Japanese Horror Films and their American Remakes

Valerie Wee

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415888608
• eBook ISBN: 9781134109692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Ring (2002)—Hollywood's remake of the Japanese cult success Ringu (1998)—marked the beginning of a significant trend in the late 1990s and early 2000s of American adaptations of Asian horror films. This book explores this complex process of adaptation, paying particular attention to the various transformations that occur when texts cross cultural boundaries. Through close readings of a range of Japanese horror films and their Hollywood remakes, this study addresses the social, cultural, aesthetic and generic features of each national cinema's approach to and representation of horror, within the subgenre of the ghost story, tracing convergences and divergences in the films' narrative trajectories, aesthetic style, thematic focus and ideological content. In comparing contemporary Japanese horror films with their American adaptations, this book advances existing studies of both the Japanese and American cinematic traditions, by:

• illustrating the ways in which each tradition responds to developments in its social, cultural and ideological milieu; and,

• examining Japanese horror films and their American remakes through a lens that highlights cross-cultural exchange and bilateral influence.

The book will be of interest to scholars of film, media, and cultural studies.

1
Haunting Specters

A History of Seeing Ghosts in Japanese and American Horror Films

Horror exists as a ubiquitous element in human culture. Cultural expressions of horror and the horrific have a long historical basis, and numerous explorations and expressions of the terrifying exist in mythology, primitive folktales, painting, literature, and theater and continue to extend across contemporary media (Worland 25). Japanese and Hollywood horror films in their earliest incarnations have drawn from these preceding cultural forms. Certainly, many of the distinctive horror elements found in the contemporary sets of Japanese films and their American ‘copies’ are derived from, and organized by, the dominant values, themes, and aesthetic practices that have long been expressed in earlier cultural articulations.

This chapter traces and compares the historical evolution of the supernatural horror film in both the Japanese and American contexts with an eye to revealing how this cinematic tradition reflects both a universal and shared sense of what is horrific and terrifying, even as each culture’s iterations reveal the specific sociocultural and ideological concerns unique to each national cinema. This historical overview, which focuses on examining how the ghost story has evolved through decades of cinematic representation, highlights the extent to which contemporary Japanese horror films and their American remakes reference and borrow from already established images, narratives, and structures. This chapter is the necessary first step in showing that the Japanese films that inspired the American versions are far from being ‘original.’ In fact, even as the Hollywood remakes reinterpret their Japanese inspirations, many contemporary Japanese horror films are themselves inspired echoes of horror texts that originated centuries ago.

This book’s primary focus centers on the kaidan, or ‘supernatural story/film,’ which is a subgenre of Japanese horror cinema that revolves around an unquiet spirit (almost always female, with a few distinct exceptions) that haunts the world of the living, driven by anger and a thirst for revenge. These films embody and advocate a range of ideologies, values, and beliefs, some of which are distinct to Japanese culture, whereas others coincide with broader, more generally held, notions of horror and the supernatural. Hollywood’s attempts at remaking these films invariably involve acknowledging, and where necessary reinterpreting, the values and underlying assumptions that are unfamiliar to Western culture and translating them in ways that are more accessible and familiar to the remake’s intended, more global audience. Before going on to examine how specific films negotiate the adaptive and remaking process, this chapter’s historical overview offers the necessary background and context against which the subsequent chapters’ examinations can be positioned. In addition, attention will be drawn to the instances of cross-cultural influences that have already occurred between Japanese and American cinema. The fact remains that even as contemporary American remakes reinterpret Japanese horror, Japanese horror itself has often borrowed from earlier American horror.

Onryō and Gothic Ghosts: Japanese and Western Supernatural Traditions

Cultural expressions of horror and depictions of the terrifying take many dimensions. In most cultures, one subset of such explorations features the supernatural, of which ghosts are a key component. This is certainly true in both Japanese and American traditions.

The Japanese have a deep-rooted belief in the supernatural that often includes monsters, demons, and ghosts. According to Melinda Takeuchi, the Japanese found great enjoyment in notions and depictions of the supernatural, which were treated as a form of entertainment. As she notes, “[M]onstrous or transformed creatures, including inanimate objects, are at the crux of the Japanese enjoyment of the supernatural” (10). One popular strain of horror focuses primarily on yūrei (ghosts) and, more specifically, onryō (vengeful, most commonly female, ghosts). According to the Shinto faith, after a human being dies, he or she becomes a spirit, and purification rituals are necessary to appease the angry spirits of the dead. Unappeased, any spirits who continue to suffer from jealousy, anger, or vengeance can return as ghosts to haunt the living.

