It's taken me a while to formulate my thoughts and get them down, but in a sense this piece is me drawing a line in the sand and demanding that the producers allow - or FORCE - their filmmakers to work in a creative manner and put an end to the obsessive sequel-making and regurgitation of the shinrei-mono eiga ('ghost film') that is dragging down Japanese film (and Hollywood horror for that matter). Last April, after sitting through another onslaught of these new releases I decided that I had had enough and needed to get it off of my chest. It should be obvious but I'm going to state this for the record, the history of horror in Japan is long as I will show - as it is throughout Asia and should be in any place with some sort of extended and well-defined cultural history.įurthermore, I'm going to be upfront about why I've written this feature article: I am totally tired of the 'J-Horror' releases that have come out recently. That whiff of 'orientalism' you smell might not be totally off "J-Horror" was a cult fan term that was meant as a clarifying short-hand for previously hard to categorize films (in the West) like The Grudge (Juon), The Ring (Ringu), Audition, and Dark Water (Honogurai Mizu no Soko Kara).
No different than the equally patronizing and vaguely pejoratively titled "K-Horror," it needs to be noted that this is a title that neither the Japanese nor the Koreans coined themselves. "J-Horror," as it is called, is a clever appellation for what is in reality only a very thin sliver of the Japanese horror genre that has been produced since the mid-90s. Then there're the bizarrely happy endings and, lest we forget, the saccharine pop songs. Little did anyone suspect when this double-bill was created that this was to be ground zero of what is now, seven years later, a highly successful cottage industry.Īh, yes, "J-Horror " everyone knows its tropes by now: vengeful ghosts, long stringy black hair, impossible physical gymnastics, meowing little ghost boys, cursed videos (or cell phones or computers), old rotted buildings and corpses, moldy books and newspapers, elliptical storylines (or a total abandonment of logic), creepy sound design, and creepy cinematography.
Japanese junior high and high school girls might have been the target audience, but the effect of these films exploded around the world. Japan, 1998: Hideo Nakata's The Ring (Ringu) and Joji Iida's Spiral (Rasen) horror double feature crawled into the cinemas and proceeded to kill the competition.