Hey guys, i’m doing a research project for my media course..
If anyones interested theres a few youtube clips on this link to my blog..
if anyone wants to watchthem and then hit the big blue survey buttom in the right hand corner i would really appreciate it as this research will help with my findings and evaluation in my exam in a few weeks.
My research project is to look at Japanese Horror and see how and if it has influenced other international sub-genres of horror, i.e – South Korean, French, German. I tried to stray away from Western films (US, UK, NZ, AUS) as the project was based on World Cinema. Any questions/ answers please feel free to ask/say.
The basis i have been focusing on mainly are the main conventions of each sub-genre and looking for similarities and how each have influenced each other.
The four main films i have looked at are: Ringu (Japanese), Infection (Japanese), A Tale Of Two Sisters (korean) & Frontier(s) (French).
Ringu was alright, not that much scarier than its westernized partner and I remember at the time being embarrassed by the endless plot holes.
i thought ringu was superb, first film to actually scare me since watching stephen king’s IT as a kid, and i don’t really care about how scary it is compared with the hollywood remake, it was the same director and i don’t think he set out to make a version with an altogether different level of scariness
if you watch ring 0 the plot does make sense, but then don’t because it’s rubbish, 2 was alright though
And Ringu (Japanese), Infection (Japanese) are both brilliant films. The Japanese Ringu was much better than the American version. Although The Juon was a MASSIVE let down.
yeah, i’ve got tale of two sisters, it’s ok, nowhere near as engaging as ring and it borrows a lot in the SFX department
(Different colours indicate different posts by different people).
Based on Asian & French Horror within World Cinema.
Thanks for checking out my site. Here’s what I sent over to the previous person who asked.
1)What, in your opinion, are the main conventions of a modern French horror?
Well my first real French horror movie was Haute Tension (high tension). I met the director Alexandre Aja and got to briefly speak with him.
It seems he was influenced by Lucio Fulci’s work so I guess french horror has gained its momentum from Italian horror.
I guess the first convention that seems most prominent is the home invasion. High Tension, Them (Ils) (more so than ever as the American version The Strangers seems to have the same premise), Inside and even Frontiere(s) have this same horror convention.
I’m an American so I don’t really know if this is a deep fear within the French culture but if it plays on that fear….I guess it works.
I think the 2nd convention is the French horror allusion to “others” as evil and maniacal.
It seems the French riots in 2005 have deemed Muslims as others. In Frontiere(s), it seems they play on the borderland rural french community.
But French horror seems to be an homage to the splatter of old. Good ole solid gore and carnage.
American horror has been PG-13 of late which sucks for us but I see the savagery of the new wave of French horror filmmakers seems to be going in that direction. There’s a new french horror film called Martyrs that follows the same suit.
2)What, in your opinion, are the main conventions of a modern Asian horror?
Asian horror mainly from Japan and Thailand is generally centered on the supernatural. Folk tales, old ghost stories seem to be the main focus with films such as the Ring and others.
Also, the Japanese seem to be focused on using their own society problems to make horror movies (bullying, sexual perversion, etc.)
I’m sure you could find loads of info on asian horror but those 2 would be the main conventions.
3)As you can see from your blog, who have seen a great many horror/zombie film! What do you think makes Asian (mainly Japanese) and French horror so different?
The japanese horror films are less on gore and more on the psychological. A creeping hand on the back of your neck for a quick scare. A mysterious phone call. Japanese horror is all about death in the future. Whereas French horror is more immediate.
4)I have read that J-horror mainly focuses on psychological horror and tension building, would you agree with this statement?
Yes. As I said above, it’s about atmosphere and using modern technology we use everyday that engulfs most japanese horror.
Possessed internet, videotape or notebook that kills. Every japanese movie is not abot the quick kills…its the building of 2-3 several deaths that make it memorable.
5)How many films do you know of featuring a Yurei?
I do know Yurei are japanese ghosts.
Ring, Ju on, Dark Water, One Missed Call, Shikoku, Spiral, The Grudge, Shutter all have this same premise.
I really didn’t like One Missed Call or any of these. Though I did like the Ring alot.
6)Why do you think that lately there have been such a great amount of French horror films being released?
Honestly, I think most French filmmakers make horror films to get into the Hollywood market. Aja made Hills Have Eyes remake. Others are following as well.
