In Her Shadow

ONE OR TWO THINGS ABOUT the ghost: they are disruptive, usually desperate. They test the borders of the corporeal and invite the living to translate their mysteries, to give language to what has gone untold. This is what the troubled boy medium of The Sixth Sense (1999) discovers, and why the cursed VHS in Ringu (1998) and its 2002 American adaptation must eternally be reshared (the vengeful girl-poltergeist is unmoved by the mere discovery of her grave). The ghost often attracts storytellers (in the forenamed cases, a psychologist and journalist respectively) and children, but is perhaps most drawn to women, never more than when the departed is a woman herself. (It is worth noting here, the “madwoman in the attic”—the quintessential female double—was not just the heroine’s monstrous shadow, but her author’s.)