The New York Times-20080127-Screams in Asia Echo in Hollywood
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Screams in Asia Echo in Hollywood
Full Text (1568 words)EVERY remake has at least one ghost in it, the specter of its original, and ghosts, everybody knows, do not take kindly to being disturbed. The makers of horror movies should understand this better than most, yet they persist, like dedicated mediums, in trying to raise the spirits of the dead. And increasingly, the uneasy departed of places halfway around the world are turning up at Hollywood seances, rapping on the table, spelling out cryptic messages on the Ouija board and generally doing their damnedest to make us swoon with fright.
As of Friday, when David Moreau and Xavier Palud's film The Eye creeps into multiplexes around the country, this young movie year will already have seen two English-language remakes of Asian horror pictures: The Eye may even haunt some of the same darkened rooms recently vacated by 2008's previous Asian-horror revenant, One Missed Call.
There are many possible explanations for this development, only one of which is the traditional shamelessness of the horror genre. From the commercial point of view the strongest reason to remake pictures like The Eye, whose first incarnation was brought into the world in Hong Kong in 2002 by the Thai-born brothers Danny and Oxide Pang, and One Missed Call, a 2003 Japanese film directed by the prolific Takashi Miike, is that movies with similar bloodlines have done well in the not-too-distant past. The Ring, Gore Verbinski's big-budget reworking of the Japanese ghost story Ringu (1998), did some serious damage at the box office in 2002, and a couple of years later Takashi Shimizu's Grudge, an English-speaking remake of his own haunted-house shocker Ju-On, was a hit too.
The original Ringu, based on a novel by Koji Suzuki and directed by Hideo Nakata, was so popular in Asia that it spawned two sequels and a prequel within two years and, over the next decade, dozens of imitations: quiet, slow-paced, utterly solemn ghost stories in which young women (or schoolgirls) are repeatedly menaced by some malevolent supernatural entity, usually the spirit of a pale, longhaired woman who's extremely annoyed about having expired. This sort of picture became known generically as J-horror: J for Japanese, although other Asian countries, especially South Korea, churned out their fair share of Ringu-inspired spook shows as well.
In the '50s, the Stone Age of exploitation-movie history, shrewd Hollywood producers would simply have done what they did with the Japanese monster movies of that era: chop them up, hastily dub them into English and -- if the repackagers were feeling particularly frisky -- shoot a few minutes of new footage with a minor, familiar and presumably desperate American actor. Say what you will about remakes, they seem, all in all, a better option than Raymond Burr in Godzilla.
And horror is by its nature a good deal friendlier to cross-cultural transplantation than most movie genres, because fear is universal in a way that, say, a sense of humor is not: what we dread is far less socially determined than what we laugh at. (If you had to choose between remaking a French romantic farce or a Japanese ghost story, the latter would be much the safer bet, as movie history pretty conclusively demonstrates.) The vengeful specters of J-horror are, despite their often outre wardrobes and hairstyle preferences, instantly and unsettlingly recognizable to everyone, everywhere in the world. We all know a ghost when we see one.
But spirits are perverse. By reputation ghosts are homebodies, sticking close to the sites of their untimely demises; they don't travel well. When Mr. Shimizu remade his Ju-On as the Hollywood-produced Grudge in 2004, he cannily kept the action in Tokyo, where, despite the presence of the odd American, his ghosts could feel secure, in their element; but when he tried to transport them to Chicago, in the misbegotten Grudge 2, everything seemed out of whack, tentative, jangled, and even Mr. Shimizu's characteristic visual inventiveness couldn't save the picture from its babbling absurdity.
It may not be entirely fair to use the Grudge 2 debacle as a metaphor for the difficulty of relocating Asian ghosts in American contexts. With Mr. Shimizu, who has made several more-or-less identical versions of the Ju-on-Grudge tale in the past eight years, it might simply be a case of (to borrow an image from the Ring series) going to the well once too often. But in all the J-horror remakes, the good as well as the more numerous bad, there's always at least a faint sense of dislocation, like the jet-lagged twitchiness that comes over even experienced travelers when they settle into a clean, expensive and impersonal hotel room.
