream House, too, the ghosts accept their ghost status and move on. Charlie St. Cloud poses more of a problem for mourning. Charlie is obsessive about his commitment to Sam; Sam, a typical ghost, has no sense of time and is entirely selfish, showing no sign of ever wishing to give up his daily meetings with his brother. It is another ghost event that intervenes to break the spell. Charlie is visited by the girl he loves, Tess (Amanda Crew), who spends a day and a night with him. Significantly, during this period, the two go to the top of a lighthouse. It’s as though this is a clue. Charlie then learns that Tess has been missing at sea for three days, and is probably dead. But, thanks to a message from Florio, Charlie realises that the Tess who visited him was not, in fact, a ghost, but her spirit – she is between worlds. The notion that it is possible for someone hovering between life and death to manifest themselves, to certain people, as a spirit, is not unprecedented. Ghost Dad deploys the notion in a screwball narrative, and Just Like Heaven (Mark Waters 2005) in a comedy-drama. Charlie’s search for Tess then necessarily takes him away from Sam, freeing the latter to move on to a better world. But, as Sam does so, he gives a sign to show Charlie where to search. Here the tight family huddle at the end of the earlier films is replaced by a more romantic equivalent: finding Tess hypothermic on some isolated rocks, Charlie strips off her clothes at the front and holds his body against her – which keeps her alive until help arrives. Mourning is sublimated into saving Tess’s life. The ghost events of Charlie St. Cloud emphasise the reassuring nature of the supernatural in these narratives. Similarly, at their last meeting in Dream House, Libby tells Peter: ‘I’ll always be with you’. Nevertheless, both The Lovely Bones and Dream House use the mediations between the real world and the film’s other world with commendable inventiveness. Along with the recent British ghost movies, they suggest promising developments in the cycle. A film that seems thus far to be a one-off also deserves mention. Solstice (Dan Myrick 2007), reworks a familiar teenage horror situation: a group of friends go to stay in an isolated house in the woods. Five teenagers go for the summer solstice to the Louisiana lakeside summerhouse belonging to the parents of Megan (Elisabeth Harnois), the heroine. However, instead of the group being menaced by psychos or supernatural malevolent entities, the heroine is spooked by a ghost. The result is an intense and compelling ghost melodrama. Solstice is a remake of Midsommer (Carsten Myllerup, Denmark, 2003). It follows the plot of the original very closely, but rejigs the characters. The

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past traumatic event in both films is the recent suicide of a sister, Sofie/ Sophie, but in Midsommer, the protagonist is her brother; in Solstice her twin sister. This change – which necessitated a switch of gender for three further characters in Solstice – immediately places Solstice more firmly within the conventions of the ghost melodrama cycle: the investigative figure is female, and she is bereaved by her twin. In the spooky events experienced by Megan one stands out: a key chain attached to a small teddy bear, found in Sophie’s hand when she died, keeps turning up. A ghost-induced dream takes things further, intimating a connection between the key chain, the ghost and mud. Although the notion is resisted by Sophie’s ex-boyfriend Christian (Shawn Ashmore), Megan becomes convinced that Sophie’s ghost is trying to communicate with her. In Midsommer, the teenagers hold a séance to try and contact the ghostly presence; in Solstice a local youth Nick (Tyler Hoechlin) conducts a Cajun ritual in the lake. He explains: ‘water is the best conductor between this world and the next’ – an explicit reference to the workings of a crucial ghost melodrama motif. During the ritual, Megan is pulled underwater, where she experiences a rush of images further linking Sophie, the key chain and mud. As in a number of other films, an immersion results in contact with the ghost world. In fact, Megan is not being haunted by her sister’s ghost, but by that of Malin, a young local girl who went missing a year ago. Megan eventually realises this, and, after another series of psychic visions, announces dramatically that she knows where Malin is. Despite Christian’s protests, she leads him, Nick and Zoe (Amanda Seyfried) to Malin’s grave – which contains both her body and her bicycle. In a number of the ghost melodramas, the ghost carries a repressed secret, and when the body is found, the secret comes to light. Usually to do with the nature of the death, the secret may be revealed psychically – as in Ringu, Stir of Echoes and Dark Water (2002) – but very occasionally it is linked physically to the body. In The Changeling, it is only when John finds the baptism medal, as well as Joseph’s body, in the well that he has proof of the secret: that Senator Joseph Carmichael is a changeling. In Solstice, Megan now discovers that the key which has been following her around fits Malin’s bicycle. This reveals the secret: Sophie was involved in Malin’s death. As flashbacks will shortly reveal, Malin was killed in a hit-and-run accident by Sophie and Christian, and Christian persuaded Sophie that they should bury her and her bicycle in the woods. As so often in these films, the climax is accompanied by rain. Here it is as though this releases the pent-up melodramatic tensions. Travelling with

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three others in a car, Christian has by now acquired a rifle. He sees Malin’s ghost in the road ahead and is so terrified, he shoots. He hits the driver; the car crashes. A demented Christian runs around in the woods, shrieking for Malin. Nick, fleeing from him, is caught in an animal trap. Megan, also fleeing from him, calls out frenziedly in words familiar from the slasher genre: ‘Somebody help me!’ And just as Malin started the frenzy, so she now brings it to a close. She spooks Christian to such an extent that he runs into the path of the arriving sheriff’s car. He is killed, with melodramatic logic, at the site of the primary traumatic event. In the slasher films, the evil is usually out there; here, the teenagers bring their traumas with them. In Solstice, the ghost is indeed the return of the repressed. It is implied that Malin’s ghost drove Sophie to her death, and now she uses Megan as a conduit to confront Christian, driving him to his own death at the place where she herself was killed. Filmed with remarkable assurance, and with a firm grasp of the conventions of melodrama, Solstice is an excellent but little-known addition to the cycle. Finally, Mama (2013) introduces freshness and invention into the horror strand of the cycle. Encouraged as a project by Guillermo del Toro, who acted as executive producer, directed by the Argentinian Andy Muschietti and co-scripted by him and his sister Barbara, Mama is strictly speaking a Canadian-Spanish co-production. But it is set in the US and was distributed by Universal. It is also the most impressive ghost horror film to come out of North America for some time. Mama begins like a dark fairytale: ‘Once upon a time…’. After a breakdown explicitly related to the f inancial crisis of 2008, Jeffrey Desange (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau) shoots his business partners and then his wife, and flees with his young daughters Victoria and Lilly. His car crashes; they find shelter in a remote derelict cabin in the woods. Jeffrey is about to kill the girls, too, but they are saved by a strange otherworldly figure who will turn out to be Mama (Javier Botet). She kills Jeffrey. Five years later, the girls are found in the cabin in a feral state and reunited with their uncle, Jeffrey’s twin Lucas (Coster-Waldau), and his girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain). Now aged eight and six, Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) have been kept alive in the wilderness by Mama, and she does not want to let them go. When Dr Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash), seeking to unravel the mystery of the girls’ survival, moves the new family of Lucas, Annabel and the girls into a ‘research house’, Mama follows. Mama is aware of ghost movie tropes and motifs: spooky apparitions; a ghost that drowned; ghost-induced dreams; use of the I-camera; haunted children; children’s drawings; a portal in a closet; possession. Equally, it

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understands ghost motivations. As a young woman in 1887, Mama died trying to escape from an asylum with her baby, and as a ghost she has been searching for her lost baby ever since. Here it is the ghost that is mourning; the girls are her substitute. An archivist, Louise (Diane Gordon), tracks down the baby’s unburied skeleton. As she hands its box to Dr Dreyfuss, she makes the film’s key speech: ‘A ghost is an emotion bent out of shape, condemned to repeat itself time and again until it rights the wrong’. When Dreyfuss asks what’s in the box, she replies, ‘The wrong’. Equally, the film has some striking innovations. Although I regret that she is played by a man, Mama herself is a remarkable ghost monster. It is her body that has been ‘bent out of shape’ by the years of mourning: she is distorted, twisted, and moves in a whole variety of unnerving, contorted ways. The only sounds she makes are eerie animal-like noises; her face is dark and malevolent, with wild eyes and even wilder Japanese-ghost hair. At one point, her hair moves across the floor as in Chakushin ari. Her animal is the moth: moths emerged out of her body when she died, and moths signal her imminent appearance. Strengthening the film’s deployment of horror tropes, the cabin is a rare example in these films of Carol Clover’s ‘terrible place’: like Arbogast (Martin Balsam) in Psycho, Dreyfuss enters the building secure in what he thinks he knows, and is killed by the mother as monster. Eventually, Mama kidnaps the girls, and takes them to the clifftop from which she jumped to her death, intending to kill them, too. Annabel and Lucas pursue them there. This leads to a very fine clifftop climax; a dark reworking of the clifftop climax of Lady in White. Again, we return to the site of the primary traumatic event; again, children’s lives are at stake. But here the ghost is malevolent. Annabel checks Mama by giving her the remains of her baby and, as Mama holds the skeleton, her face returns, briefly and sadly, to that of the young woman she once was. But Lilly, still in thrall to her, calls out, and Mama’s murderousness returns. With Lucas incapacitated, Annabel struggles heroically to hold on to Victoria, and Mama finally accepts a compromise: she will take Lilly, but she relinquishes Victoria. The separation of the sisters – Lilly suspended in the air by Mama over the drop to the lake below; Victoria holding out her arms from the clifftop – is very powerful. As Mama falls with Lilly into the lake, they disintegrate into moths. One lands on Victoria’s finger; she understands that this is Lilly. Annabel, Lucas and Victoria then form a tight family huddle – the sixth such example in the films in this book – on the clifftop. Mama has structural weaknesses, but it also has genuine intensity, and its deployment of ghost horror tropes is often impressive. It introduces a

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Gothic ghost into a modern setting, and shows the failure of a contemporary figure of authority to ‘right the wrong’. Lacking the wisdom of Louise and Annabel, Dreyfuss does not attempt to reunite Mama with the remains of her baby – and he is killed. Finally, Mama is the first ghost movie to locate breakdown within an American family to the 2008 crisis in capitalism. Mama emerges into the gap created by the breakdown, and her frenzied intervention results in a new, poorer, but more caring substitute family. But it is one cast loose from the comforts of the bourgeois home and left marooned in the wilderness.

Conclusion Why should a cluster of scary ghost films, several of them seminal, arise at the end of the 20th century? This matter has been discussed within the concept of the spectral by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in his introduction to his anthology Spectral America: Ghosts […] reflect the ethos and anxieties of the eras of their production. In this respect, the spectral turn of American culture should be read as a mark of millennial anxiety. As a symptom of repressed knowledge, the ghost calls into question the possibilities of a future based on avoidance of the past. Millennial specters ask us to what extent we can move forward into a new millennium when we are still shackled to a past that haunts us and that we have yet to face and mourn fully. (2004: 6)

Weinstock elaborates on what he feels the ghost represents: ‘[The ghost’s] haunting indicates that, beneath the surface of received history, there lurks another narrative, an untold story that calls into question the veracity of the authorized version of events’ (2004: 5). Here The Sixth Sense offers an excellent example. Within Cole’s school, he sees the hanging bodies of a family, which seems to have been the victim of a racist lynching. Such an incident, denied by his teacher, represents precisely the sort of repressed history to which Weinstock refers – not just of the premises (once a seat of legislature), but also of the city of Philadelphia. In fact, there is only one essay in Weinstock’s anthology dealing with contemporary ghost movies: Katherine Fowkes (2004) looks at The Sixth Sense in terms of the sophistication of the film’s narrative. She does not mention the millennium. However, the issue of millennial anxiety in Hollywood movies was subsequently taken up by Mick Broderick in ‘Better the

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Devil You Know: Antichrists at the Millennium’ (2010). And although Broderick concentrates on the Antichrist films that emerged at this point (e.g. End of Days, Peter Hyams 1999), he also mentions other pre-millennium movie strands: apocalyptic alien invasion films (e.g. Independence Day, Roland Emmerich 1996) and those depicting a cosmic catastrophe (e.g. Deep Impact, Mimi Leder 1998). The early scary ghost films could be seen as registering potential premillennial anxieties less histrionically. Although not many of the films were actually made before the millennium, it is perhaps possible to argue that premillennial anxieties kick-started the cycle. Collectively, the films emphasise that the dead are restless and they want something. As Cole discovers, their demands may well be insistent and violent. The essence of the films is that the dead have awakened, and they are making (aggressive) demands on the living. Equally, this is not just an issue in the US. In Japan, the bursting of the nation’s ‘bubble economy’ in the early 1990s, and the resultant long recession created its own anxieties, and although Colette Balmain finds these reflected in the cinema mainly in zombie films, she notes that the zombies are also like vengeful ghosts (2008: 127). Equally, Ringu and Ringu 2 are like low-key apocalypse films, in which the curse – embodying a repressed Japanese obsession with death – spreads slowly but inexorably throughout the country. Moreover, it spreads through global technology, which emphasises its potential reach. Kokkuri also suggests an obsession with death, here in the younger generation. The early Yeogo goedam films are concerned more with the devastating effects of a repressive educational system. Stir of Echoes is particularly suggestive in terms of the concept of a repressed history, in that the ghost’s appeal for justice reveals underlying fascistic elements within the local working-class community. Whether these films really are registering premillennial anxieties, or whether there was simply a fortuitous cluster of films that arose at the same time in the same generic area, once the early examples had demonstrated the commercial potential of such movies, the cycle developed in a familiar way, repeating patterns and trying new variations. During this evolution, fresh anxieties were occasionally registered, such as modern alienation in Dark Water (both versions) and Sakebi; the breakdown of the Japanese family in Ju-on, a matter addressed by Jay McRoy (2005: 179). But unease about the restless, vengeful dead continued to echo through the movies. Although not really a ghost movie, Kairo fits here as a post-millennium apocalypse film, in which the Internet assumes the form of a universal malevolent force, sucking the life out of people.

