become aestheticized, this overlapping of functions should not be framed as art imitating life or life imitating art, but as various components (aesthetic, industrial, and technological) of the same assemblage working in tandem with each other in a way perhaps unique in the history of both popular culture and of cinema.
reinforce the idea that the narrative of the nation also produces its own set of tropes and expectations, i.e. national stereotypes? What does it mean to hybridise the national with the generic? Are all Japanese horror films now considered “J-horror”, and if not then is there a clear distinction between the two? If the distinction is based on characteristics unrelated to the idea of nation, can non-Japanese horror films be labeled “J-horror” if they possess these characteristics? Is the distinction between “J-horror” and the also popular label
“East Asian horror” determined by aesthetics, politics, or production? How did the terms “Japanese” and “East Asian” come to be almost interchangeable when discussing a style of horror developed and popularized at the turn of the century, and what does this conflation between regions entail?
To begin answering these questions, let us consider how J-horror and similar labels for East Asian cinema gained traction in the early 2000s. The term
“J-horror” is believed to have emerged from English-language internet forums as a way for fans of cult films to discuss the new horror films emerging from Japan in the wake of the domestic success of Ring.89 Importantly, these films shared certain sensibilities beyond their country of origin – more direct than the image of the virus were the images of urban decay, murky water and damp interiors, and the female ghosts, as well as the commonalities of being slow-paced and atmospheric, accompanied by subtle discordant ambient sounds and shot on grainy film that created the impression of roughness or unevenness. If we follow the definition in which “genre is not a set of textual features that can be enumerated; rather, it is an expectation”,90 then it was the expectation of these features that led to the categorising of the J-horror film. At the same time, the proliferation of independent DVD distribution companies were searching for ways to compartmentalize the vast array of regional cinemas that had become available thanks to the new methods of distribution discussed above. For distributors, terms like “J-horror” signified not only a readymade niche category, but also an audience invested in the term. The largest distributor of J-horror films to a foreign audience was the U.K.-based Tartan (1984 – 2008), which
89 Rucka (2005).
90 Cobley, Paul (2006). “Objectivity and Immanence in Genre Theory”. Genre Matters. Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson, and Jeremy Strong, eds. Bristol: Intellect Books. 41.
developed its “Asia Extreme” branch in response to these pressures, as well as the image of “controversial new Asian films” that proliferated in the British press.
A pivotal point in the company’s turn to Asia, and therefore pivotal also for the global dissemination of J-horror, was the divided reaction among critics towards Audition (1999), with some praising its artistry and others condemning its violence. Oliver Dew describes the intervention (or co-opting) of Tartan and Asia Extreme into the J-horror narrative as such:
A series of festival and industry screenings in 1999 and 2000 led to British theatrical and video/DVD releases for Miike Takashi’s Audition (1999), Nakata Hideo’s Ring (1998) and Fukasaku Kinji’s Battle Royale (2000) by Tartan in 2001 […] Capitalizing on [the controversy over Audition], Tartan rebranded the titles as Asia Extreme in 2002. By March 2005, Asia Extreme included over 40 DVD/video titles, almost a third of Tartan’s entire catalogue. Other UK distribution companies established Asian genre cinema imprints concomitant with Tartan’s growth, including Arts Magic’s Warrior and EasternCult labels, Optimum Releasing’s Optimum Asia, Medusa’s Premier Asia and Momentum’s Momentum Asia. In recognition of this proliferation, DVD retailer HMV set up a separate
‘Extreme Asia’ section in their shops.91
While J-horror had its own aesthetic, it was conflated with other East Asian films (mostly South Korean) under the image of “extremity” – quite a few of these films were not horror at all, such as Park Chan Wook’s JSA: Joint Security Area (2000), a mystery thriller about taboo friendships within the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. While the label “Asia Extreme” seems out of place here, so it also does with many of the Japanese horror films, which, as I’ve mentioned, were slow and contemplative in comparison with other horror films (and indeed with most genre cinema) of the time. Other words used to promote these films – shocking, perverse, weird, outrageous, sick, twisted – also seem to have less to do with the content of the films and more to do with marketing strategy: despite the explicit and implicit claims of representing Japanese or
91 Dew (2007), 54.
Asian film cultures, labels like “J-horror” and “Asia Extreme” can be said to be more reflective of cultural expectations of what “Asia” and “foreign” cinema signifies.92
The J-horror phenomenon therefore gained traction in non-Asian regions from a fetishistic discourse in Western film marketing, given that “since the 1960s foreign-language films in the United States and Britain have often carried an expectation of nudity or violence”.93 By repeating and amplifying the binaristic figure of the “West and the Rest”, the neocolonial nature of this established discourse that has allowed the proliferation of J-horror must not be underestimated. As well as describing filmic tropes, “J-horror” and “Asia Extreme”
became labels which conflated entire regions with the expectation of a horrific or shocking spectacle, in contrast to the imagined non-Asian, shockable consumers.