Onryō are central figures in numerous kaidan (‘supernatural’) myths and folktales dating back to the Edo period (1603–1867). These traditional narratives reflect the values and superstitions that dominated premodern Japan, and the most popular ones typically feature innocent women who are victimized and brutally murdered by men. In Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan (Ghost Story of Yotsuya), a socially ambitious husband, Iemon, murders his young wife, Oiwa, so that he can be free to marry another woman. Oiwa’s ghost returns for vengeance and destroys her faithless husband. Bancho sarayashiki (The Dish Mansion at Bancho or The Story of Okiku) tells the tale of Okiku, a housemaid who is murdered by her samurai master, Aoyama. Okiku’s ghost returns nightly to haunt Aoyama, finally driving him mad. In Kuroneko (Black Cat), a woman and her daughter-in-law are robbed, raped, and murdered by samurai. These women’s spirits return as demon cats, killing any samurai they encounter. In all these tales, the vengeful spirits of these dead women return to wreak vengeance on their murderers and, in some instances, on society as a whole.

The appeal and popularity of these folktales have endured through the centuries, resurfacing in multiple cultural forms: in woodcut prints, classical theater, and more recently in film, television, and video.¹ Japanese cultural depictions of the supernatural in almost all of these formats overwhelmingly emphasize the bizarre, grotesque, and macabre. Ukiyo-e woodblocks from famed Japanese artists including Hokusai and Kuniyoshi Utagawa associated the supernatural “with images of transgression, mutation, and catastrophe” (Pointon 50). On the traditional Japanese stage in the eighteenth century, Kabuki, a mass-oriented form of theatrical entertainment that remains popular today, had a strong tradition of exploring and expressing notions of terror and the horrific.² Kabuki is characterized as “an unrealistic art; it is an art of bold outlines” (Miyake 25), and it “consists not in making the real look real, but in making the unreal look real (and by working on) principles of symbolism and impressionism” (Miyake 70). Aesthetically, Kabuki is characterized by a propensity for striking visuals and graphic effects and is marked by “zankoku no bi ([an] aesthetic of cruelty),” which according to Samuel Leiter equates to the form’s “highly aestheticized, even fantastical world where inherent sadism is muted by artistic techniques” (221). Kabuki, alongside other Japanese arts, centers on presentation, embracing and foregrounding stylization instead of realism and representation. Japanese art, therefore, tends to be presentational, focusing on artifice and emphasizing the performance rather than attempting the re-creation of ‘reality.’³ Characterized by a heightened visual theatricality encompassing elaborate staging and costumes, and highly dramatic performances, Kabuki’s preference for Edo gothic/supernatural narratives typically featured violent themes with a tendency toward highly stylized eroticism and sexual transgression. Onryō were often central figures in Kabuki performances that depicted murder in gory, albeit stylized, detail. These plays tended toward the brutal, presenting scenes of torture, murder, and self-mutilation, alongside sequences featuring the abuse and physical torment of women (which made Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan a popular favorite).

These premodern folktales of betrayed women and avenging onryō; the narrative blending of sexual treachery, selfish desires, fear, and despair; and visual depictions of yūrei as grotesque, deformed figures would have notable influence over later cinematic representations of horror and the supernatural. Indeed, many of the contemporary Japanese horror films, particularly Ringu, Honogurai mizu, Ju-On, and Chakushin ari, are overtly linked to these earlier texts both narratively and aesthetically, a point that will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapters.

Where the roots of contemporary Japanese horror can be traced back to the early 1600s, the modern Western horror tradition is often historically linked to gothic literature that emerged in England in the late eighteenth century. The gothic genre’s popularity was established by a range of novels that include Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Not unlike Japanese kaidan, these classic tales featured mysterious, often terrifying, events that blended heightened states of irrationality, fear, and eroticism with elements of the fantastic and supernatural. Much of gothic fiction features female victims who venture into crumbling, decaying, threatening spaces (most typically mansions, monasteries, and castles) to uncover previously hidden secrets. Where faithless and treacherous husbands are the traditional rogues in kaidan, the typical gothic villain is usually a violent, sexually predatory male who may possess supernatural abilities.⁴ This gothic horror tradition paved the way for the emergence of some of the most influential and enduring representatives of horror literature in the nineteenth century: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Fran-kenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

Although these three classic gothic tales revolved around unnatural monsters, other gothic tales featured “the ghost [as] the gothic threat par excellence—the restless spirit of a victim or villain from long ago” (Wor-land 28). Henry James’s gothic-inspired The Turn of the Screw (1898) is one of the more famous supernaturally tainted tales that features disturbing and haunting ghosts. The tale revolves around a young governess who is placed in charge of two young children, Flora and Miles, in a country estate. While there, she sees a mysterious couple wandering the grounds and begins to suspect that they are the ghosts of her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and Quint, Miss Jessel’s lover. The governess suspects that her young charges are aware of and have contact with the ghosts. One night, while the governess is taking care of Miles, Quint appears in a window. Attempting to protect Miles, the governess declares that Miles is free of Quint’s haunting but discovers that Miles has died in her arms. James’s ambiguous treatment of the supernatural clearly borrows from the gothic tradition.

