Cosmological Haunting and the Afterlives of Empire: Dinka Moral Ethics and Asylum Governance in His House

This article analyses Remi Weekes’s His House (2020) as a work of socially conscious supernatural horror that interrogates the moral and psychological consequences of displacement within the contemporary UK asylum system. The film follows Bol and Rial, a South Sudanese couple granted probationary refuge in Britain after a perilous migration that results in the death of a child in their care. While existing scholarship has primarily interpreted the film through postcolonial Gothic or trauma–based frameworks, this article situates its haunting within the spiritual cosmology of the Dinka of South Sudan. In Dinka ontology, moral transgressions, particularly those involving betrayal, bloodshed, or unresolved death, disrupt the equilibrium between the living, the dead, and the spiritual realm, demanding recognition and ritual redress. Drawing on Fanon’s account of colonial trauma in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I argue that the apeth, associated with witchcraft in Dinka cosmology, cannot be reduced to a metaphor for guilt or psychological trauma alone. It also functions as a narrative logic of cosmological rupture intensified by exile and by the epistemic violence of the British asylum regime, which renders non-Western spiritual frameworks unintelligible or pathological. Through close analysis of the film’s narrative structure, visual aesthetics, and depiction of asylum governance, the article demonstrates how His House stages a collision between Dinka cosmology and the bureaucratic rationality of the postcolonial state. Horror emerges from this ontological dissonance: unresolved violence persists across borders, while the asylum system compounds displacement by denying the cultural and spiritual frameworks through which trauma might be addressed. The film reframes supernatural horror as a diagnostic mode that reveals the enduring afterlives of empire. The haunted house becomes a political allegory of managed marginality, exposing how Britain’s humanitarian discourse obscures deeper colonial continuities. By situating the film within Dinka cosmology and Fanonian postcolonial critique, this article demonstrates how His House transforms horror into a medium through which colonial histories, moral accountability, and displaced subjectivity return to demand recognition.