J-horror Inquirer article

[Aaron Gerow]

Just one thought:

One of the dangers when talking about the issue of East vs. West in 
history of horror cinema is the terminology used. The fact is that 
"horror" is a term used for Euro-American cinema that only recently has 
been used in Japan. Before that, there were many other terms used, 
especially kaidan eiga, bakeneko eiga, etc. The danger is that to use 
the term "horror" to refer to films that were never discussed using 
that term always threatens to impose the assumptions of that term on 
films where it is inappropriate. The effect is thus to impose 
Euro-American genre definitions on a foreign tradition--and to in 
affect assume the West is the dominant tradition that Japan is only 
copying. Even if one tries to allow for differences within "horror," 
one is still imposing a rubric with many assumptions that threatens to 
obscure more than it reveals. One thing it obscures is the multiple 
terms used to refer to different forms of film in Japan--again, kaidan, 
bakeneko, kaiki eiga, etc.--terms that since they were separate, 
indicate these films may not have been grouped together--as we do now, 
perhaps artificially--under a single term like "horror."

I think we should all step back and rethink our use of the term 
"horror." I, for one, would be very averse to using the term "horror" 
to refer to 1930s Shinko Kinema bakeneko films, for instance. (When 
Kurosawa was here, I spoke of my doubts and he sympathized with my 
worries.) We have to ask ourselves questions like this: What other 
genre terms exist and what do they tell us about the films they refer 
to? How did those terms function industrially or historically 
(especially the relation to kabuki and rakugo in prewar films)? When 
does the term "horror" appear in Japanese? How is it used and why? What 
are we losing when we use the term? An even more basic question is 
still this: Is the notion of "genre" itself equally applicable to 
Japanese cinema as it is to American cinema (i.e., is the phenomenon 
itself the same, given the Japanese studios' emphasis on studio styles, 
on series, on the director, etc., instead of genres across studios)?

These are all questions we need to ask when using the term "horror" 
with regard to Japanese cinema.

Aaron Gerow
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film Studies Program
Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
53 Wall Street, Room 316
PO Box 208363
New Haven, CT 06520-8363
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6764
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu