I like Asia and its culture and though I have never yet had the opportunity to visit the continent I am persuaded by what I see on TV that I would be worshipped in Japan as some kind of deity: I am tall, bug eyed and act like a complete Looney Tune at times which, if I understand manga, fits the bill. The reality, of course, is that I don’t understand manga or really anything about Asisan culture aside from what I can piece together in the films that I watch, which is a shame because I always feel somehow distant with films from a far away culture, as if I am watching things happening through a window but without the real ability to directly associate with the characters.
It is for this reason that to a certain extent I do understand the American desire to remake Asian horror films almost scene by scene to up the chances of their having a box office success in the United States; after all it is hard enough to convince an American audience to watch anything with subtitles as it is and Asian horror might very well be a double edged sword in that sense.
You see the problem is that film is, as I have mentioned before, a visual media and as a consequence relies first and foremost on the accomplishment of its images to touch you in the desired manner, a fact which is slightly hindered by the necessity of reading subtitled text in the case of foreign films which is not a terrible handicap since the mind seems quite able to keep up, but it would appear at least from my point of view that this hic up is slightly more evident in horror. Look at The Eye for example: the mood was there, the set up was original and all of the elements of a good movie were in place, but because everything was in Chinese, the exact millisecond of a moment in which I should be watch the character walking about scared in the dark get jumped by a ghost screaming ‘I’m cold!!!’ I missed the fear factor jump because I was too busy reading to find out what the old hag said.
So there is some justification for the horror remake, albeit not without a consequence because whereas it seems sometimes the Japanese find it hard to make films that speak to anyone who is not Japanese, for example, the Americans seem to find it hard to make a film that can speak to anyone and so the results of ninety per cent of these remakes are terrible. That is to say, they all wanted to be The Ring but most of them were The Grudge.
But on the other hand, if we are to be fair a few trips to the TLA and a careful study of Asian horror will quickly prove Sturgeon’s Law to be very much correct and in reality most of what comes from abroad is just as bad as what we make at home. There almost appears to be some kind of rule where if the Asian film was good, the American one will butcher it but this can also work inversely. The Ring is a prime example of this: I have watched all three of the Japanese films and they are all boring if not flat out terrible- I don’t know if culturally photo negatives are scary and that is why the death scenes were seen to be so effective but someone made a good decision in cutting those in the western version. Inversely, Pulse is amazingly well done with an interesting but subtle commentary on society at large to go along with the freaky atmosphere- the American one felt that would hurt people’s heads and so opted out for a simpler and thus more mundane formula.
Then there are films which simply have never been remade but are worth discovering: the first two Death Note movies come to mind immediately which I won’t praise with all of my admiration here; I want to give those films their own space sometime in the future, each one deserves its own review. The film Battle Royale also comes to mind but I was never quite sure why exactly that counted as horror and I am confused every time I see it in a video store.
The point is that this holiday season we would all do well to get out of the box just a little bit and allow ourselves to be scared in a new and inventive way which we might not otherwise get to experience if we stay in our comfort zone and just Westernize everything we don’t understand. So go down to the TLA and get something different for your scare this evening. Share Halloween with the East: this is a continent that made erotic movies with tentacles for the love of God so imagine what they do when they want to be afraid!
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