Japanese Horror, or J-Horror as it is know in movies circles, has really had the spotlight on it for the last Ten years. Its mood, while sometimes gory, does not celebrate the purely visual, mind numbing violence so common now in Western Horror movies. J-Horror is far more subtle than that and normally has altogether more spiritual angles to its stories. Its villains tend to come from the spiritual world: Ghosts, Poltergeists and demons or, Yokai, as they are known in Japan are far more likely to make it to the screen than your average axe wielding maniac. (Although sometimes Ghosts it seems can also wield an axe with some proficiency).
Unlike modern Western Horror movies J-Horror has not lost that Hitchcockian feel for Suspense that keeps in viewers on the edge of their seats, no matter how bonkers the story line is. Psychological horror and anticipation are the order of the day, drawing the audience further and further along a tight rope of fear and dread until finally the knives are out and the walls are leaking blood.
I have chosen three of the best and most popular J-Horrors movies that best describe the art of Japanese horror making for this article. The first is the Ring, a film most people will have heard of and which has been remade for both the Korean and America markets. The second film I have chosen is, The Audition, a strange and classic example of the genera and a real rollercoaster of trills and suspense. Finally we have, Uzumaki, an even weirder and to western audience's completely off the wall piece, which really has to be seen to be believed.
The Ring (1998)
A Reporter is doing a piece on the death of her niece and a number of her friends who it is rumoured died one week after they apparently watched a video tape. Her snooping soon brings her into contact with one of these tapes and after watching it she discovers that she also is cursed and set to die one week later. Teaming up with her Ex-husband, the reporter and her ex set themselves to discovering the secret of the Tape before the week is up. They soon discover that a woman on the tape is a Dead Psychic and that her daughter, who is also dead is probably the vengeful spirit wreaking havoc among the Video tape watching public at large, To complicate matters further our reporters young son also watches the tape and so the urgency to solve its mysteries and stop the spirit become ever more important.
Okay, so the Ring has started the ball rolling for the imaginative J-Horror makers. It was hugely successful all over the world and started this new fascination with Japanese horror. But wait and see what's coming next.
The Audition (2001)
Here we have a middle aged widower whose teenage son convinces him he needs to find a new woman. We also have a movie producer who convinces our widower that the best way to go about this is to hold false Auditions for a movie so his widower friend can see what's on offer. A girl walks in to the audition and steels our hero's heart. However this girls history seems a bit shaky at best and our Hero's producer friend warns him away from her, but alas to know affect.
Around now, we, the viewers sense something might be wrong to, because the girl lives in an empty apartment with only a large bag for company and what's worse, the bag tends to move about and answer the phone.
Girl and hero get together but then the girl vanishes so our hero goes looking for, only to discover a long line of dead and missing people in her past. Meanwhile our girl has broken into our Hero's apartment and starts to go a bit Phsycho (Not really a surprise at his point). We also discover that the thing living in the bag is a man who's seems to have lost all his limbs and that our Girl feeds him by vomiting into a bowl (Lovely). Eventually our hero and his girl get together again and she drugs him and then starts sticking needle into him in places that needle really shouldn't go. Finally our hero's son make an appearance again and between them manage to throw the girl down a nice set of concrete steps, killing her.
The phrase, You couldn't make it up, may by now be coming to mind. But we are not finished yet. We are now getting to the last of our chosen J-Horror movies and I have kept the… eh, oddest till last.
Uzumaki (2000)
Okay, so this time we start of with a man obsessed with all things spiral. A man who spends his days photographing and filming the spiral shells of snails. Now the hero of this piece is not our snail lover, or his nerdy son but a girl who is friends with the snail lovers nerdy son. Things go down hill for our pair when, The snail lover, decides to kill himself by climbing into a machine and turning it on (don't ask how he turned it on from the inside. Watch the film if you're that interested). But very soon after we have people walking really slowly and only coming out when it rains, quickly followed by students sliming their way up walls and mad curling hair taking over some poor girls mind as well, it seems, the minds of all the other young girls in its vicinity. Eventually just about everybody is dead. Snail lover's wife commits suicide but only after she cuts all her hair off and shaves her finger prints off too (she has developed an aversion to all thins spiral). A group or reporters go into a tunnel one day and just die. One fellow's eye turns into a spiral and sort of gobbles him up. In fact the only two people we don't see die are our Girl and a police officer who's looking into the whole thing (poor chap) and we don't even get to see what happens to either of them.
To sum up I'd just like to say that, yes, J-horror is utterly, utterly mad but do you know what; it's full of the vivid imagination and suspense that has so long been forgotten by western horror that it leaves our attempts at Horror looking stayed and even stale.
