The reading from Ancuta criticize urbanization in the cultural perspective. Using ghosts to reflect the failure of urbanization, Ancuta outlines the “loss of humanity” in the process where rural populations move into the city. Urbanization, with the build-up of sky scrapers using cold indifferent concrete, has turned into monsters with the shell of technology. Specifically in Hong Kong, due to the high population density, skyscrapers have to be built closely together, with little space left between them, making it the ideal setting for horror movies. The apartment’s inhabitants, often vulnerable and fragile with little exposure to nature, stares at the

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Scared of confronting our past and facing the future, we represent the ghosts in ghost movies. Especially living in a modernistic, glamorized city like Hong Kong where everything is happening everywhere all at once, as the city grows, so does the fear of loneliness and social isolation of those who are socially and culturally marginalized. Despite us not being physically alone in this highly-packed, densely-populated city, we feel socially alone. In many ways, that could be even scarier than being physically alone. Apt (2006) provides us with a horror perspective of social loneliness from the protagonist’s disturbing experience in her

Continue readingReading Response: Katarzyna Ancuta

It is inspiring to discover how ghosts are and represent in films that features Asian apartment buildings. Initially we would approach ghost films as just a medium of gaining stimulations due to hedonic revesral effect (Classen et al., 2020).  However, these films could actually be: the portrayal of contiguous community where ghost lives together in the space along side the living; the representation of the alienating character of modern urban communal lifestyles so as the fear of being isolated; and the representation of the failed dream of economic success that continues to drive Asian rural-urban migration.  Taking the Korean movie

Continue reading[READING RESPONSE] Ancuta, K. (2020)

In the first article, the article discusses the concerns caused by modernity in the United States about the modernity embodied in modern buildings, apartments. The villains in the film began to live in modern buildings, reflecting the American resistance to traditionalism and modernity. And in the second article, the article discusses the apartment plot in detail, illustrating the development of the apartment plot. At the same time, it proposes that, for the apartment narrative, in different time backgrounds and spatial backgrounds (different countries, regions, communities), its influence on the narrative is completely different. For example, in the United States, the

Continue reading[Reading Response: Joseph Rosa AND Pamela Robertson Wojcik]

Rosa discussed the relationship between film and modern domestic architecture from the article. It is a common thought that modern architecture is always related to negative characters. Maybe that’s because Americans never fully accept the modern house as their home, but rather as a workplace. The apartment-dweller are usually young and naive, while the penthouse is generally for single wealthy people who only care about social status. However, when the rich fall in love and get married, it is a typical development that they reallocate to a traditional house. However, traditional architecture is often associated with happiness in film. In

Continue readingReading Response: Joseph Rosa