An Idea that Haunts Me, Spatial Emotion and Temporal Memory
This text is written in the course of a discussion on Hauntology with Possible, Probable, and Preferable (PPP). As this text is purely speculative and personal in its understanding of Ghost and Ontology, it will focus on the spatiality of the ghost in relation to the human.
As the name suggests, Hauntology reminds me of a ghost, a figure with no specific form nor definite identity, a clustered energy or atmospheric sensation around us. It is already a reasonably tricky question to ask what the ghost is and what it means to us because it relates to cultural, social, personal, and even aesthetic understandings of the spirit or the human. The idea of a ghost is spread across the world with different stories or logical structures as if we share everything and do not share anything at the same time. It is something that we know might exist yet cannot understand what it is. Therefore, my text will be purely speculative on the spatiality of the ghost in relation to the human.
In many films, especially Japanese horror films, there are two distinct types of how ghosts appear to us: spatial and temporal. The first is the residual ghost that stays in one place without temporal sense, carrying only unresolved anger, sorrow, or even longing that merged into the place or object. The second type of ghost is the temporal ghost, which can be seen in the traditional ghost stories in Korea, haunted by the last memory before their death. The reason why they became ghosts is related to their memory or cause of death, and they have weaker ideas about space. Both types can converge, as in the case of Sadako in Ring (1998). She became a ghost because of her anguish of despair and the cause of her death, which made her drift from video to video as a pure emotion of sorrow in the image of a well. If she had been on the internet, she could have lived forever until the server went down. There could be many interesting points of defining what types of ghosts are or what ghosts mean to us. Instead, I want to trigger a small question: Where does this ghost exist exactly? I want to approach this question using some examples of films.
The majority of ghost stories in Asian films show malignant spirits, which I would like to call spatial ghosts. The haunted spatiality can vary from a haunted house to a haunted object. What is interesting here is that the ghost itself is haunted by the emotion within the spatial site. This spatial ghost is stuck in a place or object whose entire world is limited to that place or object without the sense of time, experiencing only the intense emotion that can be represented as spatial memory. However, does this ghost occupy the same place as a human being? A most interesting example would be The Others (2001), which shows two different layers of humans and ghosts that share the same space and time, and for both layers, there is no true reality. Both are realities as much as they believe.
This relative space might sound like the trendy word "multiverse," yet it differs significantly. The concept of the multiverse originated from quantum physics and has now spread to franchise films, most famously the Marvel comics and films. Every decision makes a forked universe. In the multiverse, people living in the same world share the same spatial experience as a global or universal space, while each universe cannot share its history or experience despite having the same geography or orientation. In the spatial ghost's world, however, humans and ghosts share the same formations of the world in a limited sense yet never see each other nor recognise others. The moment they realise each other is when they encounter each other through certain sensations, shocks, and violence as an atmospheric experience.
In the traditional ghost story in Korea, a water ghost is represented as a pure, invisible sensation of pulling force under the water. It has both spatial and temporal features and intensifies its force that affects the human body, an energy that can possess the human mind. Paranormal Activity (2007) visualised this experience in the domestic environment with a semi-CCTV style, which heightened fears toward the unknown and strangeness. In the film, we only see the existence of the ghost through atmospheric sensations, movement of the objects, and technical effects such as camera movement, shots, and sounds. Unlike general horror films, it intentionally shifts the sense of "haunted" from the ghost to the human, and more specifically, to the home. In the film, the ghost has no backstory of memories or emotions and becomes a pure action, which I would call an excessively sensuous style of ghost. This style can be seen more in recent horror films such as Host (2020), which culminates in brutal and bloody panic and terror.
Because of their sensuous intensity, ghosts are no longer apart from the human world. They exist within us, with us, and alongside us. It is unidentifiable what haunts whom, as all are united and crumbling at once: ghosts, humans, and places. This entanglement is more clearly visualised in recent Screenlife films, such as Unfriended (2014) or Searching (2018), which show a part of reality where humans do not occupy any physical place and float on the screen like temporal ghosts. These are ghosts only with memories, ideas, conceptual thoughts, emotions, and desires, brave enough to discard the sacred body to be a spiritual being willingly. Or perhaps they are ghosts haunted by thoughts and desires who cannot afford to look down where they stand. After all, the ghost is a thing that was once a human. It is the shadow of the human or the world, the shadow that stands alongside us.