From Ringu to The Grudge, Japanese horror has taken the world by storm. Dave Hall looks at the rise of this movement and reflects on the differences between the originals and their English-language remakes.
 With Ju-on: The
Grudge 2 (2003) now re-released, and a US version of The Grudge 2 due on our screens later this year, writer-director Takashi
Shimizu seems to be enacting the filmmaker’s equivalent of Groundhog Day; The Grudge 2 will be Shimizu’s sixth variation on his creepy haunted house story, and a Japanese-language seventh, Ju-on: The Grudge 3, has already been announced. Not that he’s alone in revisiting the J-Horror genre pool; US versions of Ringu (1998), Ringu
2 (1999) and Dark Water (2002) show that the crossover appeal is considerable, and it’s intriguing to compare how the tropes of Japanese and US horror differ, and how the two styles have melded and clashed, particularly as US horror films have now started to cannibalise their own past in a slew of recent remakes.
J-Horror films are familiar in their make-up; they are often composed of a series of spine-tingling, but largely bloodless horror set-pieces, so expertly timed and choreographed that they engender a consistent level of creepy unease. The films are nightmarish, literally. In the original Ju-on:
The Grudge (2003), the most elliptical of the group, almost any scene could be removed from context and shoe-horned in randomly elsewhere with a negligible effect on the overall narrative. And though, in retrospect, the episodes are frequently repetitive, the clever use of angles, shadows, shallow focus, low light and spooky sound makes it seem that each appearance of the ghostly figure is freshly minted. What lies beneath - that’s J-Horror’s stock-in-trade; that, and hair - lots and lots of black, curtain-like hair. You may well have a hair-raising time at these films, but the last thing you want is for the hair of these jerky-limbed, vengeful waifs to rise and reveal what really does lie beneath.
 As Shimizu seems to have become married to the Grudge legend, it’s appropriate to look as well at how many J-Horror films, and especially those that have been remade for the American market, often have as a theme the breakdown of the nuclear family. In Ringu, Ju-on: The Grudge and Dark Water, the hauntings are by children who have been murdered or abandoned by disturbed parents, and in, for example, Dark Water and the US version of Ring 2 (2005), they are looking for surrogate mothers to accompany them to their watery resting places. Both the latter films are virtually meditations on what a mother will do for her child when it is threatened, and the home is under siege.
In fact, the house is the last place those under threat feel able to take refuge; as Takashige Ichise, producer of many J-Horror classics, has said: “Japanese films show ghosts coming into people’s everyday lives. When the audience goes home, in the elevator, in the bath, wherever they are, they will feel afraid…” Nor can technology help – video (the Ring films), the Internet (Kairo), the mobile phone (One Missed Call, and, er, Phone) all turn on their users and serve as a channel for evil forces (and perhaps act as a metaphor for the world of chaos brought into our homes by the mass media). In the US version of The
Ring (2002), the opening scene even features two teenage characters discussing how the magnetic waves in the air are frying their brains.
The breakdown of the family, the dangers that technology poses to our young ones, being under siege in our own homes. Editorials in the popular press might have just as great an influence over these films as the Japanese kwaidan, traditional stories and myths that feature vengeful ghosts, and which J-Horror has updated for the technological age. Lafcadio Hearn’s collection of these stories, Kwaidan (1903), for example, contains the story Furisode, in which a haunted kimono kills all who wear it. Kwaidan also use water as a supernatural element, and in Japanese mythology, water is a gateway to the torment of the underworld; in Hideo Nakata’s US version of Ring
2, the line “…when her mother used to bathe her…she’d scream like it was the end of the world” takes on new resonance.
 In comparing J-Horror with its US remakes, it’s interesting to compare Shimizu’s original Ju-on: The Grudge with his English-language The Grudge (2004). Unusually, the remake is still set in Japan, though with a largely American cast and English dialogue. The presence in the cast of Sarah
Michelle Gellar might have sold the film in the multiplex, but the bland obviousness of her role softens the nightmarish, logic-distorting narrative that Shimizu is clearly more interested in. Gellar's character, which doesn't exist in the original, is there to provide a path through the proceedings for Western audiences more used to logic and resolution.