I think American horror is very bad right now. We’re in remake city and it comepletely fuckin sucks. So many freakin remakes it makes me sick.
French horror movies and I’ve seen most of them are awesome because of their atmosphere, various chilling scenes and all out splatter and gore. No cut aways. Just buckets of guts and blood.
American horror fans love that stuff. We appreciate it.
Only one American movie has come close (Hatchet)
I’ve written a lot of French horror reviews. You should check it out (my reviews are more humorous than your straight forward “real” critic review.
The Following films are that of which i am researching to help with my critical research study into the influence of Japanese Horror onto other horror within World Cinema. Two of the films sampled are Japanese (J-Horror). All contain some basic information, a brief clip of each film and a synopsis.
Kansen (English – Infection) (2004 Directed by Masayuki Ochiai) – Japanese
‘A patient dies at a hospital due to a mistake made by a team of hospital personnel. Wanting so save their careers, they vow to cover it up. Around the same time, a young man arrives at the hospital exhibiting symptoms of an unknown contagion. After the youth dies due to the virus (by melting away, of all the unpleasant ways to go), the members of the conspiracy start behaving strangely and also experiencing the same symptoms. What is happening to them? That is about as linear as the plot ever gets, from there on the story starts rocketing back and forth between flashbacks, hallucinations, ghostly encounters and other odd events.’ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418778/)
Ringu (English – The Ring) (1998, Directed by Hideo Nakata) – Japanese
‘Reiko Asakawa is a young journalist with a divorced husband, Ryuji, and a son, Yoichi. Her niece, Tomoko, was recently found dead with a look of pure shock embedded in her face as if something scared her to death. Upon learning that her niece’s three friends died at the same time, too, and hearing about a disturbing videotape that is said to kill you seven days after watching it, Reiko comes into the possession of that same tape. Now, as time grows short, Reiko and Ryuji race to save their lives from impending doom and discover what the tape has to do with a tragedy-stricken volcanic island and a very strange little girl named Sadako’ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0178868/plotsummary)
Frontier(s) (2007, Director Xavier Gens) – French
‘In Paris, during the riots due to the election of a conservative candidate to the presidency of France, the Muslin small thieves teenagers from the periphery Alex, Tom, Farid, the pregnant Yasmine and her brother Sami plan to run away from Paris to Amsterdam with a bag full of robbed money. However, Sami is shot and the group split, with Alex and Yasmine going to the emergency of a hospital with Sami while Tom and Farid heads to the border with the money. Tom and Farid decide to stop in a bed and breakfast nearby the frontier, and are hosted by Gilberte and Klaudia that offer free room and sex to the newcomers. They call Alex and Yasmine that are fleeing from Paris to join them in the inn, but sooner they discover that their hosts are sadistic cannibals of a Nazi family leaded by the deranged patriarch and former SS officer Le Von Geisler.’ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814685/plotsummary)
Janghwa, Hongryeon (English – A Tale Of Two Sisters)(2003, Directed by Ji-woon Kim) – South Korean
‘Two sisters who, after spending time in a mental institution, return to the home of their father and cruel stepmother. Once there, in addition to dealing with their stepmother’s obsessive and unbalanced ways, an interfering ghost also affects their recovery.’ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365376/plotsummary)
For sheer imaginative brio, Pan’s Labyrinth is one of the films of the year. But the dark fable was a labour of love for director Guillermo del Toro, who says that violence in his native Mexico is key to his extraordinary vision. For those with a weakness for the beautiful monsters of modern cinema, Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro has earned a deserved reputation as the finest living exponent of fabulist film. Gregarious and personable, with an almost photographic recall of faces, he has charmed both the hardcore horror fans, who gave him a hero’s welcome at London’s Frightfest in August, and now the upmarket critical cognoscenti, who snapped to attention following his Palme d’Or nomination for his new film Pan’s Labyrinth at Cannes in May. Set against the backdrop of fascist Spain in 1944, Pan’s Labyrinth is a dark fairy tale that distils his distinctive mix of fact and fantasy, poetry and politics, pain and pleasure. It’s an epic, poetic vision in which the grim realities of war are matched and mirrored by a descent into an underworld populated by fearsomely beautiful monsters – a transformative, life-affirming nightmare which is, for my money, the very best film of the year.
