Rana Dasgupta, Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi and Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

This chapter tracks the dominant trends of the twenty-first-century ghost. It argues that Sadako, the techno-onryō from Ringu (1998), has proved a model that would spread in countless ways, cementing the idea of the media ghost in both Asian and western media, sometimes focused on new technology but with a surprising tendency to evoke ‘outdated’ media as haunted/haunting residue. It also discusses the availability of the ghost not only to popular media like reality television and to middlebrow horror films such as those of Blumhouse Pictures, but also to ‘legitimate’ art, like Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2007) and works by films like film auteurs like ApichatpongWeerasethakul, Guillermo del Toro and Guy Maddin. It proposes that many of these works provide their own critical commentary on the ghost story itself.

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Virginia Woolf, Filmmaker

The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198811589.013.40 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 604-621

Author(s):

Jacqueline Shin

Keyword(s):

Virginia Woolf ◽

First Century ◽

Ghost Story ◽

General Overview ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

Modes Of Engagement

This chapter considers the afterlives of Virginia Woolf, beginning with a general overview and then turning to Woolf’s legacy in film. Whereas a few filmmakers have attempted to adapt Woolf’s works with varying degrees of success, a handful of twenty-first-century filmmakers have moved towards alternative modes of engagement beyond adaptation. Mark Cousins, François Ozon, David Lowery, and Alex Garland, this chapter suggests, have embraced Woolf as an experimental filmmaker, as one of them. Her writing helps focalize the explorations of identity, loss, and survival in What Is This Film Called Love? (2012), Under the Sand (2000), A Ghost Story (2017), and Annihilation (2018). No longer are Woolf’s biography, her body, or even particular works at the forefront of her legacy; this chapter argues that in this eclectic group of films, Woolf and her writing are not only vaporized and reconfigured but also, problematically, domesticated and neutered.

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Post-Horror

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475884.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

David Church

Keyword(s):

Political Identity ◽

First Century ◽

New Wave ◽

Popular Film ◽

Ghost Story ◽

Horror Genre ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

The Witch ◽

The Aesthetic ◽

Entertainment Value

Horror’s longstanding reputation as a popular but culturally denigrated genre has been challenged by a new wave of films mixing arthouse minimalism with established genre conventions. Variously dubbed “elevated horror” and “post-horror” in popular film criticism, texts such as The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, It Comes at Night, Get Out, The Invitation, Hereditary, Midsommar, A Ghost Story, and mother! represent an emerging nexus of taste, politics, and style that has often earned outsized acclaim from high-minded critics and populist rejection by wider audiences. Post-Horror is the first full-length study of one of the most important and divisive movements in twenty-first-century horror cinema. It argues that the affect produced by these films’ minimalist aesthetic has fueled taste-based disagreements between professional film critics, genre fans, and more casual viewers about whether the horror genre can or should be upheld as more than a populist entertainment form, especially as the genre turned away from the post-9/11 debates about graphic violence that consumed the first decade of the twenty-first century. The book thus explores the aesthetic qualities, historical precursors, affective resonances, and thematic concerns of this emerging cycle by situating these texts within revived debates between over the genre’s larger artistic, cultural, and entertainment value. Chapters include thematic analyses of trauma, gaslighting, landscape, existential dread, and political identity across a range of films straddling the line between art-horror and multiplex fare since approximately 2013.

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Let the quiet ones in

Contemporary British Horror Cinema ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9780748689736.003.0006 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Johnny Walker

Keyword(s):

First Century ◽

Primary Sources ◽

Recent History ◽

Film Production ◽

Ghost Story ◽

Market Positioning ◽

Industry Trade ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

The Web ◽

Trade Press

Chapter 6 returns to industry, and charts the re-emergence of Hammer Films, which, after thirty years, finally went back into film production in the 2000s. Drawing from primary sources such as the industry trade press and interviews, the chapter reflects on Hammer’s recent history, considering briefly the tumultuous 1980s and 1990s, before assessing the company’s market positioning between its re-launch in 2007 with the web serial Beyond the Rave (Matthias Hoene, 2008), through its theatrical success with the blockbuster The Woman in Black in 2012, up until the release of its lower-budgeted ghost story, The Quiet Ones (John Pogue) in 2014. Ultimately, taking into account Hammer’s prominence in much discourse around classic British horror, I use its millennial incarnation to assess its relevance (or not) to the identity of British horror in the twenty-first century.

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