Transnational Horror Across Visual Media

Fragmented Bodies

Dana Och, Kirsten Strayer, Dana Och, Kirsten Strayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136744914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This volume investigates the horror genre across national boundaries (including locations such as Africa, Turkey, and post-Soviet Russia) and different media forms, illustrating the ways that horror can be theorized through the circulation, reception, and production of transnational media texts. Perhaps more than any other genre, horror is characterized by its ability to be simultaneously aware of the local while able to permeate national boundaries, to function on both regional and international registers. The essays here explore political models and allegories, questions of cult or subcultural media and their distribution practices, the relationship between regional or cultural networks, and the legibility of international horror iconography across distinct media. The book underscores how a discussion of contemporary international horror is not only about genre but about how genre can inform theories of visual cultures and the increasing permeability of their borders.

Part I
Spectres of History

1 Ghastly Transmissions

The Horror of Connectivity and the Transnational Flow of Fear

Brenda S. Gardenour Walter

Modern media and rapid communication technologies have made possible a language of transnational horror predicated neither on the Hollywood version of Gothic, nor on a single horror tradition from any given region, but instead on the flow of fear along a network of edges and hubs, in which elements of terror are continually received, shaped, and transmitted in myriad patterns and multicultural contexts. At the heart of this new fractal of horror are digital technologies such as digital cameras, computers, and the Internet, all of which have facilitated the regional creation and transnational distribution of cutting-edge horror cinema.¹ Ghost stories, in particular those involving angry and sorrowful spirits that return from a cursed past to haunt the present through modern technology, are not only the most popular subgenre of horror film, but also the most frequently and fluidly disseminated across cultures. One example would be the Thai horror film Shutter (2004), in which the ghost of a wronged woman seeks revenge against her abuser by haunting his camera. After its release in Thailand, the regional film quickly gained a devoted international following through official and bootleg DVD sales, video on demand rentals, as well as Internet file sharing. Its seemingly universal popularity spawned a multitude of remakes, including the Tamil film Sivi (2007), the Hindi film Click (2010), and the American film Shutter (2008), which was directed by Japan’s Masayuki Ochiai. Through remakes and transformations, regional tales of vengeful ghosts and cursed pasts are culturally adapted, internationally disseminated, and instantaneously transmitted into our homes through digital devices and networks such as the Internet. The resulting transnational and transmedial matrix of fear blurs the boundaries between original and remake, foreign and native, sender and receiver, and creates a web of postmodern horror mediated by digital technology, one in which distant ghosts and curses might become our own.²

The pervasive nature of digital technology in our quotidian lives and its power to connect us to invisible and distant worlds makes it an excellent conduit for transnational terror within and beyond the context of the horror film. From Tokyo and Bangkok to Boston and Ankara, modern life is bound by a matrix of digital media; our homes are permeated by digital communication technologies that link us to one another in a complex network of connectivity spanning the earth and extending into space. Digital cameras, smartphones, e-readers, and personal computers are with us at all times, sharing our most intimate living spaces, waiting to connect us to the ethereal realm of the Internet that swirls about us imperceptibly and the disembodied voices that inhabit it. For many, the digital age of hyper-communication has led to a fractured existence, with traditional social structures such as family and community having given way to the isolated life of the individual. From our middle-class fortresses, we reach out through digital media in a desperate attempt to contact others and reaffirm our own existence, often without our knowing whom or what we are inviting into our lives. This tension between the desire for and fear of an unseen “other” that might penetrate our homes, bodies, and memories provides the emotional substrate for horror films focusing on the return of vengeful ghosts and their contamination of the living through digital communication. Confronted with moving images of these desperately lonely disembodied beings, we are ultimately forced into a Kristevan state of abjection in which we transcend the symbolic order to become the very thing we revile.³ These ghostly transmissions not only present us with our own horrifying reflections as nameless and rootless ghosts but also connect us to a repressed past that, refusing to remain silent, claims us and drags us back into the darkness.⁴ As we are forced to confront our shadowy existence, the ghost in the machine reminds us that we are never truly alone, nor safe from penetration but, like flies struggling in an unseen spider’s ever-vibrating web, are bound to the memories, ghosts, fates, and curses of myriad invisible beings. Such is the horror of inescapable connectivity.

