Page 194 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

New Terrors, Emerging Trends 181

audiences with nothing less than the terror of being alive. In this sense,
Premonition can be understood as an existential examination of the limits
of human understanding, the inability to predict disasters (let alone
prevent them), and, in some ways, the necessity for accepting the horrific
as we accept the pleasant and the beautiful. As the sequence of ‘what if’
scenarios that comprises Premonition’s climax illustrates, the existential
crisis that by turns paralyses Hideki with grief and compels him to
reassess his ability to affect positive change is the same condition that
compels humanity to embrace the illusion of order and transcendent
meaning through religion and other supernatural narratives, including
cinematic horror.
In this preoccupation with chaos as a (self-)organising system,
Tsuruta Norio’s Premonition charts a similar thematic terrain as
Higuchinsky’s apocalyptic spectacle, Uzumaki. The realisation that small-
scale, seemingly insignificant decisions (or indecisions) may have
catastrophic impacts on a larger scale influences Hideki’s actions in
several ways throughout the film. Not only does it contribute substantially
to his life-shattering sense of culpability and regret (‘What if I could have
done one thing differently?’), but it also informs his anguish over the
potential consequences of interfering with the futures revealed to him by
the increasingly overwhelming volume of premonitions he receives.
Hideki, having glimpsed a newspaper article announcing his own death,
soon finds himself on an all-too-literal deadline reminiscent of that facing
Ringu’s cursed protagonists. Under the impression that his life is rapidly
drawing to a close, Hideki zealously scrawls down as many premonitions
as he can. Tsuruta’s approach to the trope of a death foretold, however,
differs importantly from the ‘countdown’ faced by the characters in
Nakata’s Ringu who, either by chance or out of desire to prolong the
cycle of deaths through a process of eternal deferment, have watched the
haunted video tape. Hideki is aware that he will eventually die, but the
date and manner of his demise remain indeterminate. As the time and
means of Hideki’s seemingly inevitable death elide him, his condition can
be read expansively as representative of the larger human condition. We
are all going to die someday, Premonition’s narrative ultimately posits, so