As with 'Ju-On' (The Grudge), the premise of J-Horror chiller 'Dark Water' revolves around a haunted house, or an house inhabited by a vengeful, evil spirit. (Insert Japanese term.)
From Midnight Eye review by Nicholas Rucka:
'My apartment is alive and I know it has a lot of stories. But this makes sense seeing as it is an unrefurbished tenement. Hideo Nakata understands the concept of the old building that is alive and chose to set his film Dark Water in this type of location: an old, moldy, concrete apartment building. Nakata realizes that often times in horror, the location is an additional character in the cast - often co-starring.'
Monday, 30 April 2007
Sunday, 22 April 2007
Preface of 'Japanese Horror Cinema', Jay McRoy, Principal Secondary Research Text
Written January 2004 by Christopher Sharrett, Professor of Communication and Film Studies at Seton Hall University.
(as with my previous posts, the use of italics denotes my reproduction of the text verbatim, while other prose is my own.)
'The golden age of the American and British horror cinema faded, with many of the best political aspirations of commercial film, during the Reagan/ Thatcher era, a not coincidental occurence considering the many radical challenges the horror film's impulses made to dominant culture. Long considered a low-brow genre by the mainstream press and sectors of academe, the designation might be read today as a consequence of the adversarial relationship the horror film tended to have to the assumptions of western patriarchal capitalist civilisation.'
The rise of neo-conservatism in the West marked the decline of western horror, suppressed for its challenges to mainstream society and ideology. Evidently the political climate has not changed much since then as we have not seen anything like a resurgence of the counter-culture theme in horror, or, for that matter, any film genre or indeed any medium of media.
Eastern horror has taken the place of western in the context of the modern era.
'Since its glorious inception first in the Weimar cinema, then at Universal studios, few genres have been as blunt in questioning notions of the monstrous Other, the nature of the family and other elements of received social wisdom as the horror film. As if a prelude to the activism of the 1960s, landmark films such as Hitchcock's 'Psycho' (1960) and 'The Birds' (1963) very consciously deconstructed the more suffocating features of bourgeois life, and society's tendency to find pleasure in the sacrificial scapegoating of so-called monsters who, at various levels of their being, raised the proposition that under current social and economic assumptions we are all monsters, and our civilisation a madhouse. All of this has sadly gone by. Distinguished works such as George Romero's zombie films, Tobe Hooper's 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' (1974), Larry Cohen's 'God Told Me To' (1976) and Wes Craven's 'The Hills Have Eyes' (1977) have been replaced by hi-tech rollercoaster rides enforcing the old refrain that the horror film is merely a clever device for saying 'boo'! Important horror films of the past, such as Robert Wise's remarkable 'The Haunting' (1963), have been subjected to indulgent, insulting remakes that strip away the original work's radical or contentious ideas, a fate, of course, not unique to horror cinema'.
'The Other', a theory coined by post-colonial literary theorist Edward Saïd and perhaps the most prominent overtone in the horror cinema of Hitchcock's era, is the process of defining what you are by recognising what you are not. In my opinion Hitchcock delineated our human nature by saying that to some extent we are all believers of this idea and therefore we too are monsters, since a) we are stupid enough to believe that we are somehow different from creatures or beings essentially the same as us and b) in doing so we (unwittingly) accept that we are part of the monster and the monster is part of us. Hence it can be seen that in challenging dominant ideology the horror of Hitchcocks' era was infinitely more intelligent and intellectually driven than the shallow populist trash of today (although the latter does excel in entertainment value). Could the continued demise of the intelligent horror film in our society be representative of a reverse trend in the censorious, controlling and ultimately fascist elements of the state?
While Asia has taken over the reins of smart, imaginative, artistic horror, proving (thankfully) that an impetus for it still exists, it doubtless retains some crowd-pleasing aspects from its Western counterparts. But it is nowhere near to matching Hollywood's seemingly endless conveyor belt of sequels, prequels, remakes and adaptations so devoid of any original ideas that it now seeks to depreciate the very genre that superceded it, and is succeeding in doing so.
