The J-Horror Wave and What the American Remakes Lost

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 13:00:00 +0000

For a few years around the turn of the millennium, the most frightening films in the world were coming out of Japan, and they were frightening in a way Western horror had almost forgotten. There were no killers to outrun, no rules to exploit, no third-act confrontation where the monster could be burned or shot or reasoned with. There were long, still shots of empty rooms. There were figures who moved wrong, or did not move at all. There was a ghost you could not fight, only postpone, and a dread that arrived with a slow, patient certainty that the thing in the frame had all the time in the world. Hollywood noticed, bought the lot, and remade nearly every one, and in doing so it demonstrated, film by film, precisely what it did not understand.

Ringu: The Well, the Tape, and the Slowest Dread in Horror

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Watch a lot of horror and you develop a tolerance to speed — to the cut, the sting, the sudden face in the mirror. What breaks the tolerance is patience, and Ringu is the most patient horror film that ever became a global phenomenon. Hideo Nakata’s 1998 picture moves at the pace of an investigation, quiet and procedural, a journalist chasing a rumour about a videotape that kills its viewers seven days after they watch it. For most of its length nothing leaps at you. The dread accumulates like cold water rising in a well, and by the time it reaches your throat you have forgotten you were ever safe.

Ringu - vo.rs

The J-Horror Wave and What the American Remakes Lost

Ringu: The Well, the Tape, and the Slowest Dread in Horror