Review of Communal After-Living: Asian Ghosts and the City-Katarzyna Ancuta
Urban cities have been equated with the development and progress of a person which leads people in rural areas to migrate into big cities. The rapid growth of the cities highlighted the themes of loneliness and alienation for the newly migrated people, offering fertile grounds for horror movie makers to use stories merging with ghosts. The horror movies made in the Asian regions including Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and China mostly rely on the use of a contiguous community where humans and ghosts co-habitat. Additionally, isolation and loneliness themes act as powerful catalysts for movies that depict ghosts as more visible than the living. The idea stems from economic failures and unsuccessful dreams. The contiguous communities of ghosts and humans show a complex relationship between living and dead. Chinese believe that unrested spirits who were unable to have desired goodbyes tend to return. The people who come to urbanization tend to live alone, chasing their dreams, which leads them to take their lives and become unrested spirits living in the areas. These movies are pictured in apartments rather than homes, further reinforcing the isolation faced by the people coming after urban success. Asian movies are less apocalyptic and more anthropocene-driven where human activities lead to adverse outcomes. I believe that the core concept of nobody cares about living and we all are living disappearing lives that are going to vanish is terrorizing the people. We have come to a place where horror movies have become our life stories and unlike Western culture, we do not need an apocalypse to die but our desires are killing us.
Reference
Ancuta, K. (2020). Communal After-Living: Asian Ghosts and the City. In Palgrave gothic (pp. 173–189). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43777-0_10
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