'The dominant tone of Japanese horror seems to be hysteria, propelled chiefly by Japan's mastery with a vengeance of industrial and post-industrial capitalism. This hysteria seems a legitimate response to the social environment the genre traces, especially given the absence, in the age of transnational capital, of effective forms of political resistance. Forbidden to rearm after the Allied victory in The Second World War, Japan instead seriously challenged the US at its own economic game, only to see the chickens come to roost. Japan's ferocious capitalism created for it a spectre almost as large as the memory of the A-bomb, which now seems as half-suppressed in the nation's mainstream culture as the reality of capitalist life. That such knowledge is not totally suppressed is evident enough in the nation's genre films. Apocalypse waits at the margins of (or is integral to) so much Japanese horror.
Images of out-of-control madness, bloodshed and mass destruction are often connected quite blatantly by Japanese horror with corporate capitalism's assault on the very institutions and values its superstructure says it holds dear: the home, the family, the community, the sanctity of the individual life. While there is nothing especially ironic about the phenomenon, Japanese horror cinema's graphic portrayal of patriarchal capitalism's rampage is especially compelling within a society that has held sacred some positive, now rather residual, traditions.'
Post-war Japanese history has been monolithically dominated by capitalism, the evils of which, naturally, have been exploited by its horror cinema. Meanwhile, the memory of the A-bomb still holds strong. These two principal influences have been pitted against and equated with the apparent decline of the institutions Japanese society has traditionally respected; perhaps the most notable manifestation of which, for me, is the ultra-violent post-apocalyptic manga flick 'Akira' (1988), which centres on a sprawling dystopian Tokyo, the biggest and most densely-populated city on Earth, perhaps the emblem of capitalism in the modern world.
'Nakata's popular 'Ringu' (1998), which owes a great deal to earlier phases of the Japanese 'fantastique', portrays the collision of traditional cultural myths (many centred on an exaggerated and hypocritical veneration of the female) with their perverse realisation in the post-industrial landscape. Tsukamoto's Tetsuo films, perhaps the most manic and hysterical of all Japanese horror, suggest humanity's physical and psychological inability to compete with the corporatised, hypertechnological present. These films, and Miike's 'Audition' (2000) and 'Visitor Q' (2001), are especially compelling for their implication that an older world, the one depicted in Ozu, can exist today only in vaguest memory, a situation that 'Tokyo Story' (1953) so presciently foretold. Yet the real integrity of Miike and Tsukamoto is their sense that current horrors of Japanese mainstream life are rooted in the very traditions that the society so doggedly extolled, especially the veneration of the family and ancestry.
The teaming of culturally-grounded superstitions and myths with the harsh realities of the modern money-obsessed world seems to form the basis of J-Horror; meanwhile, a nostalgic lens is cast upon the halcyon of the past, adding fear associated with a sense of loss into the mix.
