Before you die, you see the ring…
Courtesy of www.hollywood.com

Samara is a perfectly frightful little girl.
Courtesy of www.hollywood.com

There's Something About Asian Horror…Maybe It's the Schoolgirl Zombies

Eastern horror flicks are being reborn into American thrillers faster than you can say "reincarnation."

By Shirley Hsu

Barring the 1999 hit "The Sixth Sense," American-born horror movies as of late are more likely to make you yawn than scream. On the prowl for a source of fresh blood, Hollywood seems to have discovered an abundant, and until now, untapped resource to quench American audiences' lust for terror-Asian horror films.

Hollywood has only recently stumbled upon the goldmine of Asian horror with the hugely successful "The Ring," DreamWorks' 2002 remake of the hit Japanese film, "Ringu," about the malevolent spirit of a little girl who kills people through a haunted videotape. However, Japanese, Hong Kong, and Korean horror films have attracted a cult following for years, and those who know horror know that Asian films take it beyond things that go bump in the night-way beyond. These films frequently feature themes of sadism, ritual torture, eroticism, and revenge, while the most hard core often degenerate into ultra-gory, no-holds-barred splatter fests replete with disembowelments, graphic torture and rape scenes, dismemberments, and many other unpleasantries.

Of course, not all of these films are of the gross-out variety; on the contrary, many of the Eastern born horror flicks that have made their way into Western art theaters are hauntingly beautiful, and are marked by cultural depth, rich storytelling, and a subtlety and restraint foreign to most American horror. The most well known Eastern import, Hideo Nakata's "Ringu," is remarkable for its simple yet haunting images: A long haired girl in a white nightgown rises out of a well; victims lie dead with expressions of frozen terror on their faces. These quiet images serve to suggest terror rather than luridly display it.

Other films are less restrained. Takashi Miike's stylish thriller "Audition," (2001) created quite a stir when it played at the 2002 Rotterdam film festival, garnering critical acclaim while also provoking audiences to walk out in disgust at its sadomasochistic scenes. "Audition" tells the story of a middle-aged widowed man who, with the help of his producer friend, sets up a fake audition so he can meet women. The film, which has become an art-house favorite, contains moments of profound sadness, and the first half of the film moves at a languid, melancholy pace that does nothing to prepare you for the shocking torture scene (which involves the "creative" use of acupuncture) and bizarre dream-like sequences that take place later.

The message to take home: these aren't your garden-variety monster-in-the-closet scary movies.

While some of these films can be quite inventive, others are downright funny. In the 2002 Japanese flick "Stacy," Japanese teenage girls succumb to a mysterious epidemic, which kills them and turns them into flesh-eating zombies named STACY, who wreak havoc and destroy all lives in their way. And, Takashi Miike's demented 2001 film, "Happiness of the Katakuris," is a pioneer in a groundbreaking new genre: the zombie musical.

At its core, Eastern horror grapples with the universal questions that lie at the heart of all horror art: What is the nature of evil, and how do you react when face-to-face with it?

Asian horror is arguably the best at exploring the nature of evil. Mostly emerging from Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea, these films draw upon thousands of years of oral and literary folklore rife with ghosts, demons, spirits, supernatural creatures, and themes of reincarnation, revenge, honor, and familial loyalty. These films seem to connect young people to their heritages by combining age-old cultural traditions with spicy plots, racy sex scenes, and contemporary fears and anxieties.

For example, "Ringu" touches upon contemporary anxieties about television and mass media; it was reported that Japanese audiences, so terrified by the scene in which the longhaired Sadako climbs out of the T.V., would not turn on their television sets for days. It also draws upon traditional themes of retribution and maintaining "face." Sadako's family, ashamed of her psychic powers, kill her in order to maintain face within their community. Sadako then takes vengeance upon the living through a cursed videotape. The film also centers on the well that Sadako is thrown alive into. In Chinese and Japanese traditions, the well symbolizes a link to the underworld, and is considered haunted. (This notion is explored in the classic Japanese horror, "Onibaba.") Also, the evil girl's long hair obscures her entire face until the near end of the movie, when she reveals one hideous eye looking grotesquely upward, an image taken from the Japanese folktale of the Oiwa, a disfigured female ghost who has one eye completely shut and the other looking skyward.

This rich heritage gives these horror films a certain "Asian mystique" that intrigues American audiences and has Hollywood execs drooling. Numerous films are currently in line for American remakes, most notably, the Thai-born Pang brothers "The Eye," about a girl who undergoes a cornea implant to recover her eyesight but ends up with an enhanced ability to see dead people. Tom Cruise's Cruise-Wagner Productions has acquired the rights to remake this spooky thriller in the next year, which will be rewritten by Ryne Pearson (Mercury Rising).