Some of the most terrifying and successful transnational horror films fuse regional customs regarding the curses of the angry dead with a more global fear of technology and instant connectivity and the seemingly uncontrollable power of both to permeate our lives and alter our fundamental sense of identity. In the Thai film Shutter and its subsequent transnational remakes, a vengeful female spirit confronts the living through visual media, forcing the present to bear witness to horrifying injustices callously left rotting in the darkness of the past. In these films, the grudge between dead and living is intimate and bound to a single event: the rape and abandonment of an unstable young woman whose spirit returns to stalk her tormenters through photographs. In Shutter, fragmented images communicated by a vengeful ghost through visual media invade the domestic sphere, further rupturing already destabilized relationships in the living present, reminding us that the legacy of abuse ripples across the waters of time in endless waves of sorrow. The power of angry ghosts to destroy human relationships and individual identities through technology is multiplied geometrically in a second set of transnational horror films, the Japanese Kairo (2001) and its Turkish remake, D@bbe (2006). In both films, the Internet becomes a matrix of fear, a dangerous network that allows disembodied entities to transform those who log on into ghosts, isolating and trapping them in their own forlorn and forgotten haunted houses. In Kairo, the souls of the dead penetrate the world of the living through the Internet and drag lonely individuals from their empty lives into the digital void with the promise that they will become part of an interconnected and invisible community. In D@bbe, the Turkish director Hasan Karacadag˘ reshapes Kairo to resonate with a Muslim audience, replacing the hungry ghosts of the original with Qur’anic entities, Dabbe and jinn, who use the Internet as a mechanism to punish sinners at the beginning of the Yawm al-Qiyāmah, or end of times. Although culturally divergent, Kairo and D@bbe are both founded in a fear that angry ghosts from anywhere geographically or temporally might stalk us at our jobs and in our homes and claim us instantly through an indiscriminate digital network from which it is nearly impossible to disconnect.

The ghostly use of technology to communicate the forgotten past to the living and the subsequent creation of a network of fear that permeates the present in films such as Shutter, Kairo, and D@bbe can be traced back to the Japanese movie Ringu (1998), directed by Hideo Nakata and based on the novel by Koji Suzuki. Ringu tells the tale of two fractured Japanese families bound across time by the curse of an angry child-ghost named Sadako who stalks and kills strangers unfortunate enough to witness her fragmented memories—mental images that provide clues to her wretched life and horrifying death—recorded on videotape.⁵ Like urban legends and local rumors, Sadako’s cursed videotape circulates from person to person in an ever- widening network, in this case facilitated by the proliferation of televisions and VCRs in homes across Japan. Ringu’s popularity in Japan and in burgeoning J-pop culture in the U.S. inspired an American remake, The Ring (2002), directed by Gore Verbinski. The Ring reshapes much of Ringu for an American audience, including moving the setting to Seattle and radically altering the story behind the ghost and her curse in order to emphasize the cyclical nature of child abandonment and neglect in the modern home. While excising almost all evidence of the movie’s Japanese cultural origins, The Ring retains two of Ringu’s foundational elements: the depiction of the vengeful ghost as a Japanese onryou and the use of modern technology and media to transmit ancient curses.⁶ These two elements would become standard tropes in the numerous East to West horror remakes that have proliferated since The Ring’s phenomenal success.