Fukasuku Kinji's 'Battle Royale' (2000), the genre's most uncompromised bloodbath, may be the Japanese cinema's postmodern equivalent of Goya's 'Cronos Devouring His Children'. The film is an extraordinarily cunning remark on present 'survivor' culture, with its debased 'reality TV' and similar horrendous and commonplace cultural features extolling predatory values as the most laudable. The reactionary political situation of the new millenium, which is worlwide in scope and consequence, attempts to inculcate in young people the cruellest 'only the strong survive' values, a practice not seen since the late nineteenth century, but fully in play under neoliberal economics. 'Battle Royale' is among the very few films of any current cinema to examine clearheadedly these assumptions, and in particular Japan's gruelling, earn-more-learn-more educational system that places schooling fully in service of the corporate world. The model owes a great deal to the business-driven US, a society that insists on 'practical' education for today's 'marketplace'. The Columbine High School shootings [note: and more recently those in Virginia] in the US, along with other acts of youth violence, while treated as monstrous abberations by the US media, find profound and uncompromised understanding in Fukasaku's film. Fukasaku's sequel, 'Battle Royale II: Requiem, is an even more extraordinary (and very expansive) indictment of the current civilisation, both East and West, with a particular focus on the monstrous US-driven 'war on terrorism'. Courageously simulating the collapse of a World Trade Center-like pair of office towers in its prelude, 'Battle Royale II' (2003) associates the young people of the first film with the 'terrorists' (that is, displaced and disaffected young people) of the planet, as the discarded, regimented children of the first film declare war on the adult world. The rather amazing inclusion of footage of contemporary Afghanistan makes the association explicit. The film's send-up of popular action cinema drivel, especially 'Saving Private Ryan' (1998), makes Battle Royale II a distinguished latter-day exemplar of the fantastic cinema as social and cultural commentary.'
The message of 'Battle Royale' and its sequel seem to be that history repeats itself and hence we are trapped in an existence where war is cyclical, inescapable and inexorable. The films bear testimony to the fascist elements of our society (mentioned above) which disturbingly evoke images of Mussolini-/ Hitler-/ Stalin-esque control and Orwellian ideas of hegemony: parallels include the indoctrination of nationalist ideology into the young through, principally, the tool of media, or the incitement to hatred with the aim of legitimising war on a particular people or religion, of which footage of Afghanistan in 'BR:2' is unequivocally indicative. Furthermore, the business-led education model in Japan and the US where the most valued qualifications are both the most expensive and those which most strongly consolidate the state's power surely calls to mind the phrase 'breeding slaves for the system'.
The fact that few, if any, other media texts dare to allude to such blatant resemblances extends, almost ironically, said parallels (i.e. fascist censorship/ expurgation/ punishment of deviation).
'BR:2' even goes as far as to say that the current zeitgeist is so unacceptable that it either promotes or foresees revolution, while in a skilful diversification of genre it parodies US propaganda film 'Saving Private Ryan' (1998). The intelligence of this film alone ('Battle Royale'), which delivers on so many different levels and is still by no means the flagship of J-Horror, makes me wonder what else is out there, outside of my current (somewhat limited) knowledge of this genre.
'For all its fascinations and challenges, Japanese horror must, of course, be approached critically. Some of it, including a few of its outstanding works, seem to project nihilism, a view that is a rejection of social transformation long embodied in the western horror film, the point being that this attitude has too long substituted for genuine radicalism. At its worst, Japanese horror offers a critique of dominant culture from the right, a recurrent, tired, and dangerous perspective all too common in postwar Hollywood cinema from 'The Searchers' (1956) to 'Fight Club' (1999). There also appears to be a neoconservative fear of the body in some Japanese horror similar to the 'Hellraiser' (1987 et al.) series and likeminded films, whose frisson (passing, it seems, for a form of resistance) comes from a bizarre synthesis of urban neoprimitive cults with religious myth.'
To me a subtext of nihilism would derive from the history of the A-bomb to the present climate of omnipotent capitalism, which hinders more people than it helps. Ironically the author only lists American films in his critique: no Japanese texts listed, so I cannot validate these criticisms.
Conclusions:
From this piece I gained an insight into the decline of western horror, the cultural roots of J-Horror, and the political significance of the latter.
(as with my previous posts, the use of italics denotes my reproduction of the text verbatim, while other prose is my own.)
'The golden age of the American and British horror cinema faded, with many of the best political aspirations of commercial film, during the Reagan/ Thatcher era, a not coincidental occurence considering the many radical challenges the horror film's impulses made to dominant culture. Long considered a low-brow genre by the mainstream press and sectors of academe, the designation might be read today as a consequence of the adversarial relationship the horror film tended to have to the assumptions of western patriarchal capitalist civilisation.'