That stranger-in-a-strange-land feeling might be induced by, say, the production values of the American version of The Eye, which, in their relative luxuriousness, suggest a happier, more hopeful view of the world than the starker sets of the Pang brothers do; or by the casting of sunny-looking Jessica Alba as the heroine, played in the original by the beautiful but grim-faced Lee Sin-je. The role is essentially the same: A young blind woman has her vision restored by cornea transplants and begins to see, along with the ordinary sights of everyday life, disturbing, unaccountable visions of shadowy afterlives. Ms. Alba looks unpleasantly surprised; Ms. Lee looks shaken to her core (though somehow less surprised).
And that half-perceptible increase in optimism continues all the way to the movie's climactic sequence, a deadly incident in city traffic, which in the American version is suspenseful and horrifying, and in the Pangs' film is downright apocalyptic. The ghosts are ghostlier in the Hong Kong Eye, and there are more of them. (You may even be reminded of a line from The Waste Land: I had not thought that death had undone so many.)
Or you might get that vague sense of displacement from the snappy editing rhythms of Eric Valette's remake of One Missed Call, which takes nearly half an hour less to tell the story Mr. Miike told in the original. Or in Mr. Valette's exaggeratedly somber tone, which -- although it would suit a remake of almost any other J-horror film -- doesn't fit One Missed Call comfortably, because it suggests that the director is unaware of the deep inanity of the story, a Ring-like concoction in which the resentful villainess attacks her victims through their cellphones.
Mr. Miike, who says on the DVD that he's never much liked horror movies, gives the whole silly enterprise a teasing undertone of genre parody, which if it's present in the remake is pitched at a frequency inaudible to the normal human ear. It's clear as a bell (or the ringtone of your choice) in the original, though. When the director cranks up ominous music for a shot of a woman cutting her toenails, the suspicion that he's putting the audience on is kind of tough to avoid.
The Eye and One Missed Call aren't the worst of the J-horror remakes: that distinction would go to Jim Sonzero's witless Pulse (2006), which treats its source, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's great 2001 horror poem Kairo, as if it were a dirty limerick. The best, I'd say, is Walter Salles's Dark Water (2005), whose 2002 Japanese original was, like Ringu, adapted from a story by Koji Suzuki and directed by Mr. Nakata. It's much simpler than the elaborate Ring saga: just a straightforward haunted-house tale set in a decrepit apartment building, where a mother and her little daughter suffer the supernatural consequences of previous tenants' sins.
Mr. Salles, the Brazilian-born director who became known here with his 1998 Central Station and had an indie hit with The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), is perhaps a counterintuitive choice to shoot a horror movie, but in Dark Water he gets practically everything right, maybe because he's never developed any of the conventional genre reflexes, those self-protective impulses that tell a filmmaker he had better speed up the action or throw in a extra shock or use a wee bit more C.G.I. for the big climax.
Rhythm is often the most significant difference between Asian horror movies and their American versions: the good Far Eastern directors know that the most interesting part of any ghost story is the buildup, the dawning dread that gradually makes the world feel alien, uncanny. Mr. Salles has the nerve to keep the pace deliberate. And he resists too the temptation to tart up the production values: the Roosevelt Island apartment complex where the heroine and her daughter live is gray, soulless, Soviet-drab. It seems barely habitable for humans. But it's perfect for ghosts.
Most of the Asian-horror remakes fall, like The Eye and One Missed Call, somewhere in the vast territory that separates the grave, elegant spookiness of Dark Water and the brute stupidity of Pulse. But it looks as if we're going to have to learn to live with them, good or bad, because that's another thing everybody knows about ghosts: It's hard to make them go away.
[Illustration]PHOTOS: KaDee Strickland in The Grudge, first made in Japan. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TAKASHI SEIDA/COLUMBIA PICTURES) (pg. AR14); Ariel Gade, left, and Jennifer Connelly in Dark Water, a 2005 Hollywood remake of a Japanese supernatural thriller. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RAFY/TOUCHSTONE PICTURES) (pg. AR14); Alessandro Nivola and Jessica Alba in The Eye, the latest American adaptation of an Asian horror movie. Hollywood is finding in Asian horror a deep well of material to remake in English. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSEPH LEDERER/LIONSGATE) (pg. AR13)