It's come to my attention that ghost stories can be read as parables of intergenerational trauma; that those haunted by the dead are sequestered into a dissociative theatre to re-enact the past unto an eternal deferral of the future. Through possessions and hauntings the living play out their own deaths without an end in sight. Living death is much like ptsd, it's a death you cannot die, a violation from without that settles into one's inmost core. It's history, congealed beyond articulation; bodies trapped in their own temporal loops. The possessed becomes the possessor, the traumatised becomes the traumatiser.

The fantasy of ghost stories is that speaking the historical injustice will end this loop. Its inverse fantasy is that the loop is eternal, unchangeable, human-nature. Both are simplistic narratives. Change only happens through loops, through repetition. The formation of new habits requires a deeper engagement with the past, of which acknowledgement is the first step. If there is a human-nature it is malleable, fixed only insofar as the assemblages it is constituted through remain the same. Knowing, feeling, and doing occur through bodily practices aligned to institutional frameworks. Moving through one's home and one's workplace, through malls, and streets, and gyms, and cafes. Setting boundaries, coming to consensus, voicing one's pain to a friend or colleague, accepting critique, standing up for oneself. These are all intersubjective phenomena that are not merely internalised, but actively reinforced (as well as undone) through social engagements.

Perhaps this is the failing of so many ghost stories. They depict the ontological rupture and its subsequent restoration (or continuation) as all too clean. Something happens, something unhappens (or never stops happening). There is no social act that transforms the haunted space; there is only the lone protagonist whose revelation speaks truth into being (or merely primes them to their inescapable fate as the next victim-victimiser in line). Ghost stories are all too singular and ahistorical, despite their evocation of historical wrongs.

Perhaps this is the brilliance of newer horror films such as Get Out, which pivot the ghostly and the weird as an intersection of differently situated bodies vying for political hegemony. Intergenerational trauma is ghostly precisely through its capacity to efface the pain and subjectivity of the other. To make the other invisible—even to themselves. To colonise the mind. Black bodies become the terrain through which colonial history progresses, a terra nullius for white becoming—the horror of becoming a nameless, faceless spook, once more.

Horror is the repetition of history, not as a house of strange accidents and shrieks, but as a system of domination whose social articulation is uncontested, roots sunken so deeply in time we believe no other reality could flourish in its place.