Page 186 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

New Terrors, Emerging Trends 173

traditions. As an exasperated Grady Hendrix remarks in a recent entry on
his blog, Kaiju Shakedown:

I mean, after The Ring, The Ring Two, The Ring Virus, Nightmare, Scissors,
Ju-on 1 & 2, A Tale of Two Sisters, Dark Water, Kakashi, The Phone, Shutter,
Unborn but Forgotten, Into the Mirror, Wicked Ghost, Shikoku, One Missed
Call, Horror Hotline…Big Head Monster, Pulse, R-Point, Three Extremes and
on and on, this whole "long-haired-dead-wet-chick" trope is dead. Done.
Finished. Must we destroy the planet to save ourselves from this flood of J-
horror knock-off movies?... J-horror is dead. Someone, anyone, please get it to
lay down and stop moving.

While Hendrix may overstate his case, casually applying the label, ‘J-
horror’ to films from countries other than Japan (six of the nine movies he
lists are South Korean productions and one, Shutter, is from Thailand) his
point regarding the risks of continually depicting similar iconographic
images (for example, the ‘long-haired-dead-wet-chick’ motif) is well
worth heeding.
One advantage to this recent proliferation of short films made for
television or straight-to-video/DVD release, however, is that the format
lends itself, by virtue of the sheer quantity of films produced, to the
occasional emergence of narratives that propel the horror genre forwards
in innovative if not always revolutionary ways. In the anthology, Dark
Tales of Japan, for example, Shimizu Takashi’s Blonde Kaidan
distinguishes itself from the collection’s other offerings in its critique of
Western appropriations and (com)modifications of Japanese horror
motifs. In Blonde Kaidan’s story of a Japanese director’s frustration over
Hollywood’s neo-colonial capitalisation upon the recent Japanese horror
boom, Shimizu’s central protagonist pontificates upon not only Western
cinema’s predilection for remaking films from ‘other’ cultures, but also
what he considers to be Hollywood’s fascination with, and insistence
upon, heroines with blonde hair. Consequently, in a farcical inversion of
‘J-horror’ clichés, the filmmaker soon finds himself haunted by a ghostly
variation of the onryou convention, repeatedly besieged by her
ridiculously expansive and resilient flaxen locks. Spectators familiar with
Shimizu’s work, especially his Hollywood-financed reiteration of his
popular Ju-on series – 2004’s The Grudge, starring fair-haired teen icon