Don’t return that missed call
December 13th, 2007Warner Brothers is releasing a re-make of the 2003 Japanese horror film “One Missed Call” (Chakushin ari) in early January. I haven’t seen either version of the film, but I gather that the mobile occupies a central spot in the plot, allowing unfortunate folks to hear voicemail messages left by their future selves. The messages are not good news.
On the missed call theme, the film draws from a form of the practice called Wangiri or “one and cut”. At the time of the 2003 film, Wangiri was frequently used to deliver random solicitations for pay-per-call telephone sex line services. The use of missed calls to drive people to recorded messages (sexy or otherwise) is not so common in India, since it seems that relatively few people use voicemail.
As for the phantasmal, there are scholarly assessments of the mobile handset as magic device or portal to the afterlife by Jim Katz (see chapter 2) Bart Barendregt, and Jane Francis Agbu, among others. Bart’s paper, The Ghost in the Phone and other Tales of Indonesian Modernity, was originally presented at a conference on Mobiles and Asian Modernities in 2005, and will appear in an upcoming special issue of the Information Society.
By the way, my literature review on mobiles in the developing world will appears in the same issue; in the meantime, an updated/temporary/working version of the review is available here.