The rise of neo-conservatism in the West marked the decline of western horror, suppressed for its challenges to mainstream society and ideology. Evidently the political climate has not changed much since then as we have not seen anything like a resurgence of the counter-culture theme in horror, or, for that matter, any film genre or indeed any medium of media.
Eastern horror has taken the place of western in the context of the modern era.
'Since its glorious inception first in the Weimar cinema, then at Universal studios, few genres have been as blunt in questioning notions of the monstrous Other, the nature of the family and other elements of received social wisdom as the horror film. As if a prelude to the activism of the 1960s, landmark films such as Hitchcock's 'Psycho' (1960) and 'The Birds' (1963) very consciously deconstructed the more suffocating features of bourgeois life, and society's tendency to find pleasure in the sacrificial scapegoating of so-called monsters who, at various levels of their being, raised the proposition that under current social and economic assumptions we are all monsters, and our civilisation a madhouse. All of this has sadly gone by. Distinguished works such as George Romero's zombie films, Tobe Hooper's 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' (1974), Larry Cohen's 'God Told Me To' (1976) and Wes Craven's 'The Hills Have Eyes' (1977) have been replaced by hi-tech rollercoaster rides enforcing the old refrain that the horror film is merely a clever device for saying 'boo'! Important horror films of the past, such as Robert Wise's remarkable 'The Haunting' (1963), have been subjected to indulgent, insulting remakes that strip away the original work's radical or contentious ideas, a fate, of course, not unique to horror cinema'.
'The Other', a theory coined by post-colonial literary theorist Edward Saïd and perhaps the most prominent overtone in the horror cinema of Hitchcock's era, is the process of defining what you are by recognising what you are not. In my opinion Hitchcock delineated our human nature by saying that to some extent we are all believers of this idea and therefore we too are monsters, since a) we are stupid enough to believe that we are somehow different from creatures or beings essentially the same as us and b) in doing so we (unwittingly) accept that we are part of the monster and the monster is part of us. Hence it can be seen that in challenging dominant ideology the horror of Hitchcocks' era was infinitely more intelligent and intellectually driven than the shallow populist trash of today (although the latter does excel in entertainment value). Could the continued demise of the intelligent horror film in our society be representative of a reverse trend in the censorious, controlling and ultimately fascist elements of the state?
While Asia has taken over the reins of smart, imaginative, artistic horror, proving (thankfully) that an impetus for it still exists, it doubtless retains some crowd-pleasing aspects from its Western counterparts. But it is nowhere near to matching Hollywood's seemingly endless conveyor belt of sequels, prequels, remakes and adaptations so devoid of any original ideas that it now seeks to depreciate the very genre that superceded it, and is succeeding in doing so.
'The dominant tone of Japanese horror seems to be hysteria, propelled chiefly by Japan's mastery with a vengeance of industrial and post-industrial capitalism. This hysteria seems a legitimate response to the social environment the genre traces, especially given the absence, in the age of transnational capital, of effective forms of political resistance. Forbidden to rearm after the Allied victory in The Second World War, Japan instead seriously challenged the US at its own economic game, only to see the chickens come to roost. Japan's ferocious capitalism created for it a spectre almost as large as the memory of the A-bomb, which now seems as half-suppressed in the nation's mainstream culture as the reality of capitalist life. That such knowledge is not totally suppressed is evident enough in the nation's genre films. Apocalypse waits at the margins of (or is integral to) so much Japanese horror.
Images of out-of-control madness, bloodshed and mass destruction are often connected quite blatantly by Japanese horror with corporate capitalism's assault on the very institutions and values its superstructure says it holds dear: the home, the family, the community, the sanctity of the individual life. While there is nothing especially ironic about the phenomenon, Japanese horror cinema's graphic portrayal of patriarchal capitalism's rampage is especially compelling within a society that has held sacred some positive, now rather residual, traditions.'
