Description: "Leeder skillfully unpacks the cultural currents that bound cinema's early development to late-Victorian interest in paranormal phenomena. In rich and revelatory detail, he uncovers cinema's hidden origins as a technology that spurred the imaginations of a motley crew of avant-gardists, would-be spiritualists, and charlatans who bespeak cinema's ambivalent entry into the modern era." (Rob King, Columbia University, USA. Author of The Fun Factory, 2008) "A timely, original and above all captivating contribution to the field of early cinema studies, as well as to the thinking of the supernatural and, more specifically, spectrality. The 'haunted screen' is resoundingly and engagingly historicized, making readers realize that seemingly illuminating metaphors may actually serve to obscure and misdirect."(Esther Peeren, University of Amsterdam, UK. Author of The Spectral Metaphor, 2014) "Following the 'spectral turn' in recent scholarship, Leeder provocatively re-reads early film history and theory in relation to the historical occult. His engaging new book demonstrates just how much the emerging culture of cinema was haunted by ostensibly mystical concepts and ghostlike apparitions." (Matthew Solomon, University of Michigan, USA. Author of Disappearing Tricks, 2010)

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