Japanese Horror and the Transnational Cinema of Sensations

Steven T. Brown

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319706283
• eBook ISBN: 9783319706290
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Japanese Horror and the Transnational Cinema of Sensations undertakes a critical reassessment of Japanese horror cinema byattending to its intermediality and transnational hybridity in relation to world horrorcinema. Neither a conventional film history nor a thematic survey ofJapanese horror cinema, this study offers a transnational analysis ofselected films from new angles that shed light on previously ignored aspects of thegenre, including sound design, framing techniques, and lighting, as well as theslow attack and long release times of J-horror's slow-burn style, which havecontributed significantly to the development of its dread-filled cinema of sensations.

© The Author(s) 2018

Steven T. BrownJapanese Horror and the Transnational Cinema of SensationsEast Asian Popular Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70629-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Steven T. Brown¹

(1)

Department of Comparative Literature, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

End Abstract

Ah, yes, “J-Horror”; everyone knows its tropes by now: vengeful ghosts, long stringy black hair, impossible physical gymnastics, meowing little ghost boys, cursed videos (or cell phones or computers), old rotted buildings and corpses, moldy books and newspapers, elliptical storylines (or a total abandonment of logic), creepy sound design, and creepy cinematography.—Nicholas Rucka¹

What Was J-Horror?

J-horror is dead, long live J-horror! In an article titled “The Death of J-Horror ?” that was published in 2005 on the once highly acclaimed but now (sadly) retired Midnight Eye website, Nicholas Rucka surveyed the state of the art with respect to Japanese horror cinema and concluded that the spate of J-horror film and video releases that had flooded the market in recent years lacked the creative spark of earlier, more groundbreaking films. In response, Rucka made a strong appeal to Japanese filmmakers and producers “to work in a creative manner and put an end to the obsessive sequel-making and regurgitation of the shinrei-mono eiga (‘ghost film’) that is dragging down Japanese film (and Hollywood horror for that matter).”² If J-horror was already running out of steam at the time that Rucka penned his essay in 2005, the intervening years have shown few signs of revival. Indeed, few would disagree that by the time the crossover experiments started to appear—such as in the critically panned Sadako vs. Kayako (dir. Shiraishi Kôji, 2016), a mashup of the Ringu -Ju-on franchises—it was a clear sign that the “J-horror ” brand was not simply in its final death throes—it was already dead, if not yet buried. However, rather than pounding the final nail into its coffin, I would contend that it is precisely when the J-horror boom has finally run out of box office steam that the time is ripe for a critical reassessment.

Just over 25 years have passed since the origins of modern J-horror first emerged—coinciding not with Nakata Hideo’s Don’t Look Up ( Joyūrei , 1996) or Ring ( Ringu , 1998), as is often claimed, but rather with Director Tsuruta Norio’s straight-to-video anthology, Scary True Stories (Hontō ni atta kowai hanashi, 1991–1992).³ That V-Cinema anthologies such as Scary True Stories mark the true beginnings of the J-horror movement is the opinion of no less an authority than Takahashi Hiroshi , the screenwriter responsible for numerous J-horror classics—most notably the original Ringu trilogy that garnered so much attention around the turn of the millennium.⁴ In a fascinating and sometimes contentious interview, Takahashi challenged accepted wisdom about the genealogy of J-horror and reaffirmed the movement’s transnational hybridity . Conducted in connection with Takahashi’s role as the series supervisor for the “Horror Banchō” (2004) series of which Marebito (dir. Shimizu Takashi, 2004) was a part,⁵ Takahashi reflected on the early beginnings of the “J-horror” genre before it became a globally recognized brand at a time when directors such as Tsuruta Norio and screenwriters such as Konaka Chiaki were just starting to make “true ghost stories” ( shinrei jitsuwa ) for the straight-to-video V-Cinema market. “True ghost stories” ( shinrei jitsuwa ), or “real ghost stories ” ( jitsuwa kaidan ) as they are sometimes called, are a particular subgenre of the kaidan ghost storytelling tradition set in everyday settings that exemplify many of the narrative traits associated with legends, whether urban or rural: e.g., like legends, true ghost stories purport “to relate something that actually happened, an event which occurred in the same world in which the teller and listener live, but which took place in front of others (often the friend of a friend, in the case of modern ‘urban’ legends, or a deceased relative in the older ones).”⁶ Indeed, the connection between the two is made even stronger by the fact that, as Takahashi has acknowledged, many true ghost stories were actually inspired by urban legends circulating around Japan in the 1980s and 1990s that were collected and popularized in a range of successful publications and television dramatizations that fueled pop cultural interest in the paranormal.⁷ Moreover, “unlike the folktale, which is clearly fiction,” the legendary narratival form of true ghost stories uses “details and a convincing style to create a lifelike account,” so that, as folklorists Iwasaka Michiko and Barre Toelken point out, “even when the teller is not entirely convinced of the ‘facts,’ the story will be narrated as if it could be true, as if it were being held up for verification—or at least serious scrutiny.”⁸ In a wide-ranging interview on the genealogy of J-horror , Takahashi acknowledged that

The nature of this Original Video cinema movement was that it was extremely low-budget. How to make movies without spending money was the question. The other question was: “What is really scary?” “What is a truly scary movie?” We used to discuss that amongst ourselves. As expected, it was ghosts . For example, we could make it as an urban legend and make it feel like a “true ghost story” [ shinrei jitsuwa ]. We gathered many details of true ghost stories and pursued making them visually realistic as a method. In horror movies prior to that, for example, a ghost appears. But for many people, what is scary about a ghost is that it attacks you. They are scary because they attack people. That’s how it’s depicted. However, we didn’t show the attack. We didn’t think that way. The presence of a ghost is what is scary. It’s scary just standing there. That shot was the challenge. That was our way of thinking. The taste for “true ghost stories” is what we called it amongst ourselves. That’s how we approached making movies.

In my movies—those that I wrote, such as Don’t Look Up [Joyūrei] and Ring [ Ringu ]—this [taste for true ghost stories] was well received in America and Europe. For Mr. Kurosawa [Kiyoshi], it was Séance [Kōrei, 1999] and Pulse [ Kairo , 2001b]. That kind of expression became popular overseas. I think it was interpreted as the “Japanese taste” and spread as “J-horror,” but we don’t think of it as “Japanese” by any means. On the contrary, this type of “true ghost story” was first done in British ghost...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Ambient Horror: From Sonic Palimpsests to Haptic Sonority in the Cinema of Kurosawa Kiyoshi
• 3. Double Trouble: Doppelgängers in Japanese Horror
• 4.  Cinema Fou: Surrealist Horror from Face of Another to Gozu
• 5. In the Wake of Artaud: Cinema of Cruelty in Audition and Oldboy
• 6. Conclusion: Envelopes of Fear—The Temporality of Japanese Horror
• Back Matter