In Gore Verbinski’s remake of The
Ring, the differences in approach taken by the US film is encapsulated in the genre-defining moment where the ghost-child Samara crosses over from video to reality to attack Noah (perhaps significantly, an absentee father). Verbinski turns it into a Halloween stalk-and-slash moment, whilst Rachel swerves in and out of traffic in a rescue bid; in the original, Sadako’s emergence is as understated as all the film’s other set-pieces, and the victim, Ryuji, as isolated as every other victim. It’s perhaps a little unfair to compare the two; after all, the US version had something to live up to. But even the cursed videotape looks less like a message from beyond than the product of a demented editor splicing together a bunch of David Lynch outtakes.
There are other differences: in the US version, Samara survives for only seven days in the well; in the original, Sadako survived for 30 years. The shorter time is the more horrific for being the more realistic, but seems to reflect an unwillingness to countenance the fact implicit in the Japanese original that the child might be imbued with supernatural powers. Similarly, in the original, Kyuji possesses psychic powers that he has passed on to his son; in the US version, Noah is not similarly blessed/cursed. In both cases, the effect is to make the evil dwell outside the children Samara and Aidan, which is more typical of Hollywood horror (H-horror, perhaps) traditions, where horror is the disordering of reason. “There’s an acceptance of the unexplained and the irrational in Japanese horror movies that was never very big in American horror films”, says Patrick Macais, in Tokyoscape: The Japanese Cult Film Companion.
 Much recent H-horror can best be described as a variation of a “if you go down in the woods today” cautionary tale, and is far more willing and able to be explicit than its J-Horror counterpart. Whilst J-Horror has been gently chilling our spine, H-Horror has been punching us in the gut. Recent examples of H-Horror feature a flesh-eating virus (Cabin Fever, 2002), flesh-eating zombies (Dawn of the Dead, 2004), alien virus/zombie crossovers (Slither, 2006), and grotesque mutants (Wrong
Turn, 2003; Hills Have Eyes, 2006). In some cases, it’s our own bodies that pose the greatest threat, and this return to the body horror conventions of the 70s and 80s is replicated too in recent UK releases (28
Days Later (2002), Shaun of the Dead (2004)), with only M Night Shyamalan and the occasional old-fashioned ghost story such as The Others (2001), attempting to hold back the tide of viscera.
Despite a handful of haunted house movies, H-horror is much more focused on threats from the external world; horror shows its ugly face only after we’ve left the safety of home and technology behind (no mobile phones or Internet to help you here), and lost our way in the woods. By contrast, J-Horror usually invades the everyday life of the characters, and home and technology are just as likely to turn on us as they are to offer a safe haven. In H-horror, the threat is largely physical and, if you run far enough and fast enough, you’ll escape; in J-Horror, it is psychological and spiritual, and there’s nowhere to run.
 Just as the style of J-Horror reflect its themes, so H-horror is shot with the kinetic, restless energy of the action film, replete with pyrotechnics, car and foot chases, gunplay, spiky impalements and thunderous soundtracks. It’s no coincidence that zombies in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead can sprint at breakneck speed, at a stroke cranking up the action quotient whilst removing the element of nightmare that George A Romero’s shambling zombies trailed in their rotting wake. Ringu’s Sadako and Ju-on:
The Grudge’s Kayako have more in common with Romero’s heavy-limbed undead than their gym-trained successors. It’s perhaps a mercy that J-Horror relies on what isn’t shown; in the US remake of The Grudge, for example, the one attempt at an out-and-out special effect is decidedly un-special, a sub-Poltergeist airborne manifestation that looks like a raft of seaweed crossed with an Aristocat.
H-Horror may reflect concerns of us losing control of our bodies to viruses and alien life forms, and being attacked by mutated versions of ourselves, but J-Horror is very much horror for our time, too. Impersonal apartments and cities, technology that delivers chaos into our homes, psychological disturbance and the insecurity of everyday life. Ju-on: The Grudge 2 and The Grudge 2 giveShimizu the chance to explore a more domestic kind of nightmare.
|
