Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era, edited by Murray Leeder

Murray Leeder’s exciting new book sits comfortably alongside The Haunted Screen: Ghosts in Literature & Film (Kovacs), Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife (Ruffles), Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (Curtis), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (Blanco and Peeren), The Spectralities Reader: Ghost and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (Blanco and Peeren), The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities (Kröger and Anderson), and The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Peeren) amongst others. Within his Introduction Leeder claims that “[g]hosts have been with cinema since its first days” (4), that “cinematic double exposures, [were] the first conventional strategy for displaying ghosts on screen” (5), and that “[c]inema does not need to depict ghosts to be ghostly and haunted” (3).