Page 184 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Chapter Six:

New Terrors, Emerging Trends

and the Future of Japanese Horror

Repetition, Innovation, and ‘J-Horror’ Anthologies

The following pages constitute not only this book’s final chapter, but its
conclusion as well. I adopt this structural and rhetorical manoeuvre for
two reasons. Firstly, the arguments advanced in this chapter provide a
critical assessment of the state of the horror genre in Japanese cinema at
the time of this writing. As a result, this chapter examines not only the
rise of a self-reflexive tendency within recent works of Japanese horror
film, but also explores how visual and narratological redundancy may
compromise the effectiveness of future creations, transforming motifs
into clichés and, quite possibly, reducing the tradition’s potential as an
avenue for cultural critique and aesthetic intervention. As one might
suspect, the promise of quick economic gain – motivated both by the
genre’s popularity in Western markets, as well as by the cinematic
tradition’s contribution to what James Udden calls a ‘pan-[east-]Asian’
film style (2005: para 5) – inform the fevered perpetuation of predictable
shinrei mono eiga (‘ghost films’). Secondly, by examining the emergence
of several visually inventive and intellectually sophisticated films by
some of Japanese horror cinema’s most accomplished practitioners, this
chapter proposes that the creative fires spawned by the explosion of
Japanese horror in the 1990s are far from extinguished. As close readings