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Many of the films of the cycle have a paranoid structure, as the ghosts drive the protagonist mercilessly, sometimes to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Narratively tying together both the pulsations of the death drive and the melodramatic return of the repressed, the paranoid structure may be seen with particular clarity in the American films from In Dreams to Dark Water (2005). Four films from 2005 show the extremes, both in the heroines’ reactions and in the films’ outcomes. Whereas in Dark Water, Dahlia is overwhelmed by the ghost’s powers and dies, in The Ring Two, Rachel fights back and triumphs. However, fighting back does not guarantee success. Adelle in The Dark and Amy in Fragile – American heroines abroad – both resist the ghost to the full extent of their abilities. But Amy alone survives. A crucial feature across the films is thus the extent of the protagonist’s – usually the heroine’s – drive to succeed against the persecuting attentions of the ghost(s). This applies to films of all nationalities, from the resignation and defeatism of Kokkuri to the fierce determination of Annabel in Mama. This is one area in which the films frequently display a powerfully feminist thrust. Also relevant is what the ghosts want. Here a distinction needs to be drawn between the two strands of the cycle, horror and melodrama. Whereas in most ghost melodramas, the ghosts seek some sort of resolution, in the horror films, they may well not be appeased, as in Ringu and its successors, where the curse will continue, or Ju-on and its successors and The Woman in Black, where the killings will continue. In these films, the anxieties registered by the ghosts are not worked through. It is similar in those films where at the end the living abandon a building to the ghosts, who will haunt it forever: The Devil’s Backbone, The Others, El orfanato and The Secret of Crickley Hall. The haunted buildings are like ghostly traces of the country’s past traumas. There are also some films that end with the final status of the ghost uncertain, as in Chakushin ari and Ryeong. And occasionally the ghosts triumph over someone we care for, as in Dark Water (both versions), Voice and The Dark. But in most of the films, the ghosts achieve a resolution which gives them peace, and, in the Western films at least, enables them to go to a ‘better world’. This is what happens to Nancy and the children at the end of The Secret of Crickley Hall. Resolution is most often achieved with the death of the killer and/or a suitable funeral or other ceremony – hence the number of graveside endings. But there are alternatives. In Whispering Corridors and The Sixth Sense, the ghost finally accepts her/his ghost status and fades away. In

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Inner Senses and The Awakening, the ghost gives up her/his obsession with the protagonist. In The Haunting (1999) and The Secret of Crickley Hall, child ghosts are freed from tyranny. In Ghost Story all that seems to be required is that the body is retrieved; Lady in White has a ghost reunion ending. But, whatever form they take, these endings suggest that the ghosts, whether appeased, freed, or with a new understanding, have been able to move on. As noted in the Introduction, the most important development introduced by the seminal films was the shift to a female protagonist, a shift anticipated in key earlier films with female investigators, such as The Silence of the Lambs and Candyman. As investigators, the heroines in these films are sensitive to subtly different things to men, such as, in The Silence of the Lambs, where a teenage girl would hide her secret photographs. They also have a particular sympathy for the victims. In the ghost melodramas, this extends to the ghosts themselves, which are mainly of women or children. Moreover, female or child ghosts usually arise from violent patriarchal repression. The ghosts in What Lies Beneath, The Gift, Gothika and The Grudge are of young women murdered by repressive or psychopathic men and, in the Hollywood films at least, the men all have a significant status within the community. It is much the same with child victims, as in Riget, Ringu, The Haunting (1999), The Dark, The Marsh, No-Do, The Awakening and The Secret of Crickley Hall. Although there are films in which ghosts are the result of neglect or murder by women – Dark Water (both versions), Phone, Chakushin ari, Ryeong, Fragile, El orfanato – the vast majority of ghosts in these films arise from murder by men in positions of power: bourgeois husbands; fathers; figures of authority. That it is a woman who brings these murders to light again suggests a feminist thrust to the movies. This applies especially to Bhoot, where the heroine is possessed by the ghost and others do the investigating. Here the failure of male figures of authority to understand the nature of the problem is pointedly contrasted with the successful investigation conducted by the women. In her book Japanese Horror Films and Their American Remakes, Valerie Wee seeks to argue that, because of their different cultures, the West and Japan produce radically different horror narratives. She maintains that this difference arises initially from the dominant religious traditions in each region: Judaeo-Christian, with its focus on good against evil in the West; Buddhism and Shinto, with their emphasis on restoring balance and equilibrium in Japan. In addition:

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Confucianism’s focus on proper, ritualized behaviours and actions reinforces Buddhism’s emphasis on order, structure and balance. In many of the contemporary Japanese films […] the horrific and terrifying onryo [vengeful female ghosts] that claw their way into the human realm seeking retribution are born of irresponsible or selfish acts by individuals who have destabilized social order by betraying their positions of authority and abandoning their social and communal responsibilities. These include parents who have either abdicated their duties or selfishly decided to place their own desires before those for whom […] they are responsible; or figures of patriarchal authority who neglect their responsibilities to those dependent on them, notably women and children. (2014: 61-62)

However, as noted, precisely the same motivations occur in a number of the films made in the West. Patriarchal oppression is just as nasty in the West as in the East. Wee’s argument founders because scary ghost stories are quite unlike those horror narratives which obviously do derive from Judaeo-Christian beliefs, such as Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen. Even in those ghost films which are horror narratives, the ghosts are a different sort of monster – born, usually, of injustice. Nevertheless, there are differences between the Japanese films and those from the West. In her book Japanese and American Horror, Katarzyna Marak points out that whereas Japanese ghosts tend to haunt those who harmed them directly, in American films this is not always the case. Writing of the novel of Stir of Echoes, and the films What Lies Beneath and Gothika, she notes that, ‘the American ghost seeking retribution tends [to] be able to approach its killer […] only during the final confrontation – after the complete truth has been revealed, and no sooner. Before that time comes, it needs an enormous amount of assistance’ (2014: 56). Solstice is another example. There are of course some American films in which the ghost does haunt its killers directly – e.g. Ghost Story and Below – and in Gothika, because there are two killers, it is more complicated. But Marak’s observation is nevertheless intriguing. I would suggest that there are a number of points to consider. First, in the American films, it would seem that the ghost is concerned that the society itself learns about the crimes of the killer, and this can be done more successfully by enlisting a helper. This would apply, too, to the film of Stir of Echoes, where the ghost never does haunt her killers, but where her haunting brings their crime to light. By contrast, Japanese ghosts tend to move straight to vengeance, as in The Ghost Story of Yotsuya,

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Kuroneko, the killing of the mother in Chakushin ari and the husband in The Grudge. Second, this helper is usually a relative of the killer, and the ghost wishes his or her eyes to be opened to the crime. Third, coming at the end of a suspenseful build-up, the moment of confrontation is chosen for maximum emotional and physical effect. In What Lies Beneath, nonchalantly telling Claire as he sets out to drown her that he and Caitlin will soon be getting together, Norman is at his most smug, and Madison’s appearance gives him such a shock, he knocks himself out. Semi-conscious, he then crawls away from the bath, as though terrified of what he just saw. At the climax in the jail in Gothika, Sheriff Ryan is pumped full of the drugs he intended for Miranda and seems to be imagining himself as a sort of superman. Rachel’s appearance as a ghost he cannot kill is utterly baffling to his befuddled brain. The ghosts do not just catch these men when they are off-guard, but when they are convinced of their murderous power over the heroines. In Solstice, when Malin – again protecting the heroine – finally confronts Christian, he is almost hysterical with fear. The ghosts focus very precisely on destroying the masculinity of these figures. For men or boys to experience the ghosts, and hence to qualify as investigative figures, they usually have to be opened up in some way, as Tom is by hypnosis in Stir of Echoes. In most cases this occurs through bereavement, as in The Changeling, Lady in White, Dragonfly, The Disappeared and The Woman in Black (2011). Moreover, this opening up may well be coded as feminisation: Tom weeps when he is under hypnosis; John in The Changeling weeps at the memory of the death of his wife and child. But in Into the Mirror, where the feminisation includes the hero’s move from a macho occupation to a more genteel one, he resents the change. Here a ghost melodrama addresses the problem of aggressive masculinity through the hero. Again, however, there is a crucial scene in which the hero weeps. In the backstories of these films, too, the same patterns emerge as with investigative heroines: female victims of violent masculinity in Ghost Story, Stir of Echoes and Into the Mirror; child victims in The Changeling, Lady in White, The Devil’s Backbone and The Disappeared. Although the films include a greater range of types of killer, including two child serial killers, most are again respected members of the community. As befits melodrama, there is often a personal element to the investigations, especially those conducted by women. In Dark Water (both versions) and Chakushin ari, the ghost reawakens the heroine’s memories of a traumatic childhood. In El orfanato, the ghosts were the heroine’s childhood friends. In other films, where the heroine has repressed crucial

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memories, the investigation also uncovers this repressed past: What Lies Beneath, The Others, Gothika, Ryeong, The Marsh, The Awakening. This thematic thread is shared by some of the male investigators: The Sixth Sense, Inner Senses and Sakebi. In all these cases, the protagonist suffers from a form of amnesia, and this is almost always linked to her or his presence at the primary traumatic event. The only exceptions are What Lies Beneath, where the repressed incident was the husband’s infidelity with his future victim, and Gothika, where it was the heroine’s murder of her husband, a murder enacted whilst she was possessed by the ghost girl. Moreover, just as the ghost in Gothika possessed the heroine and then made her forget, so the ghost in What Lies Beneath possesses the heroine to make her remember. Both operate through the heroine’s unconscious. The ghosts in this ‘amnesia group’ represent a personal return of the repressed for the protagonists, and the details of the return are like messages in code from the protagonist’s unconscious: this is what you have repressed. The narrative in these, and certain other, films also has the flavour of a session of therapy, and it is in these works in particular that a psychiatrist may make an appearance. However all are male, and almost all are ineffectual – a trope going back to In Dreams. Instead, the ghosts are the mechanism whereby the ‘therapy’ is effected. The Sixth Sense is a special case: here the hero himself is a psychologist, but he is also a ghost. As a psychologist, he does indeed help Cole, but his ghost status may well assist in this, since his insights into Cole’s problems could as a consequence be unwittingly sharper. Also like Dark Water and El orfanato, in the amnesia group of ghost melodramas there is an unusually close relationships between some of the protagonists and the ghosts. In What Lies Beneath and Gothika, the ghost is like the heroine’s alter ego, guiding her to a deeper matter that she has repressed: her husband is really a monster. In Inner Senses and The Awakening, the ghost was a childhood sweetheart, who wants the hero/ heroine to remember their relationship. In Ryeong, the ghost was a close friend whom the heroine betrayed – and so it embodies her guilt. In The Marsh, one of the ghosts was the heroine’s twin, and so represents a lost part of herself. Again, we can see how personal such ghosts are. Psychic characters also occur repeatedly in these f ilms, from The Changeling and The Shining to The Secret of Crickley Hall. Most are women and children, and male figures of authority are often quick to patronise or mock them, as with Annie in The Gift or Lili in The Secret of Crickley Hall. But their intuitions and insights are invariably correct.

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Again the films, like most melodramas, position themselves on the side of the female characters. The patterns in the teenage-girl ghost films are a little different. Kokkuri introduced the theme of the suicidal (teenage) girl, where the ghost is primarily an expression of the girls’ death drive. However, the films also include other concerns. With the exception of Voice, any investigation is secondary; instead, the films are about the intense relationships between the girls and, in the South Korean movies, their school life. Here the girl who becomes a ghost is usually a victim of one or more of the other girls, and so in some sense carries their guilt. The nature of the victimhood varies from film to film, but it can usually be traced to two factors: the highly pressured South Korean education system and/or lesbianism. Both of these features may be seen to embody political critiques. The education system is indicted for the heightened stress it places on the girls; the teachers and pupils are indicted for their intolerance of lesbianism. However, although lesbianism disturbs the films in line with Steve Neale’s formulation for melodrama, no sooner has it made an appearance than it is repressed. In the Yeogo goedam films, again and again a girl who has lesbian feelings is the person who dies and becomes the ghost. Kokkuri is even more pessimistic: as soon as the two main girls reveal their feelings for one another, they quite arbitrarily kill themselves. But the repression of lesbianism may well be critiqued by the films – a central concern of Memento Mori in particular. The films’ endings may also be suggestive. Whispering Corridors ends with a female teacher and a pupil huddled together on the classroom floor. Memento Mori ends, on one reading, with the lesbian lovers reunited in the afterlife. And A Blood Pledge ends with the sublimation of the lesbianism of the ghost girl into a renewed relationship between her sister and the heroine. Voice is different from the other teenage-girl films. Here there is an investigation: now herself a ghost, Young-eon, like Sam in Ghost, wants to know why she was killed. Eccentrically, she is in fact guided by her killer, another ghost. But during the investigation disturbing facts emerge about Young-eon herself. As in The Others – and perhaps The Sixth Sense – the ghost world we are now in reveals sinister secrets about the protagonist. This reinforces the link between the ghost world and the unconscious: in the former, as in the latter, the secrets of the protagonist are already known. Although its hero is not a ghost, Sakebi is oddly similar, supporting the idea that the film is like an expressionist rendering of the world of a man on the verge of psychosis.

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The Sixth Sense was seminal primarily in the aesthetic sense: it demonstrated that a ghost melodrama could be highly successful without resorting to horror tropes or a plethora of special effects. Its plot premise was nevertheless anticipated in Carnival of Souls and its influence thematically apparent in The Others and Ovunque sei. These four films have an oblique relationship to the more usual investigative structure because, although we may not realise this at first, it is the protagonist him or herself who is the hidden problem, since he or she is really a ghost. Again Sakebi, too, has this narrative premise: the hero is the real problem, and the ghostly happenings are designed to bring this out. Revenants introduce a different thematic thread, one which focuses on the seduction of susceptible men, as in Ghost Story, The Discarnates, Haunted and Histoire de Marie et Julien. But although the hero may be bewitched by the revenant, there is necessarily a fatal flaw in their relationship – after all, the heroine is dead. Since the revenant usually wants the hero to die for her, her intentions tend to emerge in ways that refer, albeit obliquely, to death. In Ghost Story, she goes into a trance and her body becomes cold; in The Discarnates, the hero discovers through his mirror reflection that he is rapidly ageing; in Haunted, the house itself becomes funereal. Of these four films, only Histoire de Marie et Julien contrives a happy ending, with the heroine returning to life. Some of the films don’t seem to fit the dominant patterns. Although the backstory in The Shining concerns both psychopathic masculinity and the abuse of children, the film does not really have an investigative figure. The ghosts would seem to be produced by the hotel out of the inner world of the hero and be functioning to induct him into their world. However, this is not dissimilar to what happens to the heroes in several of the revenant films, where seduction is a stage towards tempting the hero to die and join the revenant in the ghost world. Phone also seems rather different. Here the investigative heroine could perhaps have her own hidden agenda in relation to the film’s family, an agenda the ghost acts to further. Nevertheless, Phone also belongs to a small but significant subgroup of ghost melodramas, those in which heterosexual desire erupts into ‘an already firmly established social order’, here the family. In looking at this subgroup, I would also like to compare the films, where possible, to melodramas with a similar plot but without a ghost – a comparison which enables the effect of introducing a ghost into the narrative to be interrogated. The other ghost films in this subgroup are Ghost Story, Stir of Echoes, What Lies Beneath, The Gift and The Grudge. The Marsh, with its

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implicitly paedophilic murder, should also be noted. In all these films, heterosexual desire leads to violence, and a young woman or girl is killed – and becomes a ghost. For Phone, a suitable non-ghost film with a similar murder plot is La femme infidèle (Claude Chabrol, France/Italy, 1968). In Phone, a wife secretly murders her husband’s mistress; in La femme infidèle, a husband secretly murders his wife’s lover. In both cases, the betrayed spouse meets the mistress/lover with no apparent thought of violence, but matters get out of hand and murder abruptly occurs. Both spouses then go to great lengths to conceal the bodies. Of course, Phone also includes a crucial extra character: the heroine Ji-won, who finally uncovers the affair, if not the murderer. Nevertheless, without a ghost, La femme infidèle relies on a (here background) police investigation to bring to light first the affair, then the murderer. Melodrama resides mainly in the tensions introduced into the family by the husband’s guilt and the wife’s distress at the sudden disappearance of her lover. The ghost’s interventions in Phone heighten the melodrama, introducing anxiety and conflict directly into the family home. It is similar with other films in this subgroup for which comparable non-ghost films may be found, e.g. What Lies Beneath, which may be linked with Rebecca through the husband’s responsibility for killing a mistress/previous wife, or Stir of Echoes, which may be linked with The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls 1949) through the crucial intervention of a parent to dispose of the incriminating body. A number of points may be made. First, the victims in the ghost melodramas – all women or children – are usually more sympathetic than those in the non-ghost films. Here the ghosts speak for young women whose sexuality threatened the family or the community, and who were then brutally silenced by murder or manslaughter. Again we can see a feminist thrust to the films. Second, the ghosts act directly as the return of the repressed. In both Rebecca and The Reckless Moment, the return of the repressed operates through displacement – in the former, through the ghost-like Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson) and the discovery of Rebecca’s body; in the latter, through the arrival of a blackmailer (see Walker 1982b: 58-60). In What Lies Beneath and Stir of Echoes, the ghost itself appears in the family home. The forceful intervention of the ghost as the return of the repressed is not of course confined to this subgroup. In all those ghost melodramas where the bodies are concealed – plastered into walls, buried in the woods, or dumped in local ponds, lakes, swamps or wells – the ghosts return to bear

