Page 113 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

100 Nightmare Japan

version met with mixed reactions among internet-based Japanese horror
fans, many of which were divided less in terms of the film’s artistic merit
than in terms of which version they had seen first (2005: 161-75). Many
film critics and horror movie fans found Verbinksi’s film both compelling
and frightening; it grossed over three billion dollars in US box office
receipts alone (Internet Movie Database 2006), assuring that a
Hollywood-produced sequel would soon follow. As expected, debates
inevitably arose over why Verbinski changed certain elements of
Nakata’s ‘original’ Japanese version, as if the term ‘remake’ implies that
successful transcultural adaptations should be largely faithful re-
constructions rather than a process of re-visioning or re-imagining that
allows larger, perhaps even wholesale reconceptualisations of the material
based upon social and cultural disparities. Perhaps, then, as the products
of Japanese and other East Asian cinemas continue to find themselves
queued for eventual Hollywood refashioning/regurgitation, it is time for
film scholars to revisit the aesthetics and politics of adaptation, perhaps
envisioning such texts as ‘covers’ (to borrow a term from music
criticism), or as ‘variations on a theme’, rather than merely visual and
narratological translations of a ‘foreign’ text for a ‘domestic’ market. If
Hollywood’s dominant economic logics render remakes of successful
Asian horror films virtual inevitabilities, perhaps it is time to perceive
such adaptations as musicians approach the recreation of jazz standards
from their own unique ethno-musicological positions. Doing so may
allow filmmakers to assess the new visual and narrative ‘arrangements’
on their own merits.
That said, this chapter’s conclusion turns its critical attention, if
only briefly, towards The Grudge (2004), Shimizu Takashi’s Hollywood-
funded reworking of Ju-on: The Grudge, a text whose premise and visual
style, as mentioned earlier, has been reconceptualised several times for
television and theatrical release. Unlike the Hollywood versions of
Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Dark Water, which transport the film’s action
from Japan to recognisably Western – albeit still uncanny – locations,
Shimizu, retaining a substantial degree of creative control over his motion
picture franchise, elected to set his film in urban Japan. Although much of
the cast, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Sarah Michelle Gellar