In the West, explorations into things disturbing, terrifying, and grotesque were not limited to literary texts and also extended to the stage, where perhaps the most dedicated representations of the macabre and supernatural could be found in Paris at the Grand Theatre de Grand Guignol. Opened in 1897, the theater specialized in one-act plays featuring tales of terror, insanity, and murder. Audiences were drawn to the realistic stagings of “graphic mutilations, eviscerations, stabbings, beheadings, electrocutions, hangings, rapes, and other atrocious acts performed live on stage” (Worland 38). These performances were often naturalistic and revolutionary in nature, mocking and rejecting traditional moral perspectives in preference for darker, ironic, and often cynical conclusions. The Grand Guignol’s tolerance, and indeed preference, for shocking visual effects and the grotesque would outstrip the content found in early silent cinematic representations of horror that were created by Hollywood and European film producers during cinema’s experimental phase.⁵

If Japanese narrative and theatrical tradition emphasized the vengeful ghost, wronged spirits and demons, haunting the living, Western notions of horror were more commonly populated by unnatural or supernatural monsters, classically represented by Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the terrifying Mr. Hyde, the deviant counterpart to Dr. Jekyll. These literary monsters would have a significant influence and representation within Western horror cinema.

Hollywood and the Emergence of the Horror Film

The horror film has a long-established historical footprint dating back almost as far as the cinematic form itself. In the early days of cinematic experimentation during the early silent film/nickelodeon era (1908–1914), working-class audiences interested in motion picture entertainment would pay a dime to watch several short films screened in a small, often converted storefront theater. The typical bill consisted of two short films, and these theaters offered a changing roster of films to attract return business. The novelty of moving pictures and its relative affordability ensured its popularity, which translated into heightened demand for new product and encouraged increased industrial production. A number of films that would eventually be categorized as horror were produced at this time, with many of them drawing from popular literary works including Selig Polyscope Company’s short film adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908) and the Edison Film Company’s fifteen-minute version of Fran-kenstein (J. Serle Dawley, 1910).⁶

The next notable phase for the horror film did not develop in Hollywood but in Germany, with the release of the silent German Expressionist horror classics Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920),⁷ Der Golem (Paul Wegener, 1920), and Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922). Notably, these classic horror films were released several short years after the end of World War I, when a significant number of Europe’s youth lost their lives in violent warfare and the nations involved were suffering under great social and economic strain. Perhaps not surprisingly, these films reflected a world of paranoia, psychological fragility, and human anxiety that would continue to characterize Western horror films through the subsequent decades. When key German filmmakers fled to Hollywood to escape the rising threat of Nazi Germany, they brought the German Expressionist aesthetic style, and the interest in dark, horror-inflected narratives, with them.⁸ German expatriate filmmaker Karl Freund worked on Universal’s Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), which was credited with launching the modern Hollywood horror genre and shaping Hollywood’s cinematic horror tradition. Andrew Tudor characterizes the classical period of Hollywood horror (1931–1936) as one in which “[t]his ‘German style’ proved highly effective in suggesting a world in which dimly seen and dimly understood forces constrained, controlled and attacked its unsuspecting inhabitants” (Monsters 27–28), which stood in direct contrast to the more “naturalistic” aesthetic norms adopted in nonhorror, realist films (Monsters 24).

By the late 1930s and early 1940s, however, Hollywood horror films had shifted away from the Expressionist style toward a more naturalistic and realistic visual tradition (Tudor, Monsters 33). Mainstream Hollywood’s commitment to the literal, the realistic, and the representative had infiltrated the horror genre. The traditional American horror film of the 1930s and 1940s conformed to classical Hollywood conventions, which centered on a ‘goal-oriented protagonist,’ the need for a clear (read ‘rational’) cause-and-effect traditional narrative trajectory that moved from a state of order to chaos, and a final return to order reinstated with the neutralization of the evil threat culminating in neat narrative closure.⁹ Hollywood’s initial forays into horror films focused primarily on monsters in the borrowed tradition of literature’s Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At this stage, the ghost had not yet made any notable appearances on American screens.

Early Japanese Cinema and the Kaidan

Cinema’s arrival in Japan occurred in the late 1890s. In early examinations of Japanese film history, Western scholars and critics have tended to create the impression that Japanese cinema developed in cultural and aesthetic isolation, separate and distinct from that of the Western world. These perceptions have ten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note
• Introduction: The Horror, the Horror...
• 1 Haunting Specters: A History of Seeing Ghosts in Japanese and American Horror Films
• 2 Hollywood and Japan, Comparing Supernatural Constructions: Cultural Ideologies, Social Anxieties, and Aesthetic Tendencies
• 3 Terrifying Images: Visual Aesthetics and Ways of Seeing in Ringu and The Ring
• 4 “Oh, Mother!”: Single Mothers and Abandoned Daughters in Honogurai mizu no soko kara and Dark Water
• 5 “Father Knows Best?”: Patriarchal Anxieties and Familial Dysfunction in Ju-On and The Grudge
• 6 The End of the World as We Know It: Apocalyptic Visions in Kairo and Pulse
• 7 (Post-)Modern Anxieties, Technohorror, and Technophobia in Chakushin ari and One Missed Call
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Filmography
• Index