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witness to the hidden secrets of the family or community – or, in No-Do, the Catholic Church. Third, although the killing (in The Reckless Moment, the body disposal) in the non-ghost films results in guilt and anxiety, in the ghost melodramas the ghost’s intervention has physical as well as emotional consequences. In particular, with thematic suggestiveness, the ghost inhibits sex. Thus the old men of the Chowder Society in Ghost Story seem sexually repressed and emotionally frozen, and they tell each other stories about death. The young couples in Stir of Echoes and Phone find their lovemaking interrupted by ghostly manifestations, a motif also found in In Dreams. Although, except for the special case of revenants, sex is in fact relatively rare in the films of the cycle, once a ghost has made an appearance, sex usually stops completely. The effect of ghosts on the living is visceral, which is why possession and troubled dreams play such a significant role across the films. Fourth, in keeping with the general thrust of the ghost melodramas, the ghosts are seeking their own resolution. In the non-ghost films, this matter is handed over to the law, but the law can be deceived, and events may be resolved contrary to the presumed wishes of the dead person, as in Rebecca. Ghosts are more demanding, and in these films they continue until their killers have been dealt with. Patterns also occur in the types of ghost. In the Spanish films, and all the later British examples, child ghosts dominate. In the former, this would seem to be an allusion to the ‘disappeared’ of Franco’s Spain: in their innocence, the children stand in for the multiplicity of past political victims. In the latter, the reference would seem to be to more contemporary cultural undercurrents, mentioned in the conclusion to Chapter 18. Again, these undercurrents embody a political critique. The South Korean ghosts, too, have a closely defined identity. Except for Into the Mirror, where the ghost is of a young woman in her twenties, all the ghosts are of teenage girls. Although this highlights the sexuality in the Korean films – lesbianism in the girls’ high school films; heterosexuality in Phone – it is invariably an unhappy sexuality. Two heroines who do receive happy endings – Ji-won in Phone; her namesake in Ryeong – would seem to be protected by their celibacy. A Blood Pledge is the only Korean film to give a sexual heroine a happy ending, but her heterosexual liaison has been deemed a mistake and will not continue. The troubled – often ghost-induced – dream sequences show with particular clarity how the typically Freudian sexual dream material has been displaced by anxieties about murder and death. Jack’s dream of slaughtering his family in The Shining; the men of the Chowder Society’s dreams about

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Eva’s death in Ghost Story; Frankie’s dream of his mother’s funeral in Lady in White – these early examples established a pattern that echoes through the films of the cycle. In The Gift, Annie dreams she herself is being strangled. In Dark Water (2002), Yoshimi dreams of Mitsuko on the day she died. In Inner Senses, Jim dreams of Siu Yu’s funeral. In Gothika, Miranda dreams of slaughtering her husband. In Into the Mirror, Woo dreams repeatedly of his partner’s murder. In Bhoot, Vishal dreams his wife Swati stabs him. In The Disappeared, Matthew dreams of being buried alive. The subtextual undercurrents suggested by the dreams in these films are overwhelmingly about violence and death. Again a psychoanalytical approach to the narrative of the films would seem to bear fruit. The primary traumatic event and/or the protagonist’s personal past traumatic event (where applicable) are like founding traumas, which have to be worked through in the narrative, again as in therapy. The dreams of the characters are repeatedly like echoes of one or the other of those events, sometimes referring to it explicitly, sometimes obliquely, by displacement. It is for that reason the dreams almost invariably highlight violence. Tom’s hallucinations in Stir of Echoes serve a similar purpose. Moreover, with the ghost-induced dreams, it is again as though the ghost itself is implicated in this working through, as it seeks resolution in some form. In The Secret of Crickley Hall, both Eve and Lili are subjected to ghost-induced dreams from the night of the primary traumatic event, and each set of dreams are angled to express, in a coded form, the ghost children’s wish to be freed. Another recurring feature of the films that pointedly excludes sex is the ‘key montage’, found at its most developed in Chakushin ari, The Dark and Fragile. The earliest example I can recall of the elaborated form of this montage is at the climax of Liebestraum (Mike Figgis 1991), where (a) it cuts between two locations and two time periods, and (b) it reveals crucial new information about the past traumatic event and simultaneously echoes that event in the present. But although the montage includes no less than three deaths, sex is also an absolutely crucial ingredient in the cross-cutting (see Walker 2005b: 152-153). But in none of the examples in the ghost melodramas is sex an element in the montage. Nevertheless, it is striking that Liebestraum should provide an earlier example of the montage: Liebestraum is in key respects like a ghost melodrama, with a seemingly haunted derelict department store. A number of major motifs have also emerged. Water and rain occur across the films in a wide range of different manifestations. As well as ghosts being repeatedly linked to water, there are also many scenes in which the

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immersion of the protagonist in water leads to a glimpse of the ghost world. There are also some more developed examples in which a drenching in water connects a figure entering a house quite precisely to a ghost. In a number of ghost melodramas, water can seem like an interface to the ghost world. The bath is a linked motif. Ghosts appear in baths from The Changeling onwards, and in The Ring Two, it is implied that the bath offers direct access to the ghost world of the well. Heroines have ghostly dreams in baths in What Lies Beneath and Ryeong; running or taking a bath in Stir of Echoes, The Gift, Phone, Inner Senses and The Awakening prompts ghostly manifestations. There are ghost-induced suicides in baths in The Ring and Solstice, and a ghost-induced murder in one in Sakebi. Showers, however, are different. Although we would expect a shower, with its falling water, to be more like rain and thus ‘summon’ the ghost, it is only rarely that this occurs: Ju-on, Gothika and Chakushin ari. In general, ghosts much prefer baths – no doubt because of their womb-like associations. Mirrors, closets, lifts, doors and televisions also form part of the iconography of the ghost melodramas. Ghosts often (first) appear in mirrors – a motif that perhaps began in Japanese narratives but is now widespread. Closets provide access to ghost zones, such as the attics in The Changeling and Ju-on. Lifts are the site of ghostly events in East Asian films in particular. A door mysteriously opening in front of someone is a standard signifier of ghostly activity; likewise doors which mysteriously lock and unlock suggest ghosts are guiding characters in the direction they wish them to go. In Gothika, the ghost girl even responds to a request to open a prison door. Ghosts can indeed manipulate thresholds such that a peephole in a door can reveal someone who isn’t there, as in Ju-On and The Grudge. More rarely, these iconographic elements can function as portals to a ghost world: mirrors in Into the Mirror, a closet in El orfanato, the lift in Dark Water (2002) and Voice, a door in The Marsh and televisions in Ringu and The Ring Two. Photographs, videos and home movies in the films are, like dreams, almost invariably charged with intimations of death. Even children’s drawings have similar resonances, since they typically either show ghosts (El orfanato; Genova) or are haunted by imagery that focuses on the darkness associated with the ghost (The Ring). A particularly poignant example occurs in Dark Water (2002), where the children in the kindergarten have done crayon drawings of Mitsuko with her red Kitty bag, asking her to come back to them. In The Woman in Black (2011), a ghost boy communicates through his mother, getting her to draw pictures for Arthur – in one case, a hanging woman; in another, a warning of death. In The Sixth Sense,

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Cole mentions that his violent drawings – representations of scenes he had witnessed – led to staff meetings and the summoning to school of his mother, and now he draws dogs and rainbows. But the aggression of the ghosts is still in evidence in the words he has written on sheets of paper in his bedroom. The ghost world can sometimes seethe with violence, and children are often the figures most sensitive to such undercurrents. At the same time, the primitive quality of the drawings also suggests inchoate forms of the unconscious. Across the films, again and again links and correspondences can be drawn – some of them surprising. The ghost melodrama may not be a recognised generic area, but it can clearly be shown to have the ingredients of one. All that is really necessary for a scary ghost film is a suitably scary ghost. Nevertheless, from this basic concept there has emerged a rich cycle of films which has probably not yet exhausted itself. With its corpus of typical characters, characteristic narrative patterns, resonant themes and motifs, stylistic tropes and underlying ideological concerns, the ghost melodrama is one of the most fascinating film cycles to have emerged in the 21st century.



Filmography

Listed here are all the ghost films, films with ghost elements, and the TV ghost films and mini-series cited in the text. The listing is chronological by year but alphabetical within each year. Spaces mark out (1) very approximate ghost film eras before the late 20th /early 21st century ghost melodrama cycle, then (2) the chronological distribution of films within the cycle. Out Yonder (Ralph Ince, US, 1919) Topper (Norman Z. McLeod, US, 1937) The Ghost Breakers (George Marshall, US, 1940) Curse of the Cat People (Gunther V. Fritsch & Robert Wise, US, 1944) The Halfway House (Basil Dearden, GB, 1944) The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, US, 1944) Dead of Night (Albert Cavalcanti et al., GB, 1945) A Place of One’s Own (Bernard Knowles, GB, 1945) Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, US, 1949) Orphée (Jean Cocteau, France, 1950) Ugetsu monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1953) Kaidan Kasanegafuchi/The Ghost of Kasane Swamp (Nobuo Nakagawa, Japan, 1957) Borei kaibyo yashiki/The Mansion of the Ghost Cat (Nobuo Nakagawa, Japan, 1958) Madhumati (Bimal Roy, India, 1958) Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan/The Yotsuya Ghost Story (Nobuo Nakagawa, Japan, 1959) The Innocents (Jack Clayton, GB, 1961) Carnival of Souls (Heck Harvey, US, 1962) The Haunting (Robert Wise, US, 1963) Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, Japan, 1964) Yotsuya kaidan/Illusion of Blood/The Yotsuya Ghost Story (Shiro Toyoda, Japan, 1965) Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo, Japan, 1968) Whistle and I’ll Come to You (Jonathan Miller, short TV film, GB, 1968) Seidan botan-doro/Hellish Love (Chusei Sone, Japan, 1972) Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, GB, 1973)

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The Legend of Hell House (John Hough, GB, 1973) Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Jacques Rivette, France, 1974) Cria cuervos (Carlos Saura, Spain, 1975) Ai no borei/ Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima, Japan, 1976) Hausu/House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, Japan, 1977) The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, US, 1979) The Changeling (Peter Medak, Canada, 1979) The Fog (John Carpenter, US, 1979) The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, GB, 1980) Ghost Story (John Irvin, US, 1981) The Watcher in the Woods (John Hough, US, 1981) Kiss Me Goodbye (Robert Mulligan, US, 1982) Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, US, 1982) Bez końka/No End (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Poland, 1984) A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, US, 1984) Mr. Vampire (Ricky Lau, Hong Kong, 1985) A Chinese Ghost Story (Ching Siu Tung, Hong Kong, 1987) Rouge (Stanley Kwan, Hong Kong, 1987) Ijintachi tono natsu/The Discarnates (Nobuhiko Obayashi, Japan, 1988) High Spirits (Neil Jordan, US, 1988) Lady in White (Frank LaLoggia, US, 1988) Always (Steven Spielberg, US, 1989) The Woman in Black (Herbert Wise, TV film, UK, 1989) Ghost (Jerry Zucker, US, 1990) Ghost Dad (Sidney Poitier, US, 1990) Ming Ghost (Qui Gangjian, Hong Kong, 1990) Truly, Madly, Deeply (Anthony Minghella, UK, 1990) Futari/Us Two (Nobuhiko Obayashi, Japan, 1991) Liebestraum (Mike Figgis, US, 1991) Candyman (Bernard Rose, US, 1992) Ghostwatch (Lesley Manning, TV film, UK, 1992) Heart and Souls (Ron Underwood, US, 1993) Riget/The Kingdom (Lars von Trier & Morten Arnfred, TV mini-series, Denmark, 1994) Casper (Brad Silberling, US, 1995) Haunted (Lewis Gilbert, UK/ US, 1995) Kanzenban (Chisui Takagawa, TV film, Japan, 1995) The Frighteners (Peter Jackson, New Zealand/ US, 1996)

Filmogr aphy

441

Riget II/The Kingdom II (Lars von Trier & Morten Arnfred, TV mini-series, Denmark, 1997) Kokkuri-san/Kokkuri (Takahisa Zeze, Japan, 1997) In Dreams (Neil Jordan, US, 1998) Rasen/The Spiral (Joji Iida, Japan, 1998) Ringu/Ring (Hideo Nakata, Japan, 1998) Yeogo goedam/Whispering corridors (Park Ki-Hyeong, South Korea, 1998) The Haunting (Jan de Bont, US, 1999) House on Haunted Hill (William Malone, US, 1999) The Ring Virus (Kim Dong-Bin, South Korea, 1999) Ringu 2/Ring 2 (Hideo Nakata, Japan, 1999) The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, US, 1999) Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, US, 1999) Sleepy Hollow (Tim Burton, US/Germany, 1999) Yeogo goedam 2/Memento Mori (Kim Tae-yong & Min Kyu-dong, South Korea, 1999) The Gift (Sam Raimi, US, 2000) Ring 0: Birthday (Norio Tsuruta, Japan, 2000) What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, US, 2000) El espinazo del diabolo/The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, Spain/Mexico, 2001) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Christopher Columbus, US/UK, 2001) Kairo/Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2001) Los otros/The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, Spain/ US, 2001) Below (David Twohy, US, 2002) Dragonfly (Tom Shadyac, US/Germany, 2002) Honogurai mizu no soko kara/Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, Japan, 2002) Inner Senses (Lo Chi-leung, Hong Kong, 2002) Ju-on/Ju-on: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, Japan, 2002) Pon/Phone (Ahn Byung-ki, South Korea, 2002) The Ring (Gore Verbinski, US, 2002) Bhoot/Ghost (Ram Gopal Varma, India, 2003)

442 

Modern Ghost Melodr amas

Geoul sokeru/Into the Mirror (Kim Sung-ho, South Korea, 2003) Gothika (Mathieu Kassovitz, US, 2003) Histoire de Marie et Julien (Jacques Rivette, France, 2003) Midsommer (Carsten Myllerup, Denmark, 2003) Yeogo goedam 3/Wishing Stairs (Yun Jae-yeon, South Korea, 2003) L’a more ritorna/Love Returns (Sergio Rubini, Italy, 2004) Chakushin ari/One Missed Call (Takashi Miike, Japan, 2004) The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, US, 2004) Non ti muovere/Don’t move (Sergio Castellitto, Italy/Spain/UK, 2004) Ovunque sei/Wherever You Are (Michele Placido, Italy, 2004) Ryeong/The Ghost/Dead Friend (Kim Tae-kyoung, South Korea, 2004) Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital (Craig R. Baxley, TV mini-series, US, 2004) The Amityville Horror (Andrew Douglas, US, 2005) Chakushin ari 2 (Renpei Tsukamoto, Japan, 2005) The Dark (John Fawcett, UK/Germany, 2005) Dark Water (Walter Salles, US, 2005) Frágiles/Fragile (Jaume Balagueró, Spain/UK, 2005) Just Like Heaven (Mark Waters, US, 2005) The Ring Two (Hideo Nakata, US, 2005) Yeogo goedam 4/Voice (Choi Equan, South Korea, 2005) Half Light (Craig Rosenberg, Germany/US, 2006) The Marsh (Jordan Barker, Canada/US, 2006) El orfanato/The Orphanage (J. A. Bayona, Spain, 2006) The Messengers (Danny & Oxide Pang, US/Canada, 2006) Pulse (Jim Sonzero, US/South Africa, 2006) Sakebi/Retribution (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2006) One Missed Call (Eric Valette, Germany/US/Japan, 2007) Solstice (Dan Myrick, US, 2007) The Disappeared (Johnny Kevorkian, UK, 2008) Genova (Michael Winterbottom, UK/Cayman Islands, 2008) Mirrors (Alexandre Aja, US, 2008) The Haunting in Connecticut (Peter Cornwell, US/Canada, 2009) The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson, US/New Zealand/UK, 2009)

Filmogr aphy

443

No-Do/The Haunting (Elio Quiroga, Spain, 2009) Yeogo goedam 5/A Blood Pledge (Lee Jong-yong, South Korea, 2009) Charlie St. Cloud (Burr Steers, US/Japan, 2010) The Awakening (Nick Murphy, UK/France, 2011) Dream House (Jim Sheridan, US, 2011) The Innkeepers (Ti West, US, 2011) The Woman in Black (James Watkins, UK/US/Canada/Sweden, 2011) Muirhouse (Tanzeal Rahim, Australia, 2012) Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, US, 2012) The Secret of Crickley Hall (Joe Ahearne, TV mini-series, UK, 2012) The Conjuring (James Wan, US, 2013) Mama (Andy Muschietti, Canada/Spain/US, 2013) Remember Me (Ashley Pearce, TV mini-series, UK, 2014) The Woman in Black: Angel of Death (Tom Harper, UK/US/Canada, 2014)



Illustrations

Copyright of the frames used for the illustrations rests with either the production companies or the distributors of the DVD. Buena Vista Home Entertainment Inc. (The Sixth Sense, Dragonfly & The Others). Casteleo Productions SA/ Just Films SL Ute (Fragile). Chakushin-ari Film Partners (Chakushin ari). CJ Entertainment Inc. (Voice). Document Security Systems Inc. (Lady in White). Dreamworks LLC (In Dreams, The Ring & The Ring Two). Filmko Pictures Ltd. (Bhoot). Home Box Office Inc. (The Changeling). Impact Pictures LLC (The Dark). Ju-On Film Partners (Ju-on). Lakeshore Entertainment Corp. (The Gift). Momentum Pictures (The Woman in Black). Optimum Releasing Ltd., now Studio Canal UK (The Devil’s Backbone, Ryeong & El orfanato). Sakebi Film Partners (Sakebi). Scanbox Entertainment Ltd. (No-Do). Shochiku Company (The Discarnates). Spark Worldwide Ltd. (Bhoot). Studio Canal Ltd. (The Awakening). Tartan Video (Ringu, Ringu 2, Memento Mori, Phone, Dark Water [2002], Whispering Corridors & Into the Mirror). Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Inc. (Stir of Echoes & What Lies Beneath). Universal Studios (Ghost Story & Haunted). Urban Vision Entertainment (Kokkuri). Warner Home Video (The Shining). Warner Bros Entertainment Inc. & Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. (Gothika). We regret if any copyright holders have been overlooked, and, if notified, will make amendments in the second addition.



