Page 89 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

76 Nightmare Japan

trope continue to relate tales of ‘wronged’, primarily female entities who
return to avenge themselves upon those who harmed them. The targets of
these angry spirits’ rage, however, are often multiple, and careful
analyses of the focus of the spirits’ wrath, as well as the motivations
behind their actions, provide valuable insights into the historical,
political, gendered, and economic logics informing current socio-cultural
tensions between nostalgic imaginings of a ‘traditional Japanese’ past and
the equally illusory threat and/or promise of an ever-emerging
technological, global, and postmodern Japan. Consequently, the impact of
late industrial capitalism on the various (re)constructions of the ‘family’
in contemporary Japan constitutes one of the chapter’s primary concerns.
In particular, since both Ringu and Dark Water feature heroines who are
also single mothers, this chapter examines the extent to which Nakata’s
female protagonists function as aesthetic and cultural barometers for
highly contested comprehensions of gender and gendered behaviours in
Japan. As well, these cinematic heroines – and the ghosts they confront –
provide compelling analogies not only for Japan’s protean economic and
familial landscape, but also for emerging neo-conservative ideologies that
threaten to re-imagine the notion of equal rights for men and women from
a more ‘conventionally Japanese’ perspective. Furthermore, although
Nakata depicts the exorcism, or even temporary placation, of these
‘avenging ghosts’ as nearly impossible, containment is frequently
depicted as achievable, if only (as is most conspicuously the case in
Ringu) through a process of eternal deferment.
Similarly, Shimizu Takashi’s Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) extends
the onryou motif in important new directions. The initial ‘big screen’ re-
imagining of Shimizu’s two 1998 straight-to-video precursors, Ju-on 1
(The Curse) and Ju-on 2 (Curse 2), Ju-on: The Grudge is a curious filmic
hybrid, combining carefully chosen aesthetic trappings of Western –
particularly US – horror films with visual and narrative tropes long
familiar to fans of Japanese horror cinema. Such a mixture of filmmaking
approaches seems appropriate when one considers that Shimizu Takashi
is, by his own admission, largely influenced by US ‘splatter’ movie icons
th
like A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Kruger and Friday the 13 ’s
Jason, as well as ‘an alumnus of the Film School of Tokyo’ where he