Shutter takes the traditional Thai ghost film and inflects it through the analog horror of the early 2000s to form one of the eeriest testaments to the decline of traditional photography. The script revolves around a young couple, Tun (Ananda Everingham) and Jane (Natthaweeranuch Thongmee), who hit a young woman, Natre (Achita Sikamana), when they’re driving home from a drunken night out. Natre’s spirit starts to haunt them, occasionally directly, but mainly through photographs. At first, she appears in the background of images and then she starts to directly haunt the camera itself. Watching it, I was reminded of what a strange time this period was to experience images. On the one hand, it was almost unbelievable to think that you could examine an image in real time within a camera. On the other hand, the digital future seemed to arrive so suddenly that the idea of physical photographs felt obsolete overnight, along with the spaces where they were developed.

Shutter takes this analog horror in two distinct directions. First, it expands its focus from the camera to the darkroom. The opening credits play out over montages of developer, fixer and stop bath trays, and Natre’s spirit first emerges from these watery surfaces – easily mistaken, in the early stages of the film, for Tun’s own face reflected in the liquids. As a photographer himself, Tun spends a great deal of time in the darkroom, whose red lighting presages many of the supernatural motifs to come. Shutter’s second area of focus is the polaroid image, the closest that analog technology ever came to digital instaneity. At one point in the film, a specialist in both doctored and real ghost photography points to polaroids as proof positive that certain images can’t be faked. Likewise, one of the eeriest sequences in the film sees Jane use polaroids as a strategy for following and situating the spirit in real time, creating an almost unbroken flow of images that replaces the static singularity of the older analog artefact.

Between this dual focus on darkrooms and polaroids, Shutter presents the still image iself as somewhat uncanny in a world on the brink of digital continuity. Natre’s ghost often turns up suddenly in Tun’s field of vision like a static image and at one point she turns off the lights and strobes a series of ultra-still images in his studio. When Jane follows Natre via polaroid, she does so in a laboratory of exotic animals, all of which have been “fixed” via formaldehyde in a single posture. In stark contrast to those eerily photographic tableaux, the spirit takes refuge around the billowing fluidity of a curtain blown through an open window. In trying to capture the spirit on polaroids, Jane often seems to be attempting to pin down the wind itself. Christian Keathley described the wind in the trees as a cipher for the fleeting material phenomena, caught on film and often incidental to the plot, that comprise cinephilia. Of course, those transitory moments only ramify in a world where film is a discrete object, composed of still frames. Without that static formulation to make the emergence of effervescent mobility miraculous, and on the cusp of a world in which all images are constantly in motion, available in a steady digital stream, Shutter often seems to be elegising the decline of cinephilic potentiality itself.

This transition between analog stasis and digital fluidity reaches its climax at the end of the film, when Tun and Jane discover a series of photographs of themselves taken at night by some unknown hand, in a powerful and prescient forerunner to Paranormal Activity. At first the appear to be alone but as they flip through the images a blur emerges, then strengthens, then moves across the room towards them. However, it is only by literally turning the image into a flipbook, or a film spool, that they can see the full import of the sequence: the spirit gradually materialising and moving across the room towards them. The spirit’s trajectory, in turn, leads them to a series of negatives on Tun’s bookshelf, and to the narrative and conceptual twist of the film; that he knew Natre when he was at university. Not only did she have an unrequited crush on him, but Tun’s friends raped her and cajoled Natre into taking a photograph of the aftermath to shame her into keeping silent. In other words, the entire supernatural narrative is set in play by the traumatic facticity and materiality of a single image. It is only after shedding her body, and her bodily inextricability from this photograph, that Natre can absorb it into a more seamless flow of images, and so tell her whole story. At times it feels as if she positioned herself in the way of Tun’s car precisely so she could do this.

The flipbook thus takes us to an entirely new image regime, a kind of digital afterlife in which the rules of cinematic space and time no longer apply. Hence the extraordinary finale, in which Tun, like Jane before him in the zoological laboratory, attempt to track Natre down by taking polaroids of his apartment. However, unlike Jane, who leaves him after discovering about his complicity in the group rape, he is unable to locate Natre anywhere. Only when the camera becomes autonomous, and photographs him of his own accord, does he discover the horrific truth – she has spent most of her spirit life sitting on his shoulders, and has now reached around to possess the camera as well. Whereas he took the photograph of Natre to silence her enough to distance himself and his friends from her rape forever, her photograph is a reminder that she will always be with him, and her images will even more inextricable from him than his photograph was from her bodily abjection. It’s a chilling closing vision of a new digital regime in which the images that we process are somehow always already inside us, part of a haunted ambience that is continuous with our proprioceptive limits; a world where there are no longer images, only hauntings.