Page 105 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

92 Nightmare Japan

Hybrid Moments: Cinematic Symbiosis and Familial Mutation in
Shimizu Takashi’s Ju-on: The Grudge

The symbiotic relationship between US and Japanese cinema is perhaps
the most creative and consistent in the history of motion pictures. Of
course, at the epicenter of any discussion of this topic looms the presence
of legendary director Kurosawa Akira, whose Stray Dog (1949) and High
and Low (1963) remain vital experiments with the primarily US style
known as ‘film noir’, and whose more canonical works, such as The
Seven Samurai (1951) and The Hidden Fortress (1958), have been
famously remade in the US as The Magnificent Seven (USA John Sturges,
1960) and Star Wars (USA George Lucas, 1977) respectively. When one
factors in such epic Japanese-US co-productions as Tora, Tora, Tora
(Richard Fleischer and Fukusaku Kinji, 1970) and Gojira 2000 (Okawara
Takao, 1999), as well as the increasingly prevalent interconnections
between Japanese anime and Western science fiction texts, one soon
discovers that even a cursory investigation of this phenomenon could fill
an entire volume of film scholarship and, most certainly, exceeds the
scope of this project.
Recognising the debts that these two crucial film industries owe to
one another, however, is critical to this essay’s project. At the very least,
it allows us to advance some preliminary theories as to why Shimizu
Takashi’s Ju-on: The Grudge has so quickly garnered a modest cult
following in the US and other Western markets – as evidenced by the
Hollywood remake, titled The Grudge, starring Buffy the Vampire
Slayer’s Sarah Michelle Gellar and helmed by Shimizu Takashi himself.
If, as Shimizu claims, US horror film series like Friday the 13 th and A
Nightmare on Elm Street have impacted his conceptualisation of
cinematic horror, then might Ju-on: The Grudge’s international success
be a result of Shimizu’s skillful weaving of the visual logics behind what
2
Vera Dika and Carol Clover call the ‘stalker cycle’ with filmic sequences

2
See Dika, V. (1987) ‘The Stalker Film, 1978-81’, in Waller, G.A. American Horrors: Essays
on the Modern American Horror Film. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, and