Since the early 1990s, del Toro has divided his film-making between personal European projects (the modern vampiric chiller Cronos in 1993; the ghostly Spanish Civil War fable The Devil’s Backbone in 2001) and big-budget Hollywood hits (ongoing comic-book franchises Blade II in 2002, and Hellboy in 2004). Those familiar with the guilty ghosts of The Devil’s Backbone will recognise key motifs in his new fable, about a young girl’s exploration of a labyrinthine underworld in Franco-era Spain.
The young heroine of Pan’s Labyrinth is Ofelia, whose widowed mother, Carmen, has recently married Vidal, a vicious captain in Spain’s Civil Guard, involved in policing anti-fascist Maquis resistance in the mountainous wooded northern region. Vidal’s housekeeper, Mercedes, befriends Ofelia, protecting her from her stepfather’s wrath while maintaining secretive connections with the Maquis. Meanwhile, Ofelia meets an alarmingly devious faun who suggests that she may be the lost princess of a beautiful and terrifying netherworld. While Mercedes attempts to help the Maquis in their struggles, Ofelia embarks on a quest that will test her true nature.
This quest involves a journey through a labyrinth, a word with which the Civil War has become intrinsically linked (think of key historical accounts such as Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth) and which served as the ‘perfect metaphor’ for del Toro’s endeavours.
‘A maze is a place where you get lost,’ he explains. ‘But a labyrinth is essentially a place of transit, an ethical, moral transit to one inevitable centre. You think of the transit of Spanish society from the 1940s to the incredible explosion of the post-Franco period. The 1980s in Spain were like the 1960s in the rest of the world! In the movie, Ofelia is a “princess who forgot who she was and where she came from”, who progresses through the labyrinth to emerge as a promise that gives children the chance never to know the name of their father – the fascist. It’s a parable, just as The Devil’s Backbone was a parable of the Spanish Civil War.
‘I was also trying to uncover a common thread between the “real world” and the “imaginary world”through one of the seminal concerns of fairy tales: choice. It’s something that has intrigued me since Cronos, through Hellboy and now to Pan’s Labyrinth: the way your choices define you. And I thought it would be great to counterpoint an institutional lack of choice, which is fascism, with the chance to choose, which the girl takes in this movie.’
Del Toro’s faun is just one of the film’s menagerie of fantastical creatures and monsters, drawn from sources that range from Goya’s paintings to Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. Amazingly for a film that features around 300 effects shots and boasts complex creature designs, Pan’s Labyrinth was completed for a mere £10m, a feat del Toro attributes to the lessons learnt on Blade II and Hellboy (‘I love to play with the big toys… and to learn from them’). As always, the director sketched each character in the notebooks that are his constant companions, extraordinary documents of his mind at work and his obsessive attention to detail. Here we find the original drawings for the ‘vegetable baby’ which Ofelia places beneath her mother’s bed, nurtured with milk and magic, and the terrifying ‘pale man’ whose ire she arouses by stealing from his table.
‘I wanted to represent political power within the creatures,’ del Toro says. ‘And that particular character somehow came to represent the church and the devouring of children. The original design was just an old man who seemed to have lost a lot of weight and was covered in loose skin. Then I removed the face, so it became part of the personality of the institution. But then, what to do about the eyes? So I decided to place stigmata on the hands and shove the eyes into the stigmata. Having done that, I thought it would be great to make the fingers like peacock feathers that fluff and open. That’s how that figure evolved.
‘The faun proved more difficult. The idea was to make him very masculine, not aggressively so, just sinuous. I remember talking to Doug Jones [who plays both the faun and the pale man] when he first started working on the role and saying, “More Mick Jagger, less David Bowie!” I wanted the faun to have a rock star quality. Everything about the faun and his personality needed to be masculine because you had to pit the female energy of the girl against something monolithic.’
In essence, del Toro is a divided soul, a realist attuned to the strange vibrations of the supernatural, a lapsed Catholic (‘not quite the same thing as an atheist’) with an interest in sacrifice and redemption who turned down the chance to direct The Chronicles of Narnia because he ‘wasn’t interested in the lion resurrecting’. Crucially, like the artistic refugees from Franco’s Spain who first inspired him, the writer-director considers himself an exile from his home country, Mexico, not least because of the 1997 kidnapping of his father, at the height of a vogue for such ransomed abductions. He was released after 72 days.
