Mysskin’s Pisaasu (2014): Ghost as the goddess

This article engages with the Tamil film Pisaasu/‘The Ghost’ (Mysskin, 2014) to analyse the horror genre as providing the space for the binary of a beautiful maiden and her ghost and the gradual collapsing of the binary between the body and the spirit to make a statement on the predicament of women, particularly in Tamil society, thereby enabling the unravelling of the layers of the unconscious of a patriarchal society. The singularity of Mysskin’s Pisaasu, however, lies in its inversion of the ghost as yearning for love instead of revenge and thereby offering a rich space to interrogate Creed’s theorization of the monstrous feminine by juxtaposing it with the specificity of Tamil culture and psyche, as well as engage with the possibilities afforded by digital technology to converse with the cultural subconscious in its own language – one made up of complex images.