One of the most interesting but underexplored developments in recent cinema has been the international cycle of scary ghost movies stimulated by the success at the end of the 20th century of The Sixth Sense and the two Japanese Ringu films. In the wake of these films a series of ghost films has been made across a number of different countries, including the USA, Japan, South Korea, Spain, and Great Britain. This book looks at these films, but argues against the conventional view that they belong in the horror genre. Only a minority are horror films; the vast majority are more productively viewed as ghost melodramas. This opens the films up to analysis in terms of the theorisation of melodrama, in which psychoanalysis plays a central role. More than fifty representative films are discussed, many with close attention to textual detail, from a total of eleven different countries. Revealing narrative patterns, tropes, themes, and motifs, the book is a stimulating and insightful exploration of what is, in critical terms, a new generic area.