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452 

Modern Ghost Melodr amas

Walker, Michael (1993) ‘Melodramatic Narrative: Orphans of the Storm and The Searchers’, CineAction 31, Spring-Summer, 62-73. Walker, Michael (2005a) Hitchcock’s Motifs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Walker, Michael (2005b) ‘A Hollywood Art Film: Liebestraum’ in Gibbs, John & Douglas Pye (Eds.) Style and meaning: Studies in the detailed analysis of film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 141-154. Walker, Michael (2006-07) ‘Hitchcockian Narrative: A Provisional Structural Model’ in Hitchcock Annual 15, 122-163. Walsh, Andrea S. (1984) Women’s Film and Female Experience 1940-1950. New York: Praeger. Wee, Valerie (2014) Japanese Horror Films and Their American Remakes. London: Routledge. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew (2004) ‘Introduction: The Spectral Turn’ in Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew (Ed.) Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 3-17. Weisser, Thomas & Yuko Mihara Weisser (1997): Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction Films. Miami, FL: Vital Books. Wetmore, Kevin J. (2012) Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema. New York: Continuum. White, Eric (2005) ‘Case Study: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Ringu 2’ in Jay McRoy (Ed.) Japanese Horror Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 38-47. White, Patricia (1991) ‘Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting’ in Fuss, Diana (Ed.) Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York: Routledge, 142-172. Wiles, Mary M. (2012) Jacques Rivette. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press. Wilson, William (1980) ‘Riding the Crest of the Horror Craze’, New York Times Magazine, 11 May. Quoted in Hoile, Christopher (1984): ‘The Uncanny and the Fairy Tale in Kubrick’s The Shining’, Literature/ Film Quarterly Vol. 12 ,No.1, 5-12. Wood, Alan and Mary Seaton Wood ([1955] 1969) Islands in Danger. London: New English Library. Wood, Bari (1994) Doll’s Eyes. London: HarperCollins. Wood, Robin (1977) ‘Ideology, Genre, Auteur’, Film Comment Vol. 13, No. 1, Jan./Feb., 46-51. Reprinted in Mast, Gerald, Cohen, Marshall & Leo Braudy (Eds.) (1992) Film Theory and Criticism, Fourth Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 475-485. Wood, Robin (1979) ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’ in Wood, Robin & Richard Lippe (Eds.) The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 7-28. Reprinted in Nichols, Bill (Ed.) (1985) Movies and Methods Volume II. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 195-220. Wood, Robin (1985) ‘Cat and Dog: Lewis Teague’s Stephen King Movies’, CineAction! No. 2, Fall, 39-45. Yamada, Taichi (1987) Ijintachi tono natsu. Tokyo: Shinchosha. Translated as ([2003] 2006) Strangers. London: Faber and Faber. Zhang, Yingjin & Zhiwei Xiao (1998) Encyclopedia of Chinese Film. London: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj (1992) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT.



Index

With films, page numbers in bold mark the main discussion for that film. With motifs, themes and tropes, italicised page numbers indicate where the feature is discussed. 9/11 212-213, Fig. 26 Abraham, Karl 397 Abre los ojos (A. Amenábar 1997) 194, 332 Accorsi, Stefano 330 Addy, Mark 414 Ahearne, Joe 24, 405-414, 443 Ahn Byung-Ki 30, 221-228, 441 Akimoto, Yasushi 235 Akiyoshi, Kumiko 72, Fig. 6 Aldrich, Robert 192 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (L. Carroll novel) 139 Alien3 (D. Fincher 1992) 299 Aliens (J. Cameron 1986) 27 All That Heaven Allows (D. Sirk 1955) 101 Allen, Keith 200, Fig. 24 Allen, Lewis 12, 439 Alexander, Jane 206 Almodóvar, Augustin 187 Almodóvar, Pedro 187 alter ego 136, 157, 172, 184, 228, 268, 272-273, 283, 284, 298, 342, 364, 366, 431. See also double Always (S. Spielberg 1989) 16, 65, 78, 81-84, 104, 134, 139, 175, 440 Amenábar, Alejandro 11, 193-202, 441 Ames, Kenner 259 Amiel, Jon 242 Amityville Horror, The (S. Rosenberg 1979) 14, 417, 440 Amityville Horror, The (A. Douglas 2005) 417, 442 amnesia 171, 258, 301, 311, 313, 314, 315, 338, 339, 340, 342, 343, 392, 431 amore ritorna, L’ (S. Rubini 2004) 328, 329-330, 335, 442 Amuka-Bird, Nikki 383 Anaya, Elena 298 Anderson, Judith 434 Andersson, Harriet 208 Andrews, Anthony 85 Angel (E. Lubitsch 1937) 147 Angel Eyes (L. Mandoki 2001) 181, 182 Anwar, Gabrielle 257 Aoshima, Saki 132, Figs. 15, 16 Arias Navarro, Carlos 363 Arnfred, Morten 288-292, 440

Arnolfini Marriage, The (van Eyck painting) 281 Aronofsky, Darren 217 Asherson, Renée 197, Fig. 24 Ashley, Mike 16 Ashmore, Shawn 422 Astaire, Fred 54 Audition (T. Miike 1999) 211-212, 238 Aviles, Rick 79 Awakening, The (N. Murphy 2011) 43, 386-395, 410, 411, 413, 428, 431, 437, 443, Figs. 45, 46, 47 Baby Doll (E. Kazan 1956) 392 Back Jong-hak 138 Bacon Kevin 105, Fig. 11 Bailey Jr, Robert 182 Baker, Simon 214 Balagueró, Jaume 292-299, 442 Balawi, Beans 256 Balmain, Colette 12, 29, 30, 74, 116, 125, 128, 231, 237, 426 Balsam, Martin 424 Ban, Daisuke 117 Banerjee, Victor 317 Baquero, Ivana 295 Barker, Jordan 257, 442 Barrie, J.M. 363, 373 Barton, Mischa 97 Bassett, Linda 91 Bates, Kathy 183 bath, bathroom, cistern 21, 27-28, 30, 37, 39, 43, 48, 51, 55-56, 57, 62, 101-102, 105, 106, 109, 127, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 157, 160, 161, 170, 172, 173-176, 179, 188-193, 208, 214, 216, 224, 227, 240, 248, 249, 251, 253, 255, 286, 305, 312, 343, 353, 364, 366, 367, 387, 393, 419, 430, 437, Figs. 1, 2, 16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 28. See also shower Batista, Max 294 Bayona, J.A. 11, 363-375, 442 Bean, Sean 151 Béart, Emmanuelle 323, 324-325 Beckinsale, Kate 86 Beckoning, The (E. Quiroga 2009). See No-Do Beethoven, Ludwig von 225, 226 Behr, Jason 233 Bell, Book and Candle (R. Quine 1958) 325, 326

454  Bella, Rachael 203 Belle de Jour (L. Buñuel 1967) 392 Bello, Maria 150 Below (D. Twohy 2002) 217-220, 261, 285, 415, 429, 441 Belson, Jerry 81 Bening, Annette 149 Benn, Krystal 154 Bentivoglio, Fabrizio 329 Bentley, James 194 Benton, Robert 89 Bergman, Ingmar 208-209 Bernhardt, Curtis 156 Berry, Halle 300, Fig. 37 Bettelheim, Bruno 45 Bez końka. See No End Bhoot (R. G. Varma 2003) 315, 316-322, 428, 436, 441, Fig. 39 Bigger than Life (N. Ray 1956) 109 Binoche, Juliette 181 Bion, W.R. 347 Birds, The (A. Hitchcock 1963) 416 Biswas, Seema 316 Black, Art 146, 147, 263, 264 Black Narcissus (M. Powell & E. Pressburger 1947) 101 Blackwelder, Rob 195 Blake, Linnie 207 Blanchett, Cate 177 Blind Chance (K. Kieslowski 1982) 358 blood 17, 25, 30, 44, 46, 49, 50-51, 52, 76-77, 136, 141, 156, 160, 178, 206, 222, 229, 231, 232, 235, 244, 252, 263, 268, 276, 277, 284, 289, 293, 298, 302, 377, 393, 416, 419 Blood Pledge, A (Lee Jong-Yong 2009) 261, 262, 275-277, 432, 435, 443 Blue Velvet (D. Lynch 1986) 288 Bobulova, Barbara 330 Boehm, Carl 306 Bogdanovich, Peter 372 Boira, Francisco 375 Bone Collector, The (P. Noyce 1999) 242 Bonitzer, Pascal 323 Borei kaibyo yashiki. See Mansion of the Ghost Cat, The Borzage, Frank 81 Botan-Doro (story) 74 Botet, Javier 423, 424 Bourne film series 340 Bower, Tom 70 Bragge, Lea 291 Brandenburg, Otto 289  Braund, Simon 20 Briggs, Julia 25 Britton, Andrew 256 Brochet, Anne 323 Broderick, Mick 426-427 Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith 1919) 104 Brontë, Charlotte 43

Modern Ghost Melodr amas

Brooks, Jacqueline 59 Brooks, Katherine 140 Brooks, Peter 32-33, 227, 359 Brown, Norman O. 33, 57, 175, 252, 253, 413 Brute Force (J. Dassin 1947) 299 Buddha, Buddhism 144, 146, 428, 429 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (F. R. Kuzui 1992) 262 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series) 262 Bunnell, Charlene 24 Buñuel, Luis 228, 392 Burns, Helen 38 Burton, Tim 17, 441 Buse, Peter 41 Cameron, James 27, 81, 120 Camp, Brandon 182 Candyman (B. Rose 1992) 15, 114, 245, 428, 440 Cariou, Len 69 Carnival of Souls (H. Harvey 1962) 13, 28, 317, 433, 439 Caron, Leslie 325 Carpenter, John 13, 38, 440 Carrie (B. De Palma 1976) 27, 55, 139, 215, 262 Carroll, Lewis 139 Carroll, Noël 13 Carula, Montserrat 364 Casares, Francisco 375 Casares, Maria 30 Casas, Oscar 366 Casper (B. Silberling 1995) 257, 440 Cassidy, Elaine 195 Castellitto, Sergio 328-329, 442 ‘Casting the Runes’ (M.R. James story) 111 Castle, William 17 Catholic, Catholicism. See Christian Cavalluzzi, Carla 329 Caviezel, Jim 181 Cayo, Fernando 364, Fig. 43 Céline et Julie vont au bateau (J. Rivette 1974) 139, 141, 324, 327, 440 Cepa, Miriam 375 Cervera, Karmeta 295 Cettl, Robert 155 Cha Ye-ryun 269 Chabrol, Claude 434 Chakushin ari (T. Miike 2004) 31, 161, 229, 235-245, 251, 252, 254, 295, 296, 297, 342, 344, 345, 347, 348, 368, 373, 378, 392, 394, 416, 424, 427, 428, 430, 436, 437, 442, Fig. 31 Chakushin ari 2 (R. Tsukamoto 2005) 239, 244, 442 Chamberlin, Mark 58 Changeling, The (P. Medak 1979) 11, 13, 18, 24, 27-29, 31, 37-43, 48, 53, 54, 62, 65, 67, 102, 105, 132, 139, 149, 161, 181, 200-201, 208, 242, 251, 340, 366, 368, 374, 394, 408, 422, 430, 431, 437, 400, Fig. 1 Chaplin, Geraldine 368, 384

Index

Charlie St. Cloud (B. Steers 2010) 418-421, 443 Charpentier, Megan 423 Chase, Daveigh 204 Chase, The (A. Penn 1966) 71 Chastain, Jessica 423 Cheung, Leslie 309, 310 child(hood) abuse 19, 96, 100, 149, 153-154, 164, 177, 180, 214-215, 237, 238, 243, 245, 292, 296, 406, 407, 411, 413, 433 children’s drawings 197, 212-213, 225, 293, 294, 365, 371, 372, 385, 403, 423, 437-438, Fig. 26. children’s games 85, 126, 131-132, 142, 339, 340, 363-364, 365, 368, 369-371, 387, 390. See also hide-and-seek Children’s Hour, The (W. Wyler 1961) 140 Chim, Hugo 310 Chinese Ghost Story, A (Ching Siu Tung 1987) 309, 440 Choate, Tim 58 Choi Jinhee 147 Choi Ji-yeon 221 Choi Min-sung 276 Choi Ran 345 Choi Se-yeon 264, Fig. 33 Choi Woo-jae 221 Christensen, Laura 290 Christian (including Catholic, Protestant) 22, 122, 145-146, 185, 194-196, 199, 262, 265, 275, 306, 345, 363, 375-381, 412-413, 428-429, 435, Fig. 44 Christie, Julie 374 Christmas, Eric 38 Chu, Emily 309 Chun, Kimberly 187 Ciment, Michel 53 Cixous, Hélène 32 Clarke, Roger 21, 28, 292, 327 Clayton, Jack 12, 439 Climbié, Victoria 413 Clooney, George 181, 210 closet, cupboard 37-38, 51, 52, 97, 229, 232, 234, 237-239, 258, 344, 371, 374, 391-392, 406, 410, 411, 423, 437, Fig. 47 Clover, Carol J. 27, 39, 123, 424 Cochran, Shannon 205 Cocteau, Jean 30, 439 Coen, Joel 327 Cohen, Lawrence D. 55 Cohu, Lucy 391 Cole, Gary 177 Colette, Toni 97 Colicos, John 40 Collins, Wilkie 43 Colomé, Hector 375 Columbus, Chris 399, 441 Combs, Richard 45 Comer, Jodie 414 Company of Wolves (N. Jordan 1984) 119

