Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond

Narratives, Cultural Contexts, Audiences

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by Peter J. Bräunlein and Andrea Lauser

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > Southeast Asia

Keywords

Southeast Asia, ghosts, horror

Publishing date

2016

Publisher

Brill

Collection

Southeast Asia Mediated

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 310 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ¼ inches (16 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-90-04-32340-7

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Book Presentation:
Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond explores ghost movies, one of the most popular film genres in East and Southeast Asia, by focusing on movie narratives, the cultural contexts of their origins and audience reception.

In the middle of the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, ghost movies became major box office hits. The emergence of the phenomenally popular "J-Horror" genre inspired similar ghost movie productions in Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore. Ghost movies are embedded and reflected in national as well as transnational cultures and politics, in narrative traditions, in the social worlds of the audience, and in the perceptual experience of each individual. They reflect upon the identity crises and traumas of the living as well as of the dead, and they unfold affection and attraction in the border zone between amusement and thrill, secular and religious worldviews. This makes the genre interesting not only for sociologists, anthropologists, media and film scholars, but also for scholars of religion.

About the authors:
Peter J. Bräunlein currently holds a visiting professorship at the Institute for the Study of Religion at the University of Leipzig. From 2011-2015 he conducted a collaborative research project on "spirits and modernity" in the Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia network (DORISEA), at the University of Göttingen. His research interests include Christianity in anthropological and historical perspectives; religious pluralism in Southeast Asia; film and media studies; ghosts, spirits and the uncertainties of modernity.Andrea Lauser is professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Georg-August-University, Göttingen. From 2011-2015 she was the spokesperson of the research network on the Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia (DORISEA) and engaged in the research project "spirits and modernity". She co-edited among others the volume Religion, Place and Modernity in Southeast and East Asia. Spatial Articulations in Southeast Asia and East Asia (Brill, 2016).

See the publisher website: Brill