Greed Makes a Ghost Story

In the Howling Village, a psychologist Kanae Morita uncovers her family’s dark past while investigating the disappearance of Yuma, her older brother, into the haunted Howling tunnel, which has been walled off from the public for decades. She possesses the ability to communicate with ghosts, and with the aid of a stranger, enables her to uncover the horrific events surrounding the Howling Village.

 Directed by Takashi Shimizu, known for his Ju-on: The Grudge series (American adaptations were released soon after), the film’s setting is built around the legendary Inunaki tunnel, ridge, and village in Fukouka, Japan. Legend has it that one can hear howling and screaming in the woods surrounding the ridge.

 The film establishes that the village, which did not exist on a map, nestled outside the bounds of the Japanese Constitution, and it is revealed for a very nefarious purpose.

 The Howling villagers kept themselves from the rest of society, sustaining themselves by eating wild dogs. This leads them being cursed by the outsiders. But it was an electric power company that wanted its land for expansion, and subsequently sealed their fate.

 The power company promised to improve their standing outside the Constitution. But soon after the company’s henchmen slaughtered the villagers. Eventually, the village is submerged by the local reservoir. Those unfortunate targets of the village ghosts die by drowning while on land.

 As with many ghost stories, there is the theme of the spirits taking revenge on those who harmed them, or getting the living to expose the truth of their demise. Howling Village explores not just individuals, but a company as the culprit.

 How many villages have been submerged underwater, lain to waste, buried deep under the dirt, by those who destroyed its culture for the sake of land and development, for greed?

 It is natural that civilizations will be constructed on top of others. Empires rise and fall, countries get renamed, boundaries are redrawn, and regions are redistributed.

 Whether we as humans evolve over time from this activity is hotly debated. We have far advanced technology than a thousand years ago, but there are ways in which we still use it for nefarious purposes. Slavery does not exist the way it did 500 years ago, though it is still practiced today, a grotesque feature of this being human trafficking.

 Are haunted by what transpired in the past? Many believe that the strife that occurs in America today is a result of the Native’s blood that was spilt by the colonists, that the genocide that occurred to transform “Turtle Island” in the United States of America has cursed this land, and that the ensuing horrors of the enslaved Africans are still with us, their apparitions lurking about the geography of their oppression.

 Is it the same for Germany? Turkey? England? How many ghosts populate this globe, terrifying its inhabitants, demanding their stories be told, causing unexplained death and destruction as retribution for the crimes committed against them? Do the descendants of the companies that razed the homelands and decimated the peoples suffer that fate?

 Many may say that this is mythology and legend, and that existence does not operate that way. Perhaps, or maybe it is the supernatural superstition we choose to believe, as opposed to what actually exists. We may believe that there are no such things as ghosts, while believing that there are angels and demons.

Are what we view in cinema simply the result of our imaginations or dreams, or are they rooted in something much more tangible? Can the supposed unexplained be explained in some plausible way? In Dracula, Professor Van Helsing, a man of science, contends that there are things that science cannot explain, things that operate outside the realms of human understanding, and that we must accept it for what it is.

So, it is possible that unexplainable incidents possess supernatural elements, that the spirits of those who were wronged have risen to exact retribution of those related to the perpetrators.

Perhaps then Gordon Gekko, the wealthy corporate stock pirate in the film Wall Street, would ultimately suffer a fate of which his wealth and power could not protect him. In that scenario, have any of the greedy lived happy and healthy lives, and died peacefully?

If the wealth of the Rothschilds and the Kennedys were factually built upon criminal enterprise, does it explain the torment that their families have faced? We are familiar with the stories of the robber barons, the ruthless businessman – Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Jay Gould, all accused of monopoly and price gouging. What were their final outcomes?

We have 21st Century examples that many of the public accuse of engaging in unscrupulous business practices, creating monopolies, and perpetrating gross wealth inequality. The media constantly inundates the information waves with pieces about Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Of course, the rub is that although many of us rail against these alleged modern-day robber barons, they are intertwined in our everyday lives. We consume their products and services, which has made our living far more convenient and comfortable. Does this mean we are complicit, and we should be haunted as well?

We do not want to believe that anything supernatural could influence or cause the fate of others, that only humans can adjudicate a person or a company’s guilt or innocence, and then exact the appropriate punishment. We are a nation of laws, and no entity beyond the god we have chosen can accomplish this. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” a passage written by Paul in Romans 12:19 in the Christian bible.

Death comes to all of us, and it is true that how we die will reflect how we have lived. We would like to believe that when it is time for us to transition, that we have lived well and done well. How do we really know? We customarily point to not just other individuals, but particularly companies and corporations as examples of the kind of moral and ethical practices that either merit upliftment or condemnation.

It is the case that over the course of human history, peoples and lands have been razed for the sake of the greedy. Still, it is not for us to take vengeance, that perhaps instead it is for the ones who exist beyond this world, whether we believe it, or not.