by Esha Ann Mariya
- Introduction:
Malayalam horror cinema grows out of a cultural landscape shaped by Kerala’s deep repertoire of Yakshi stories – female spirits returning from the dead burdened by grief, betrayal, desire, rage or unfinished longing. Contemporary films continue to draw from this tradition, often returning to a familiar storyline in which a woman’s suffering returns to haunt the man deemed responsible for it. The genre typically frames her return as both justified and unsettling, an eruption of emotion that demands recognition yet is marked as excessive. Male protagonists often reclaim safety only when priests or exorcists reassert the old order. Haunting is rarely neutral. It is attached to a gendered economy of feeling where the ghost becomes a vehicle through which repressed or socially disruptive emotions re-enter the world of the living.
Rahul Sadashivan’s Diés Iraé (2025) begins by tapping into this expectation. Kani’s death and Rohan’s emotional evasiveness seem to position the film within a recognisable Gothic structure, encouraging viewers to anticipate the return of a wronged woman seeking recognition or retribution. Early scenes encourage this reading: a soft, feminine presence sits near Rohan, touches his hair, and plays with the hairclip she once wore. Yet the film dismantles this setup when it reveals that the ghost harrowing Rohan is not Kani but Philip, a terminally ill man who loved her intensely but never confessed to her while alive. This revelation unsettles the gendered assumptions through which haunting itself is recognised and interpreted.
This paper argues that Diés Iraé unsettles Kerala’s patriarchal Gothic tradition by placing a male spectre within a narrative tradition historically dominated by feminised ghosts. Rather than treating queerness as a question of sexual identity, the paper draws on queer hauntology to examine forms of desire, attachment, and longing that remain suspended outside normative structures of closure and progression. Drawing on queer hauntology, masculine hysteria and affect theory, the analysis shows how the film reframes the ghost as a bearer of culturally denied emotion. In the process, Diés Iraé expands the affective possibilities of Malayalam Gothic cinema beyond familiar narratives of feminine vengeance and moral retribution.
2. Ways of Reading the Spectres:
2.1 Haunting beyond Linear Time
Hauntology, a term introduced by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx, describes the persistence of what should have disappeared. For Derrida, the spectre unsettles the boundaries between presence and absence, life and death, past and present. It occupies what he describes as a time that “is out of joint”. Haunting, in this sense, is the return of whatever has not been fully laid to rest. The spectre marks an interruption in linear chronology, revealing how the past continues to exert force long after it is presumed finished.
This idea of temporal disturbance is expanded by José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia. Challenging the linear progression of what he terms heteronormative “straight time”, Muñoz argues that desire is often oriented toward futures that have not yet arrived. As he writes, “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing…. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” This formulation opens up a way of reading haunting also as an attachment to futures that never materialised, where longing persists because the horizon toward which it was directed remains perpetually out of reach.
2.2 The Gender of Haunting
Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) examines how horror repeatedly associates femininity with monstrosity by linking it with emotions and states of bodily fluids, sexuality, volatility, and forms of affect that challenge the social order. The female ghost becomes one of the genre’s most persistent embodiments of this logic. Rather than simply producing monstrous women, these narratives establish a broader affective economy in which emotional excess itself becomes feminised. Surplus affect belongs to the feminine, while masculinity is framed as its opposite – ordered, rational, and in control.
Mark S. Micale’s Hysterical Men (2007) complicates this gendered distribution of emotion by recovering a largely erased history of male hysteria. Through an examination of medical and cultural archives, Micale demonstrates that men often displayed symptoms such as panic, somatic distress, and emotional collapse commonly associated with hysteria. The emergence of Enlightenment ideals of rational masculinity gradually obscured these histories, producing the image of the self-controlled, emotionally disciplined man as a cultural norm. Micale’s work makes it clear that masculine hysteria is not a rare deviation but a reality pushed out of view to protect patriarchal ideals.
If monstrosity grows out of affective overflow, then masculinity, when it cracks under strain or slides into obsession or irrational behaviour, can also become monstrous. A man who loses the emotional discipline society demands can occupy the same abject space traditionally reserved for women in horror. This possibility opens a way to read male ghosts or spectral figures as embodying emotional registers conventionally coded as feminine.
2.3 The Afterlife of Attachment
Contemporary affect theory understands emotion not as a private feeling but as something that circulates across bodies, spaces, and objects. Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism argues that people often remain attached to objects, fantasies, relationships or promises that simultaneously sustain and obstruct them. This paradox is what she calls cruel optimism, where something you desire becomes an obstacle to your flourishing. Her work directs attention toward the persistence of attachment, particularly those attachments that continue despite their impossibility, loss or failure.
