Page 193 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

180 Nightmare Japan

entire physique. Over time, these grey blotches take on the texture of
aged newspaper, slowly consuming the afflicted person’s body until he is
reduced to dust. Faced with this scenario, Hideki’s grasp on reality
becomes increasingly tenuous. In a climactic series of dream sequences,
Hideki relives the events surrounding Nana’s death. Each re-visitation of
that tragic event allows him the opportunity to alter the past. Hideki
realises, however, that regardless of his attempts to save his family, one
member inevitably perishes. Finally electing to sacrifice himself in his
daughter’s place, Hideki appears to alter the past, albeit at a price. As the
film ends, we find ourselves viewing a scene very similar to the one that
opened the narrative. The family car speeds towards its apparently
unavoidable collision, the cursed newspaper fragment fluttering through
the air as if racing them to their destination. Suddenly, the paper flattens
out against Nana’s window, displaying its announcement of Hideki’s
impending death. As this scene suggests, while Hideki may have found a
way to save his wife and daughter from a violent demise, his young
daughter must now bear the weight of the otherworldly newspaper’s
endless barrage of premonitions.
The second instalment of Ichise Takashige’s ‘J-Horror Theatre’
series, Tsuruta Norio’s Premonition articulates a tension between two
seemingly incongruous and contradictory fears: (1) the nightmarish
potential of a universe in which human relationships and activities are
circumscribed by predestination, and (2) the terror of an existence
predicated upon randomness and chaos, of a life in which seemingly
inconsequential actions may result in both large-scale catastrophes and
smaller, personal tragedies. The philosophical conundrum driving
Premonition, in other words, finds articulation through the film’s
vacillation between a focus on the dread of foreknowledge (‘It’s
terrifying isn’t it,’ an enigmatic character ominously inquires of Hideki,
‘to see what you write come true?’) and a thoughtful reflection upon the
anxieties that arise when we recognise that we dwell in a universe driven
by chaotic contingencies beyond our absolute control. This tension
between an ideological framework grounded upon the possibility of
predestination and the ontologically disparate premise of an existence
predicated upon the impossibility of knowing the future confronts