‘I was 33,’ el Toro recalls. ‘The perfect age to be crucified! I had lived my life believing two things – that pain should not be sought, but, by the same token, it should never be avoided, because there is a lesson in facing adversity. Having gone through that experience, I can attest, in a non-masochistic way, that pain is a great teacher. I don’t relish it, but I learn from it. I always say, even as an ex-Catholic, that God sends the letter, but not the dictionary. You need to forge your own dictionary.’
This willingness to confront pain and to forge his own cinematic dictionary has informed the blend of innocence and brutality that is a trademark of del Toro’s phantasmagorical cinema. From the crushing addiction of Cronos, whose ageing anti-hero is reduced to licking blood from the tiled floor of a public lavatory, to the redemptive fantasy of Hellboy, whose titular demon takes an industrial grinder to the horns on his head in a bid to take control of his destiny, del Toro has returned compulsively to these twinned themes. Now in Pan’s Labyrinth, which he wrote, directed and produced, he has created a Citizen Kane of fantasy cinema, a masterpiece made entirely on his own terms.
Del Toro is working within the same tradition of cinematic horror that spawned A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s seminal reinvention of the ‘classic dark fairytale’, in which Freddy Krueger emerged as an 1980s incarnation of the Big Bad Wolf. ‘I think that really is one of the best fairytales of any decade, because Craven understands the roots of those myths,’ says del Toro. Pan’s Labyrinth is being promoted in America with a classic horror tagline: ‘Innocence has a power that evil cannot imagine’.
That power is also self-generating. ‘Pan’s Labyrinth is a movie about a girl who gives birth to herself into the world she believes in,’ del Toro continues. ‘At that moment, it doesn’t matter if her body lives or dies. And this is something I have experienced. I remember the worst experience of my life, even above the kidnapping of my father, was shooting Mimic [del Toro's first Hollywood feature, in 1997, which was severely compromised by producer interference]. Because what was happening to me and the movie was far more illogical than kidnapping, which is brutal, but at least there are rules. Now when I look at Mimic, what I see is the pain of a deeply flawed creature that could have been so beautiful.’
Pain and beauty, brutality and innocence – once again, del Toro’s conversation finds a way back to the central duality of death and rebirth. ‘Those things are one and the same,’ he says. ‘It would be a cliche to say that, because I am a Mexican, I see death in a certain way. But I have seen more than my share of corpses, certainly more than the average First World guy. I worked for months next to a morgue that I had to go through to get to work. I’ve seen people being shot; I’ve had guns put to my head; I’ve seen people burnt alive, stabbed, decapitated … because Mexico is still a very violent place. So I do think that some of that element in my films comes from a Mexican sensibility.’
Like the heroine of Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro’s career now seems to be at a point of rebirth and regeneration. ‘Hopefully, this movie will allow me to start a new path,’ he says. ‘The way I see my craft, and the way I see the stories I tell, has completely changed as a result of this movie. Shooting Pan’s Labyrinth was very painful, but it also became a war about me not compromising.
‘I gave back my entire salary in order to get the film made the way I wanted it. I probably should have abandoned it the moment the funding fell through the first time, but I stuck with it for almost two-and-a-half years and refused to back down. It’s the first time in the six movies I’ve directed where I’ve said: I’m doing this one my way, no matter what.
‘Financiers ran out on me and everyone involved in my career was saying it was the biggest mistake I could make. But I’m very happy with the result. And for me, nothing will be the same again.’
· This is an edited version of an article from the December issue of Sight and Sound, on sale from Tuesday
Australia and New Zealand have a relatively short but rich horror film tradition, ranging from lowbrow slashers to socially relevant fare, from tense thrillers to outrageous horror comedies.
The Beginning: 1970s
Although horror movies have remained popular in Australia and New Zealand since the early part of the 20th century — particularly during America’s Universal years of the 1930s and Britain’s Hammer years of the 1950s and ’60s — it wasn’t until the 1970s that self-made Australian horror began to take root. It was during this time that Australian cinema as a whole experienced a resurgence due to increased governmental funding.
