Ghosts looking.

• Main Author: Leong, Jean Yan Di.
• Other Authors: Brian Keith Bergen-Aurand
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/44246
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Since the 1970s, film spectatorship has dominated mainly two categories: Lacanian-ideological approaches that posit a textual position into which the subject is inserted and Freudian readings that proposes either sadistic or a masochistic point of view. These two approaches have dominated the analysis of horror film genres. Mythical, science-fictional, supernatural and psychotic killers are the figures that startle, scare and violate the unsuspecting characters in horror films. Majority of horror film theorists such as Carol J. Clover and Linda Williams focus on these figures of transgression such as the slashers and the monster figures respectively. Yet one glaring blind spot in which these theorists have miss would be the role of ghosts in horror films. Ghosts in horror films, I would suggest, proposes an approach that conceives of a particular position which at the same time, with recourse to the theoretical frameworks obeying the psychoanalytic pale and with an approach to dislodge the field's favorite dualities: masculine/ feminine and sadistic voyeur/ masochistic spectator. Particularly in Carol J. Clover‟s Men Women and Chainsaws, she focuses mainly on slashers and thriller films. However, her argument only pertains to that particular genre and ignores largely on the supernatural, except for her discussion on possession films.