A Gathering of Spirits by Patrick Drazen

Author:Patrick Drazen [Drazen, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781462029433
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2011-06-27T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20: SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY

Two landmarks from modern Japanese ghost cinema have scenes that rely on still photographs for their chills. One interesting scene from Ringu shows the heroine looking through photographs of the young people on holiday, a week before they died. Everything looks normal, except in one snapshot: there, the faces of the victims—and only their faces—are blurred beyond recognition, as if deliberately smudged by somebody’s thumb. Of course, this kind of botched photo can always be dismissed as a mistake in the developing process. There’s surely a perfectly reasonable, logical, and prosaic explanation…

A similar scene takes place in Ju-On (known in the west as The Grudge) after three schoolgirls disappear. They had gone with a friend to a reputedly haunted house; the friend had left early, but was now staying away from school. A few of her other friends offer to take her copies of pictures from the last school trip; when they get them developed, they see that the eyes of the missing girls have all been blacked out. Maybe there isn’t always a logical explanation…

xxx

Moon Phase

This supernatural romantic comedy, fairly sweet and relatively tame (given that it airs “after hours” on Japan television at 1:45 a.m.), doesn’t have a lot to do with ghosts. The heroine is a cute, bossy, juvenile looking and acting vampiress named Hazuki.[64] She bites into a Japanese boy and expects him to become her slave; when that doesn’t happen, the lad, Kouhei Morioka, is understood to be in a special category: a Vampire’s Lover. Rather than follow Hazuki and Kouhei down the course of true love, however, we should note Kouhei’s profession: a freelance magazine photographer. However, he has trouble selling most of his work because of his other inadvertent talent: he’s a gifted spirit photographer. So gifted, in fact, that even doing a simple layout in a candy store gets spoiled by the ghosts that appear in his pictures. If his best friend, Hiromi Anzai, wasn’t Managing Editor at Occult Magazine, he’d probably never sell a single photo.

And then there’s…

Ai yori Aoshi

This romantic-comedy manga by Ko Fumizuki, which began running in 1998 and was a successful television anime from 2002 to 2004, has a very minor role for some ghosts, but establishes the continuing attraction of ghost stories, even in a technological 21st century, as well as their invasion of that technology.

Kaoru Hanabishi, a college law student, crosses paths with a girl who dresses in old-fashioned kimono and speaks in a formal, stilted manner. She turns out to be the fiancée he hasn’t seen in fifteen years. He was “engaged” to Aoi Sakuraba, the heiress to a prominent family, when they were both children. However, Kaoru’s mother was sent away from the equally prestigious Hanabishi clan when Kaoru’s father died, since his parents had never been married; the clan, however, kept custody of the boy. When his mother died as well, Kaoru ultimately rebelled and left the Hanabishi. Aoi, however, never gave up the dream of her intended fiancée, so,

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