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)