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Asian Horror

Oldcastle Books

THIN PARTITIONS: ASIA & THE SUPERNATURAL

"I've heard this sentence: the partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick to us as it does to a westerner." Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983)

Cultural generalisations can be perilous undertakings, but there are significant ways in which contemporary eastern cultures demonstrate a more widespread and engrained acceptance of supernatural forces than their western counterparts. The roots of this lie in Asian religious traditions (Buddhism and Shinto, for example), whose animistic, pantheistic and karmic beliefs contrast sharply with the more binary moralities of the western Judeo-Christian tradition. According to Shinto, for instance, millions of Japanese objects – from trees, rocks and rivers to commonplace domestic items – are inhabited by spirit deities, which in varying circumstances can prove friendly or aggressive. Spirits are not necessarily seen as antagonists or entities that should be eliminated, but as beings that co-exist with the world of the living.

There are various concrete examples of modern-day Asian cultural practices that reflect this sense of the porous boundaries and free-flowing interplay between the material world and the afterlife. Many Japanese homes contain a butsudan (Buddhist household altar), where the spirits of dead relatives are supposed to reside, and to whom regular offerings are made. Many South Koreans regularly consult with Shamanistic mudangs, who dispense advice on matters of the heart and perform rituals or exorcisms. As a result of these active religious traditions, eastern cultures are saturated with ghost stories to a much greater degree than those of the West – stories which dominate their visual, literary and theatrical heritage, as well as their cinematic traditions.

SUPERNATURAL STORYTELLING

Japanese literature contains a long tradition of supernatural storytelling that draws on the ghosts and demons of Shinto and Buddhism. A major touchstone was the eleventh-century The Tale of Genji, whose jealous Lady Rokujo is a prototype for the unquiet spirit – or yurei – that would become such a crucial component of Japanese mythology (and virtually a cliché of J-Horror). Yurei come into being when people die violently through suicide or murder, or in the grip of passionate emotions, or if fitting burial rites have not been adequately performed. Almost invariably female, yurei tend to float while dressed in white Shinto burial kimonos, hands dangling limply, with a single baleful eye staring through sheets of long, scraggly black hair (Japanese women traditionally pinned their hair up, but it was let down for burial). Vengeance-driven yurei were sub-categorised as onryou, and their murderous retribution would often not merely be restricted to those who had wronged them (a tradition that would memorably extend to the ghostly Kayako in IJu-On: The Grudge [2002]).

Another entity that has recurred throughout the history of Japanese horror is the bakeneko ('cat demon') – a creature capable of possessing people, created when a cat licks the blood of its murdered owner. Wells are another classic trope, and are frequently used as places for concealing corpses. This stratagem is used by the samurai Aoyama in one classic folktale – he kills his maid, Okiku, after she rejects his overtures, only to be tormented by her disconsolate wails from the depths of her watery grave. Water is often seen as a gateway to the underworld – as demonstrated by the floating of lanterns during the annual O-Bon Japanese Buddhist festival honouring ancestral spirits.

Japan's Edo period (1603–1867) was the golden age of the kaidan (ghost story), when authors like Ogita Ansei, Asai Ryoi and Ueda Akinari (sometimes referred to as the Japanese Maupassant) perfected the form. These were usually based on didactic Buddhist stories or folk legends (sometimes taken from plays), and onryou and haunted houses were commonly featured. One Edo parlour game called Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai involved players sitting in a room with a hundred lit candles and extinguishing them one at a time after recounting a series of kaidan (the final candle was believed to summon a spirit). The phenomenal popularity of this game – combined with new printing technology – led to ghost stories being collected and published from all parts of Japan (and the transplantation of Chinese folktales to Japan). Later writers like Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) and Junichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965) created anthologised collections of the nation's folktales, providing a wellspring for films like Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (1964). The writings of Hirai Taro (1894–1965) – who adopted the pen name Edogawa Rampo, an oriental rendering of the name of his literary idol Edgar Allan Poe (try saying it out loud) – would be a major influence on the later ero-gro ('erotic-grotesque') subgenre of films.

Many kaidan story motifs were absorbed into – and simultaneously drew from – Japan's performing arts traditions. The repertoire of Noh theatre – a style originating in the fourteenth century – boasts over 200 plays, many with supernatural elements. These highly stylised blends of music, drama and dance, designed for the ruling classes, were enacted in a minimalist, semi-abstract fashion by a pair of (usually masked) performers. Prominent categories include shura-mono (ghost plays) and shunen-mono (revenge plays), which would often combine in stories of otherworldly retribution, frequently involving vengeful yurei. Transformations were often part of the narratives (in Yamanba, for example, a humble old lady mutates into an onibaba, or demon woman); undead warriors were another trope – plays like Funa-Benkei anticipate the otherworldly clashes of Kitamura's Versus (2000) by centuries. Often, characters known as waki – usually wandering priests – would appear and offer warnings to the principal characters about ghosts or curses.

