Since the late twentieth century, the scary ghost film has experienced a major revival, with films from a number of different countries collectively creating a rich international cycle of ghost movies. This book looks at the cycle generically, but within a different framework from that usually adopted towards such films. Traditionally, ghost movies have been placed within two broad categories, depending on the nature of the ghost. In one group are films featuring benevolent or comedy ghosts, e.g. GHOST (Jerry Zucker 1990) or HIGH SPIRITS (Neil Jordan 1988); in the other, those with scary ghosts, e.g. THE CHANGELING (Peter Medak 1979) and THE SHINING (Stanley Kubrick 1980). English-language films in the first category have already been discussed, in Katherine A. Fowkes's Giving up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films (1998). This book concentrates on the second category, which is now the dominant form of the ghost movie. My argument is that within this category there are again different types of ghost, and different types of movie. I believe that the common tendency to place all scary ghost movies in the horror genre is misguided, and the contemporary cycle can be used to demonstrate this. Indeed, I would maintain that key works in the cycle – e.g. The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan 1999), THE OTHERS (Alejandro Amenábar 2001) and EL ORFANATO/ THE ORPHANAGE (J.A. Bayona 2006) – are not really horror films at all. They are more productively viewed as ghost melodramas.

This is not to suggest that no recent ghost movies are horror films; RINGU (Hideo Nakata 1998), RINGU 2 (Nakata 1999) and their spin-offs fit readily into the horror genre. That is because Sadako, the ghost girl in these films, is in effect a monster, with a supernatural ability to kill, and a similar power is found in her successors. But this is not the case with the ghosts in most of the films discussed in this book. The ghosts may well be aggressive and demanding, and some indeed seek to kill, but they are rarely monstrous. The distinction between a ghost melodrama and a ghost horror film is nevertheless not clear-cut, and is perhaps best seen as a question of tendencies within a given work. As will be argued in detail in the chapters discussing these films, even in the horror strand, melodrama is still relevant to the structure of the films.