Page 108 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Ghosts of the Present 95

culture: the patriarchal paradigm assaulted at its very foundations. Central
to Ju-on: The Grudge, then, are those social transformations linked with
the radical changes in the socio-cultural landscape that followed the
bursting of the economic bubble in the early nineties – an implosion that
has resulted in not only transforming notions of gender roles, but also
what cultural theorists like Hayao Kawai identify as the collapse of the
‘Japanese-style extended family’ (1986: 303) and the rise of domestic
violence (306). One can read the fragmented, impressionistic opening
montage as illustrative of a profound social disorientation, but one can
also comprehend the sequence’s implied violence as emblematic of a
larger compulsion to re-establish and/or maintain a regime of masculine
dominance.
Of course, similar ‘gender trouble’ has long informed Western
horror cinema, and so Shimizu’s occasional appropriation of visual tropes
from US slasher films of the late seventies and early eighties seems
fitting, particularly given both the often neoconservative agendas of such
texts 3 and the shifting alignment of the spectator’s gaze. This is not to
suggest that apparently ideologically recuperative productions lack the
potential, in spite of themselves, to advance progressive political
perspectives. As Douglas Kellner notes, even the most ‘conservative’
horror films not only ‘put on display both the significant dreams and
nightmares of a culture and the ways that the culture is attempting to
channel them to maintain its present relations of power and domination’,
but also expose the ‘hopes and fears that contest dominant hegemonic and
hierarchical relations of power’ (1995: 111). Nevertheless, the US horror
film icons Shimizu cites as inspirational (A Nightmare on Elm Street’s
th
Freddie Kruger and Friday the 13 ’s Jason), as well as the slasher film/
‘stalker cycle’ sub-genre from which they arise, are veritable repositories
of ‘repressed body anxiety[ies]…erupting with a vengeance’ (Dery 1997:
233). In this sense, even if these films from which Shimizu borrows
seemingly promote a certain political or ideological agenda by
‘punishing’ certain behaviours (for instance, sexual promiscuity, or drug

3 See Sharrett, C. (1993) ‘The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture’, Journal of Popular
Film and Television, vol. 21 no. 3, 1993, pp. 100-110.