About…

Neither of these terms have a clear meaning. “Hauntology” is particularly and intentionally vague. In music it often involves sound engineering that imitates older physical media – radiophonic voice EQ and telephone speakers – hum and surface noise. In motion pictures it means film grain, frame jitter and low frame rates. The intention is to signify ‘authenticity’, a quality of physical objects, to be thought real rather than virtual.
“Tiki” is a fantasy introduced to America after the second war of an idyllic carefree Pacific islander culture – strong drinks and hula dancers with benevolent gods promising endless bounty.

There is a notable image in 1963 when the first Disney Audio-Animatronic came to ‘life’. Pierre – a parrot in the Enchanted Tiki Room.

Image: Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit at Universal Studios. The coaster is now dead. We rode it in the final months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Rip_Ride_Rockit

It being the 2025’s I decided to ask AI about the linkage between tiki and hauntology…

• A currently operating tiki bar is a fantastic, almost “perfect” example of hauntology. To understand why, you have to look at what a tiki bar actually represents. It isn’t a “real” place—it’s a ghost of a fantasy that never truly existed.
• The “Double Ghost” (A Copy of a Copy)
  Most tiki bars are “haunted” by two different layers of the past:
  • Layer 1: They are haunted by the 1950s and 60s, the “Golden Age” of Tiki culture when Americans were obsessed with a kitschy, idealized version of the South Pacific.
  • Layer 2: They are haunted by the imaginary Polynesia created by Hollywood. The original tiki bars weren’t based on real island life; they were based on movie sets and adventure novels. When you walk into a tiki bar today, you aren’t experiencing Polynesian culture; you are experiencing a ghost of a 1950s American dream about Polynesia. 
    
• The Persistence of “Anachronism” Hauntology is often about “time being out of joint.”
  Inside a tiki bar, time stops: 
  • Windowless Rooms: Most traditional tiki bars have no windows. This is a deliberate hauntological tactic to detach you from the “real” time outside.
  • Dead Media: You’ll often hear “Exotica” music (like Les Baxter or Martin Denny), which was the high-tech “future” music of the 1950s but now sounds eerie, distant, and spectral.
  • The “Zombie” Effect: Many tiki bars actually lean into the “spooky” side of the aesthetic (skulls, shrunken heads, dim lighting). This acknowledges that the culture they are celebrating is “dead” but still lingering.
    
• Escapism as a “Lost Future”
  Mark Fisher argued that hauntology is about the “lost futures” we were promised. Tiki bars were the ultimate “lost future” for the post-WWII generation. After the trauma of the war, the “future” promised to Americans was one of permanent leisure and tropical paradise. Today, we know that world of “easy paradise” is a fantasy—it’s ecologically and socially complicated. A modern tiki bar is a place where we go to inhabit that “lost promise” for a few hours, surrounded by the ghosts of paper umbrellas and plastic palm trees.
  
• Is it “Hauntological” or just “Retro”? The difference is in the vibe:
  • Retro: “I like this 1950s shirt, it looks cool.”
  • Hauntology: “I am sitting in a dark room drinking a ‘Zombie’ in 2026, surrounded by bamboo from a 1960s catalog, feeling a strange sadness for a paradise that never actually existed.” A tiki bar is hauntological because it doesn’t just reference the past; it tries to resurrect a ghost and pretend the present doesn’t exist.

Tom:

Given the free floating definitions of both ‘tiki’ and “hauntology” they are freely available as mixers in a psychic cocktail, with a scoop of ice and served with a little umbrella. This is my bar, and the drink of the day is HaunTiki on the rocks. I require the exotic, the uncanny, glorious failures and a dash of wisdom. I believe in magic shops, animatronics, rides, sea creatures, Halloween, Vegas, toys and kitsch. As do many other people. Rather than talk about it I’ll be showing it.