The text gives opinions on the relationship among humans, ghosts, and the city, while the author mainly focuses on Asian regions.
When talking about ghosts and their spaces, haunted apartments and haunted houses were mentioned as two different concepts, while haunted houses can be clearly recognized as scary places, but a haunted apartment often looks common and could be hidden in the city. Also, haunted apartments are used more frequently in Asian horror films.
Then the text brought us to the discussion on ghosts and “living ghosts”. According to Katarzyna Ancuta, the ghosts are the by-product of the city’s capitalism, and the ghost films help reveal a dark side to Hong Kong’s economic success and financial prosperity. This is a new prospect for me but I found it true after recalling the “apartment horror” films I’ve watched before. In these films, the main characters are usually ordinary people or even the poor ones, living in a rented apartment, lonely and isolated, just like “living ghosts”. As an audience, I only saw them struggling but sometimes ignored that these difficulties appear to show the inequality of the society, none of them are intended to be “ghosts”, but life made them to.
I also quite agree with the author’s words that “In apartments, we are all ghosts”, sometimes ghosts and humans have no clear distinctions. Since I live in an apartment by myself, I often feel like every room is a isolated space, residents don’t care about who live beside them, they live like “ghosts” and don’t know whether their neighbor is a human or a ghost.
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