As Dew puts it, “these brands are not merely a passive expression of Japanese cinematic culture, but are in part constructed by traditions of marketing and watching foreign language film in Anglophone territories”.94 These particular
“traditions of marketing and watching” were shaped by the ideology of the Eastern Other, Orientalism, and so it is clear that companies like Tartan exploited and promoted pre-existing Orientalist stereotypes in order to sell East Asian films to a global audience.
The presence of Orientalism in the discourse surrounding J-horror did not remain confined to marketing strategies, but permeated both journalistic and academic writing. Both favourable and negative reviews could be found to have racist remarks based on assumptions that the violence or perverseness of this new wave of films could be explained by an Asian or Japanese culture or psyche.95 Similarly, if the films were seen to be making a critique of, say patriarchal violence, critics would tend to frame these as critiques of specifically
92 Shin, Chi-Yun (2009). “The Art of Branding: Tartan ‘Asia Extreme’ Films”.
Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Eds. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 86-87.
93 Betz, Mark (2003). “Art, Exploitation, Underground”. Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste. Eds. Mark Jancovish et al. Machester:
Manchester University Press. 205.
94 Dew (2007), 56.
95 Dew (2007), 68.
Asian or Japanese patriarchal norms, rather than patriarchy in general.96 This culturalist approach found its voice in academia in the plethora of works that primarily saw J-horror as reflective of Japanese culture, history, or psychology.97 To take a striking example, we have the claim in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic that
J-horror is also known for its fascination with the flesh […] Japanese body horror is frequently described as excessive due to its combination of sado-masochistic eroticism, graphic representation of violence, and pornographic modes of visual representation including a perverse fascination with deformity.98
While saying Japanese horror is “frequently described” in such terms is correct, by following this statement with a list of Japanese films rather than interrogating why they are considered “excessive” the critic contributes to a milieu in which
“perversity” and “Japanese film” are associatively linked. It is the culturalist focus on “Japan” as object of analysis that prohibits meaningful comparisons with similar non-Japanese works such as Canadian auteur David Cronenberg’s body horror films, or the use of physically impaired actors in the works of Chilean-French auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky, and it is this culturalism which leads to the reproduction of Orientalist ideology.
In journalistic reviews, the Orientalism of the culturalist approach towards Asian horror films becomes more evident when it is compared with contemporary reviews of similarly styled Hollywood horror films such as The Blair Witch Project, which rarely consider their objects of study in the context of American or Western culture and history.99 In addition to written media, new
96 Dew (2007), 68.
97 See Chapter One, Footnote 37.
98 Ancuta, Katarzyna (2016). “Japanese Gothic”. The Encyclopedia of the Gothic.
William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, eds. Chichester: Blackwell Publishing. 373.
99 There are of course exceptions, like this contemporary review, though it stops short of identifying literary antecedents such as Dracula as Western culture:
French, Philip (1999). “Who’s Afraid of Blair Witch?”. The Guardian.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/1999/oct/24/philipfrench> [04/07/2018].
visual media representing J-horror also reproduced Orientalist discourses: Dew demonstrates how the United Kingdom DVD cover of Audition rearranged the original Japanese cover, which focused on the male protagonist, to show only a blown-up image of the film’s female antagonist, looking seductively downwards while brandishing a syringe in gloved hands, in a sexualized image evocative of sado-masochism.100 The book cover of J-horror: The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge, and Beyond imaginatively positions a sideways image of a woman’s ethnically East Asian eye in front of the title, so that the woman’s eyebrow forms the shape of the “J” in the word “J-horror” (Fig. 1). The eye combined with the white of the book’s cover also suggests the painted face of a geisha, or perhaps a traditional Japanese ghost. This cover is impressive in the variety of images it conflates despite the simplicity of the image: in the figure of the Asian sideways eye we see a conflation of the ethnic, the sexual, and the national, thanks to the “J for Japan” of the eyebrow, as well as the literal inscription of the word “horror”
into a body signified as Japanese and female. The book, bridging lay and academic registers of commentary, inadvertently shows how J-horror has helped instigate a fresh wave of Orientalist exoticisation in popular media.
100 Dew (2007), 61.
Figure 1: The book cover.
IV. Not Bound By Time or Place: J-Horror’s Cross-Genre, Pan-Asian