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

by Murray J.D. Leeder (Editor)

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.

Genres: Horror, Nonfiction, Film

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 2015

Reviews

[Catarina · Rating 2 out of 5]

In its introduction, Murray Leeder asserts that the book is focused on diegetic ghosts, instead of going in the "spectral turn" trend of using the ghostly figure as a metaphor. However, the book doesn't seem to build a cohesive knowledge around ghost movies, being instead more of a patchwork of articles very unequal in their quality. It also lacks a rigorous review of the text (some names and dates are not correct). Some articles have individual merit, though, as Tom Gunning's "Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films and Photography's Uncanny".

[The Reading Lantern · Rating 5 out of 5]

cool beans