Monster Scholar

It’s the classic love story. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy and girl get married and punch out 2.5 kids. With Japanese horror, nothing is ever that simple. In Tomie (1999), boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy falls into a homicidal rage and kills girl as well as other men who have fallen under her spell. Boy hacks girl to pieces and disposes of the body. Girl regenerates from a single body part and looks for new victims to carry out the same grisly pattern. This is the premise of Tomie, the story of a school girl/demon who returns from the dead to inspire others to murder her in the most violent ways possible. Talk about a masochistic complex. The idea is fascinating and a little more than disturbing, a serial victim instead of your garden variety serial killer. Score one for director Ataru Oikawa. The opening scene is a subtle punch to the gut. A mousy looking boy dressed in a baseball cap trolls the crowded streets of a city like Tokyo. Sudden...

I find recently that I’ve been on a informal quest to find a decent ghost movie that scares me. I like gore just as much as the next guy, but there is just something about the subtlety and atmosphere of ghost movies that goes a long way for my sense of terror. So I’ve been searching the internet, haunting my library and scouring Blockbuster looking for the perfect thrill. What I’ve found has been less than thrilling. Take for example the Haunting in Connecticut. The film had everything it needed for a great ghost tale—creepy house, restless undead and an extra creepy embalming/necromancy room in the basement. But instead of coming across as atmospheric and terrifying, the film’s fractured narrative doesn’t give the scares the support they need. Paranormal Activity came real close to satisfying my ghostly craving, but even it had its flaws. Predicable plot, inane dialogue and the Blair Witch style camera work were only made tolerable by the jump-out-at-you scares, which were few an...

When you think of the phrase “dead wet girl” (to borrow a term from David Kalat the author of J-Horror: The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge and Beyond ) the image that might come to mind is the ending of the 2002 blockbuster, The Ring. In one of the scariest moments in horror to date, the audience watches transfixed as the dripping ghost of Samara crawls out of the TV screen and to take the life of her terrified victim. But what is it with Dead Wet Girls in Japanese horror and their remakes? Why are they dead? Why are they wet? Why are they girls? And what is up with all that long black hair? To get a deeper understanding of Dead Wet Girls and their terrifying power in horror, let’s break down the moniker, Dead. Wet. Girl. Dead. Of course death is a prerequisite to becoming a ghost, but Dead Wet Girls move beyond the standard understanding of ghosts in Western culture. In the western world, spooks are recognizable as other from living people and there is a sharp demarcatio...

Every woman knows the magic of a perfect pair of shoes. Slip them on and you transform from the average housewife or soccer mom into a slinky sex goddess, powerful and confident in your six inch stilettos. A woman will do anything for a premier pair of pumps. Cinderella’s stepsisters were willing to hack off heel and toe to make those glass slippers fit and Dorothy went head to head with the Wicked Witch of the West for her sparkly ruby footwear. The unbreakable bond between a woman and her shoes is at the heart of the Korean horror film, The Red Shoes. Viewers might be confused by the title of the film because the cursed shoes that appear in the film are actually pink. This color change (as far as I can remember) was the result of a copyright dispute involving another pair of prominent red slippers in cinema. Ahem. A woman named Sun-jae finds herself on the business end of horrible curse when she picks up a pair of seemingly abandoned shoes on the subway. But these shoes aren’t y...

I am totally digging these posters for various Asian horror films. You'll notice the repeat appearance of girls in flowing white night gowns and long black hair, a staple of the genre. Before you ask, I have no idea what films these posters correspond to, but if you do, give me a heads up so I can check them out. If the posters are any indication, they should be great fun.                        

In most horror films, the source of fear is usually something external seeking to harm and or kill the protagonists we identify with at the center of the action. Think about the chestburster from Aliens, Michael’s homicidal rampage or any zombie movie you’ve ever seen and you get the idea. But the dynamic at work in these horror films is not the same software running beneath Kurosawa’s bleak thriller, Pulse. Instead of the fear of being attacked or annihilated, the fear that drives Pulse is the simple terror of being alone. The film opens on Michi Kudo, a young woman who works for a plant sales company with her friends Sasano Junko, Toshio Yabe and Taguchi. Michi goes to check on Taguchi at home as he works on a disk of compiled sales data. When Michi arrives all seems well but in the middle of their conversation, Taguchi retreats to a side room and hangs himself abruptly. Junko, Yabe and Michi are baffled by their friend’s sudden suicide and turn to the disk for answers. What they fi...

I’m on a serious J- Horror trip, so for this month’s monsters I’ve chosen Kayako and Toshio from the Ju-On films and the Grudge series of American remakes. This mother and son team of spirits haunts the house where they were murdered and cause the disappearance or death of anyone who enters the abode. Though the particulars of Kayako and Toshio’s deaths change from film to film, the foundation of their narrative is essentially the same. Kayako falls in love with another man and writes about her romantic obsession with him in her diary. Upon discovering this diary, her husband Takeo flies into a fury. He murders his wife, stowing her body away in the attic and drowns his son Toshio along with the child’s cat, Mar. Takeo dies after committing these horrible acts and his death is often ruled a suicide. As far as the curse goes, from then on anyone entering their house is doomed to fall victim to the powerful grudge born of Kayako and Toshio’s vengeful rage. Kayako is easily distinguishe...

Chan-wook Park’s Cut opens up on a vampiress with long black hair and flowing robes sucking on the neck of her unfortunate victim, who is frozen in place. Finishing her meal, she answers her cell phone and is suddenly ill. With a flourish, she throws up her dinner in a splash of red while the camera retreats behind the crew to focus on the director as he watches the events with his production team on a remote monitor. This tricky camera movie reveals that the vampire film is just the first layer of a short film concerned with celluloid illusion and gut wrenching reality. After seeing Chan Wook-Park’s latest film Thirst , I was primed for a vampire tale, but got something much better instead. The opening scene is merely a distraction and the real horror comes after the director yells “cut!” Byung-hun Lee, of recent GI Joe fame plays a premier director who is kidnapped along with his wife by a psychotic extra. Said extra has snapped with the realization that his director idol has it all...

Ask any horror fan and they’ll tell you that the only sub-genre making quality horror nowadays is J-Horror which includes filmmakers from China, Korea and East Asia. Three Extremes showcases this broad spectrum of talent in the three short films of Dumplings by Fruit Chan, Cut by Park Chan-Wook and Box by Takashi Miike. Fruit Chan’s Dumplings is delectable short film sure to peak the taste buds. An elite housewife and former actress, Mrs. Lee seeks out Aunt Mei, a woman reported to make the best dumplings in town. What makes her dumplings so special is their ability to preserve a woman’s youth. Aunt Mei calls herself “[her] own best advertisement” as she is sixty four years old, but doesn’t look a day over thirty five. Mrs. Lee is in the market for such a product in the hopes that it will revive her failing marriage. It might seem easy enough, but the secret ingredients that give the dumplings their power are the aborted fetuses of human children. In this sense the film reverses th...