A later form of Japanese theatre, Kabuki, was less elitist than Noh, and had an even more direct impact on later horror cinema. First developed in the seventeenth century, Kabuki drew on Noh plays for some of its stories and style, but was an altogether more elaborate type of theatrical experience. It developed complicated systems of trapdoors, passageways, hidden wires, pulleys, water pits and revolving stages to create slick theatrical illusions that were the precursors of modern cinematic SFX (its legacy reflected perhaps in the DIY effects of Ishiro Honda's seminal 1954 Godzilla). Kaidan were a popular Kabuki genre – The Ghost Story of Yotsuya, first performed in 1821, being probably the most famous. Visual shorthands for representing yurei were developed – including a white burial kimono, wild black hair and white-and-indigo face makeup. Transformations were again a recurring theme: in Tsuchigumo, a young boy is revealed to be a monstrous spider demon. There were also strong streaks of brutality and cruelty in Kabuki – torture, mutilation and suicide were regular elements – that find many echoes in later horror cinema.

The visual arts have also been a rich source of the horrific imagery that fed into horror cinema. Buddhist temple paintings and twelfth-century jigoku-zoshi (Hell scroll paintings) contained graphic depictions of the torments of the underworld, administered by grotesque demons. The first known image of a yurei was in Okyo Maruyama's painting The Ghost of Oyuki, and Tokyo's Zenshoan Temple now has a collection of 50 nineteenth-century silk scroll paintings depicting yurei. Another key source of inspiration was the tradition of Ukiyo-e (the 'floating world' genre of woodblock prints), which contained vividly colourful and physically graphic depictions of mythological ghosts, demons and yurei alongside domestic scenes. Katsushika Hokusai was one of the most celebrated exponents, and his series of nineteenth-century prints, One Hundred Tales, includes such choice sights as an onibaba eating the decapitated head of a baby, while the artist Yoshitoshi depicted scenes of mutilation and the torture of captive women plucked directly from his era's grisly civil war. Elsewhere, Ukiyo-e images of water dragons can be found that anticipate the appearance of Godzilla. The work of artists like Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi – which they sometimes bound together in notebooks – is a precursor of the work of modern-day manga artists, a key influence on contemporary horror films.

JAPANESE HORROR FILMS: MODERNISM & MONSTERS

Examples of Japanese horror cinema can be found from as early as 1898, when shorts like Jizo the Ghost and Resurrection of a Corpse were produced. But it wasn't until after the Second World War that the genre would really take flight. Horror films have always tended to reflect the dominant social anxieties of the time and place in which they are produced, and the post-war era was a particularly turbulent one for Japan: the country had suffered a humiliating military defeat, entailing catastrophic casualties (2.7 million dead and a huge number missing or wounded). Hundreds of thousands had perished in the nuclear obliterations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their radioactive aftermaths. Humiliatingly, after its defeat Japan was placed under occupation by US troops for the next seven years and prevented from re-arming.

The sheer scale of Japan's wartime destruction found its most obvious mirror in the kaiju eiga ('monster movie') cycle of the 1950s, with Godzilla (1954) leading the charge. This film, along with its numerous sequels and imitators, would ritualistically re-enact the destruction of Tokyo (which had been saturation-bombed by the Allies), while the parade of mutant beasts was a blatant reminder of the horrors of radiation damage and environmental pollution. Fears of apocalyptic destruction have been a constant theme of Japanese horror through to the present day, while scarred female faces (a common sight on nuclear-bomb victims) find their way into a number of horror films – from Ghost Story of Yotsuya (1959) and Onibaba (1964) to Face of Another (1966) and Imprint (2006).

As commentators like Colette Balmain have noted, during the occupation period the country's traditional value system collided head-on with the forces of western modernisation. The Shinto codes that the nation had been built on – based on Confucian ethics setting out complex sets of reciprocal responsibilities between the emperor and his subjects, and between family members and friends – were replaced by western democratic values and a new emphasis on capitalist individualism. Many of the Japanese horror films produced in the 1950s dramatised this collision in coded form: the selfish pursuit of personal gain at the expense of collective values lies at the root of the ghostly tragedies of Tales of Ugetsu and Ghost Story of Yotsuya, for example.