455 Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (S. Sugarman 2004) 262 Conjuring, The (J. Wan 2013) 417-418, 443 Connelly, Jennifer 254 Conquering Power, The (R. Ingram 1921) 192 Contarello, Umberto 330 Cooke, Olivia 405 Cooper, Gary 192 Cope, Zachary David 105 Copycat (J. Amiel 1995) 242 Cord, Erik 177 Coriat, Laurence 384 corpse, body, skeleton (linked to ghost) 29-30, 39, 56, 59-62, 108, 112, 118, 126, 128, 141-142, 174, 176, 177, 178, 188, 209, 219, 221-223, 228, 234-235, 240, 248, 255, 260, 266, 272, 281, 283, 290-291, 302-303, 338-340, 345-346, 351, 357, 371-372, 384, 401, 403-404, 410, 420, 422, 424, 428, Figs. 35, 40 Coster-Waldau, Nicolaj 423 Costner, Kevin 182 Cox, Brian 206 Craig, Daniel 418 Craven, Wes 15, 440 Creed, Barbara 27, 230 Crew, Amanda 421 Cria Cuervos (C. Saura 1975) 384-386, 440 Crick, Robert A. 66 Crimson Rivers, The. See Rivières pourpres, Les Croker, Jon 405 Crothers, Scatman 44 Cruise-Wagner Productions 194 Cruz, Penélope 300, 328 Cukor, George 256 Curse of the Cat People (G.V. Fritsch & R. Wise 1944) 16, 439 Curtis, Barry 14-15, 37, 287, 343 Cusick, Henry Ian 256 Daira, Minako 235 Darabont, Frank 299 Dark, The (J. Fawcett 2005) 28, 29, 35, 149-163, 195, 216, 217, 241, 260, 274, 327, 355, 366, 367, 369, 373, 383, 395, 413, 427, 428, 436, 442, Fig. 19 Dark Water (K. Suzuki story) 247 Dark Water (H. Nakata 2002) 18, 27-30, 161, 216, 238, 247-254, 255, 266, 270-272, 338, 344, 416, 422, 426-428, 430, 431, 436, 437, 441, Fig. 32 Dark Water (W. Salles 2005) 18, 27-29, 31, 216, 247, 254-255, 426-428, 430, 431, 442 Dassin, Jules 299 Davies, Pixie 406 Davis, Bette 63 Davis, Hope 384 Davis, Matt 218 De Bont, Jan 17, 164-165, 441

456  De Caestecker, Ian 407 De Francovich, Massimo 332 De Leonardi, Giulia 330 De Lorde, André 14 De Mille, Cecil B. 331 De Palma, Brian 27, 105, 327 Dead Friend (Kim Tae-kyoung 2004). See Ryeong Dead of Night (A. Cavalcanti et al. 1945) 397, 439 Dead on Sight (R. Preuss 1994) 178 Dearden, Basil 12, 439 Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, The (B. Sherwood novel) 418, 419 death drive, death instincts 14, 22, 24, 32-34, 50, 108, 113, 118, 133-134, 136, 138, 159, 175, 252-253, 285, 312, 313, 314, 316, 325, 346, 359, 369-371, 388, 401, 419, 427, 432 Deep Impact (M. Leder 1998) 426 Del Toro, Guillermo 27, 187-193, 363, 423, 441 Delgado, Maria 363, 374 Delvaux, André 333 Demme, Jonathan 118 Denis, Claire 325 Deutsch, Howard 262 Devgan, Ajay 316 Devil’s Backbone, The (G. del Toro 2001) 27, 29, 31, 187-193, 201, 220, 229, 239, 282, 363, 375, 387, 392, 409, 427, 430, 441, Fig. 23 Diana, Princess 120-121, 212 Dickinson, Thorold 256 ‘Did you ever see a dream walking?’ (song) 66, 68, 69 Dieterle, William 257, 331, 439 Dinicol, Joe 258 Disappeared, The (J. Kevorkian 2008) 383384, 411, 413, 419, 420, 430, 436, 442 Discarnates, The (N. Obayashi 1988) 30, 31, 35, 65-66, 71-78, 81, 90, 268, 327, 341, 357, 433, 440, Figs. 6, 7 Disney, Walt 62, 70 Dmytryk, Edward 156 Doane, Mary Ann 256 Doll’s Eyes (B. Wood novel) 149, 153, 163, 178 Donner, Richard 111 Don’t Look Now (N. Roeg 1973) 133, 181, 374, 439 Don’t Move (M. Mazzantini novel) 328 Don’t Move. See Non ti muovere Dooley, Shaun 387, 399 door(s) 22, 24, 38, 40, 41, 44, 47, 48, 50-52, 62, 66, 67, 72, 76, 88, 89, 97, 101, 103, 109, 128-129, 133, 134, 139, 144, 145, 156, 162, 170, 173, 192, 196, 197, 198, 199, 208, 226, 230, 239, 240, 243, 251-252, 259, 260, 271-273, 281, 282, 294, 295, 299, 302, 312, 343, 351, 357, 364, 366, 367, 370, 371, 373, 391, 402, 437, Fig. 43 Dorfman, David 203, Fig. 28

Modern Ghost Melodr amas

double, doppelgänger 22, 25, 31, 130, 132, 133-134, 161, 176, 278-279, 281, 282, 283, 290, 299, 305, 325, 371-372. See also alter ego Douglas, Illeana 105 Douglas, Melvyn 39, 54 Dower, John 356 Dowie, Freda 294 Downey Jr, Robert 150, 302 Dragonfly (T. Shadyac 2002) 34, 169, 181-185, 287, 294, 346, 374, 388, 415, 430, 441, Fig. 22 Dream House (J. Sheridan 2011) 418-421, 443 dream, nightmare 22-23, 25-26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 45, 47, 48, 49, 54, 55, 59, 60-62, 66, 67, 78, 86, 88, 91, 98, 109, 116, 119, 133, 137, 150, 151, 152-153, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 162, 163, 172, 194, 195, 205, 207, 208, 214, 223-225, 228, 231, 244, 250, 254, 257-259, 278, 279, 293-295, 298, 301, 302, 306, 307, 313, 314, 317, 322, 325, 329, 332, 334, 338, 342, 343, 350, 352, 367, 376, 380, 383, 384, 391, 397, 406-408, 422, 423, 435-436, 437, Fig. 29 DreamWorks 175 Dreyfuss, Richard 81 Duelle (J. Rivette 1976) 324 Dunn, Kevin 106 Dutton, Charles S. 300, Fig. 37 Duvall, Shelley 44 Ebbe, Annevig Schelde 288 Eccleston, Christopher 194 Edel, Leon 23 Efron, Zak 418 electric light disturbance 20, 126, 143, 145, 218, 226, 301, 312. See also technological manipulation Elfyn, Richard 151 Eliade, Mircea 109 Eliot, George 85 Ellis, Tom 406 Elsaesser, Thomas 14, 146, 147, 256 Emmerich, Roland 426 Empire of Passion (N. Oshima 1976) 12, 408, 440 End of Days (P. Hyams 1999) 426 England, Peter 85 Englund, Robert 15 Epperson, Tom 177 Equan Choi 268-275, 442 Erbe, Kathryn 105 espinazo del diabolo, El. See Devil’s Backbone, The Eun Seo-woo 221 Exorcist, The (W. Friedkin 1973) 215, 216, 217, 253, 255, 295, 418, 429 Experiment Perilous (J. Tourneur 1944) 256 Eyck, Jan van 281 Eye, The (D. & O. Pang 2002) 415 Eyes of Laura Mars, The (I. Kershner 1978) 178

Index

Faculty, The (R. Rodriguez 1998) 262 Fairbanks Jr, Douglas 54 Fairley, Michelle 200 fairy tales, folk tales 22, 25, 45-46, 49, 51, 52, 71, 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 163, 297, 298, Fig. 18 fantôme de la liberté, Le (L. Buñuel 1974) 228 Farewell to Arms, A (F. Borzage 1932) 81 Farrow, Mia 38 Fawcett, John 28, 149-163, 442 Fear (R.S. O’Bannon 1990) 178 Femme Fatale (B. De Palma 2002) 327 femme infidèle, La (C. Chabrol 1968) 434 Ferenczi, Sándor 234 Fernandes, Miguel 60 Fiedler, Leslie 275 Figgis, Mike 436 Fincher, David 299 Finney, Albert 325 fire, flames 41-42, 61, 70, 71, 84-86, 90-91, 177, 212, 228, 235, 277, 279, 280, 286, 300-301, 303, 306-307, 380, 398, 416, Fig. 5 Firth, Colin 385 Flanagan, Fionnula 195 Fleder, Gary 164 Flemyng, Jason 218 Floating Water (K. Suzuki story) 247-248 Flockhart, Calista 293, Fig. 36 Fog, The (J. Carpenter 1979) 13, 14, 15, 257, 440 Foley, Scott 218 Ford, Harrison 170, 173 Ford, John 193 Forman, Milos 300 Fowkes, Katherine A. 11, 16, 78, 79, 82, 425 Fox, Phoebe 405 Fragile (J. Balagueró 2005) 288, 292-299, 368, 369, 374, 375, 378, 389, 427, 428, 436, 442, Fig. 36 Frágiles. See Fragile Franco, General Francisco 190, 363, 380 Franklin, Pamela 23, 296 Frayling, Christopher 23 Freud, Sigmund (including Freudian) 22, 23, 26-33, 45, 47, 57, 61, 62, 69, 98, 118, 153, 256, 274, 402, 420, 435 Friedkin, William 215 Frighteners, The (P. Jackson 1996) 20, 440 Fritsch, Gunther V. 439 Frosch, Stephen 29 Frye, Northrop 46 Fuji, Takako 229, Fig. 30 Fukiishi, Kazue 236 Fukuda, Kyoko 121 Furukawa, Rika 131 Fuseli, Henri 231 Futari (N. Obayashi 1991) 83, 84, 440 Fuwake (S. Maeda painting) 75

457 Gade, Ariel 254 Gaidry, Diane 140 Galcerán, Jordi 292 Galifianakis, Zach 218 Gallner, Kyle 416 Gangjian, Qui 309, 440 Garcés, Iñigo 188 Garcia, Ana 185 Garnett, Tay 81 Gaslight (T. Dickinson 1940) 256 Gaslight (G. Cukor 1944) 256 Gellar, Sarah Michelle 232 Gellner, Ernst 29 Genova (M. Winterbottom 2008) 384-386, 411, 419, 420, 437, 442 Geoul sokeru. See Into the Mirror Gere, Richard 181 Gertrúdix, Andrés 368 Ghost (J. Zucker 1990) 11, 16, 65, 78-81, 82, 84, 97, 104, 139, 161, 163, 184, 269, 344, 419, 432, 440 Ghost, The (Kim Tae-kyoung 2004). See Ryeong Ghost Breakers, The (G. Marshall 1940) 12, 439 Ghost Dad (S. Poitier 1990) 65, 421, 440 Ghost of Kasane Swamp, The (N. Nakagawa 1957) 12, 439 Ghost Story (P. Straub novel) 55, 58-60 Ghost Story (J. Irvin 1981) 13, 28, 31, 32, 34, 54-62, 65, 85, 90, 116, 118, 170, 195, 259, 327, 338, 340, 428-430, 433, 435, 436, 440, Fig. 4 Ghost Story of Yotsuya, The (N. Nakagawa 1959) 12, 117, 222, 429, 439 ghost thrusts up under sheet, cushion etc. 164, 293-294, 296, 298, 389, Fig. 45 ghost world 29, 35, 44, 45, 46, 49, 53, 63, 73, 75, 88-89, 90, 91, 95-104, 109-110, 115, 125, 134, 146, 152, 153, 155, 159-161, 163, 164, 175, 184-185, 189, 194-202, 209, 233-234, 238, 239-240, 251-252, 253, 259, 270-271, 274, 294, 304, 326, 332-334, 335, 339, 354-357, 366, 370, 371-373, 374, 384, 388, 407, 408, 418, 420, 422, 432, 433, 437, 438, Figs. 6, 8, 11, 14, 27, 48 ghost zone 35, 37, 60, 132, 164, 188, 293, 295, 299, 355, 371, 397, 437 Ghostwatch (L. Manning 1992) 386, 440 Gianni Schicchi (Puccini opera) 73 Gibbs, John 19 Gibbs, Matyelok 294 Gibson, Mel 181 Gielgud, John 86 Gift, The (S. Raimi 2000) 18, 169, 177-181, 303, 385, 411, 415, 428, 431, 433, 436, 437, 441, Fig. 21 Gilbert, Lewis 24, 84-91, 440 Gilling, John 400 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 208 Gislason, Tómas 288

458  Godzilla (I. Honda 1954) 29, 440 Gojira. See Godzilla Goldberg, Ruth 125, 211 Goldberg, Whoopie 79 Goldman, Jane 398 Goldwyn, Tony 79 Gordon, Diane 424 Gothic 17, 18, 21-26, 150, 159, 169, 177-181, 287, 292, 293, 295, 300, 305, 425-426 Gothika (M. Kassovitz 2004) 31, 34, 110, 156, 226, 260, 284-285, 299-308, 316, 320, 339, 368, 404, 415, 428-431, 436, 437, 442, Fig. 37 Goulding, Edmund 252 Grahame, Gloria 270 Grau, Eduard 395 Gray, William 37 Grease (R. Kleiser 1978) 262 Greco, Jessica 258 Greed (E. von Stroheim 1925) 192 Greenwood, Bruce 218 Gregg, Clark 169 Gregorio, Eduardo de 325 Griffith, D.W. 15, 43, 104 Grist, Leighton 39 Groom, Nick 22-25 Grossman, Andrew 147 Grosz, Elizabeth 118 Grudge, The (T. Shimizu 2004) 18, 229, 230, 232-235, 243, 245, 286, 392, 415, 428, 430, 433, 437, 442 Grudge 2, The (T. Shimizu 2006) 229 Gunning, Tom 14 Gutierrez, Sebastian 300 Guttenberg, Steve 49 Guy Named Joe, A (V. Fleming 1944) 81 Ha Ji-won 221, Fig. 25 Haas, Lucas 65 hair 18, 21, 30, 56, 61, 75, 83, 111, 115, 116, 117-119, 124, 126, 127, 128, 171, 172, 177, 205, 223, 225, 228, 231, 232, 234, 240, 241-242, 341, 343, 350, 357, 424, Figs. 4, 7, 13, 29, 41, 42 Half Light (C. Rosenberg 2006) 255-257, 373, 383, 415, 442 Halfway House (B. Dearden 1944) 12, 82, 439 Hall, Rebecca 386, Fig. 46 Halloween (J. Carpenter 1978) 38-39 Hamlet (Shakespeare play) 29 Hammer Films 399, 400 hand(s) 41, 68, 69, 74, 83, 90, 96, 110, 117, 118, 122-123, 138, 142, 152, 159, 184-185, 199, 208, 209, 211, 221, 223, 238, 239, 240, 251, 266, 279, 285, 286, 288, 289, 293, 301, 312, 313, 326, 339, 342, 344, 358, 366, 385, 386, 388, 397, 399, 410, 422, Figs. 9, 11, 22, 28, 41 Handley, Mischa 399, Fig. 48 Haney-Jardine, Perla 254, 255, 384 Hannah, Darryl 49 Hansen, Holger Juul 291

Modern Ghost Melodr amas

Harnois, Elizabeth 421 Harper, Tom 405, 443 Harris, Henry 68 Harris, Julie 24 Harris, Rosemary 178 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (C. Columbus 2001) 399, 441 Harvey, Heck 13, 439 Haunted (J. Herbert novel) 84-85, 86, 87, 89 Haunted (L. Gilbert 1995) 24, 31, 34, 62, 84-91, 134, 259, 260, 383, 386, 387, 388, 393, 394, 405, 406, 433, 440, Figs. 8, 9 haunted building 13, 14-15, 23-25, 37-43, 62, 65, 84-91, 104-110, 164-165, 169-177, 187-193, 194202, 208, 229-235, 247-255, 257-260, 263-268, 277-286, 287, 288-292, 292-299, 316-322, 327, 343, 363-375, 375-381, 386-395, 397, 401-403, 404, 405-413, 415-418, 420, 423-424, 427, 436 Haunting, The (R. Wise 1963) 12, 13, 16, 20, 23-25, 31, 37, 39, 41, 164, 208-209, 383, 397, 439 Haunting, The (J. De Bont 1999) 17, 21, 25, 164-165, 411, 428, 441 Haunting, The (E. Quiroga 2009). See No-Do Haunting in Connecticut, The (P. Cornwell 2009) 416, 442 Haunting of Hill House, The (S. Jackson novel) 12-13 Hausu (N. Obayashi 1977) 65, 440 Hazuki, Riona 349, Fig. 41 Heart and Souls (R. Underwood 1993) 16, 440 Heathers (M. Lehmann 1988) 262 Heffernan, Kevin 311 Heflin, Van 259 Hellish Love (C. Sone 1972). See Seidan botan-doro Helmond, Katherine 68 Henderson, Martin 203, Fig. 25 Henshall, Douglas 406 Hepburn, Audrey 81 Hepton, Bernard 396 Hide and Seek (J. Polson 2005) 343 hide-and-seek 248, 258, 342, 343-344, 346, 368, 392, 410, Fig. 47 Hideaway (B. Leonard 1995) 155, 418 High Spirits (N. Jordan 1988) 11, 16, 23, 49, 65, 440 Hill, Bernard 302 Hill, Susan 395-396, 397, 398, 405 Hills, Matt 27 Hinds Ciarán 399 Histoire de Marie et Julien (J. Rivette 2003) 16, 46, 57, 89, 322-327, 341, 357, 433, 442 Hitchcock, Alfred (including Hitchcockian) 18, 27, 30, 32, 33, 133, 135, 169, 174, 175, 255, 256, 288, 416 Hoechlin, Tyler 422 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 402