Post-war Japanese history has been monolithically dominated by capitalism, the evils of which, naturally, have been exploited by its horror cinema. Meanwhile, the memory of the A-bomb still holds strong. These two principal influences have been pitted against and equated with the apparent decline of the institutions Japanese society has traditionally respected; perhaps the most notable manifestation of which, for me, is the ultra-violent post-apocalyptic manga flick 'Akira' (1988), which centres on a sprawling dystopian Tokyo, the biggest and most densely-populated city on Earth, perhaps the emblem of capitalism in the modern world.
'Nakata's popular 'Ringu' (1998), which owes a great deal to earlier phases of the Japanese 'fantastique', portrays the collision of traditional cultural myths (many centred on an exaggerated and hypocritical veneration of the female) with their perverse realisation in the post-industrial landscape. Tsukamoto's Tetsuo films, perhaps the most manic and hysterical of all Japanese horror, suggest humanity's physical and psychological inability to compete with the corporatised, hypertechnological present. These films, and Miike's 'Audition' (2000) and 'Visitor Q' (2001), are especially compelling for their implication that an older world, the one depicted in Ozu, can exist today only in vaguest memory, a situation that 'Tokyo Story' (1953) so presciently foretold. Yet the real integrity of Miike and Tsukamoto is their sense that current horrors of Japanese mainstream life are rooted in the very traditions that the society so doggedly extolled, especially the veneration of the family and ancestry.
The teaming of culturally-grounded superstitions and myths with the harsh realities of the modern money-obsessed world seems to form the basis of J-Horror; meanwhile, a nostalgic lens is cast upon the halcyon of the past, adding fear associated with a sense of loss into the mix.
Fukasuku Kinji's 'Battle Royale' (2000), the genre's most uncompromised bloodbath, may be the Japanese cinema's postmodern equivalent of Goya's 'Cronos Devouring His Children'. The film is an extraordinarily cunning remark on present 'survivor' culture, with its debased 'reality TV' and similar horrendous and commonplace cultural features extolling predatory values as the most laudable. The reactionary political situation of the new millenium, which is worlwide in scope and consequence, attempts to inculcate in young people the cruellest 'only the strong survive' values, a practice not seen since the late nineteenth century, but fully in play under neoliberal economics. 'Battle Royale' is among the very few films of any current cinema to examine clearheadedly these assumptions, and in particular Japan's gruelling, earn-more-learn-more educational system that places schooling fully in service of the corporate world. The model owes a great deal to the business-driven US, a society that insists on 'practical' education for today's 'marketplace'. The Columbine High School shootings [note: and more recently those in Virginia] in the US, along with other acts of youth violence, while treated as monstrous abberations by the US media, find profound and uncompromised understanding in Fukasaku's film. Fukasaku's sequel, 'Battle Royale II: Requiem, is an even more extraordinary (and very expansive) indictment of the current civilisation, both East and West, with a particular focus on the monstrous US-driven 'war on terrorism'. Courageously simulating the collapse of a World Trade Center-like pair of office towers in its prelude, 'Battle Royale II' (2003) associates the young people of the first film with the 'terrorists' (that is, displaced and disaffected young people) of the planet, as the discarded, regimented children of the first film declare war on the adult world. The rather amazing inclusion of footage of contemporary Afghanistan makes the association explicit. The film's send-up of popular action cinema drivel, especially 'Saving Private Ryan' (1998), makes Battle Royale II a distinguished latter-day exemplar of the fantastic cinema as social and cultural commentary.'
The message of 'Battle Royale' and its sequel seem to be that history repeats itself and hence we are trapped in an existence where war is cyclical, inescapable and inexorable. The films bear testimony to the fascist elements of our society (mentioned above) which disturbingly evoke images of Mussolini-/ Hitler-/ Stalin-esque control and Orwellian ideas of hegemony: parallels include the indoctrination of nationalist ideology into the young through, principally, the tool of media, or the incitement to hatred with the aim of legitimising war on a particular people or religion, of which footage of Afghanistan in 'BR:2' is unequivocally indicative. Furthermore, the business-led education model in Japan and the US where the most valued qualifications are both the most expensive and those which most strongly consolidate the state's power surely calls to mind the phrase 'breeding slaves for the system'.