Director Peter Weir emerged as a fresh voice with his 1974 debut The Cars That Ate Paris. The quirky film mixed horror with humor while maintaining an art-house flavor that would characterize 1977’s The Last Wave. In that film, Weir used Australian Aboriginal mysticism to paint a haunting tale that delved into topical issues of race and culture. Before he moved on to a lengthy, prestigious international career, Weir would also direct a small psychological thriller for television called The Plumber. These early forays into horror and suspense helped propel the director into international stardom as well as aiding in the legitimization of such genre films within Australia.
While Weir’s films blended horror with other styles, the first outright Australian horror film might’ve been 1972’s Night of Fear. Originally banned for indecency, this story of a woman terrorized by a loner in the deserted Outback not only foretold 20th century Aussie exploitation fare like Wolf Creek, but it even predated the similarly themed, groundbreaking American hit The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by two years.
Early horror films like Night of Fear, the Western-styled Inn of the Damned (1975) and the nature-runs-amok Long Weekend (1978) utilized Australia’s natural, untamed environments to their advantage. The isolation of the undeveloped Outback would go on to play a major part in Australian horror — and even in action movies from Down Under, like the Mad Max series.
The Explosion: 1980s
As horror movies — and particularly slashers — exploded in popularity in the US in the 1980s, so too did Australia witness a healthy surge in the genre during the decade. Director Richard Franklin was one of the leading proponents of Aussie horror during that time, having helmed the 1978 telekinetic film Patrick and the 1981 serial killer road picture Road Games, starring reigning American “scream queen” Jamie Lee Curtis (who was riding high from her successive roles in Halloween, The Fog, Prom Night and Terror Train). Franklin would parlay those efforts into directorial duties for Psycho II in the US and the killer ape flick Link in the UK.
The avalanche of Aussie horror during that time ranged from the vampire film Thirst (1979) to the slasher Dangerous Game (1987) to the exploitation of Escape 2000 (1982) to the post-apocalyptic Dead-End Drive In (1986) to the psychological thriller Cassandra (1986) and the killer boar pic Razorback (1984). Razorback was filmed by renowned director Russell Mulcahy, who, like Peter Weir, made his early name in horror before moving on to bigger films like Highlander, Ricochet and The Shadow. Likewise, Dangerous Game director Stephen Hopkins went on to direct A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and Predator 2 before branching out into The Ghost and the Darkness and Lost in Space.
The surge of horror in Australia during the ’80s is evident in the decision to set the third film in the popular Howling franchise Down Under, featuring marsupial werewolves. Australian made-for-TV fare even tapped into the horror wave, as indicated by the 1986 survivalist tale Fortress, which revolved around the kidnapping of a rural teacher and her schoolchildren by a group of sadistic men. New Zealand also got into the act a bit, with small films like The Scarecrow (1982) and the mad scientist flick Strange Behavior (1981).
Stagnancy: 1990s
By the end of the ’80s, however, the quality of Aussie horror movies had become dubious — somewhat emblematic of the state of the country’s cinema as a whole, wherein international icons like Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee had been replaced by the likes of Yahoo Serious and the Energizer battery guy (Oy!). Cheap, cliché-ridden slashers like Houseboat Horror (1989) and Bloodmoon (1990) and thrillers featuring B-grade American stars like Linda Blair (Dead Sleep) and Jan-Michael Vincent (Demonstone) became more and more prevalent.
One exception, though, was 1989’s Dead Calm. This tense thriller about murder aboard a yacht in the middle of the ocean stood out amidst a sea of derivative, low-minded fare with its acute psychology, taut action set pieces and superb acting and direction — all of which combined to help launch the American careers of director Phillip Noyce and actors Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill. This one shining beacon signaled hope that Australian horror and suspense could regain the high quality of the late ’70s and early ’80s.
In New Zealand, however, the story was quite the opposite. The late ’80s and early ’90s witnessed the rise of Kiwi director Peter Jackson, whose Lord of the Rings films would later turn him into one of the biggest filmmakers in the world. Jackson made a name for himself in the horror genre with the graphic, campy “splatter” fare Bad Taste (1988), Meet the Feebles (1989) and Dead Alive (1992). His first American co-production, 1996’s The Frighteners, remained in the horror-comedy vein, but without all of the gore. Jackson’s success no doubt opened the door for a new generation of Kiwi genre filmmakers.