459

Index

Holben, Jay 180 Holcomb, Lance 60 Holland, Willa 384 Holman, Clare 398 Holmes, Katie 177, Fig. 21 home movie(s). See videos Honda, Ishiro 29 Honogurai mizu no soko kara (K. Suzuki story). See Floating Water Honogurai mizu no soko kara. See Dark Water (2002) Hooper, Tobe 113, 391, 440 Horse Attacked by a Lion (G. Stubbs painting) 392 Hough, John 18, 294, 440 House (N. Obayashi 1977). See Hausu House on Haunted Hill (W. Malone 1999) 17, 441 Houseman, John 54 Hudsucker Proxy, The (J. Coen 1994) 327 Hughes, Gwyneth 414 Hughes, John 107 Hughes, Kit 355 Humphries, Reynold 22 Hunt, Linda 183 Hunter, Holly 81 Hunter, Russell 37 Hyams, Peter 426 Hyland, Francis 39 I Am Legend (R. Matheson novel) 104 I-camera 38-39, 48, 62, 139, 152, 320, 409, 423 Ichikawa, Shinichi 65 Ida, Atsushi 236 Ihara, Tsuyoshi 350 Iida, Joji 114, 441 Ijintachi tono natsu (T. Yamada novel) 65, 72. See also Strangers Ijintachi tono natsu. See Discarnates, The immersion scene 83, 88, 127-128, 134, 155, 175-176, 184-185, 189, 209, 304, 339, 370, 388, 422, 436-437. See also water In Dreams (N. Jordan 1998) 15, 149-163, 164, 174, 178, 179, 207, 208, 258, 260, 287, 322, 366, 427, 431, 435, 441, Fig. 18 Ince, Ralph 257, 439 Independence Day (R. Emmerich 1996) 426 Ingram, Rex 192 Ingster, Boris 331 Inner Senses (Lo Chi-leung 2002) 276, 309316, 317, 320, 324, 338, 339, 342, 351, 392-394, 428, 431, 436, 437, 441, Fig. 38 Innkeepers, The (T. West 2011) 416-417, 443 Innocents, The (J. Clayton 1961) 12, 16, 23-24, 28, 39, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91, 383, 439 Into the Mirror (Kim Sung-ho 2003) 30, 31, 219, 277-286, 287, 301, 341, 342, 345, 430, 435, 436, 437, 442, Fig. 35 Irene Cahen D’Anvers (Renoir painting) 223

Irvin, John 13, 54-62, 440 Irvine, Jeremy 405 Ishibashi, Renji 241 Ishibashi, Ryo 212, 233 Ishikawa, Moe 131 Ishimaru, Kenjiro 121 Isitt, Kate 256 It’s a Wonderful Life (F. Capra 1946) 83 Izuchi, Kishu 131 Jackson, Peter 20, 418-421, 442 Jackson, Rosemary 26, 32 Jackson, Shirley 12, 17 Jacobi, Joelle 66 James, Henry 12, 23, 383 James, M.R. 21, 25, 28, 111, 296, 317, 374, 383, 396 Jameson, Fredric 50, 52, 53 Jane Eyre (C. Brontë novel) 43 Jang Kyoung-ah 276 Järegård, Ernst Hugo 289 Jenkins, Megs 23 Jensen, Vita 289 Jeon Hie-ju 338 Jeon Hye-bin 338 Jeux interdits (R. Clément 1951) 271 Jezebel (W. Wyler 1938) 101 Johnson, Brad 81 Johnson, Brooke 259 Johnson, Diane 43, 45 Johnson, Kurt 58 Johnson, Lynn-Holly 62 Jones, Gemma 295 Jones, Suranne 406 Jordan, Neil 11, 15, 119, 149-163, 440 Ju-on (T. Shimizu 2002) 31, 46, 229-235, 237, 242, 243, 245, 252, 282, 345, 392, 426, 427, 437, 441, Fig. 30 Ju-on 2 (T. Shimizu 2003) 229 Ju-on: The Curse (T. Shimizu 2000) 229 Ju-on: The Curse 2 (T. Shimizu 2002) 229 Ju-on: The Grudge. See Ju-on Judge Steps Out, The (B. Ingster 1949) 331 Jung, Carl (including Jungian) 34, 56, 77, 118 Jung Ji-youn 142, 145, 147 Just Like Heaven (M. Waters 2005) 421, 442 Kaidan Kasanegafuchi. See Ghost of Kasane Swamp, The Kairo (K. Kurosawa 2001) 230, 232, 348-349, 352, 355, 357-358, 360, 426, 441 Kanno, Rio 248, Fig. 32 Kanzenban (C. Takagawa 1995) 112 Kase, Ryo 359 Kash, Daniel 423 Kassovitz, Mathieu 31, 299-308, 442 Kataoka, Tsurutaro 72, Fig. 6 Kawai, Kenji 114 Kazama, Morio 66, Fig. 6 Kazan, Elia 101, 392

460  Keaton, Michael 181 Kee, Bettina 323 Keener, Christine 385 Kellet, Bob 85 Kelly, Eric 140 Kernochan, Sarah 169 Kerr, Deborah 23 Kershner, Irvin 178 Kevorkian, Johnny 383-384, 442 Khan, Fardeen 318 Ki Ju-bong 278 Kidman, Nicole 194 Kier, Udo 289 Kieslowski, Krzysztof 181, 322-323, 358, 440 Kim Gyu-ri 264 Kim Ha-neul 337, Fig. 40 Kim Hae-suk 337 Kim Hye-na 280, Fig. 35 Kim Hyung-min 278 Kim Jae-in 140 Kim Min-sun 138 Kim Myung-su 278 Kim Ok-vin 268 Kim Seo-hyung 269, Fig. 34 Kim Sung-ho 30, 277-286, 442 Kim Tae-kyoung 30, 337-348, 442 Kim Tae-yong 19, 138-147, 441 Kim You-mi 221 King, Henry 104 King, Stephen 43, 51, 52, 97, 288, 442 Kingdom, The (L. von Trier & M. Arnfred 1994). See Riget Kinnear, Greg 177 Kiss Me Goodbye (R. Mulligan 1982) 16, 65, 440 Kiss the Girls (G. Fleder 1997) 164, 242 Klein, Melanie 347 Kleiser, Randall 262 Kneale, Nigel 395 Knowles, Bernard 12, 439 Kobayashi, Masaki 12, 439 Koepp, David 14, 309-310, 441 Kohinata, Fumiyo 122, 248 Kokkuri (T. Zeze 1997) 19, 27, 30, 31, 35, 43, 131-137, 138, 140, 142, 155, 251, 270, 338-340, 342, 349, 355, 426, 427, 432, 441, Figs. 15, 16 Kokkuri-san. See Kokkuri Kong Hyo-jin 140 Konishi, Manami 349, Fig. 42 Kramer, Stanley 357 Krige, Alice 54, Fig. 4 Kristeva, Julia 118 Kruger, Ehren 203, 213 Krutnik, Frank 286 Kubrick, Stanley 11, 43-54, 440 Kuroki, Hitomi 248, Fig. 32 Kuroneko (K. Shindo 1968) 12, 16, 21, 117-118, 430, 439 Kurosawa, Kiyoshi 19, 230, 348-361, 441, 442

Modern Ghost Melodr amas

Kwaidan (M. Kobayashi 1964) 12, 61, 439 Kwan, Stanley 14, 309-310, 440 La Caze, Marguerite 100, 420 La Tour, George de 281 Lady in White (F. LaLoggia 1988) 18, 65-71, 72, 73, 75, 77-78, 180, 238, 267-268, 303, 369, 385, 411, 424, 428, 430, 436, 440, Fig. 5 lake, pond, pool, reservoir 28, 54, 56, 58, 61, 62, 83, 84-85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 134, 150, 151, 154, 158, 170, 172, 174, 175, 176-179, 194, 337-338, 345-346, 388, 389, 398, 410, 422, 424, 434, Fig. 40 LaLoggia, Frank 18, 65-71, 440 Lam, Karina 311, Fig. 38 Laplanche, J. 347, 389 Late Mattia Pascal, The (Pirandello novel). See Fu Mattia Pascal, Il Lau, Ricky 309, 440 Laurent, Christine 323 Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio 299 Le Fanu, J.S. 43 Lean, David 400 Leder, Mimi 426 Lee, Bono 309, 310 Lee, Harper 69 Lee Hyanjin 222, 223 Lee Jong-young 275-277, 443 Lee Mi-youn 263 Lee Yong-nyeo 263 Lee Yoo-jin 221 Lee Yoon-ji 339 Lee Young-in 138, 277 Leeming, Ros 383 Leffers, Morten Rotne 289 Legend of Hell House, The (J. Hough 1973) 294, 296, 440 Leni, Paul 372 Leonard, Brett 155 lesbianism 15-16, 19, 36, 80, 135-137, 138-147, 262, 263, 267, 269, 270, 271, 274, 275-277, 297-298, 432, 435, Figs. 34, 36 Levine, Ted 158 Lewis, Matthew 22 Lewis, Molly 391, Figs. 46, 47 L’Herbier, Marcel 331 Liebestraum (M. Figgis 1991) 436 lift, lift shaft 222, 223, 226, 236, 248, 250, 251-252, 271-273, 277, 278, 282, 287, 289, 293, 294, 296, 437, Fig. 32 lighthouse 205, 207, 256, 257, 364, 368, 371, 373, 419, 421 Lim Hyeon-kyeong 269 Liotta, Ray 418 Listen with Mother (BBC radio programme) 194 Lloyd, Danny 44 Lo Chi-leung 309-316, 441 Lohan, Lindsay 262 López, Carmen 372

Index

Lopez, Jennifer 181 Lorenzo, José Manuel 188 Louis, Justin 259 Love Returns. See amore ritorna, L’ Lovely Bones, The (Sebold novel) 418-419 Lovely Bones, The (P. Jackson 2009) 418-421, 442 Loving Annabelle (K. Brooks 2006) 140, 262 Lowe, Alex 86 Lowenstein, Adam 356 Lu, Alvin 19, 121 Lucas, George 104 Luckhurst, Roger 45, 52 Luppi, Federico 187 Luther, Martin 413 Lynch, David 204, 288-289 Lynch, John Carroll 302 Lynch, Susan 407 Macaninch, Cal 391, Fig. 46 Macchniz, Emanuela 330 Mackey, Kathleen 302 MacNeill, Peter 259 Madan, Barkha 316 Mädchen in Uniform (L. Sagan 1931) 140 Madhumati (B. Roy 1958) 316, 439 Maddox, Diane 37 Madsen, Virginia 114 Maeda, Seison 75 Maestre, Paco 188 Maginn, Simon 149 Maki, Yoko 232 Malone, William 17, 441 Mama (A. Muschietti 2013) 28, 423-425, 427, 443 Mamoulian, Rouben 81 Man, Alex 309 Man who Laughs, The (P. Leni 1928) 372 Mandoki, Luis 181 Manhunter (M. Mann 1986) 372 Mann, Alakina 194 Mann, Michael 372 Manning, Leslie 386, 440 Mansion of the Ghost Cat, The (N. Nakagawa 1958) 12, 243, 439 Marak, Katarzyna 429 Marathe, Lalit 316 Markale, Jean 324 Marré, Michelle A. 23 Marsh, The (J. Barker 2006) 257-260, 392, 404, 428, 431, 433, 437, 442 Marshall, George 12, 439 Martin, Daniel 17-18 Masako 117, Fig. 14 Masani, Sabir 317 Mask (P. Bogdanovich 1985) 372 Mason, Hilary 374 Mason, James 109 Massicotte, Stephen 149, 163 Massie, Anna 86

461 Matheson, Hans 256 Matheson, Richard 104 Matondkar, Urmila 316, Fig. 39 Matsushima, Nanako 113 Matsuyama, Takashi 229 Mauceri, Joe 198 Mawle, Joseph 389 Mayersberg, Paul 48 Mazzantini, Margaret 328 McCallany, Holt 218 McCrory, Helen 405 McFarlane, Colin 294 McGillis, Kelly 417 McLeod, Norman Z. 12, 439 McMullan, Tim 399 McRoy, Jay 229, 230, 426 McTeer, Janet 400 Mean Girls (M. Waters 2004) 262 Medak, Peter 11, 37-43, 440 medium(s). See psychic characters Megumi, Okina 230, Fig. 30 Meikle, Dennis 111, 112, 204, 212, 213 Memento Mori (Kim Tae-yong & Min Kyu-dong 1999) 19, 137, 138-147, 161, 225, 226, 261, 262, 269, 272, 276, 277, 283, 339, 342, 343, 432, 441, Fig. 17 Mendel, Barry 100-101 Meninas, Las (Velasquez painting) 281 Merck, Mandy 80 Mercurio, Micole 171 Merriman, Ryan 213, Fig. 27 Messengers, The (D. & O. Pang 2006) 415-416, 442 Midsommer (C. Myllerup 2003) 421-422, 442 Miike, Takashi 31, 211, 235-245, 442 Milestone, Lewis 259 Mill on the Floss, The (G. Eliot novel) 85 Miller, Jonathan 296, 439 Milner, Bill 406 Min Kyu-dong 19, 138-147, 441 Ming Ghost (Q. Gangjian 1990) 309, 440 Minghella, Anthony 16, 440 mirror(s) 21, 25, 30-31, 40, 44, 45-46, 48-49, 51, 57, 60, 62, 74, 82, 105, 106, 109, 115, 116, 126-127, 142, 144, 153, 158, 159, 164, 170, 171, 199, 204, 206, 214, 219, 225, 226, 231, 238, 239, 243, 260, 273, 274, 277-286, 287, 301, 304, 305-306, 312, 314-316, 318-319, 321, 341, 350, 351, 352-353, 355, 374, 399, 417, 433, 437, Figs. 2, 18, 31, 35, 39 Mirrors (A. Aja 2008) 286, 315, 442 Misaki, Ito 230 Mizoguchi, Kenji 12, 439 Mizukawa, Asami 252 montage, key 19, 40-42, 48, 78-79, 103, 144-145, 159-162, 163, 184-185, 210, 219, 241-243, 251, 266, 296-297, 346-347, 378-379, 390-391, 436 Montand, Yves 333 Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven) 225, 226 Moore, Demi 78, 256

