Familiar with those creepy girls with the long black hair that seem to show up in every Asian horror movie? Well, that’s not a manifestation of a lack of creativity. The plethora of those characters—known as an onryo, by the way—is not a Hollywood-style theft of a good idea. The onryo is a figure that spans across the breadth of Asian myth which dates back for centuries, possibly millennia. She figures prominently in Asian ghost stories because the onryo is an avenging angel in this mythic construction. Her appearance in folk tales long before movies came along has been associated with delivering retributive justice from the grave for a wronged woman. Although only well-known to Americans with the dawn of the 21st century, the idea has been around in American literature also since before the advent of film.
The term “ghost story” natural conjures up concepts like scary stories to tell in the dark and horror tales that keep you from getting to sleep. It was really only until around the middle of the 20th century that this associated with the ghost story came into being. In fact, for most of its existence in the English language, the holiday associated most closely with ghosts was not Halloween, but Christmas. Ghosts stories in the sense of Edith Wharton writing enough to fill two collections should thus not be assumed as having been penned with the intention of scaring readers. While they are ghost stories beyond argument, it is highly debatable as to whether they deserve to be called scary stories.
Because she was a literary writer and not a pulp magazine hack but more importantly because she was a woman instead of a man, Edith Wharton’s ghost stories sacrifice terror for meaning. The difference is like that between Kubrick’s conception of horror in The Shining and the conception of those lesser movies relying on cheap jump scares. Where Kubrick unnerves with a steadily rising sense of tension that is never released through such tactics, the ironically counterproductive consequence of relying on a sequence of jump scares is a reduction of perhaps horror’s most powerful element: the intensification of a feeling of dread.
Even her most ardent admirers have to admit Wharton’s ghost stories are not distinguished by the ability to distinguish them. For the most part, they follow a reliable pattern constructed upon the common theme of women being overpowered by the patriarchy and ghostly appearances being manifested as a psychic response to male supremacy. The plots do not radically diverge, but they do not all come to the same conclusion. Wharton adds the element of the unexpected there and as such the power of getting to the ending comes from that slow intensification of dread. Reading her ghost stories is much more similar to watching The Shining actually reading Stephen King’s novel. The comparison with Kubrick’s vision of King’s novel is bizarrely appropriate as well. Just as Kubrick transforms the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel into active agents of the patriarchy urging Jack Torrance to carry out his expected role as paternal caretaker of society, so are the ghosts which haunt Wharton’s vast expanse of equally gothic domiciles active agents in the subversive rebellion against patriarchal domination. If made into a film today, some of her ghosts might very appropriately being sporting creepy long black hair.
