How Japanese Horror Films Have Influenced Hollywood
Recently in Hollywood there has been a growing trend of taking successful Japanese horror films and remaking them for an American audience. Recent examples of this trend would be movies such as The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water. Many people wonder why Hollywood is suddenly taking an interest in Japanese horror films. Japanese horror films have repeatedly shown they are more innovative and are more scary and than recent Hollywood horror films such as House of Wax.
Since the beginning of Hollywood, audiences have loved horror films. Classic Universal horror movies such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf-Man were considered scary and frightening by the people of that time period. These old horror movies didn’t contain excessive violence or gore mostly because of how the strict the censorship boards were back then. So the directors had to use atmosphere to create an effective scary movie. Horror movies continued to do this through the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1960, two horror films changed and influenced the genre for years to come. These movies were Psycho and Peeping Tom. Psycho dealt with issues that moviegoers had not seen in movies before. Issues such as necrophelia and voyeurism shocked audiences and many were frightened by the infamous shower scene where Janet Leigh’s
character is stabbed to death in the shower.
Peeping Tom was about a young man who murdered women and used a movie camera to film them dying. People were shocked by the kind of behavior displayed by the killers in these two films. Psycho influenced a group of slasher horror films such as the Halloween and Friday the 13th films.
During the 1970s and 1980s, John Carpenter helped revolutionize the horror genre with films such as Halloween, The Thing and The Fog. The Friday the 13th and Nightmare On Elm Street films also became popular. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the horror genre suffered from repetitive and dull sequels and to movies such as Halloween and Friday the 13th. It seemed that there was no more originality in Hollywood anymore. Horror films began to focus more on violence and high body counts instead of what they should be focusing on which is plot and atmosphere.
Around the time that American horror films were suffering from lack of originality, horror films in Japan began to take off
and become very popular with audiences. Many Japanese horror films are known for their cleverness and restraint
which was much different compared to American horror films at the time which focused more on excessive nudity and high body counts.
Japanese horror films usually have surreal plot lines and use revenge as a common theme among them. They also typically have twisty plotlines and confuse audiences by not letting them know exactly what is going on. This exactly the kind of the movie that the Japanese people respond to. They loved horror movies that kept them guessing all the way up to the end.
Japanese horror films rely more on psychological horror which was a staple of earlier American horror films such as The Haunting, The Shining, and Poltergeist. These films are often cited by Japanese horror directors as their inspiration. Japanese horror films use folklore, ghost stories, and tales of honor and allegiance. Many of these movies
deal with the breakdown of reality, family, and the mind. These horror films deal with the unexplained.
The Japanese thriller Ringu inspired the hit American remake The Ring. The Ring became very successful in the US After The Ring hit big at the box office, studios looked to Japan for other horror movies they could remake. Ju-On was
the next Japanese horror film to remade. It was titled The Grudge and went on to become successful at the box office as well.
Recently, US horror films have begun to resemble action films more than horror films with hyper kinetic action scenes and MTV style editing. The storytelling in Japanese horror films usually goes slowly. They use silence and empty spaces to create a sensation of impending death and doom. You don’t know exactly what is going in these films and it is that feeling which creates terror. People are always scared the most by what they don’t know or understand. The movie Jaws used this exact formula. Nobody saw the shark for the first half of the movie and that helped make the film more suspenseful and scary.
With the popularity of movies such as The Ring, The Ring 2, and the Grudge it is a sure bet that producers will continue to look across the Pacific for more original and scary ideas. Japanese horror films work on a more dreamlike level than current American horror films do. They give the sense of not being in control which is a good feeling for a horror movie. Hopefully the Japanese style of horror will continue to influence Hollywood horror films for many years to come.