Master horror director Hideo Nakata is also being wooed by various Hollywood studios eager to cash in on another Ring-like success. Disney has purchased Nakata's 2002 film "Dark Water," about a mother and daughter who encounter a mysterious spirit in a run-down apartment building, and Tribeca Productions with Universal Pictures is rumored to be remaking Nakata's 1999 film "Chaos," about a kidnapper who gets more than he bargained for when his captive is murdered. The "Chaos" remake will star Robert De Niro and Benicio Del Toro ("The Way of the Gun"), and will be directed by Jonathan Glazer ("Sexy Beast").

Nakata's phenomenal success with "Ringu" propelled him into the international spotlight and gave birth to the current Western mania over Japanese horror, or J-horror. However, the next blockbuster horror hit may not come out of Nakata's twisted imagination, but from another hot director with a penchant for things morbid-Korean native Kim Jee-woon ("Three: Going Home," "The Foul King"). DreamWorks recently won a heated bidding war to purchase the rights to remake Kim's most recent release, "A Tale of Two Sisters," about a pair of siblings who return home from a mental hospital only to find a mentally unbalanced stepmother and a meddling ghost. Based on a traditional Korean folktale, the film has become the biggest Korean opener in history with a weekend audience of over 770,000, ringing in over $4 million. It is currently scheduled for simultaneous release in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia on August 15. According to the film's sales agent, Cineclick Asia, the price DreamWorks paid for the remake rights surpasses that paid for any other Korean film ever sold for remake. The American version will be penned by Craig Rosenberg (Hotel de Love).

Finally, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film, "The Pulse," is slated for a makeover by Wes Craven. In "Pulse," an unsettling story with an undercurrent of existentialist despair, ghosts prey upon lonely Internet users, murdering them through their computers and reinforcing the notion that technology, while seeming to connect people to one another, in the end can do nothing to ease the inherent loneliness of human beings.

It's possible that Eastern horror is intriguing to American audiences because of its long cultural tradition. Dr. Tim White, a National University of Singapore senior lecturer in film studies, said in the Straits Times that for the most part, American films lack basis in folklore, and that the closest thing America has to Asian horror are the Urban Legend and Candyman movies, based on small-town American local superstitions. Foreign films may serve to fill this cultural vacuum.

Another, simpler explanation for the invasion of Asian films: they're fixer-uppers. With budgets miniscule by Hollywood standards, the films usually lack special effects and big name actors. American studios see a prime opportunity to do a little buffing up and a lot of marketing to help the films blossom into the moneymaking monstrosities they deserve to be. For example, the Japanese "Ringu" costs only US $1.5 million and was a sensational hit in Japan, grossing 6.6 million while remaining virtually unknown in the states until DreamWorks remade the film with a budget 30 times that of the original, and grossed over $129 million.

Asian horror purists dismayed at the onslaught of films traveling abroad bemoan that American directors will make chop suey of cult classics-that they will pick and choose the scraps tastiest to Western palates, toss them in a wok, add special effects and big-name actors, and slap a fortune cookie on the side, thus drowning all subtlety and cultural depth in a sea of soy sauce.

Furthermore, purists worry that much of the meaning of these stories may be lost in the voyage overseas. In many Asian countries, ghosts stories are not merely scary campfire stories; especially in rural areas of China and Japan, ghosts are considered to be living, breathing aspects of daily life, and ghost stories are taken as warnings to children, or instructions on how to protect oneself from dangerous ghosts. Far from being purely evil creatures, ghosts are often complex characters seeking revenge or lost honor. These meanings might be lost on Western audiences unaware of the cultural context of the films.

However, it's probably true that for every Eastern film that falls victim to butchering by rabid Hollywood directors, another could probably use a little beefing up with special effects and big budgets. Anyone who has seen "The Eye" probably hopes that the remake will be a little more quickly paced and plot-driven. And while the remake of "Ringu" lost some subtlety in the depiction of the evil Samara/Sadako, the enhanced special effects and more well developed plot of the remake effectively made for a more terrifying movie-the shots of the victims' horrified faces will make your skin crawl, for example, and the steady buildup of suspense is more effective.

Eastern horror could well provide the infusion of fresh blood needed to jolt desensitized American audiences out of their recliners. Perhaps one day, Hollywood will seize upon the idea of simply releasing Asian horror films in their original form more widely in America, rather than reincarnating them as American thrillers starring Caucasian actors. But until that day, for better or worse, we can be sure that Asian remakes will be haunting American theatres for many a chilling night to come.

August 1, 2003