Resurgence: 2000s
The dawn of the 21st century signaled a comeback for Aussie horror movies. A string of releases did solid business on video in the US: the inventive slasher Cut (2000), the supernatural Hellion (2002), the murder mystery Lost Things (2003) and the psychological terror of Visitors (2003). The year 2003 witnessed the surprise success of the zombie comedy Undead, which earned a rare, albeit limited, theatrical release in America.
Even bigger was 2005’s torture-fest Wolf Creek, which became the highest-grossing Australian horror movie of all time and made over $16 million at the US box office. Wolf Creek director Greg McLean’s next feature, Rogue, was one of two Aussie killer crocodile films — along with Black Water — made in 2007. The Spierig Brothers, meanwhile, followed up Undead with 2008’s apocalyptic vampire flick Daybreakers, and Australian director Jamie Blanks returned to his homeland after helming American slashers Urban Legend and Valentine for 2007’s Storm Warning. As bigger budgets and bigger profits begin to mount for Australian horror, there’s even a planned trip back to the modest early days, with Blanks directing a remake of Long Weekend, scheduled for release in 2008.
New Zealand horror has likewise flourished (relatively speaking) since 2000, with films like The Locals (2003), The Ferryman (2007) and The Tattooist (2008) making a showing on video in America, and the Peter Jackson-inspired horror-comedy Black Sheep even receiving a limited release stateside in 2007.
( Source Taken from http://horror.about.com/od/foreignhorrormovies/a/france.htm )
France’s tradition of filmmaking is as long and as rich as any country’s. Although it’s more renowned for its high dramas, its edgy experimentalism and its art house sensibilities, French cinema also has an eclectic history within the horror genre. Pioneers
Even before its had a viable movie industry, France displayed an obsession with macabre visual arts through the popularity of the Grand Guignol Theater in Paris, a forum dedicated to horrific plays that climaxed in gruesome violence. It didn’t take long, then, for the country to adapt its dark curiosity to the fledgling cinema.
Georges Méliès, famed for creating the first science fiction film with 1902’s A Trip to the Moon, had, some six years earlier, directed what is believed to be the first horror movie, a three-minute short entitled The House of the Devil. A simple film with little plot, its imagery of bats, witches, ghosts, skeletons, cauldrons and Satan himself established an early template for supernatural cinema. Méliès followed that up with a dozen horror-themed shorts over the next decade (amidst the 500-plus films he shot), with titles such as The Devil’s Laboratory, The Infernal Boiling Pot, The Cave of the Demons and Summoning the Spirits. Méliès’ films were extravaganzas of magic tricks and special effects, creating the sort of visual awe and grotesque displays that would characterize later horror cinema.
Pioneering filmmaker Abel Gance likewise directed early supernatural shorts, such as The Mask of Horror (1912) and Help! (1924), but made a more indelible mark with his feature films. In 1919, he directed I Accuse, a frank anti-war response to France’s involvement in World War I that culminated in the corpses of dead soldiers rising from their graves to declare their opposition to war. Gance would later remake the film in 1938 on the verge of World War II.
In 1929, surrealist Luis Buñuel directed one of the most famous examples of French avant-garde cinema, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), which featured horrific imagery aimed at shocking the viewer — including the famed shot of a woman’s eye being slit with a razor. Old Standards
Despite the groundbreaking early work of French filmmakers, many French horror movies made between the late ’20s and the early ’60s recycled old classic works. For instance:
In 1928, Jean Epstein brought Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” to the screen.
Maurice Tourneur’s La Main du Diable (Carnival of Sinners) (1943) is a retelling of the age-old Faust legend, with a man selling his soul to the Devil in exchange for wealth and success.
Beauty and the Beast (1946) was one of the most important films of this era, horror or otherwise, for its breathtaking visuals, set design and cinematography.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956), starring Anthony Quinn as Quasimodo, was a natural choice to film in the actual Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Acclaimed director Jean Renoir made his only venture into horror in 1959 with a version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, entitled The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment.
The Hands of Orloc (1960) revisited a lesser-known tale of a hand transplant gone awry, which had been filmed twice previously, first in Germany and then in the US.
Innovation
With 1955’s Diabolique, however, French suspense-horror began to show the sort of cutting-edge artistry that characterized the country’s other film genres. On par with Hitchcock’s best, the tale of murder and revenge was a sensation around the world, eventually spawning an American remake four decades later.