The fact that few, if any, other media texts dare to allude to such blatant resemblances extends, almost ironically, said parallels (i.e. fascist censorship/ expurgation/ punishment of deviation).
'BR:2' even goes as far as to say that the current zeitgeist is so unacceptable that it either promotes or foresees revolution, while in a skilful diversification of genre it parodies US propaganda film 'Saving Private Ryan' (1998). The intelligence of this film alone ('Battle Royale'), which delivers on so many different levels and is still by no means the flagship of J-Horror, makes me wonder what else is out there, outside of my current (somewhat limited) knowledge of this genre.
'For all its fascinations and challenges, Japanese horror must, of course, be approached critically. Some of it, including a few of its outstanding works, seem to project nihilism, a view that is a rejection of social transformation long embodied in the western horror film, the point being that this attitude has too long substituted for genuine radicalism. At its worst, Japanese horror offers a critique of dominant culture from the right, a recurrent, tired, and dangerous perspective all too common in postwar Hollywood cinema from 'The Searchers' (1956) to 'Fight Club' (1999). There also appears to be a neoconservative fear of the body in some Japanese horror similar to the 'Hellraiser' (1987 et al.) series and likeminded films, whose frisson (passing, it seems, for a form of resistance) comes from a bizarre synthesis of urban neoprimitive cults with religious myth.'
To me a subtext of nihilism would derive from the history of the A-bomb to the present climate of omnipotent capitalism, which hinders more people than it helps. Ironically the author only lists American films in his critique: no Japanese texts listed, so I cannot validate these criticisms.
Conclusions:
From this piece I gained an insight into the decline of western horror, the cultural roots of J-Horror, and the political significance of the latter.
Monday, 16 April 2007
Paraphrased from Empire, August 2004, 'Remade in the USA'
Takashi Shimizu, director of Ju-On: The Grudge, was retained for the Hollywood remake of his film in the latest of a long line of Eastern horror flicks being remade into mainstream frightfests by US studios.
This, however, is a rare case where the original director has been retained. He says: 'I didn't actually want to do it, because I'd already done the original. But Sam (Raimi) really wanted me to do it again because the taste I have has never been done in America as a horror movie. That kind of taste can only be brought by me'.
>Hence we can see that a director's individual artistic style and approach is still valued by some of the main Hollywood players, despite the fact that it runs along the lines of commercial profitability like any other industry (obviously).
The Ring was the first in this trend. Its rights were bought for $1 million and it made more than $100 million in its first five weeks in the US alone. Given that the original spawned a sequel, a prequel and a TV series in its native Japan, it's easy to see why US studios were interested.
>It appears the American companies take a more pragmatic approach in evaluating a film's commercial potential.
"Every Asian film is a target for idea-hungry studios", says Mike Goodridge of Screen International, "and some executives specifically scour all output from Japan and South Korea for remake potential. One in particular, Roy Lee, an Asian-American producer, has developed a special talent for brokering deals between local producers and the studios by identifying which films would suit a US remake. He's the brains behind The Ring and The Grudge, as well as Infernal Affairs (since remade by Scorsese) and Dark Water".
Meanwhile Dreamworks has plans for Ring 2 (completed) and a remake of Korean ghost story A Tale of Two Sisters (apparently underway). But how long can this trend continue? "It will go on as long as there are films out there", says Goodridge, "Dreamworks' version of The Ring outgrossed the original in Japan. Bizzarely, it seems that even in Asia, there's a market for US remakes".
>Proving that cultural variations and nuances are less significant than I had thought. Although I can't see this continuing in force.
