Asian Film Foundation - 05/02/07 - David Kalat, J-Horror Interview

It seems like J-Horror films are here to stay in America both with remakes and influences. But what is J-Horror? We got a chance to talk with J-Horror: The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge and Beyond author David Kalat, and he gave us a good idea of what it's all about.

[UGO]
by Daniel Robert Epstein

UGO: From what I can tell, you were not an official J-horror expert until a few years ago.

DAVID KALAT: Yeah, I'm a self-made expert. I think like a lot of people, whom I expect to be my readers, you run across a handful of these films and some of them really appeal to you. You see The Ring, you see The Grudge, and you say, "Wow, I really like that." Then you see on the video store shelves so many that look so similar. It's hard to get a sense of what they are, especially given the fact that some of these franchises have produced so many titles that are all very similar.

The Grudge is a special offender in that regard. I've always been fascinated by film franchises. A couple of years ago, I read Frankenstein and then watched every single movie that had Frankenstein in it just to see what was irreducibly Frankensteinian about this cultural concept. That's just something that I love to do. So when I started to become a fan of J-horror around 2002, I found that with the exception of a handful of websites, it was really hard to get reliable information. I thought there was a gap in the marketplace with this genre. It's very commercially important. I think it's artistically important. It's having influences around the world. In that way, it's showing that something has changed about the global film market. But nobody's really writing about it or not very many people are writing about it. That was the impetus for the book. Then it was a process of seeking the films out and doing the research to figure out what my thesis was. I knew I was doing a book, but I wasn't quite sure what it was going to say until I got started on it.

UGO: Without Asian films in general, we wouldn't have Star Wars or Fistful of Dollars or movies like that. Is it because of distribution or that there were no popular remakes that it took so long for Japanese horror films to become a phenomenon in America?

DAVID: You hit upon two really excellent points in that question. As I said I'm fascinated with franchises and if you wanted to, you could sit down with some guy who's a huge fan of The Seven Samurai and someone else who's a huge fan of The Magnificent Seven and they're going to have a lot to talk about which one is superior. There's a lot of material that they can use to back up one position or the other. Same thing with A Fistful of Dollars versus Yojimbo and if you want to, toss in that Bruce Willis thing, Last Man Standing. You could really start to parse out what each filmmaker brings to this basic idea to produce a fundamentally different film. If you run clips from it, nobody's going to confuse one with the other. You're not going to be watching Yojimbo and think you were seeing Fistful of Dollars. As similar as the movies are, they're distinctive in that way.

But it would be possible, if you weren't keen to the distinction between say Korean and Japanese, you could show someone Ring Virus and then show them Ring and they might not know which one they were seeing. They are so similar, which is not to say that there aren't differences, but the differences between Hideo Nakata's Ring and the American version are in the minutiae. When these films have been remade, there hasn't been that same effort to completely put it into a new context. You couldn't make a coherent samurai picture in the US. It would be silly so they get done as westerns. But with these J-horror films, the stylistic context of it is carried over just as much as the plot itself. In fact, that's really the part that's kept. Stylistically, Ring, Ring Virus and the American Ring all look the same. The differences are in the story, rather than having two films that have exactly the same story but look completely different stylistically.

UGO: Some people said that the American versions being so close to the Asian versions was a bad thing and others would say it was a good thing. Do you feel like both of these camps are satisfied at this point?

DAVID: I think they are now more so than before. One of the things that drew me into this was the fact that I grew up on gothic horror, like Universal and Hammer horror films, which was much more built around atmosphere and suspense than it was around gore. In the '80s, that horror was killed off and the whole genre was hijacked by shock oriented, gore oriented mad slasher films. I wasn't as interested in that. What Ring and Grudge and the rest of J-horror signaled was a return to atmosphere and moodiness and suspense, which I thought was more adult, more inclusionary. One of the things that's demonstrable about the genre is that it is rare among horror films to be marketed to women. But in Japan, Korea and other Asian nations it is teenage girls that forms the largest audience segment for these films. They have a huge female following in this country as well. That was something that was really new for horror and it showed a kind of horror entertainment that American films weren't trying up until that point.

