Montclair Professor Gives Lectures on Tap Talk on Asian Ghost Films

Dr. Jason Abbott explored why some of the most haunting ghost films came from Japan and South Korea. Far from being simple scares, films like The Ring, The Grudge, The Wailing, and Exhuma emerged from societies marked by colonialism, war, and a powerful urge toward “official forgetting.”

The talk examined what ghost films were really doing in East Asian cinema: why the dead kept returning, what unresolved histories they embodied, and why the image of the haunted woman carried such immense cultural weight. Dr. Abbott unpacked how these films turned buried trauma into unforgettable horror, revealing the deeper political and social anxieties lurking beneath the jump scares.