The colonial tensions threaded through Ringu and The Ring are a salient feature of transnational remakes of supernatural horror films. Inspired by the global popularity and profitability of J-horror, film makers from China, Thailand, and Korea—especially those targeting the transnational market— routinely cast their cinematic ghosts in the mold of the Japanese onryou, with her pale skin, stringy black hair, and unnatural movements.⁷ Meanwhile, Western audiences have come to expect all Asian ghosts, whatever their culture of origin, to conform to the Japanese paradigm, even when all other indigenous cultural aspects of the original films have been expunged. Through mass media and digital technology, ancient Japanese ghosts now haunt the homes and imaginations of individuals from America and Europe to India and Turkey. In America, this Japanese cultural invasion is laden with historical and cultural memories linked to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and the subsequent American occupation of Japan through the 1950s—a period in which Japanese culture was suppressed in both nations and Western American culture was hegemonic. This fascination with and fear of a distant yet culturally ascendant other who might invade and contaminate our homes—be it out of revenge or conquest—takes on a different shape when transnational remakes move from East to West to the Middle East. In Turkey, for example, the Japanese ghost story has been reshaped to speak to a Muslim audience who does not believe in ghosts as such; what remains is a terrifying high-speed network that serves as a conduit for globalization, digital colonization, and the potential corruption and destruction of traditional Turkish ways of life by the cursed histories and superstitions of distant non-Muslim entities.

Fragmented Images: Bearing Witness in Shutter

In Shutter, the camera’s lens serves as the primary conduit through which the ghostly past communicates with the present. By embedding fragmented images in photographs and videotapes, a wronged female ghost returns to the living in order to tell her tale, to seek vengeance on her oppressors, and to discharge her wrath on the guilty and the innocent. The choice of photography as a means of communication by the dead speaks to the seemingly archetypical belief that recorded images, both still and moving, might retain an element of the subject’s soul. Popular culture in the West and East speaks to our uneasy sense of the camera’s ghastly power to capture unseen entities, from Victorian spirit photography and twenty-first century paranormal investigation shows such as Ghost Adventures to the Camera Obscura featured in the 2003 Hong Kong film The Park, and Tecmo’s transnationally popular Japanese horror-survival video game, Fatal Frame (2001).⁸ Even if a modern camera cannot physically trap a ghost from the past, it can nevertheless create ghosts by capturing moments in time and preserving them for the future. Be they happy (births, weddings, graduations, festivals) or sorrowful (crime, funerals, tragedies, disasters), photographs contain images of our own ghostly former selves and those we love, as well as those who—because of our own sorrow or guilt—we might wish to erase from our histories. Because of the physicality of photographs as artifacts, such erasures become impossible, and uncomfortable images remain as reminders of old wounds unhealed. By inserting itself into a photograph or video, a ghost provides the living with undeniable and indelible visual proof of its otherwise invisible presence as it reaches out from the past to haunt the present and, through the preservation of its image trapped on film, the future. Refusing to remain sequestered in the dark attic of the mind-crypt, the ghost in the photo forcibly and violently bursts forth, demanding remembrance.⁹ Shutter tells the tale of such a ghost, Natre, who refuses to disappear from the memories of the living, but instead reappears through visual media to demand that the present bear witness to her horrifying abuse and sorrowful death.

Released in 2004 and directed by Parkpoom Wongpoom and Banjong Pisanthanakun, the Thai film Shutter focuses on a young man named Thun, his girlfriend Jane, and the angry ghost of his former girlfriend, Natre. The opening scenes establish the film’s primary themes, the cyclical abuse of women and the disrespect of the past.¹⁰ We are introduced to Thun and Jane at the wedding of Ton, one of Thun’s friends from college, where the men are drinking heavily and recounting their sexual exploits. Just as Ton is being teased about whoring around the night before his wedding, his bride appears like a fairytale princess in a sparkling white dress, tiara, and traditional sash; upon her arrival, the group laughs at her cruelly and continues to drink while she remains innocently unaware that she is the butt of their joke. In the following scene, Jane drives a very drunk and flirtatious Thun home from the bar. Distracted by Thun’s continued advances, Jane does not see a strange young girl in t...