462  Moran, Pauline 396 Morrison, Jenny 105 Morton, Joe 170, 183 Mothman Prophecies, The (M. Pellington 2001) 181 Mr Vampire (R. Lau 1985) 309, 440 Mui, Anita 67, 309 Muirhouse (T. Rahim 2012) 417, 443 Mullen, Lisa 399 Mulligan, Robert 16, 440 Münchausen Syndrome by proxy 100, 237, 241 Mulvey, Laura 285 Munch, Edvard 358 Muñoz, David 187 Muñoz, Rocio 375 Muramatsu, Katsumi 114 Murphy, Neil 383 Murphy, Nick 386-395, 443 Murphy, Yasmin 293, Fig. 36 Muschietti, Andy 28, 423-425, 443 Muschietti, Barbara 423 music box 21, 37, 39, 42, 43, 61, 63, 130, 164, 208, 293, 295, 330, 394, 402, 417 Myrick, Dan 421-423, 442 Nagashima, Toshiyuki 72 Nagata, Anna 236 Nakagawa, Nobuo 12, 439 Nakamura, Ikuji 349 Nakamura, Yoshihiro 248 Nakata, Hideo 11,18, 111-129, 203, 213-217, 247-254, 441, 442 Nakatani, Miki 121 Nam Sang-mi 337, Fig. 40 Natori, Yuko 72, Fig. 7 Neale, Steve 14, 15, 16, 58, 276, 432 Nélisse, Isabelle 423 Neumann Jr, Larry 107 Newman, Kim 13, 164, 221, 228, 302 Nicholson, Jack 13, 44, 50, 51, Fig. 2 Nickel, Philip J. 13 Night of the Demon (J. Tourneur 1957) 111 Nightmare (Fuseli painting) 231 Nightmare on Elm Street (W. Craven 1984) 15, 245, 440 No End (K. Kieslowski 1984) 323, 440 Nocenti, Annie 96, 102, 104 No-Do (E. Quiroga 2009) 29, 363, 375-381, 412, 428, 435, 443, Fig. 44 Nomura, Hironobu 352-353 Non ti muovere (S. Castellitto 2004) 328-329, 335, 442 Nora Prentiss (V. Sherman 1947) 331 Noriega, Eduardo 187, 190 Norris, Bruce 98 North by Northwest (A. Hitchcock 1959) 175 Notorious (A. Hitchcock 1946) 256 Novak, Kim 325 Noyce, Phillip 242

Modern Ghost Melodr amas

Numata, Yoichi 115 nursery 24, 165, 182, 259, 260, 396, 397, 401, 402, 403, 404 ‘O mio babbino caro’ (Puccini aria) 73, 75 O’Bannon, Rockne S. 178 Obayashi, Nobuhiko 30, 65-66, 71-78, 83, 440 Odagiri, Jo 352 O’Farrell, Connor 107 Ogi, Shigemitsu 249 Oguchi, Mirei 249, Fig. 32 Oh Jung-se 280 Oh Yeon-seo 275 “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (M.R. James story) 296, 396 O’Hara, Maureen 270 Ojea, Berta 189 Okking, Jens 289 Okunuki, Kaoru 352 Old Maid, The (E. Goulding 1939) 252 Olin, Ken 58 Omen, The (R. Donner 1976) 111, 129, 207, 215, 429 On the Beach (S. Kramer 1959) 357 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (M. Forman 1975) 300 One Missed Call (T. Miike 2004). See Chakushin Ari One Missed Call (E. Valette 2007) 18, 442 One Way Passage (T. Garnett 1932) 81 Onibaba (K. Shindo 1964) 356 Open Your Eyes. See Abre los ojos Ophuls, Max 156, 247, 434 orfanato, El (J.A. Bayona 2006) 11, 38, 125, 208, 257, 363-375, 380, 395, 397, 403, 405-408, 411, 412, 427, 428, 430, 431, 437, 442, Fig. 43 Orphanage, The. See orfanato, El Orphans of the Storm (D.W. Griffith 1922) 43, 359 Orphée (J. Cocteau 1950) 30, 323, 439 Ortega y Gasset, José 190 Oshima, Karen 238, Fig. 31 Oshima, Nagisa 12, 440 Osment, Haley Joel 95, Fig. 10 Otaka, Rikiya 113 Others, The (A. Amenábar 2001) 11,18, 24, 43, 187, 193-202, 214, 292, 334, 340, 341, 363, 365, 368, 375, 427, 431-433, 441, Fig. 24 otros, Los. See Others, The Otto, Miranda 169 Out Yonder (R. Ince 1919) 257, 439 Outbreak (W. Petersen 1995) 114 Ovunque sei (M. Placido 2004) 330-335, 433, 442 Ozeki, Yuya 229, Fig. 30 Ozu, Yasujiro 74

463

Index

Palin, Michael 414 Paperhouse (B. Rose 1988) 257 Paredes, Marisa 187 Park Hyung-jae 279 Park Jin-hee 264 Park Ki-hyeong 140, 263-268, 441 Park Ye-jin 138, Fig. 17 Park Yong-soo 264 Parkes, Walter 204 Parolini, Marilù 325 Parsiani, Kian 406 Patekar, Nana 317 Paul, William 46 Paxton, Sarah 417 Peckinpah, Sam 400 Peeping Tom (M. Powell 1960) 306, 379 Pellington, Mark 181 Penitent Magdalen, The (de la Tour painting) 281 Penn, Arthur 71 Périer, François 323 Perkins, Anthony 60 Perkins, Elizabeth 214 Pernel, Florence 181 Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie novel) 363, 364-365, 373 Petersen, Wolfgang 114 Pfeiffer, Michelle 169, Fig. 20 Phone (Ahn Byung-ki 2002) 30, 221-228, 229, 235, 243, 252, 260, 284, 304, 305, 320, 345, 346, 366, 404, 428, 433-435, 437, 441, Fig. 29 photograph(s) 36, 38, 53, 57, 61, 100, 111, 114, 116, 117, 120, 122, 125, 128, 139, 142, 170, 171, 174, 183-185, 188, 192, 193, 196, 200, 203, 205, 206, 211, 214, 216, 226, 232, 234, 237, 259, 265, 281, 284, 285, 287, 289-291, 293, 295, 302, 305, 314, 327, 332, 333-334, 340-341, 345, 355, 367, 369, 386, 389, 402, 409, 417, 428, 437 Piccolo, Francesco 330 Pilmark, Søren 289 Pirandello, Luigi 331 Place of One’s Own, A (B. Knowles 1945) 12, 30, 439 Placido, Michele 330-335, 442 Placido, Violante 330-331 Poe, Edgar Allen 325 Poitier, Sidney 65, 440 Polanski, Roman 38, 156 Polson, John 343 Poltergeist (T. Hooper 1982) 113, 120, 416, 440 Pon. See Phone Pontalis, J.B. 347, 389 Poon, Maggie 310 portal 38, 69, 91, 128, 133, 134, 252, 259, 260, 272, 273, 288, 348, 394, 423, 437 Portrait of Jennie (W. Dieterle 1949) 257, 439 Possessed (C. Bernhardt 1947) 156 possession 12, 13, 23, 31, 47, 50, 80, 87, 110, 122, 124, 126, 136, 156, 162, 171-173, 176, 197-198, 214-217, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 231, 243, 244,

253, 257, 273-274, 295, 301, 302, 304-305, 316, 317-321, 327, 346-347, 348, 400, 403, 417, 423, 428, 431, 435, Figs. 28, 31, 37, 39 Powell, Karen 69, Fig. 5 Powell, Michael 101, 306 Prager, Tim 85 Pranzo, Giorgia 329 Premonition (N. Tsuruta 2004). See Yogen Pressburger, Emeric 101 Presson, Jay 67 Preuss, Reuben 178 Princep, Roger 364 Przypadek. See Blind Chance psychic character(s), medium(s) 24,34, 35, 38, 44, 45, 48, 49-51, 52, 79, 80, 91, 97, 105, 106, 109, 112, 113, 117, 122, 123, 126, 128, 139, 149, 150, 154-156, 163, 177, 178, 179, 180, 200, 203, 251, 256, 264, 266, 269, 289, 368-369, 383, 407, 408, 409, 411, 416, 417, 431-432, Fig. 24 Psycho (A. Hitchcock 1960) 27, 60, 176, 255, 392, 424 Puccini, Giacomo 73 Pullman, Bill 232 Pulse (K. Kurosawa 2001). See Kairo Pulse (J. Sonzero 2006) 348, 442 Punter, David 22 Pye, Douglas 19 Queen Christina (R. Mamoulian 1933) 81 Quine, Richard 311, 325 Quinn, Aidan 86, 91, 152, Figs. 8, 9 Quiroga, Elio 29, 375-381, 443 Raaberg, Birgitte 289 Radcliffe, Ann 22 Radcliffe, Daniel 399, Fig. 48 Radziwilowicz, Jerzy 322, 323 Rahim, Tanzeal 417, 443 Raimi, Sam 18, 177-181, 317, 441 rain, lightning, thunderstorm 21, 22, 25, 30, 56, 70, 75, 76, 88, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 152, 182, 191-192, 223-224, 226, 227, 250, 252, 253, 263, 294, 296, 300, 301, 304, 312, 321, 328, 344, 360, 374, 376, 402, 410, 413, 422-423, 436, 437, Figs. 4, 5, 7, 33, 37 Raintree County (E. Dmytryk 1957) 156 Randall, Mónica 384 Rank, Otto 130, 134, 283 Rasen. See Spiral Rawlins, Adrian 396, 399 Ray, Nicholas 109, 270 Rea, Stephen 156 Rear Window (A. Hitchcock 1954) 133, 169, 173 Rebecca (A. Hitchcock 1940) 256, 434, 435 Reckless Moment, The (M. Ophuls 1949) 434 Redford, Robert 71 Reeves, Keanu 177 Régent, Benôit 333 Rekha 318, Fig. 39

464  Remar, James 169 Remember Me (A. Pearce 2014) 414, 443 Renau, Mireia 363 Renoir, Auguste 223 Reptile, The (J. Gilling 1966) 400 Repulsion (R. Polanski 1964) 156 revenant 16, 28, 29, 34, 54-62, 72-77, 84-91, 150, 153-154, 163, 267, 268, 323-327, 351, 357, 358, 383, 433, 435, Figs. 4, 6, 7, 42 Ribisi, Giovanni 177 Ricci, Christine 257 Richards, Kyle 62 Rifkin, Steve 106 Riget (L. von Trier & M. Arnfred 1994) 149, 188, 239, 252, 287-292, 299, 428, 440 Ring/ Ringu (K. Suzuki novel) 111-115, 118, 119, 130 Ring (H. Nakata 1998). See Ringu Ring 0: Birthday (N. Tsuruta 2000) 130, 441 Ring 2 (H. Nakata 1999). See Ringu 2 Ring, The (G. Verbinski 2002) 18, 29, 157, 203-213, 214, 217, 223, 225, 240, 257, 266, 287, 294, 338, 366, 402, 415, 437, 441, Figs. 25, 26 Ring Two, The (H. Nakata 2005) 18, 28, 207, 213-217, 255, 341, 427, 437, 442, Figs. 27, 28 Ring Virus, The (Kim Dong-bin 1999) 130, 441 Ringu (H. Nakata 1998) 11, 14, 17-19, 21, 25, 27-29, 40, 61, 95, 111-121, 122, 125-131, 137, 149, 153, 158, 203-207, 209-212, 221, 222, 229, 235-237, 240, 242, 244, 245, 263, 266, 271, 341, 346, 355, 359, 366, 403, 408, 409, 411, 416, 422, 426-428, 437, 441, Figs. 12, 13 Ringu 2 (H. Nakata 1999) 11, 35, 111, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121-129, 134, 213, 216, 231, 239, 242, 245, 287, 345, 350, 426, 441, Fig. 14 Risho, Kiyoshi 120 Rist, Peter 263 river, stream 38, 56, 85, 90, 132, 154-155, 158, 182, 184-185, 331, 332, 335, Fig. 22 Rivera, Mabel 366 Rivette, Jacques 16, 139, 322-327, 440, 442 Rivières poupres, Les (M. Kassovitz 2000) 300 Robinson, Bruce 149, 163 Rocco, Alex 67 Rodriguez, Robert 262 Roeg, Nicolas 133, 439 Roëves, Maurice 154 Rolffes, Kirsten 289 Ronan, Saoirse 418 Room 237 (R. Ascher 2012) 45, 443 Rose, Bernard 15, 257, 440 Rosemary’s Baby (R. Polanski 1968) 38, 429 Rosenberg, Craig 255-257, 442 Rosenberg, Stuart 13, 440 Ross, Chelcie 177 Rosso, Alfonsa 375 Rouge (S. Kwan 1987) 14, 67, 267, 309-310, 315, 440 Roxburgh, Richard 293

Modern Ghost Melodr amas

Roy, Bimal 316, 439 Rubin, Bruce Joel 78 Rubini, Sergio 329-330, 442 Rueda, Belén 364 Ruffles, Tom 43, 44 Rush, Barbara 109 Ryan’s Daughter (D. Lean 1970) 400 Ryeong (Kim Tae-kyoung 2004) 30, 275, 276, 315, 316, 337-348, 349, 353, 360, 361, 367, 392, 427, 428, 431, 435, 437, 442, Fig. 40 Ryu, Jin 339 Saint, Eva Marie 175 Sakebi (K. Kurosawa 2006) 29, 34, 337, 348-362, 367, 371, 426, 431-433, 437, 442, Figs. 41, 42 Salles, Walter 18, 254-255, 442 Sanada, Hiroyuki 113 Sánchez, Sergio G. 363 Sandman, The (E.T.A. Hoffmann story) 402 Såsom i en spegel. See Through a Glass Darkly Sato, Hitomi 113 Saura, Carlos 384, 440 Scarwid, Diana 164 Schlöndorff, Volker 107 Schneider, Steven J. 27 Scott, Dougray 255 Scott, George C. 37 Scream, The (Munch painting) 358 sea 13, 57, 68, 115-116, 118, 121, 126, 128, 132-135, 150, 151, 154, 155, 159-163, 205, 206, 219, 228, 256, 257, 352, 374, 401, 403, 404, 414, 421, Figs. 12, 15 séance 37, 38, 39, 43, 86, 91, 102, 200, 339-340, 368, 386, 416, 422, Fig. 24 Searchers, The (J. Ford 1956) 193, 359 Secret of Crickley Hall, The (J. Herbert novel) 405-406, 407, 410, 413 Secret of Crickley Hall, The (J. Ahearne 2012) 24, 386, 405-414, 427, 428, 431, 436, 443 Sedan botan-doro (C. Sone 1972) 74, 439 Self, David 164 Seltzer, David 182 Seo Ji-hye 268 September Affair (W. Dieterle 1950) 331 Seyfried, Amanda 422 Shadyac, Tom 34, 181-185, 441 Shakespeare, William 22 Shalet, Victoria 85, Fig. 9 Shankley, Lloyd F. Booth 293 Sharma, Sameer 316 Shawshank Redemption, The (F. Darabont 1994) 299 Sheep (S. Massicotte novel) 149, 151, 156, 163 Sheridan, Jim 418-421, 443 Sherman, Vincent 331 Shibata, Kayako 231

Index

Shiina, Eihi 211 Shimada, Hiroko 131 Shin Yi 338 Shindo, Kaneto 12, 356, 439 Shining, The (S. King novel) 43, 44, 48, 51, 52, 53 Shining, The (S. Kubrick 1980) 11, 13, 14, 20, 24, 28, 30, 36, 43-54, 62, 65, 105, 108, 109, 153, 161, 220, 226, 231, 252, 301, 317, 326, 341, 383, 410, 431, 433, 435, 440, Figs. 2, 3 Shinnick, Kevin G. 41 Shirley, Anne 252 shower 96, 154, 231, 241-242, 269, 301-302, 307, 437 Shrinking Man, The (R. Matheson novel) 104 Shyamalan, M. Night 11, 95-104, 181, 441 Sidi, Nick 407 signora di tutti, La (M. Ophuls 1934) 156 Signs (M. N. Shyamalan 2002) 181 Silence of the Lambs, The (J. Demme 1990) 118, 158, 164, 428 Simmons, J.K. 177 Sirk, Douglas 101, 285 Sixth Sense, The (M. N. Shyamalan 1999) 11, 17, 18, 19, 20, 35, 73, 95-104, 105, 110, 111, 149, 161, 169, 195, 196, 201, 210, 214, 216, 268, 287, 311, 334, 368, 415, 419, 420, 425, 427, 431, 432, 433, 437, 441, Fig. 10 ‘Sleeping Beauty’. See fairy tales Sleepy Hollow (T. Burton 1999) 17, 441 Smart, Amy 286 Smart, Sarah 406 Smith, Jacob 182 Smith Jr, Eddie Bo 109 ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ (song) 82 ‘Snow White’. See fairy tales Soderbergh, Steven 181 Sol Joon-seok 268 Solaris (A. Tarkovsky 1972) 181 Solaris (S. Soderbergh 2002) 181 Solstice (D. Myrick 2007) 421-423, 429, 430, 437, 442 Some Kind of Wonderful (H. Deutsch 1987) 262, 274 Somerville, Geraldine 90 Son Eun-seo 275 Song Min-jeong 275 Song of the Scarlet Flower, The (M. Stiller 1919) 341 Sonzero, Jim 348, 442 Spacek, Sissy 215 Spider-Man (S. Raimi 2002) 317 Spielberg, Steven 16, 81-84, 105, 175, 440 Spillius, Elizabeth Bott 347 Spiral (J. Iida 1998) 114, 441 Splendor in the Grass (E. Kazan 1961) 101 Stack, Robert 285 Stanwyck, Barbara 252 Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (G. Lucas 1999) 104 Starnone, Domenico 329, 330

