Monster Scholar

To be honest, I have never really been able to grasp the complexity or perhaps the simplicity at the heart of Takashi Miike’s films. I first saw Audition at a conference screening and I left the room with feeling of unease and confusion. This same feeling returns to me when I watch Takashi Miike’s Box . Box is by far one of the quietist horror films I’ve ever watched. The silence is so profound that for a moment I thought my surround sound was on the fritz. As a watcher of American horror films I am used to being bombarded visually and aurally, whether it’s with a splash of bright red gore or the sickening sound of a knife as it slices through flesh and scrapes the bone. There is none of that here. Miike’s film is placid, almost serene, an environment which makes the events unfolding that much more horrifying. In Box , Miike tells the story of Kyoko, a young writer who experienced a horrible tragedy in her childhood and has recurring dreams of being buried alive in a box. With the...

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...