Asian Horror: The Remakes
It started with an exchange of Rings in 2002. Two years later, the Grudges began.Now, with the Shutters about to go up, it's clear that Hollywood's passion for remaking Asian horror movies is as feverish as ever.
Riding on a wave of techno-fear and murderous, raven-haired, mad-eyed
banshees, the Americanisation of the 'J-horror' genre has been unrelenting since director Gore Verbinski opened the floodgates in 2002 with his adaptation of Japanese mega-hit Ringu (aka The Ring).
Directed by Hideo Nakata, Ringu ripped up both box office records and the audiences' nerves with a creepy urban myth involving a cursed videotape and a heart-stopping climax from which it was impossible to hide - even behind the sofa.
After expanding on the legend of crazy well-dweller Samara with Ringu 2, Nakata warmed to his palm-dampening theme with Dark Water, another ghost story from novelist Koji Suzuki ("the Japanese Stephen King"), this one set in a leaky apartment block.
The Ring was the first of the US remakes and remains the most successful, both commercially and artistically (though what's with all that stuff about mad horses?).
But Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean commitments presented Nakata with a golden opportunity to remake his own sequel. Unfortunately, even with Naomi Watts returning as the distressed heroine, The Ring Two failed to strike the same chilling chord.
Walter Salles' 2005 take on Dark Water was also disappointingly tepid, despite the presence of recent Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly.
With the Suzuki catalogue exhausted, perhaps Takashi Shimizu would have better luck converting his Ju-On (The Grudge) franchise for western audiences?
A contemporary haunted house saga with another female phantom menace, the Japanese chapters ticked all the hair-raising boxes.
Sadly, the dead weight of Sarah Michelle Gellar flattened Shimizu's otherwise decent remake of The Grudge.
Her character's near-catatonic return in The Grudge 2 was much more convincing; this time, the acting dishonours went to spluttering star Amber Tamblyn.
Questionable casting also cast a pall over the recent rehash of Korean fright-flick The Eye.
The mere mention of Jessica Alba conjures thoughts of swimsuits and superhero spandex - images which are difficult to banish even when she's playing a vulnerable violinist with someone else's peepers.
Could the problem be that blondes are simply not scary? After all, the Asian horror template generally requires that villains be female, dead and endowed with enough black tresses to block every plughole on the planet.
Yet no matter how many times these lunatic clones of Yoko Ono appear, they never fail to give you the willies.
Take Shutter, a what's-that-lurking-in-my-photographs yarn from Thailand. It's formulaic stuff, but you should see the sort of places the tormented she-spirit pops up.
The remake stars blonde Transformers head-turner Rachael Taylor. It will come as a shock to absolutely no one that she fails to add to the goosebumps.
But then the pigmentist argument doesn't hold when you consider that the unequivocally brunette Shannon Sossamon starred in this year's One Missed Call, a feeble stab at Takeshi Miike's Chakushin Ari, wherein people leave voicemails for themselves, telling them that they're about to die.
They also made a mess of the equally technophobic Pulse, in which an online apocalypse unleashes countless demons on humanity. Most viewers were left wishing the end of the world had come a little sooner.
It's not just that the scares are lost in translation. Regardless of whether the original was made in a foreign tongue or not, try naming any recent horror remake that improved on its source material. It's a struggle.
The problem is that it's almost impossible to scare people with the same thing twice. But what do you do when the element of surprise is gone?
The simple answer would be to avoid remakes and come up with new ideas. But with a continent's worth of otherworldly output to steal from, that's unlikely to happen.
Nakata and Shimizu are already working on their next Ring and Grudge instalments, and Universal have bought the rights to salamander-squashes-Seoul creature feature The Host.
Meanwhile, Ms Gellar marks her third foray into remake territory with Possession - a reimaging of spooky Korean thriller Addicted.
Sayonara Buffy; hello J-Ho!
Elliott Noble