Later, in 1960, director Georges Franju delivered Eyes Without a Face, often considered the best French horror film of all time. Both horrific and eerily beautiful, Franju’s work is a modern Frankenstein tale of sorts, with a mad doctor frantically trying to find a suitable donor for his disfigured daughter’s face transplant.
Less artistic but equally innovative was Jean Rollin, who’s often credited with directing the first French vampire movie, 1967’s The Rape of the Vampire. The film established a formula that would become Rollin’s trademark: gothic, artsy, erotic horror that often revolves around female vampires. Substance plays second fiddle to style in his work, which stirred up controversy due to its extreme sexuality commingled with graphic violence. Rollin would later establish levels of gore previously unknown in French horror with the zombie flick The Grapes of Death (1978).
More restrained is Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976), a psychological mystery about a man (played by Polanski himself) descending into madness after moving into an eerie apartment building. It mines horror within the realities of urban life and interpersonal relations and is uncompromising in its dark, ambiguous conclusion. Modern Horror
This new wave of progressive horror bore little fruit in the ’80s, however, when horror cinema around the world came to be dominated by low-brow slashers and zombie flicks. It wasn’t until the turn of the 21st century that French horror began to generate enough quality content on a consistent level to make a name for itself.
Modern French horror and suspense is among the most edgy of any nation’s cinematic efforts. The films thrive on unsettling the audience, whether on a psychological level — as in With a Friend Like Harry… (2000) or Caché (2005) — or on a visceral, violent level, as with High Tension (2003), Sheitan (2006) or Inside (2007). Like all envelope-pushing art, they sometimes spur controversy — see Trouble Every Day’s notorious blend of sex and cannibalism or the Frontier(s) violence so extreme that it was threatened with an NC-17 rating — but at the same time, French horror continues to prove its innovation.
The haunted orphanage tale Saint Ange (2004), for instance, predated the similarly-themed Spanish hit The Orphanage by three years, and They Came Back (2004) put a dramatic, realistic spin on zombie lore. Meanwhile, movies like Brotherhood of the Wolf, Requiem and Blood Mallory mix horror with action, comedy and other genres to craft an undefinable style. Notable French Horror Movies:
To what extent has the plots of J-Horror influenced other horror films within World Cinema?
Examples of Japanese Horror films being: The Ring, Infection, Dark Water, The Grudge
I will use these examples from Japanese horror films and compare/contrast them with other horror films from around the world, sampling both Western & World Cinema & seeing how it has been influenced by J-Horror.
Looking at other areas such as: French, German, Korean, Other.
Whilst also touching on Western films such as : the hollywood remake of The Ring & early British HAMMER films such as Dracula (terrance Fisher).
New Media’s impact on contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema.
‘Japanese horror movies tend to have a distinct style — a deliberate pace, with quiet terror, often featuring morality tales and tales of vengeance either based on traditional Japanese stories or rooted in general Japanese cultural mythology (particularly when it comes to ghosts). That said, there is a significant undercurrent of graphic exploitation in Japanese genre films as well, showcasing shocking violence and sexual depravity.’ (http://horror.about.com/od/foreignhorrormovies/a/japan.htm)
A lot of the ‘original’ & now ‘modern’ J-horror films tend to be based around ‘ghost stories’ with spiritual/possessed beings, most resembling traditional Japanese spirits called “yûrei” which are pale, stringy haired female ghosts which usually crawl, walking stiff.
This has had an influence on US cinema in recent years, with remakes of these types of J-Horror being remade, such as the Ring and The Grudge being popular.
Some important/influential Japanese Horror films;
Ugetsu (1953)
Godzilla (1954)
The Ghosts of Kasane Swamp (1957)
Jigoku (1960)
Attack of the Mushroom People (1963)
Kwaidan (1964)
Onibaba (1964)
Gamera (1965)
Black Cat (1968)
Blind Beast (1969)
Horrors of Malformed Men (1969)
Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion (1972)
Guinea Pig (1985)
Entrails of a Virgin (1986)
Evil Dead Trap (1988)
Hiruko the Goblin (1991)
All Night Long (1992)
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1992)
Cure (1997)
Ring (1998)
Audition (1999)
Tomie (1999)
Wild Zero (1999)
Battle Royale (2000)
Uzumaki (2000)
Versus (2000)
Pulse (2001)
Dark Water (2002)
Suicide Club (2002)
Ju-On: The Grudge (2003)
One Missed Call (2003)
A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
Kibakichi (2004)
Marebito (2004)
Premonition (2004)
Infection (2005)
The Neighbor No. 13 (2005)
Infection – a japanese horror film based in a hospital. With a different type of stance from traditional japanese horror films.