Sara Ahmed adds another dimension by describing affect as something that “sticks”. In Happy Objects, she argues that emotions cling to particular bodies, memories, and things through repetition and social history thereby giving them a kind of emotional weight, as if the past has lodged itself within them. Ahmed calls these patterns affective economies. Within Gothic storytelling, this means that domestic objects, trinkets, and familiar spaces can act as conduits for unresolved emotion, carrying the past into the present. Rather than treating haunting solely as a supernatural event, affect theory draws attention to the emotional networks that bind people, objects, and environments together. Ghosts emerge as signs of persistence of emotions that remain unfinished, attachments that never loosen.
3. Analysis:
Diés Iraé builds its haunting on a misrecognition so deeply ingrained within the conventions of Malayalam horror that viewers scarcely notice it until the film’s final moments. The film’s first spectral moments arrive in a register of softness: a slight dip on Rohan’s bed, a hand moving gently through his hair, the soft clicking of Kani’s hair clip. These gestures are marked by cultural codes long tied to feminine ghosts. Because Kani is the only dead character introduced early on, viewers instinctively attribute these affects to her. As the haunting intensifies, this assumption becomes increasingly difficult to question. Rohan is deprived of sleep, pursued by the sound of chilangas, dragged down stairs, pinned, choked, and bitten. The instinctive reading kicks in: the wronged woman returning as a violent reckoning. Since the film has already guided viewers to read the earlier tenderness as Kani’s presence, the sudden aggression feels like moral cause and effect, a haunting targeted at a man who abandoned a woman without closure. The trope is so familiar that viewers grant the spectre agency even before the film confirms anything. The ghost acquires meaning through genre expectation before it acquires a stable identity. The second half shatters this assumption. The aggressive ghost being revealed as male (Philip) forces the viewers into a retrospective re-reading of everything that came before. Gestures that seemed self-explanatory acquire new meanings, while previously secure assumptions begin to collapse. This delayed recognition echoes Derrida’s sense of spectrality: ghosts unsettle time, and their meaning arrives out of sequence, only becoming legible once the moment has passed.
The film’s central misrecognition lies in the collapse of two distinct hauntings into a single spectral narrative. Kani’s presence is marked by tenderness, intimacy, and quiet persistence, while Philip’s manifests through aggression, pursuit, and physical violence. The film initially offers no stable markers through which these presences can be clearly separated. Because Kani is the only deceased character known to the audience, both affective registers become absorbed into the same explanatory framework. The tenderness is read as Kani’s grief; the violence is read as Kani’s vengeance. What should appear as two spectres is therefore interpreted as one. This collapse reveals the extent to which haunting is recognised through cultural expectation rather than direct perception. Faced with an aggressive supernatural presence, viewers instinctively gravitate toward the familiar figure of the wronged woman whose suffering returns as retribution. The distinction between Kani and Philip disappears not because the film conceals it, but because viewers have already learned to read spectral aggression through a feminised Gothic script.
Once the spectres are identified, the haunting ceases to resemble a conventional narrative of supernatural vengeance. Philip’s haunting follows the logic of queer time, which bends away from neat linearity or moral resolution; it loops, drags, and resists closure. He is not a man returning for justice. He died of cancer, and his only unfulfilled desire was the love he never expressed to Kani. The confession remains unspoken, the relationship unrealised, and the horizon toward which his desire was directed permanently deferred. His ghost lingers not because of anger but the possibility of a life that never materialised.
Haunting is organised less by memory than by possibility – by something anticipated but never realised. Philip’s haunting is therefore animated by absence in a particularly Gothic sense: not the absence of what once existed, but the absence of what never had the chance to exist at all. Drawing on Muñoz’s conception of queer futurity, Philip’s attachment can be understood as a form of longing directed toward the “not-yet” – a future that remained permanently out of reach yet continues to exert force upon the present. Death should terminate possibility, yet Philip remains bound to possibilities that were never fulfilled in life. His presence disrupts the movement from desire to closure that conventional narratives often demand.
The gendered implications of the viewers’ misreading run deep. Malayalam horror has historically cast feminine ghosts as excessive – hysterical, grief-soaked, enraged – fitting neatly within Barbara Creed’s monstrous feminine. Affective intensity becomes culturally legible as feminine. Masculinity, by contrast, is presented as stable, rational and self-contained. Diés Iraé unsettles this arrangement. Although Philip remains unmistakably masculine, the emotional logic of his haunting draws upon registers traditionally associated with feminine Gothic figures. His attachment to Kani is marked by longing, vulnerability, obsession, and an inability to detach from an emotional reality that never existed. Even his violence emerges less as calculated revenge than as the eruption of an attachment that has exceeded the limits of containment. Rather than attaching monstrosity to a particular gendered body, the film reveals how emotional excess itself becomes culturally coded and distributed through Gothic convention.
