Page 88 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema
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Chapter Three:
Ghosts of the Present, Spectres of
the Past: the kaidan and the
Haunted Family in the Cinema of
Nakata Hideo and Shimizu Takashi
Spirited Vengeance
Long a staple within Japanese literary and dramatic arts, the onryou, or
‘avenging spirit’ motif, remains an exceedingly popular and vital
component of contemporary Japanese horror cinema. Drawing on a
plurality of religious traditions, including Shintoism and Christianity, as
well as plot devices from traditional theatre (for instance Noh theatre’s
shunen- [revenge-] and shura-mono [ghost-plays], and Kabuki theatre’s
tales of the supernatural [or kaidan]), these narratives of incursion by the
spectral into the realm of the ordinary for the purposes of exacting
revenge continue to find new articulations, as well as new audiences,
courtesy of visually arresting and internationally acclaimed shinrei-mono
eiga (ghost story films) by directors such as Nakata Hideo’s Ringu (1998)
and Dark Water (Honogurai mizu no soko kara, 2002), and Shimizu
Takashi’s Ju-on: The Grudge (2002). Like the myriad of cultural texts
from which Nakata and Shimizu draw their inspiration, including now
‘classic’ kaidan such as Shindo Kaneto’s Onibaba (1964) and Kobayashi
Masaki’s Kwaidan (1965), these recent revisions of the ‘avenging spirit’
