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In 1896, Maxim Gorky declared cinema "the Kingdom of Shadows." In its silent, ashen-grey world, he saw a land of spectral, and ever since then cinema has had a special relationship with the haunted and the ghostly. Cinematic Ghosts is the first collection devoted to this subject, including fourteen new essays, dedicated to exploring the many permutations of the movies'' phantoms. Cinematic Ghosts contains essays revisiting some classic ghost films within the genres of horror ( The Haunting , 1963), romance ( Portrait of Jennie , 1948), comedy ( Beetlejuice, 1988) and the art film ( Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives , 2010), as well as essays dealing with a number of films from around the world, from Sweden to China. Cinematic Ghosts traces the archetype of the cinematic ghost from the silent era until today, offering analyses from a range of historical, aesthetic and theoretical dimensions.>
About the author
Murray Leeder is Assistant Lecturer in Film & English at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), and editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (2018). He has published in such journals as Horror Studies, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Film and Television.