Now the market's changed again and our popular culture's really gone back to the gore films. You can see in things like Hostel or the Saw franchise or Turistas or The Descent or stuff like that, that it's a really effective and extremely popular form right now. There's something about the torture films that are really connecting with American audiences. The fact that Audition was such a huge success in this country speaks to that same thing as well. So the American industry is going in a different direction but back in Asia, these films have not lost steam. So there's a perception in the press that J-horror is on the wane but I don't think that's true internationally, although it is a little bit true here. Some of that can be blamed on the fact that the remakes lost their way.

UGO: They suck.

DAVID: The early ones were really thoughtfully adapted with an emphasis on keeping what worked in the Japanese original. One of the things that amazes me about The Grudge is that you have the original Japanese director and he's shooting it in Japan with his Japanese crew and some of the original Japanese cast and it has American stars in it. So to call it an Americanized version is really splitting hairs. Things like that and The Ring really worked because they were respectful of what made the films work in the first place, whereas Dark Water or Pulse didn't understand or didn't appreciate what made the first films work and tried to do the wrong thing with it. There was so much about J-horror's success here that was a fad in the first place. The press is jumping on it not because they were legitimately into it, but just because it looked popular. So when the bloom is off the rose, when it looks like the fad is changing, the press is going to abandon you.

UGO: Why do the studios feel that remakes of J-horror films should be PG-13 besides the obvious financial reasons?

DAVID: Part of it was to bring in that teenage girl audience. Larger numbers of people can come when a film is PG-13. As for this historically, you have to look back to 1990. Norio Tsuruta is the father of J-horror. There was a scandal in the late '80s in Japan with a serial killer who killed a number of teenage girls. Eventually, he was caught in his apartment and the place was littered, not with pornography, but with horror videos like The Guinea Pig videos and things like that. Every country has had those incidents, where horror entertainment gets blamed for real life violence and people say watching these movies is what makes you a bad guy. So that going on in Japan in the late '80s and early '90s, where there was a lot of popular antipathy to the hardcore horror films. Norio Tsuruta had always wanted to be a filmmaker, but his parents owned a movie theater in the 1970s and always had directors sleeping over on their couch, because they couldn't afford to feed themselves. So his parents were always encouraging him to find a productive, promising career, not something as fly by night as filmmaking seemed in the '70s. So he ended up as a marketing executive at a video company. So here he is, in the late '80s, early '90s, working in a video company, when horror is supposedly on the out. But he's always been a horror fan. He sees the opportunity to make a horror movie that doesn't have the gore and the graphic violence. So he made Scary True Stories and it ended up being exceedingly popular and profitable plus it laid out all of the stylistic tricks that would then be used by everyone since. In fact, if you watch Scary True Stories now, it's like watching Ring and Grudge and Pulse, just packed down into 45 minutes. So when you make the American remakes, it's already part of the style that they don't have to be R.

UGO: I know that most of this J-horror is rooted in Asian mythology. But do things like the little boys and the white-haired girl coming down the stairs first appear in Scary True Stories?

DAVID: You definitely see them there. But that's not the first place that they appeared. It's the first place that they appeared in that form, but that image of the girl in the white dress with the long black hair is a classic image of ghostliness that goes back hundreds of years. You can find woodcuts from hundreds of years ago that show that very character. They're slightly different from culture to culture. The fun thing about Asian ghosts is that they have real lives. They can interact with people and people might not necessarily know they're ghosts. One of the great things that J-horror does is that it takes these old myths and folklore and legends and updates them for the modern world so instead of it being set in some feudal past, it's the modern world with cell phones and VCRs and all of the accoutrements of the real world.

UGO: Which Asian horror filmmaker is going to break out next in America?

DAVID: I'm not sure that I have a good answer for that. My personal favorite of this bunch is [Pulse director] Kiyoshi Kurasawa, but what I love about him is that he is such an idiosyncratic weirdo. I think that it's going to be very hard for him to ever find that mass popular appeal. I think the original Pulse is one of the true masterpieces of modern horror. It's definitely one of the scariest things that I've ever seen. But it had its chance in this country and I saw it on its first run here in Washington. I was one-sixth of the audience and it got such good press.

Source: http://www.ugo.com