Cinematic Ghosts Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era

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.

Murray Leeder is an Instructor of Film at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He is the author of Halloween (2013), as well as more than a dozen articles in such journals as Horror Studies, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, the Journal of Popular Culture, Clues: A Journal of Detection and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, including many on ghost films.

Introduction: Representing Immateriality
Murray Leeder, University of Manitoba, Canada

Ghosts of Silent Cinema

Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films and Photography’s Uncanny
Tom Gunning, University of Chicago, USA

The Strange Case of George Albert Smith: Early Cinema, Psychical Research and the Raising of Ghosts
Murray Leeder, University of Manitoba, Canada

The Fascination for the Spirit: Magic, Illusion, and Exposure in The Cat and the Canary
Simone Natale, Concordia University, Canada

Supernatural Speech: Silent Cinema's Stake in Visualizing the Ineffable
Robert Alford, UCLA, USA

‘O Spectral Wanderers of Unholy Night’? The Ghost in Swedish Literature and Cinema
Maurizio Cinquegrani, King’s College London, UK

Cinematic Ghosts from the 1940s through the 1980s

Bad Sync: Spectral Sound and Retro-effects in Portrait of Jennie
René Thoreau Bruckner, USC, USA

“Liminal Obscurity”: The Haunting, The Innocents and the Reception of the Quality Horror Films of the 1960s
Mark Jancovich, University of East Anglia, UK

The Spectre of Boredom: Monotony, Trauma and Power in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (Tara Turner, Art Gallery of Ontario)

“Burn It Out of Me!” The Negotiation of Female Desire in the 1970s Haunted House Film
Dara Downey, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Tim Burton’s Afterlife: The Ghosts of Beetlejuice
Katherine A. Fowkes, High Point University, USA

Millennial Ghosts

The Impact of CGI on the Aesthetics of the Ghost Film: A Comparative Analysis of Representational Strategies in Classic and Post-Classic American Horror Films
Steffen Hantke, Sogang University, Korea

Spectral Remainders and Transcultural Hauntings: (Re)iterations of the Onryo in Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema
Jay McRoy, University of Wisconsin – Parkside, USA

Painted Skin (2008): Romance with the Amorous Ghost in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
Li Zeng, Illinois State University, USA

“It’s Not the House that’s Haunted”: The New Suburban Ghost Story in Recent American Horror Cinema
Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

A Film that Shows What You Normally Cannot See and Plays What You Normally Cannot Hear: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Carleton University, Canada

Afterword by Jeffery Sconce (Northwestern University, USA)

Index