This, however, is a rare case where the original director has been retained. He says: 'I didn't actually want to do it, because I'd already done the original. But Sam (Raimi) really wanted me to do it again because the taste I have has never been done in America as a horror movie. That kind of taste can only be brought by me'.
>Hence we can see that a director's individual artistic style and approach is still valued by some of the main Hollywood players, despite the fact that it runs along the lines of commercial profitability like any other industry (obviously).
The Ring was the first in this trend. Its rights were bought for $1 million and it made more than $100 million in its first five weeks in the US alone. Given that the original spawned a sequel, a prequel and a TV series in its native Japan, it's easy to see why US studios were interested.
>It appears the American companies take a more pragmatic approach in evaluating a film's commercial potential.
"Every Asian film is a target for idea-hungry studios", says Mike Goodridge of Screen International, "and some executives specifically scour all output from Japan and South Korea for remake potential. One in particular, Roy Lee, an Asian-American producer, has developed a special talent for brokering deals between local producers and the studios by identifying which films would suit a US remake. He's the brains behind The Ring and The Grudge, as well as Infernal Affairs (since remade by Scorsese) and Dark Water".
Meanwhile Dreamworks has plans for Ring 2 (completed) and a remake of Korean ghost story A Tale of Two Sisters (apparently underway). But how long can this trend continue? "It will go on as long as there are films out there", says Goodridge, "Dreamworks' version of The Ring outgrossed the original in Japan. Bizzarely, it seems that even in Asia, there's a market for US remakes".
>Proving that cultural variations and nuances are less significant than I had thought. Although I can't see this continuing in force.
Wednesday, 14 March 2007
wired.com article, Jason Silverman, March 9, 07
'The Host, a wicked sci-fi horror comedy featuring a lithe and ravenous mutant tadpole, smashed South Korea's box office records in just six weeks.
Now it's coming to America, first in its original version, on screens in more than 100 cities this month, and then in a remake planned by Universal Pictures.'
Plans are already underway to remake 'The Host', evidently a huge success in its native Korea, even before the original has been released.
'Bong Joon-ho's film is the most visible of a new wave of genre-bending Korean films, including the upcoming D-War, a CGI-heavy $70 million film about a killer snake that invades L.A.'
Korea is where it's at right now.
'The Host deploys effects from A-list shops including L.A.-based The Orphanage (which worked on Hellboy, Sin City and Superman Returns) and Peter Jackson's Weta (Lord of the Rings trilogy). Kevin Rafferty, visual effects supervisor for Jurassic Park II, oversaw the action scenes.
The Host's international partnerships represent a rare bit of outreach for South Korean cinema, which has remained both stubbornly autonomous and artistically adventurous for years. But they also are a sign of South Korea's emerging position as new international hot spot for hip cinema.
Hollywood has taken notice. During the past six years, Hollywood studios have cashed in on J-horror with profitable remakes like The Ring and The Grudge. Recently, they've been gobbling up the rights to re-do South Korean movies including My Sassy Girl, Oldboy, My Wife Is a Gangster and Tale of Two Sisters. That's despite the so-so Keanu Reeves film Lake House, adapted from the ghost story Shiworae.'
Korean cinema has started to move away from being completely self-contained and started to branch out, namely, in the direction of Hollywood. This may be because they are acknowledging Hollywood's avid interest in their products (having realised that their own fare has been superceded in terms of commercial potential by their Korean counterparts) and ultimately the money this brings.
'Not all South Korean filmmakers are happy about hopping in bed with Hollywood studios. Some protested the way The Host monopolized the country's theaters last year, and worry that Korean cinema, which has developed a reputation in the cinephile world as distinctive and risk-taking, will revert to the cheap thrills of genre movies. If Bong can make buckets of money making a monster mash film, won't other directors and producers drop their art films and do the same?'
There is always the risk that all Korean directors will sell out.
