‘Cinema-Spiritualism‘ in Southeast Asia and Beyond. Encounters with Ghosts in the 21st Century [final draft]. In: Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond Narratives, Cultural Contexts, Audiences, ed. by Peter J. Bräunlein & Andrea Lauser. Leiden: Brill (original) (raw)

In the middle of the Asian crisis in the late 1990s, ghost-movies became major box-office hits. The emergence of the phenomenally popular ‘J-Horror’ genre inspired ghost-movie productions in Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore in unprecedented ways. Most often located in contemporary urban settings, these films feature frenzy, ghastly homicides, terror attacks, communication with the unredeemed (un)dead, and vengeful (female) ghosts with a terrifying grip on the living: features that have since became part of the mainstream television and film entertainment narrative pool. Southeast Asian ghost movies reflect upon the identity crises and trauma of the living as well as of the dead. Since these movies explore and depict forms of postmortem existence in various ways, they fit in a very literal sense to the label ‘post-mortem cinema’ (Elsaesser & Hagener). Ghost movies are embedded and reflected in national as well as transnational cultures and politics, in narrative traditions, in the social worlds of the audience, and in the perceptual experience of each individual. As products of popular culture, ghost movies unfold affection and attraction in the border zone between amusement and thrill, secular and religious worldviews, trivial and meaningful questions, angst and existential dread. This makes the genre interesting not only for sociologists, anthropologists, media and film scholars, but also for scholars of religion.