Page 90 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Ghosts of the Present 77

flourished under the tutelage of ‘horror maestro’ Kurosawa Kiyoshi and
Ringu’s scriptwriter Takahashi Hiroshi (Alexander 2004: 14-6). This
meshing of US and Japanese influences is crucial to understanding not
only the film’s significant appeal in Western markets, but also Shimizu’s
aesthetic as a director of cinematic horror. Additionally, this visual
combination is important since physiological, social, and narratological
hybridity, as well as the interstitial spaces from which such hybrids
emerge, inform not only Ju-on’s content, but how the film posits changes
in the institution of the family as at once the result of, and a barometer
for, larger socio-cultural transformations.
Of course, tales of horror and monstrosity have long concerned
themselves with the notion of hybridity in their exploration of those
regions where categories fail to maintain their integrity. Ghosts, for
example, are by their very definition liminal entities negotiating the
supposedly unbridgeable gulf between the world of the living and the
realm of the dead; likewise, monsters are perpetual scramblers of social
codes, often troubling the nebulous, perhaps oxymoronic distinction
between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’, or the ‘human’ and the ‘non-
human’. By combining, in his own words, ‘an American and Japanese
style’ (Macias 2003: para 18) of horror cinema, Shimizu creates a hybrid
of the US slasher film and the Japanese kaidan. Rather than a single,
individual ghost returning to seek revenge, Ju-on: The Grudge, through a
web of primarily non-linear, episodic narratives, confronts viewers with a
mother and ‘housewife’, Kayako, and son, Toshio, who were slaughtered
by their delusional patriarch, Takeo. Restless, Kayako and Toshio haunt
both the house in which they died – a geographical location that can be
read as a microcosm of a Japanese culture in transformation – and the
lives of those mortals unlucky enough to enter their abode. The murdered
mother and child are at once ethereal and corporeal; they are not merely
ghosts, but not fully monsters in the term’s most conventional sense. As
liminal, hybrid entities demanding the attention of those they encounter,
they are perhaps the most appropriate models for exploring a radically
transforming Japanese culture in which tensions between an undead past
and the unborn future find articulation in the transforming family of a
haunted present.