BOOM TIME FOR EDO GOTHIC

In the fifties and sixties, while Britain was thrilling to its Hammer horrors and America to its AIP Poe cycle, Japan was enjoying its own Gothic boom. These kaidan eiga ('ghost story films', a term with an archaic flavour redolent of the Edo era) were usually based on Kabuki plays or Buddhist folk tales set during the Edo (or occasionally the subsequent Meiji) period. The big-name player in this movement was the director Nobuo Nakagawa, who racked up a string of successes for Shintoho Studios, including The Ghosts of Kasane Swamp (1957) and Ghost Story of Yotsuya (1959). Other notable examples of the genre included Masaki Mori's Ghost of Kagama-Ga-Fuchi (1959) and Satsuo Yamamoto's The Bride From Hell (1968), the latter adapted from the oft-filmed folktale The Peony Lantern, an archetypal story of doomed love featured in an 1892 Kabuki play. Staple story elements of the kaidan eiga included vaultingly ambitious ronin (masterless samurai) betraying their bushido codes, adultery, conspiracy and revenge – with wronged women frequently returning from the graves as onryou to torment the feckless men who abused their trust. Also cropping up regularly in these films was the folkloric feline bakeneko, gracing Yoshiro Ishikawa's The Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (1960) and Kaneto Shindo's Kuroneko (1968).

During this period, some of the more prestigious Japanese horror films met with considerable international success: Mizoguchi's Tales of Ugetsu (1953), Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (1964) and Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba (1964) were all eye-openers for western audiences in the same way that Nakata's Ring would be several decades later.

WESTERN BORROWINGS

As well as this rich seam of home-grown material, Japanese horror filmmakers also mined the western horror classics for ideas, producing several blatantly orientalised reworkings. Hajime Sato came up with The Ghost of the Hunchback (1965), while Michio Yamamoto directed a trilogy of Hammer homages – Legacy of Dracula (1970), Lake of Dracula (1971) and Evil of Dracula (1974). These kind of cross-cultural borrowings have often been beneficial to the development of cinematic genres: American and European Westerns were certainly enriched by the influence of Japanese classics like Kurosawa's The Bodyguard (1961) and The Seven Samurai (1954) (themselves influenced by John Ford, and respectively remade as Leone's A Fistful of Dollars [1964] and Sturges' The Magnificent Seven [1960]). Japanese horror cinema, meanwhile, has always been open to influences from the West – from Edo Gothic's debt to the lurid period horrors of Hammer and Corman to the Dario Argento-inspired mayhem of Evil Dead Trap (1988), the Tobe Hooper nods in Shugo Fujii's Living Hell: A Japanese Chainsaw Massacre (2000) and the pervasive influence of Kubrick's The Shining on much modern J-Horror (Takashi Shimizu's 2005 Reincarnation being only the most overt in its borrowings).

CLASSIC JAPANESE HORRORS 1953–1968

Directed by: Kenji Mizoguchi

Cast: Masayuki Mori (Genjuro), Machiko Kyo (Lady Wakasa), Mitsuko Mito (Ohama), Kinuyo Tanaka (Miyagi), Sakae Ozawa (Tobei)

Story

The action is set in the sixteenth century, in a province ravaged by civil war. Genjuro, a potter, leaves his wife and son to try and sell his wares. The pots are bought by Lady Wakasa, who invites Genjuro to her home, Kutsuki Manor. There she seduces and then marries him, telling him that he must devote his entire life to her. An itinerant monk warns Genjuro that his life and soul are in danger because his new wife is actually a ghost – the last trace of a decimated noble clan. After having a Buddhist exorcism performed, Genjuro flees the Manor and returns to his wife, Ohama, who welcomes him home. The next morning, he is informed that his wife has been killed earlier by marauding soldiers. He realises that he was welcomed home by her ghost, who wanted to reunite him with his son. In a separate plotline, Genjuro's peasant neighbour, Tobei, bluffs his way to becoming a renowned samurai, although he nearly loses his wife Miyagi in the process.

Background

Snapping up the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, Mizoguchi's masterpiece (one of many) was part of the first wave of Japanese art-house cinema – preceded by Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) – that wowed international audiences in the early fifties. Tales of Ugetsu is based on the short stories 'The House in the Thicket', in which a man is welcomed home by the ghost of his dead wife, and 'A Serpent's Lust', which features a vengeful female spirit. These both appeared in Ueda Akinari's 1776 kaidan collection Tales of Moonlight and Rain (sourced from Chinese originals), and Tales of Ugetsu combines them with the separate Tobei subplot, drawn from a Maupassant story.

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Excerpted from Asian Horror by Andy Richards. Copyright © 2010 Andy Richards. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
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