Micale’s history of male hysteria clarifies this. Hysteria once applied to both men and women. Only with Enlightenment ideals of rational manhood did medicine suppress the idea of male hysteria. Panic, obsession, somatic distress, once recognised as human symptoms, were folded into a gendered script of female excess. Philip becomes a Gothic return of this repressed history. In life, he is shy, hesitant and emotionally constrained. In death, he becomes the outlet for everything he was never allowed to express. The ghostly body becomes the place where disciplined masculinity finally ruptures.
The film exposes the instability of the association between gender and emotion by demonstrating that grief, longing, obsession, and excess do not belong inherently to feminine bodies. They merely arrive there through repetition, convention, and expectation. Philip’s haunting renders that process visible by placing masculine emotionality at the centre of a Gothic narrative that initially appears incapable of recognising it.
The film presents Philip’s room filled with Kani’s belongings. They operate as points of emotional concentration, carrying attachments that survive beyond the individuals to whom they once belonged. Ahmed’s notion of affective stickiness adds a material dimension. Emotions cling to objects, gathering over time. His unspoken desire for Kani sustains him yet traps him, keeping him bound to an emotional cycle he cannot resolve. This is Berlant’s cruel optimism. Rather than allowing attachment to fade, these objects repeatedly return Philip to the same emotional horizon. The hair clip becomes charged with intimacy and memory. Philip’s room becomes saturated with traces of longing, transforming an ordinary domestic space into an affective archive. The chilanga tied to his legs binds him literally and emotionally to the world he cannot leave. The relationship remains impossible, yet the attachment continues to organise his existence.
In horror, objects often serve as totems, but Diés Iraé gives them the density of accumulated affect. Both spectres move through the same affective landscape. Kani’s tenderness and Philip’s attachment become entangled within the same objects, sounds, and spaces. As these affects accumulate, the distinction between the two spectres becomes increasingly difficult to perceive. The film therefore suggests that haunting is not simply the presence of a ghost but the continued circulation of attachment through material forms. Emotion survives by moving across bodies, objects, and environments, leaving traces that remain active long after their original moment has passed.
The exorcism sequence drives home the film’s refusal of traditional closure. Philip is expelled through practical severance, not spiritual cleansing. His legs are cut off because the chilanga cannot be removed and must be burned. There is no moral reset, just extraction. The narrative appears to close because Rohan survives, but the intervention fails to secure finality. The closing scene of the indentation on the bed, the hair clip and Kani’s quiet greeting suggests that haunting exceeds exorcism. What lingers is attachment.
Diés Iraé builds a queer affective Gothic that discards the betrayed-woman-retribution model and the restoration of patriarchal equilibrium. Haunting becomes the afterlife of feeling. Philip remains recognisably masculine, yet he occupies an affective position traditionally reserved for the female ghost. What emerges is a form of affective transvestism in which emotional and narrative roles travel across gendered bodies without fully belonging to them. Time folds in on itself. Closure dissolves. Emotion becomes spectral. The ghost becomes what remains when feeling refuses to be contained. Diés Iraé reimagines haunting as the persistence of unrealised futures, denied emotional histories, and attachments that refuse disappearance.
Works Cited:
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Routledge, 2006.
Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010.
Micale, Mark S. Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. Harvard University Press, 2008.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2019.
Prasad, Pooja, and Dr. Balakrishnan K. “Haunting the Psyche of Malayali: The Tradition of Horror in Malayalam Cinema.” ShodhKosh: Journal of Visual and Performing Arts, vol. 4 (1SE), 2023, pp. 269 – 275.
Sadasivan, Rahul, director. Diés Iraé. Night Shift Studios, YNOT Studios, 2025.
About the Author
Esha Ann Mariya is a recent BA English Language and Literature graduate from St. Teresa’s College (Autonomous), Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala and an incoming student in the MA English Studies programme at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. She was recognised as the Outstanding Student of her programme for two consecutive years and consistently ranked among its highest-performing students. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of literary theory, film and media studies, postcolonial studies, digital humanities, and contemporary culture. Alongside her academic work, she has contributed to community outreach and project initiatives through organisations such as S.L.A.T.E. and Venture Village, working in project management, writing, and public engagement. She is also actively involved in theatre, having directed and performed in multiple productions during her undergraduate years. Her broader interests include pedagogy, performance, public scholarship, and the cultural politics of storytelling across literature, film, and digital media. She can be reached through her LinkedIn profile.
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