Abstract
As part of a Trauma and Literature course, this paper aims to draw on the theoretical and critical frameworks of trauma studies and care studies to examine and analyze the French-Canadian horror film "Ghostland" (2018).
Traditionally confined to stereotypical horror stories, horror cinema exploits codes that are often predictable. Yet, Pascal Laugier's 2018 Franco-Canadian film Ghostland is a psychological thriller, which tells the story of Colleen and her two teenage daughters, who inherit the home of their deceased aunt Clarisse. On the first night, attackers enter the house, forcing Colleen to fight to save their two daughters. This event will become traumatic for the whole family and affect each of its members differently.
Extract
[...] This appears throughout the film, from the beginning of the film with the nightmares and tears of Beth in her fantasy life, but also in the panic reactions of her sister following the rape she was allegedly subjected to alone. Thus, by emphasizing the extent to which it is the bodies of women that are directly affected by men's violence, Laugier is part of a totally feminist tradition. Repeating the violence to get out of the trauma It appears that Laugier's approach of representing women wishing to escape the assault of two men by violence may correspond to a certain feminist reading of the work. [...]
[...] Also, what Laugier tends to show us is how a care ethic is established in 3 members of the same family suffering from the violence of two men. This framework involves security, mutual care maintained by caring relationships, and finally the opportunity to tell its story and make it visible to the greatest number. Finally, Laugier's work can be read in the light of a feminist reading. Indeed, Laugier tends to emphasize two essential points how women's bodies suffer both physically and psychically, but also how women can go beyond the image of victims that has been assigned to them in literary works over time, by responding to violence with violence, showing that it is the only bulwark against men's violence. [...]
[...] https://doi.org/10.3917/gs.133.0051 Wölfel, Ute. "The 'lost Child' as Figure of Trauma and Recovery in Early Post-War Cinema: Fred Zinnemann's The Search (1948) and Natan Gross' Unzere Kinder (1948)." Studies in European cinema 18.2 (2021): 159-175. Web Kurtz, J. Roger. [...]
[...] Taking care of oneself as a trauma repair The response to trauma also goes through the need to externalize and especially in the case of Beth through the need to write. Laugier decides to report on these care possibilities that have been highlighted by numerous psychoanalytic analyzes. Here we will try to analyze it. In her 2020 article, psychologist Claudine Veuillet Comblet explained the therapeutic possibilities offered by writing, referring to Beth's ability to project herself despite the trauma in writing what she experienced. [...]
[...] For Beth, the trauma of the attack remains psychically unintegrated, existing outside the normal patterns of memory and cognition. Unlike refoulement, which buries unwanted memories, dissociation prevents the experience from being meaningfully incorporated into her identity at all4. Indeed, the contents of the memorial also symbolize its relationship to the event. She categorically rejects what really happened in her reality. As the literary critic Silke Arnold of Simine explains: "Memory indicates a relationship to past events that is shaped by, and in turn profoundly impacts, how we think, feel, and live in the present"5. [...]