Korean Horror (K-horror)
K-Horror contains many of the same motifs, themes & imagery as J-horror. However it does use local venues & cultural elements. Unlike many other horror films using gore and blood, K-horror tends to focus on suffering.
K-horror tends to take ideas from both Japanese & American cinema. With many of the more popular story lines being set around a young female character.
A few noticeable Korean-Horrors:
Whispering Corridors (1998) – mysterious spiritual killings happen within a school
Phone (2002) – Supernatural overtones start when a young female journalist starts to recieve threatening phone calls over one of her articles.
A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003) – Two sisters move into a new house, when strange things start to happen.
German Expressionism and Browning:
The other great silent horror masterpiece is undoubtedly F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), still the most sublime vampire film ever made. The appearance of Max Schreck as the vampire Graf Orlok – with his hideous pointy teeth and shrivelled skin – was enough to have audiences fleeing cinemas in horror, but if they fled too early then they missed a superbly crafted horror film. Murnau, regarded as one of the leading poets of The Silent Era, had a unique sense of composition, and every frame is a testament to the director’s skill (the sequence set aboard the ship still has great power). Even though the director rarely moves his camera, Nosferatu avoids the staginess of Tod Browning’s Dracula by having characters move within the frame (did Kurosawa see this film?) and a quirky choice of camera angles. Highly influential, Nosferatu paved the way for the highly stylised productions that flourished in Hollywood during the Thirties. Directors like James Whale and Tod Browning popularised the genre beyond anyone’s expectations; the floodgates were well and truly thrown open, and no would-be King Canutes in The Hays Office were going to stop the veritable deluge of horror that ensued.
Nosferatu
Foreign Bodies
Kwaidan (1964), a Japanese film directed by Masaki Kobayashi, made a huge impression at the Cannes film festival, and is a brilliantly pictorial horror compendium, with each separate story taking place in a different season. The colour composition is awe-inspiring and must surely have influenced the Vlad the Impaler section of Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Japanese filmmakers seemed to have a penchant for the horror genre, and apart from Kobayashi’s work, Western audiences were impressed by Onibaba, a supernatural tale about a woman and her daughter who kill wandering samurai and sell their armour; they kill a soldier wearing a feudal mask, which the mother then wears to frighten her daughter, and finds that she cannot remove it… (Stanley Kubrick must surely have taken notes for his last film.)
One of the finest psychological horror films in the wake of Psycho was released in 1965. Starring French actress Catherine Deneuve, and directed by Polish artist extraordinaire Roman Polanski, Repulsion traces the deterioration into madness of a young French girl living in London. With a bravura opening credits sequence, which brings us quite literally right into the eye of Deneuve, the film’s attention to detail is exact – the psyche of Deneuve’s repressed character is laid bare before us in a series of startling hallucinatory images. Walls melt and spew forth supernatural arms, a rabbit decomposes in the kitchen, and the unhinged girl kills two men. The final tracking shot, closing in on a family photograph, and picking out the girl as a sad-looking child, looks forward to that last confusing shot in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Polanski made three great horror films in the Sixties; Repulsion was followed by the fairytale world of Dance of the Vampires (also known as The Fearless Vampire Killers) in 1967, and the highly polished paranoia classic Rosemary’s Baby (1968). I’d urge everybody to see Dance of the Vampires: far more than a mere spoof, this chilling addition to vampire lore is one of the most beautiful, lyrical films ever to grace the screen, and Jack MacGowran is simply superb as the bumbling vampire hunter (is he the same actor who made us laugh in The Exorcist? – Good God!). Rosemary’s Baby was a huge box-office hit and is a magnificently crafted film, possibly the most faithful adaptation of a literary work ever made. Dispensing with any need to portray the devil-worshippers as caricatures, Polanski gives us a wholly plausible urban nightmare, and in its own way, cleared a path for the ultra-realism of The Horror Film in the Seventies.
