Spectral Bodies and Uncanny Effects: Cosmopolitan Anxieties in Shutter Hye Jean Chung Abstract In this essay I examine the tension among the varying levels of global mobility associated with multiple spectral bodies that haunt the textual, intertextual and production spaces of the flm, Shutter (2008), a Hollywood/Japanese remake of a popular Tai movie with the same title. I identify three types of spectral incarnations that are invoked or generated by the flm: the Asian ghost fgure in the narrative, the textual body of the Tai flm that served as its source material, and Tai laborers that produced this earlier version. I argue that these spectralized forms of labor are materially present in the textual body of the flm, and are perceptible to those who cultivate a “spectral vision” via uncanny efects created by ghostly doubles. global systems of economic and cultural exchange. I analyze the flm Shutter (2008), a Hollywood/ Japanese remake of a popular Tai movie with the same title (2004),to discuss how ghostly presences in textual, intertextual and production spaces are made perceptible via uncanny efects to those who cultivate a spectral vision. [2] Jacques Derrida’s theory of hauntology considers spectrality as a mode of critique that can bring about social justice and address ethical debt by acknowledging ghostly presences, or “those who are not there” — whether they are already dead, not born yet, or are present but ignored and marginalized. [3] Derrida theorized the need to develop the ability to see specters, or a spectral vision that recognizes ghostly presences of entities that haunt the margins of reductive histories and limited perspectives in order to address the compelling injunctions of spectral forces. Tis essay addresses the need to consider specters in the context of transnational flm production. My argument hinges on perceiving the presence of those rendered spectral in transnational collaborations Specters do not respect boundaries. Te paradoxical nature of their existence that troubles the binary states of dead/alive, visible/invisible and material/immaterial enables them to haunt and traverse liminal, “in-between” states of being. An uncanny efect is created when disruptive entities refuse to stay within their specifed boundaries. Te uncanny nature of the experience of traversing borders — whether temporal, spatial, textual, national, or continental — is often overshadowed by the sense of freedom and connotations of privilege usually associated with cosmopolitan mobility. Tis essay discusses spectral bodies as an embodiment (or rather, dis-embodied incarnation) of the uncanny nature of cosmopolitanism, a concept that needs to be expanded to include those who have acquired transnational mobility and those who have not, in order to incorporate the lived experiences of a wider variety of global subjects.[1] Te acknowledgment of those excluded in limited notions of cosmopolitanism leads to a clearer understanding of how specters are created through inequities and asymmetries in