Page 187 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

174 Nightmare Japan

Sarah Michelle Gellar – will undoubtedly read this short film as an ironic,
self-reflexive indictment of not only the economic factors dominating
production concerns both in Japan and abroad, but also Shimizu’s own
acknowledged complicity in such projects. Japanese producers, like their
Hollywood counterparts, have a lengthy and well-documented history of
eagerly exploiting popular trends, and the current capitalisation upon the
cross-cultural appeal of Japanese horror movies is no exception.
In Shimizu’s Blonde Kaidan, then, the subject being haunted is
nothing less than Japanese horror film as a popular tradition in world
cinema. Furthermore, the film’s restless blonde ghost, far from merely
conforming to the genre’s motif of the wronged and vengeful female
spirit, assumes a form immediately reminiscent of Hollywood stars like
the aforementioned Sarah Michelle Gellar, as well as Naomi Watts, the
latter of whom portrayed the resourceful investigative reporter in the
2002 US remake of Nakata Hideo’s Ringu. As Gang Gary Xu correctly
notes, Shimizu’s The Grudge, with its casting of Gellar as ‘an expatriot
American social worker’ in Japan, could have provided an ‘exploration of
cultural tensions for Westerners in Tokyo, similar to that revealed in Lost
in Translation (Sophia Coppola, 2003)’ (2004: para 9). That it failed to be
anything remotely close to this illuminates the extent to which remaking
successful works of Asian cinema has become ‘Hollywood’s way of
outsourcing’, a process that saves Western producers from having to pay
labourers like ‘assistant producers’, ‘supporting crew’, and extensive
‘marketing teams’ (para 9). In this light, Shimizu’s ‘Blonde Kaidan’
functions as a corrective of sorts, at once foregrounding Shimizu’s
acknowledgement of the financial pressures driving the (mass) market for
Japanese horror films in Western cultures and criticising Hollywood’s
effacement of ‘the original ethnicity, the “aura’, the intellectual property’
and, last but certainly not least, ‘the identity and history of an entire
national film industry’ (para 9).