Page 112 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Ghosts of the Present 99

Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Dark Water, and Shimizu Takashi’s Ju-on:
The Grudge – have each spawned Hollywood remakes that, while
meeting with varying degrees of financial and critical success,
nonetheless illustrate Japanese horror cinema’s influence upon global
horror cinema’s visual and narratological landscape. As a Western film
critic with an avid interest in horror film’s shifting tropologies,
encountering this ‘new wave’ of contemporary horror cinema
reinvigorated my interest in a genre that had become depressingly
stagnant. Aside from a few truly groundbreaking texts, many of which
sailed well under the radar of the handful of distributors that fast-track
their wares into the majority of multiplexes and chain stores (both retail-
and rental-based) world-wide, Western horror cinema at the millennium’s
cusp had become stuck in a viscous feedback loop of uninspired sequels
reiterating the same tired formulae, or mired in a kitschy postmodern self-
referentiality that winked a little too obviously at its own cleverness as it
simultaneously mocked and celebrated the plurality of clichés their
narratives ironically, and inevitably, reproduced. This is not to suggest
that the iconography that permeates Japanese horror cinema emerged
without recognisable precursors, nor have they elided the market
pressures that lead producers and distributors to pressure directors for
‘more of the same’. As mentioned earlier, many of the motifs in these
films can be traced back (at least) to Japan’s kabuki and noh theatrical
traditions. Similarly, as Japanese directors like Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Nakata
Hideo, and Shimizu Takashi were weaned, to various extents, upon the
works of Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, and Wes Craven, perceptive
audiences can’t help but discern traces of these notable Western horror
auteurs’ visions within the mise-en-scène and, to a lesser extent, the
narratives of Japan’s latest generation of horror maestros.
When The Ring (2002), Gore Verbinski’s Hollywood remake of
Nakata’s Ringu, opened in theatres across North America, more than a
few Japanese horror fans held their collective breath, anxious to see how
well Nakata’s film (itself an adaptation of Suzuki Koji’s 1991 novel)
would translate for Western audiences. As Matt Hill’s excellent essay,
‘Ringing in the Changes: Cult Distinctions and Cultural Difference in US
Fans’ Readings of Japanese Horror Cinema’, illustrates, Verbinski’s