Haunted by the Other: Levinas, Derrida and the Persecutory Phantom

In this article, I explore what I call the persecutory trope – which underscores the alterity of the phantom and its relentless haunting and spectral oppression of the protagonists – in recent American ghost films, connecting it to the ethical thought of the continental philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Films like The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002), The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2004), It Follows (Robert Mitchell, 2014), and Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012) depict terrifying spectral antagonists whose relentless persecution of the protagonists often defies comprehension and narrative closure. I suggest that these films comprise a specific supernatural subgenre due to the particular way in which their specters haunt the victims. The relentlessness of the spectral assailant, and the foreclosure of actions by which the specter is either expelled from or reintegrated into symbolic understanding of its victim, can be construed in terms of the ethical relationship between the other and the self in the work of Levinas and Derrida. Their focus on the moral agent's responsibility to an other, an obligation that the agent does not undertake voluntarily, entails the spectralization of ethical responsibility insofar as it does not rest on solid, evidential grounds. This article shows how the spectralization of the ethical resonates in recent American ghost films through the disruptive effects of the specter's haunting and responsive mourning enacted by protagonists.

Make a copy, pass it on: The Ring Two and the Ghost of Verbinski

As a Hollywood production helmed by Japanese director Hideo Nakata, The Ring Two upsets categories like remake and sequel. Running below the sinuous narrative and generic entanglements of adaptation, translation, and sequelization is a pattern of shifting authorship. By analyzing the discourse of authorship in industrial texts such as trade journals, newspaper articles, press kits, and DVD featurettes, this article argues that the logic of shifting authorship reflects Hollywood's flexible accumulation of international content and labor. The fetish of the original, discussed and reinterpreted continuously in each subsequent installment of the Ringu/Ring franchise, becomes the basis for self-mythologizing and justification for Hollywood's new international division of cultural labor. Under these circumstances, Nakata's auteur status serves as (multi)cultural capital, while his labor serves to ventriloquize Hollywood horror conventions and the style of director Gore Verbinski, whose presence continues to haunt the franchise as it is further passed along.