Light, Darkness, and Fear in Hem Vejakorn’s Ghost Stories, Early 1930s to Late 1960s

Abstract

An electric light was a product of modernization project in the King Rama V era. It physically and intellectually illuminates darkness. The lights, however, benefited only middle class and elites and limited to others, leaving some areas unilluminated. These dark landscapes thus became an area not physically and intellectually modernized. This illustrates the incomplete modernization of Siam/ Thailand at the time. Hem Vejakorn’s ghost stories, published in early 1930s to late 1960s, employed dark rural landscapes and blind spots – located around and in Bangkok – as settings to narrate fears of their characters and apparitions of ghosts. Superstitions and outlaws, which should be overcome by modernity, still existed in an opaque. Lights not only created an illumination but also a shadow behind it.