Cinema is an act of haunting: freezing people, places and ideas on celluloid to later be looped over and over again ad nauseum. Viewing film is a dialogue with ghosts from the past that can influence the way we think about and build the future. In this session, panelists analyze horror films and ghost paintings as a method to theorize alternative futures from haunted pasts. Panelists use cinema, television, and art to ask prescient questions regarding postcolonial futures, the uncanny, and moving beyond the religious/secular binary. Together, they use the haunted visual medium as a mediating force between oppressive pasts and the possibility of a more liberative future.
Famous for her generation-defining short story “The Lottery” and “the definitive haunted house story” The Haunting of Hill House, critics in her own day and beyond have reached for pseudo-spiritual terms to describe Shirley Jackson’s work – haunted, gothic, mythological, primitive, and mysterious – but they do so to cut off the possibility that she could have been “really” religious. This talk will explore the affects her work generates as themselves spiritually meaningful – for Jackson and for her readers – by probing the forms of haunted imagination that emerge from spiritual power that is neither transcendent nor ontologically sticky. Jackson may help us understand the very act of feeling haunted in reading as a form of religion in literature that resists the secular/religious binary. The talk will conclude by exploring what happens to these haunted feelings when Jackson’s work migrates from the literary to the visual, in film and television specifically.
The “ghost paintings” of James Tissot depict supernatural figures that appear in both his society paintings and his late biblical cycle. From The Apparition to his biblical paintings, including He Vanished from Their Sight, The Dead Appear in the Temple, The Dead Appear in Jerusalem, and Jesus Transported by a Spirit onto a High Mountain, Tissot’s paintings present a reenchanted vision of the New Testament for the increasingly secular nineteenth century. His 350-painting collection titled The Life of Christ bears the unmistakable marks of the nineteenth-century fascination with Catholic revivalism, spiritualism, seances, and psychical research. In spite of the fantastical subject matter of these paintings, Tissot depicts Jesus’ miraculous life, death, and resurrection with a startling ethnographic and quasi-documentary precision. Even a century later, Tissot’s ghost paintings remain an example of how nineteenth-century biblical art absorbed and reimagined spiritualism, rendering the Gospel narratives newly strange and uncanny for modern audiences.
This paper examines the imagination and construction of post-colonial futures through the haunting of the "utopian impulse" in two South Korean horror films: The Wailing (2016) and Exhuma (2024). While post-colonial critiques often view utopianism with suspicion, this study utilizes Fredric Jameson, Rubem Alves, and Jacques Derrida to argue that the utopian spirit “to-come” is a necessary subversive force for resisting totalizing systems of injustice. Through a comparative analysis, I explore how both films utilize diverse religious and spiritual frameworks, including Shamanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and animism, to face the historical trauma from the Japanese occupation. I contend that while The Wailing suggests an open-ended nihilistic failure and Exhuma in collaborative resolution, both films ultimately manifest the process of Derrida’s "justice-to-come." These cinematic horror narratives demonstrate that the post-colonial future remains a deferred but persistent haunting—a utopian call to imagine alternative realities despite the lingering horrors of occupation and division.