THE TELEVISUALLY COMPROMISED SPACES IN <i>RINGU</i> AND “TV PEOPLE”

The short story “TV People” by Murakami Haruki and a pair of horror movies “Ringu” by Nakata Hideo came out in the last decade of the twentieth century and addresses the nineties’ situation of televisual permeation in the form of non-human figures coming out of the TV screen. Nakata’s films typify an updated version of a conventional ghost story, while Murakami’s text assumes unreality of another sort in the midst of ordinary life. As paranormal phenomena in J. Hillis Miller’s definition, the intruders of the space adjacent to the TV set in both cases affect not only TV watchers in the fictional plane but also film viewers and text readers outside of it in the threefold spatial dynamics. Although they differ in terms of the kind of fear they inspire or covertly insinuate, the works of two different modes foreshadow in tandem human dependency on information technology in the Internet age.