To the vibe that is Japan:
As an American, it's easy to fetishize or commodify or whatever when thinking of the Land of the Rising Sun, but perhaps what is most synonymous with it for me will resonate with others.
For one , there is a grime, a specific texture: the scales of a swirling, full-body dragon tattoo on a Yakuza boss, green and hazy like a murky bowl of miso. Or perhaps the sleek, futuristic design of the Tokyo cityscape— the nebula from which descended the landscapes of Blade Runner and Neuromancer; the worlds within the cool edges and shapes of the Wii, Game Cube, and Play Stations (PS2, the all time great). I remember watching Cyborg 009 on Toonami late at night, the volume bar at the bottom of the Toshiba screen fluctuating with the perceived sounds of my parent’s footsteps. The cyberpunk grit of that Cartoon Network segment laid the aesthetic foundation for how I would continue to digest Japanese content for years to come.
The horror movies coming out of Japan in the late 90s struck a nerve in the United States, as both countries were burning hot with the excitement of technological advancement. Japan was—still is— a major exporter of products that today have become nouns in the U.S.: Casio, Nintendo, Nikon, Sony. But there was a growing dissonance within Japan's historically traditional and conservative society: the 90’s signaled the start of the “Lost Decades,” when Japan’s death rates began to exceed its birth rates during an economic recession and the country’s dominance in the global automotive and electronics market dramatically increased.
Technology is a major theme in the majority of these films. They are specific kinds of stories known as kaidan, a verbal tradition of storytelling dating back to the Edo period, in which supernatural beings are found in everyday objects and settings. In today's context, the juxtaposition highlights our dependence on technology and its increasing role in our lives; the clash between spirits of the old world and the gods of the new.
Solidity, reliability, and the fallacy that “newer is better” when it comes to technology are all explored through this lens. The idea that technology can fail or harm us is as disconcerting as it is hard to prevent or combat and is—in a way—unavoidable, unlike other phenomena of horror or death, like killers or killer animals. It’s closer to cosmic horror, and by extension, freak accidents and natural disasters. You can’t run from it, at least not for long, anyway. Having the sense of agency taken away from a character (and thus from the viewer) is truly frightening, and our dependence on technology through which we eschew self-reliance makes us susceptible to this loss of control . The supernatural element closes us in, so even if the viewer knows how to fix the problem or reverse the damage, it's futile. This is personified by the trickling of scrambled numbers on the digital display when Rachel Keller tries to decipher the origin of the tape in The Ring. The mysticism of technology and the specificity of how it works is clouded in a supernatural haze, beyond logic and rational understanding, ergo capitalizing on the fear rooted in the unknown.
The curses of these films are endless loops, often unbreakable, wherein the sole purpose of the spirit is to kill the host. They are cold and mechanical, devoid of emotion and indiscriminate in choosing their victims—a possible representation of the inevitability of death, unstoppable like the inertia of fate. Like the Shark from Jaws or the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, it’s just their nature. On top of that, the communicable nature of the curses afford the audience a certain vulnerability and makes the threat more credible: anyone can be next.
These ideas which the original films are primarily concerned with are largely forgotten in the American remakes, which sacrifice for plot or gratuitous scares. The originals double down by focusing on drastically dark subject matter, amplified by surreal violence and gore in domestic settings. The antagonists are often vengeful spirits attacking those who come in contact with a cursed object. The ultimate goal of these films is to unsettle the viewer, which is established by a prolonged sense of dread that sticks around like smoke on one's clothes. Protagonists are rarely alone in these films, speaking to the connectedness of modern society through technology, or more specifically, social media, and the all-encompassing effect of the phenomena in question, bound in a sort of chain resigning them to the same grim fate. This is not so we reject modernity, but so that we can become more aware of it.
It’s hard to believe that two directors, Hideo Nakata and Takashi Miike, led the charge of this creative outburst--- both contributing five films total—though the latter’s films fall more into the gory torture-porn subgenre (specifically with Ichi the Killer and Audition. Suicide Club, however, speaks to the themes brought up here, albeit to a lesser degree.) The vision and effect of these films are what led the charge in Hollywood to remake them. Their first at bat with Gore Verbinski’s The Ring was a home run.
Though not a perfect film, it is the best and most original stylistically while at the same time remaining the most loyal to the source material out of all the remakes, holding up as a well made film 20 years later. While it is mostly a shot-for-shot remake, Verbinski’s choice of Seattle as the setting imbues the film with a dark and foreboding (and green color) tone that not only bolsters that of the original and builds upon it. Verbinski’s love and respect for Nakata’s film is immediately evident: Verbinski was inspired after receiving a VHS copy of the original and subsequently passed it onto others the same way, intending for his version to be “discovered” like in the film. Verbinski also avoided casting a major actress in the lead role of Rachel Keller to avoid the hype they’d bring to the film prior to its release. Naomi Watts’ star was on the rise after the success of Mulholland Drive when The Ring premiered in October 2002, cementing her as one of the most bankable stars of the 2000s.
Brutalist style and technology go hand in hand as they both tend to highlight function over form, and aesthetically this makes both subjects ripe for horror, the ghouls are not particularly striking aside from their gory or dehumanized presentation, but are still effective in alarming the viewer. They perhaps also represent the technology of the time: big, blocky VHS players, large and cumbersome antennae phones usurped in stark contrast by the sleek and convenient products whose use has become second nature to us. But we’d be remiss to forget that tools can also be weapons.