From this article I can draw the following conclusions in the context of my project as a whole: Hollywood, being an industry that works purely on the basis of capitalism (every decision is geared toward maximum revenue) will naturally seek to re-release or remake Asian horror films if it thinks that commercial gain will come of it. The increasing tendency for Korean directors to collaborate with Hollywood suggests that there's more in it for them as well, given their country's proud cinematic heritage, although financial statistics remain hard to pin down.
Monday, 5 March 2007
centrestagechicago.com article, by Joel Wicklund, Monday, Jan 03, 2005
'For those of us that love horror precisely because it is unsettling, the influence of recent Asian horror movies on American film is a welcome one, steering Hollywood horror slightly away from gore-dependent slasher fare and back to a tradition of spooky atmosphere and supernatural subject matter.'
The waning prevalence of sustained fright in favour of cut-and-thrust gore (the trend is the reverse in Asia) is perhaps indicative of a deterioration of artistry in Hollywood; certainly Hitchcock fans would argue this. It should be interesting to research this trend (suggested by Dr. P)
'The Asian influence on Hollywood fright flicks has been seen in hit remakes of the Japanese films "Ringu" ("The Ring" actually improved upon it) and "Ju-on: The Grudge" (last fall's "The Grudge" came up a bit short of the original's chills, despite having the same director). English language remakes of Hong Kong's "The Eye" and South Korea's "A Tale of Two Sisters" are in development, while the new release "White Noise" mirrors "Ringu" and other Asian films in depicting the dead contacting the living through electronic devices.'
More remakes are currently underway.
'New Asian horror is far too varied and prolific a field to cover in one column, even in a broad overview, but haunted youth is one theme common to many of these films and portrayed in impressive fashion in this week's trio of suggested viewing ("Memento Mori", "Suicide Club", Tomie").'
Research haunted youth.
The waning prevalence of sustained fright in favour of cut-and-thrust gore (the trend is the reverse in Asia) is perhaps indicative of a deterioration of artistry in Hollywood; certainly Hitchcock fans would argue this. It should be interesting to research this trend (suggested by Dr. P)
'The Asian influence on Hollywood fright flicks has been seen in hit remakes of the Japanese films "Ringu" ("The Ring" actually improved upon it) and "Ju-on: The Grudge" (last fall's "The Grudge" came up a bit short of the original's chills, despite having the same director). English language remakes of Hong Kong's "The Eye" and South Korea's "A Tale of Two Sisters" are in development, while the new release "White Noise" mirrors "Ringu" and other Asian films in depicting the dead contacting the living through electronic devices.'
More remakes are currently underway.
'New Asian horror is far too varied and prolific a field to cover in one column, even in a broad overview, but haunted youth is one theme common to many of these films and portrayed in impressive fashion in this week's trio of suggested viewing ("Memento Mori", "Suicide Club", Tomie").'
Research haunted youth.
Friday, 2 March 2007
Project proposal
'How New Asian Horror has influenced Western horror, particularly in remakes'
Issues:
Cultural context and traditions
Saturation of original film in Hollywood
Finance and remake rights
Principal texts (for drawing points of comparison):
Ringu/ The Ring
Ju-On/ The Grudge
Secondary texts (chosen as emblematic of each industry):
Audition
Alien
Other possible texts for context/ reference:
Psycho
The Shining
Dark Water (JP)/ Dark Water (US)
Tetsuo
The Eye
Organ
Visitor Q
Phone
Kyua (Cure)
Pulse
Issues:
Cultural context and traditions
Saturation of original film in Hollywood
Finance and remake rights
Principal texts (for drawing points of comparison):
Ringu/ The Ring
Ju-On/ The Grudge
Secondary texts (chosen as emblematic of each industry):
Audition
Alien
Other possible texts for context/ reference:
Psycho
The Shining
Dark Water (JP)/ Dark Water (US)
Tetsuo
The Eye
Organ
Visitor Q
Phone
Kyua (Cure)
Pulse
Thursday, 1 March 2007
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