Abstract
This chapter explores a triangular relationship between internal mental spaces, the supernatural and the trope of projection. It examines several nineteenth-century texts that display this connection: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1859 novella “The Haunted and the Haunters,” spiritualist/journalist W.T. Stead’s 1896 writings about “The Kinetiscope of the Mind” and David Starr Jordan’s 1896 sympsychography hoax. From these examples, it goes into a discussion of the use of supernatural-coded aesthetics to represent internal states in early cinema, eventually moving ahead to the reflexive hypnotism scene in Stir of Echoes (1999).
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Leeder, M. (2017). “Living Pictures at Will”: Projecting Haunted Minds. In: The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58371-0_7
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