Communal After-Living: Asian Ghosts and the City

Abstract

This chapter examines common trends in what Ancuta calls ‘Asian apartment horror’. Focusing specifically on ghosts that haunt buildings designed to house a large number of people—condominiums, high-rises and tower blocks, apartment houses and housing estates—the spaces she discusses show the living and the dead existing hard-by one another; side by side. She approaches ghost stories from the Asian perspective: as quintessentially violent confrontations with the past, which shows the choice of the multi-apartment building as the site of haunting to be specific to contemporary Asian clashes of class and social division. Characterised by loneliness and isolation, these places, and their ghosts, appear more visible than the living. Looking at films from several different countries, Ancuta reads these ghosts as representations of a failed dream of economic success that drove people into the cities in the first place. Offering a uniquely dystopian take on the haunted house movie, the films examined in this chapter express a deeper sense of failure, displacement and invisibility in spaces only found in cities.