Page 15 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

2 Nightmare Japan

and on-line fan sites illustrate, ‘New Asian Horror’ has, within the last
two decades, become both a genre deemed worthy of intellectual inquiry,
as well as one of international cinema’s most compelling and marketable
commodities. Japanese director Nakata Hideo’s wildly successful Ringu
(1998), for example, is not only one of the most discussed, re-made, and
imitated horror films in recent memory, but, as Mark Cousins points out,
it is also ‘the most commercially successful [motion picture] ever
released in [Japan]’ (2004: 475).
Ringu’s sensational reception and influence evinces Japanese
horror cinema’s position as one of the most vital and expansive filmic
traditions constituting ‘New Asian Horror’, a moniker that, like ‘French
New Wave’ or even ‘Japanese horror cinema’, serves a classificatory
function that inevitably risks privileging generic similarity over culturally
and historically specific conceptions of monstrosity, terror, and
apocalypse. This is not to suggest that each nation’s contributions to what
has come to be known as ‘New Asian Horror’ exist in a vacuum,
emerging uninflected from the imaginations of specific filmmakers; such
a claim would ignore the varying extent to which works of ‘New Asian
Horror’ borrow from, or emerge as reactions against, the aesthetic and
thematic content informing works of filmic horror from around the globe.
Nakata Hideo, for instance, admits that Ringu’s mounting dread and
terrifying visual economy owes as much to William Friedkin’s The
Exorcist (1973) as it does Mizoguchi Kenji’s haunting 1953 masterpiece,
Ugetsu monogatari, and the Suzuki Koji novel, Ring (Japan, 1991), from
which Ringu borrows its fundamental premise (475). South Korean
filmmaker Kim Dong-bin likewise adapts Suzuki’s novel with Ring
(1999). One may even go so far as to posit that by retaining the novel’s
focus on transgendered identity, Kim’s Ring is the more faithful film
adaptation of Suzuki’s novel, though one must also consider the multiple
narrative and thematic occlusions that necessarily accompany any cross-
cultural translation. Of course, such cultural cross-fertilisation in the form
of film adaptation is nothing new. Like many nations’ cinemas, Japanese
film has a lengthy history of international cultural exchange. As Richard
J. Hand notes, ‘Kurosawa Akira…takes Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1600)
and creates Throne of Blood (Kumonosu jô, 1957)’ (2005: 18), a film