Haunting as structural return: gender, guilt, and domestic space in Susan Khon Pen (2025) and Khang Ban (2025)

This article examines the Thai films Susan Khon Pen (2025) and Khang Ban (2025) to argue that haunting in contemporary Thai horror cinema functions as a form of structural return. Rather than treating female ghosts as purely supernatural entities or as products of cursed spaces, the films present them as manifestations of unresolved gendered injustice embedded within patriarchal relationships. In both narratives, the female protagonists die following experiences of sexual violence, social abandonment, and marital betrayal, with no meaningful accountability from those responsible. The deaths of Lanthom and Nok, the female ghost protagonists in both films, emerge from systems of sexual violence, marital betrayal, moral double standards, and male complicity that fail to produce accountability in the world of the living. When such injustice remains unaddressed, haunting becomes a cultural mechanism through which suppressed guilt resurfaces within domestic spaces. In both films, the house—initially imagined as a site of stability and middle-class aspiration—gradually transforms into a spatial archive of secrecy and patriarchal control. This article conceptualizes this transformation as an ‘architecture of guilt,’ in which concealed violence becomes visible through haunting. By reclaiming domestic space, the female ghost destabilizes masculine authority and exposes the fragility of patriarchal order in contemporary Thai society.