Page 197 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

184 Nightmare Japan

Fearful Multiplicities: New Visions, New Directions, and the Future
of ‘J-Horror’: Two Case Studies

Perhaps more than any other recent Japanese horror films, Shimizu
Takashi’s Marebito (or, The Stranger from Afar, 2004) and Tsukamoto
Shinya’s Vital (2004) evidence the kind of innovation necessary to keep
this vibrant cinematic tradition from falling into a stale cycle of endless
sequels and tropological redundancies. Importantly, they accomplish this
without deploying the increasingly clichéd strategy of clever self- or
poly-referentiality. Thus, Marebito and Vital rarely partake in the
tiresome strain of kitschy, postmodern rib-nudging that has become an
all-too-frequent trend within fin de siecle horror texts, from Wes Craven’s
Scream (USA, 1996) to Miike Takashi’s One Missed Call (2003).
Shimizu’s Marebito and Tsukamoto’s Vital are unsettling narratives that
confront audiences with novel re-imaginings of traditionally nightmarish
scenarios. What’s more, they provoke their audiences with intellectually
challenging premises that not only realise horror film’s potential for
advocating new ways of understanding contemporary cultural
transformations, but that also advance a reconsideration of the very
‘politics’ informing the act of watching horror films.

Haunted by Terror: Shimizu Takasi’s Marebito

Shot in only eight days during a break in the filming of the US adaptation
of Ju-on: The Grudge, Marebito’s plot is relatively simple. The central
protagonist, Masuoka, played by celebrated Japanese filmmaker
Tsukamoto Shinya, is a freelance camera operator obsessed with
capturing images of fear. These representations of mortal terror, Masuoka
reasons, will allow him to break through the banality of his daily
existence in early twenty-first century Japan. When Masuoka, armed with
with the digital video camera through which he experiences much of the
world, fortuitously captures a man’s grisly suicide, he soon feels a twinge
of excitement that leads him to revisit the scene of the man’s violent
death. Progressively drawn to the conclusion that the visceral intensity he