@catachresis:
I don't think the ghost story is dead. especially in the USA it is very important due to the Americans' complex of inferiority which is due to their lack of history. US is a very young country and therefore, suffers from a lack of history of its own. the result is Americans' fascination with european past, especially visible in Washington Irving's short stories based on E.T.A. Hoffman's stories, which itself derive from folklore from the middle ages. just look at the "legend of Sleepy Hollow" - that's a ghost story. the film "sleepy hollow" was made just a couple of years ago and shows once again the Americans' fascination with the past.
James's "Turn of the Screw" has nothing to do with the opposition of life and death, it's merely about the feminine sexual frustration (in Freud's terms the dead as well as the small boy are the personification of the governess's sexual desires). James is not interested in afterlife at all.
as far as Matrix is concerned, your interpretation is not wrong, but several other interpretations are possible. of course, you could describe the whole scenario as the product of Neo' mind. then, indeed, you are right about Neo's materialistic interests. but if we assume for a minute that everything is true, the Matrix really exists, then the aims of the characters become rather idealistic, than materialistic. of course, in any case the Matrix characters are rather concerned with this life than with afterlife. but that's just normal in our age - you can't expect people to really believe in after life, ghosts, souls in 21st century. we are still speaking about "spiritual existence", but in rather metaphorical terms. What Morpheus and Neo try to do is to ensure the spritiual existence of human race.
btw, Neo is not the Messiah, but Jesus Christ. consider the cookie, which connotes the bread in church (Christ's last supper) and the 13 buttons in the elevator (Christ+12 disciples).
the development you describe, catachresis, is just natural: prior to Modernism people were interested in afterlife, because religion still played a great role, even after the Enlightenment. but at the beginning of the 20th century religion lost its importance. Modernism is not concerned with afterlife, but with reality. That's why the detective story became so important, because a detective tries to create a coherent reality from small pieces of information he's got. ghosts and souls have become unimportant, because they are not part of objective reality, being therefore ignored.
So it depends on what you mean by "materialistic". if you take the word literally, as the opposition of materialistic and spiritual matters, then you are right - modern literature and films are materialistic. but it doesn't mean that they are primitive in any way.it's just that the word "spiritual" is used rather in metaphorical sense today, rather than in literal sense, as it used to be prior to modernism
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