In 1896, Maxim Gorky declared cinema "the Kingdom of Shadows." In its silent, ashen-grey world, he saw a land of spectral, and ever since then cinema has had a special relationship with the haunted and the ghostly. Cinematic Ghosts is the first collection devoted to this subject, including fourteen new essays, dedicated to exploring the many permutations of the movies’ phantoms.
Cinematic Ghosts contains essays revisiting some classic ghost films within the genres of horror (The Haunting, 1963), romance (Portrait of Jennie, 1948), comedy (Beetlejuice, 1988) and the art film (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010), as well as essays dealing with a number of films from around the world, from Sweden to China. Cinematic Ghosts traces the archetype of the cinematic ghost from the silent era until today, offering analyses from a range of historical, aesthetic and theoretical dimensions.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Murray Leeder, University of Calgary, Canada
Ghosts of Pre-Cinema and Silent Cinema
Chapter 1
Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films and Photography’s Uncanny
Tom Gunning, University of Chicago, USA
Chapter 2
“Visualizing the Phantoms of the Imagination”: Projecting Haunted Minds
Murray Leeder, University of Calgary, Canada
Chapter 3
Specters of the Mind: Ghosts, Illusion, and Exposure in Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary
Simone Natale, Humboldt University, Germany
Chapter 4
Supernatural Speech: Silent Cinema's Stake in Visualizing the Impossible
Robert Alford, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Cinematic Ghosts from the 1940s through the 1980s
Chapter 5
Bad Sync: Spectral Sound and Retro-effects in Portrait of Jennie
René Thoreau Bruckner, University of Southern California, USA
Chapter 6
“Antique Chiller”: Quality, Pretention and History in the Critical Reception of The Innocents and The Haunting
Mark Jancovich, University of East Anglia, UK
Chapter 7
Shadows of Shadows: The Undead in Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema
Maurizio Cinquegrani, University of Kent, UK
Chapter 8
Locating the Spectre in Dan Curtis’s Burnt Offerings
Dara Downey, University College Dublin, Ireland
Chapter 9
The Bawdy Body in Two Comedy Ghost Films: Topper and Beetlejuice
Katherine A. Fowkes, High Point University, USA
Millennial Ghosts
Chapter 10
“I See Dead People”: Visualizing Ghosts in the Horror Film Before the Arrival of CGI
Steffen Hantke, Sogang University, Korea
Chapter 11
Spectral Remainders and Transcultural Hauntings: (Re)iterations of the Onryo in Contemporary
Japanese Horror Cinema
Jay McRoy, University of Wisconsin – Parkside, USA
Chapter 12
Painted Skin: Romance with the Ghostly Femme Fatale in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
Li Zeng, Illinois State University, USA
Chapter 13
“It’s Not the House that’s Haunted”: Demons, Debt and the Family in Peril in Recent Horror Cinema
Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Chapter 14
Glitch Gothic
Marc Olivier, Brigham Young University, USA
Chapter 15
Showing the Unknown: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Carleton University, Canada
Afterword: Haunted Viewers
Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern University, USA
