In Asian ghost films, “apartment horror” is conjured by monotonous concrete cubicles and inexorable, impersonal domestic spaces. It conveys the physical and social mobility (or lack thereof) with respect to the inhabitants in these airless, natural light-less interiors. Experience of tension and constriction between the architecture and human tenants is allegorically shared by the ghostly tenants, bounded to a specific apartment and a specific anthropomorphic mien, albeit non-entity in theory. Such parallel represents how we read ghostly narratives as Asians: our past carried and constituted into the afterlife, or Karma.
When urban legends of wild, wandering, expectedly wronged spirits seek retribution and often resurrection into the afterworld, it consumes and conceptualises fear through karmaic accounts, namely the core fear of “growing old without dependency” in Asian traditions that obligates the descendants to the duties of offering and remembering, as much as the livings to pursue the ‘Asian Dream’ by building familial and material legacy. The (imaginary) reality of fear in the form of anxiety, uncertainty, and animosity towards the city as a growth machine, translates between life and afterlife, selfhood and society, in contemporary, crisis-prone Asian metropolises.
In order to be a “city” ghost, the deceased regenerates through vectors of modernity, from telecommunication, transportation, to industrialising neighbourhood and high rises. For Ancuta, the city is the reproduction of communal loneliness that invisiblised the livings whereas visibilised the ghosts, therefore, haunting spaces express loneliness as an emotional state. With that being said, I put forth the idea that ghostliness has haunted the urban spaces and minds through the fear of loneliness — as a psychological construct — validated by the commerlisation and massification of urban dwellings which perpetuates its conflation of spatial and financial fragilities. In her conclusion, Ancuta identified the “source of fear” in Asian ghost films and metropolitan ecosystems is “when nobody cares”. One thing’s for sure, there will always be an undying source of care about ghosts in Asian cinematographies and cultures when everybody fears.
Tingxuan GONG 3035830739
Your response demonstrates a thorough understanding of the idea of ghostliness from Ancuta’s reading, the conception of the superstitution and how it relates to the modern urbanism of Asian cities. I appreciate your sharp observations on the psychology of an urban mind and characterizing features of modern Asian societies that contribute to a sense of fear and isolation.