465 Staunton, Imelda 387 Steers, Burr 418-421, 443 Stella Dallas (K. Vidor 1937) 252 Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital (TV series) 288 Stephens, Martin 23 Stewart, James 169, 174, 325 Stewart, Kristen 415, 416 Still of the Night (R. Benton 1982) 89 Stiller, Mauritz 341 Stir of Echoes, A (R. Matheson novel) 104-105, 108 Stir of Echoes (D. Koepp 1999) 17, 18, 104-110, 152, 176, 179, 222, 266, 307, 366, 409, 411, 415, 422, 426, 429, 430, 433-437, 441, Fig. 11 Stokes, Michael 258 Stone, Abigail 150 Stone, Philip 49 Stott, Andrew 41 Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The (L. Milestone 1946) 259 Strangers (T. Yamada novel) 65, 75, 76 Straub, Peter 55 Straw Dogs (S. Peckinpah 1971) 400 Stroheim, Eric von 192 Strus, Luisa 107 Stubbs, George 392 Stuckey, Sophie 150, 399, Figs. 19, 48 Sugarman, Sarah 262 Sullivan, Brad 60 Sumpter, Donald 409 Sunborg, Solveig 289 Susco, Stephen 232 Suspicion (A. Hitchcock 1942) 256 Sussman, Lucas 217 Sutherland, Kiefer 286 Suzuki, Koji 111-112, 114, 119, 130, 247-248 Swank, Hilary 177 Swayze, Patrick 78 swimming pool 55, 127, 128, 134, 138, 146, 147, 291, 304, 316, 339, 343 Sykes, Eric 195 Syriana (S. Gaghan 2005) 210 Szapolowska, Graźyna 322 Tahan, Charlie 418 Takahashi, Hiroshi 113, 114, 130 Takeuchi, Yuko 113 Talwar, Amar 317 Tamblyn, Amber 203 Tanaka, Ryo 354 Tanuja 318 Tarkovsky, Andrei 181 Taylor, Lili 164, 411, 417 technological manipulation (including cell phones, computers) 34, 80, 123, 127, 156, 163, 221-226, 235-245, 287, 302-303, 313, 368, 417. See also electric light disturbances, photograph(s), televisions, videos

466  televisions 66, 71, 72, 105, 113, 114, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 135-136, 208, 209-210, 214, 216, 236-237, 258, 279, 285, 292, 298-299, 321-322, 347, 437, Fig. 13 Terminator, The (J. Cameron 1984) 120 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (T. Hooper 1974) 391 Thatcher, Margaret 398 Theweleit, Klaus 107 Thigpen, Sandra 203 Thomas, Deborah 13 Thomas, Diane 81 Thompson, Kristin 35 Thompson, Lea 274 Thompson, Mike 182 Thompson, Susanna 182, Fig. 22 Thomson, David 169 Thornton, Billy Bob 177 Thornton-Sherwood, Madeleine 38 Through a Glass Darkly (I. Bergman 1961) 208-209 Tielve, Fernando 187 time-slip 69, 132, 171, 233-234, 235, 259, 260, 270-271, 272, 283, 304-305, 378-379, Figs. 37, 44 Titanic (J. Cameron 1997) 81 To Kill a Mockingbird (H. Lee novel) 69-70, 71 Todd, Tony 15 Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan. See Ghost Story of Yotsuya, The Tol’able David (H. King 1921) 104 Topper (Norman Z. McLeod 1937) 12, 439 Torn, Angelica 100 Torrent, Ana 375, 384, Fig. 44 Totaro, Donato 263 Tourneur, Jacques 111, 256 Towne, Katharine 170 Toyoda, Shiro 12, 439 Trashorras, Antonio 187 traumatic event, past 31-32, 37, 38, 40, 43, 54, 124-125, 132-134, 137, 150-151, 152, 241, 243, 258, 278, 279, 283-285, 304, 337-338, 339, 341, 345, 359, 391, 392, 415, 420, 422, 436, Figs. 15, 46 traumatic event, primary 31-32, 33, 39, 42, 54, 56, 58, 61, 70, 86, 90, 106, 124, 132, 136, 184, 188, 191, 195, 201, 227, 229-230, 235, 241-242, 251, 258, 266, 276, 277, 282, 283, 285, 293, 304, 319, 325, 337-338, 339, 341, 345, 351, 355, 359, 361, 363, 365, 368, 377, 378, 392, 397, 406, 408, 415, 420, 423, 424, 431, 436, Fig. 1 Travers, Henry 83 Trayling, Susie 293 Treadaway, Harry 383 Tremlett, Giles 190 Trois couleurs: Bleu (K. Kieslowski 1993) 181, 182, 185, 333 Truly, Madly, Deeply (A. Minghella 1990) 16, 65, 440 Tsuda, Kanji 230 Tsui Siu-Keung 311

Modern Ghost Melodr amas

Tsukamoto, Renpei 239, 442 Tsutsumi, Mariko 238 Tucci, Stanley 419 Tung Ching Siu 309, 440 Turkel, Joe 47 Turn of the Screw, The (H. James novella) 12 Twilight film series 416 Twin Peaks (TV series) 289 twins 54, 85, 87, 258, 260, 280, 285, 422, 423, 431, Figs. 9, 35 Twohy, David 217-220, 441 Ugetsu monogatari (K. Mizoguchi 1953) 12, 16, 21, 439 Un soir, un train (A. Delvaux 1968) 333 ‘Unchained Melody’ (song) 80, 82 Uncle Silas (J.S. Sheridan novel) 43 unconscious, the (linked to ghosts) 28-29, 34-35, 40, 52, 55-56, 57, 98-99, 115, 133, 134, 153, 155, 163, 176, 183, 184-185, 211, 213, 228, 240, 253, 294, 301, 306-307, 316, 338-339, 352, 354-355, 371, 373, 420, 431, 432, 438 Underwood, Ron 16, 440 Uninvited, The (L. Allen 1944) 12, 16, 374, 397, 439 Us Two (N. Obayashi 1991). See Futari Uzuno, Orie 116, Fig. 13 Valente, Dina 329 Valette, Eric 18, 442 Valletta, Amber 171, Fig. 20 Valverde, Junio 188, Fig. 23 vampire(s) 20, 22, 28, 30, 55, 58, 262, 309, 404, 416 Van Devere, Trish 37 Vancamp, Emily 213 Vanilla Sky (C. Crow 2001) 194, 332 Vargas, Jacob 184 Varma, Ram Gopal 316-322, 441 Velasquez, Diego 281 Vera Cruz (R. Aldrich 1954) 192 Verbinski, Gore 18, 203-213, 441 Vertigo (A. Hitchcock 1958) 135, 174, 301, 325 videos, videotapes, home movies 98, 100, 103, 104, 111-116, 118-124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 203-213, 215, 216, 222, 238, 241-242, 279, 280, 287, 305-306, 367-368, 370, 371, 437, Fig. 12 Vidor, King 252 Vince, Alexander 196 Visedo, Irene 189 Vivar, Edgar 368 Voice (Choi Equan 2005) 252, 261, 262, 268275, 277, 327, 427, 432, 437, 442, Fig. 34 Volk, Stephen 386 Vørsel, Niels 288 Wahlberg, Donnie 95 Wahlberg, Mark 419 Walken, Christopher 17

467

Index

Walker, Michael 13, 30, 32, 133, 247, 256, 359, 434, 436 wallpaper 157, 208-209, 402, Fig. 25 Walpole, Horace 22, 25 Walsh, Andrea 256 Wan, James 417-418, 443 Warner, David 407 Wasson, Craig 54 Watcher in the Woods, The (J. Hough 1981) 18, 19, 62-63, 67, 416, 440 water, watery 20, 21, 27-30, 37, 39-40, 56, 62, 83, 85, 88, 91, 115, 118, 122, 127-128, 132-134, 135, 136, 137, 149, 150-151, 154-155, 158-161, 163, 170, 172, 174, 175, 178, 179, 182, 183, 184-185, 188- 190, 193, 197, 205, 208-210, 214, 215, 219, 220, 247-255, 269, 270, 288, 289, 301, 305, 337-339, 341-347, 349-354, 357, 360, 367, 370, 388, 408, 410, 413, 422, 436-437, Figs. 1, 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 32, 33, 40 Waters, Mark 262, 421, 442 Watkins, James 21, 398-405, 443 Watts, Naomi 203, Fig. 25 Wee, Valeria 428-429 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew 425 Weisser, Thomas 65 Weisser, Yuko Mihara 65 Weisz, Rachel 418 well 21, 27, 28, 37, 39-40, 43, 111, 112, 115, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127-128, 129, 149, 157-158, 204, 209, 211, 212-213, 214, 216, 217, 236, 240, 251, 403, 408, 409, 410, 413, 422, 434, 437, Fig. 27 West, Dominic 387 West, Ti 416-417, 443 Wetmore, Kevin J. 213 What Lies Beneath (R. Zemeckis 2000) 18, 28, 31, 34, 169-177, 180, 196, 226-227, 255, 260, 284, 300-305, 307, 313, 338-339, 343, 345, 404, 410, 411, 415, 428-431, 433-434, 437, 441, Fig. 20 Whispering Chorus, The (C. B. De Mille 1918) 331 Whispering Corridors (Park Ki-hyeong 1998) 140, 146, 261, 262, 263-268, 269, 272, 277, 341, 390, 427, 432, 441, Fig. 33 Whistle and I’ll Come to You (J. Miller 1968) 296, 439 Whitaker, Forest 259 White, Eric 129 White, Liz 399 White, Patricia 15-16 White Noise (G. Sax 2004) 181 Wiles, Mary M. 324, 325 Williams, Chalon 106 Williams, Maisie 406

Williams, Olivia 95, 127 Willis, Bruce 95 Wilson, Niamh 258 Wilson, Patrick 417 Wilson, William 45 Winterbottom, Michael 384-386, 442 Wise, Herbert 396-398, 440 Wise, Robert 12, 439 Wishing Stairs (Yun Jae-yeon 2003) 261, 262-263, 320, 442 Woman in Black, The (S. Hill novella) 395 Woman in Black, The (H. Wise 1989) 395398, 440 Woman in Black, The (J. Watkins 2011) 21, 24, 28, 32, 60, 125, 208, 386, 395, 396, 398-405, 413, 419, 420, 427, 430, 437, 443, Fig. 48 Woman in Black: Angel of Death, The (T. Harper 2014) 405, 443 Woman in White, The (W. Collins novel) 43 Woman’s Secret, A (N. Ray 1949) 270 Wood, Alan 198, 199 Wood, Bari 149 Wood, Greg 100 Wood, Mary Seaton 198, 199 Wood, Robin 14, 15, 27, 51, 217, 391 World of Suzie Wong, The (R. Quine 1960) 311 Wright, Isaac Hempstead 389, Fig. 47 Written on the Wind (D. Sirk 1956) 285 Wyler, William 101, 140 Xiao, Zhiwei 309 Yakusho, Koji 349, Fig. 41 Yamada, Taichi 65 Yamatsu, Ayumi 131, Fig. 16 Yanagi, Yurei 122 Yasukuni shrine 356 Yee, Derek 309 Yeogo goedam films 19, 137, 138-147, 220, 261-277, 337, 341, 426, 432, 441-443 Yeung Sin-ling 309 Yglesias, Rafael 254 Yogen (N. Tsuruta 2004) 43 Yoo Ji-tae 278, Fig. 35 Yu Shin-ae 277 Yun Ji-hye 264 Zemeckis, Robert 18, 169-177, 300, 441 Zeze, Takahisa 19, 131-137, 441 Zhang, Yingjin 309 Žižek, Slavoj 20, 29 Zucker, Carole 150 Zucker, Jerry 11, 78, 440



Film Culture in Transition

General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser Thomas Elsaesser, Robert Kievit and Jan Simons (eds.) Double Trouble: Chiem van Houweninge on Writing and Filming, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 025 9 Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons and Lucette Bronk (eds.) Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 054 9 Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (eds.) Film and the First World War, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 064 8 Warren Buckland (ed.) The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind, 1995 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 131 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 170 6 Egil Törnqvist Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 137 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 171 3 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 172 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 183 6 Thomas Elsaesser Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 059 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 184 3 Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.) Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, 1998 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 282 6; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 312 0 Siegfried Zielinski Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’Actes in History, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 313 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 303 8

Kees Bakker (ed.) Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 389 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 425 7 Egil Törnqvist Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 350 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 371 7 Michael Temple and James S. Williams (eds.) The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985-2000, 2000 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 455 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 456 1 Patricia Pisters and Catherine M. Lord (eds.) Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, 2001 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 472 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 473 8 William van der Heide Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cultures, 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 519 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 580 3 Bernadette Kester Film Front Weimar: Representations of the First World War in German Films of the Weimar Period (1919-1933), 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 597 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 598 8 Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (eds.) Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 494 3 Ivo Blom Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 463 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 570 4 Alastair Phillips City of Darkness, City of Light: Émigré Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 634 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 633 6

Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds.) The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, 2004 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 631 2; isbn hardcover 978 905356 493 6 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, 2004 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 635 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 636 7 Kristin Thompson Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 708 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 709 8 Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds.) Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 768 5; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 769 2 Thomas Elsaesser European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 594 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 602 2 Michael Walker Hitchcock’s Motifs, 2005 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 772 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 773 9 Nanna Verhoeff The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 831 6; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 832 3 Anat Zanger Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From Carmen to Ripley, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 784 5; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 785 2 Wanda Strauven The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, 2006 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 944 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 945 0

Malte Hagener Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 960 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 961 0 Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 984 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 980 1 Jan Simons Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 991 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 979 5 Marijke de Valck Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 192 8; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 216 1 Asbjørn Grønstad Transfigurations: Violence, Death, and Masculinity in American Cinema, 2008 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 010 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 030 7 Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.) Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, 2009 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 013 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 012 3 François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cinema beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 083 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 084 0 Pasi Väliaho Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 140 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 141 0 Pietsie Feenstra New Mythological Figures in Spanish Cinema: Dissident Bodies under Franco, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 304 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 303 2

Eivind Røssaak (ed.) Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 212 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 213 4 Tara Forrest Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 272 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 273 8 Belén Vidal Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 282 0 Bo Florin Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjöström in Hollywood 1923-1930, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 504 3 Erika Balsom Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 471 8 Gilles Mouëllic Improvising Cinema, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 4551 7 Christian Jungen Hollywood in Canne$: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 566 1 Michael Cowan Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde Film ‒ ­Advertising ‒ Modernity, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 585 2 Temenuga Trifonova Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 632 3 Christine N. Brinckmann Color and Empathy: Essays on Two Aspects of Film, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 656 9

François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cine-Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 666 8 Volker Pantenburg Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 891 4 Paul Cuff A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance’s Napoléon, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 734 4 Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann (eds.) Melodrama After the Tears: New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 673 6 Steve Choe Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 638 5 Melis Behlil Hollywood is Everywhere: Global Directors in the Blockbuster Era, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 739 9 Thomas Elsaesser Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema, 2016 isbn 978 94 6298 057 0