J-horror Inquirer article

[Ian Conrich]

> Continuing the J-Horror discussion from my previous email I want to begin by
> saying that I agree with Jim that the issue of cultural influences cannot be
> simplified. I contributed an article, ŒMetal-Morphosis: Post Industrial Crisis
> and the Tormented Body in the Tetsuo Films' to ŒJapanese Horror Cinema¹, (ed.)
> Jay McRoy, (Edinburgh University Press/ University of Hawai¹i Press, 2004) and
> I quote from Tsukomoto in interview -
> 
³like other kids of my generation, I grew up with Toho monsters. They were a
big part of my childhood reality²
³Later my interests broadened to take in everything from Italian futurism to
"Metropolis", from Helmut Newton's photos to the cyberpunk sensibility, and
all that fed into my Tetsuo movies².

I would like to respond to Jasper¹s email by saying that the origins of
horror are too often tied into Gothic literature, when the art works of
painters such as Rosa, Fuseli, Blake, Mortimer, Dixon, Goya and later Redon
had an immense visual impact. And in considering the history or heritage of
projected images of horror, the phantasmagorias of the late 18th century, a
period in which the Gothic arts developed, must be a central part of such
discussions.

Also I would like to disagree with the emails sent talking about 1930s
Universal horror films as these very much neglect the importance of the
studio¹s productions in the 1920s, and continue the myth that Universal¹s
style was a result of emigres from Germany and Europe. As I write in my
article 'Before Sound: Universal, Silent Cinema, and the Last of the
Horror-Spectaculars', in 'The Horror Film' (Ed.) Stephen Prince, (Rutgers
University Press, 1994)

³The Horror film was a genre that developed with the early period of sound
production, and the studio most associated with such movies was Universal.
But, this studio which produced films such as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein
(1931), The Mummy (1932), The Black Cat (1934), and The Raven (1935), had
also made some of the most impressive American horror movies of the 1920s --
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and The
Man Who Laughs (1928). The vast scale of these productions, which I will
term horror-spectaculars, sets them aside from Universal's other silent
horrors -- The Cat and the Canary (1927), The Chinese Parrot (1927), The
Last Performance (1929), and (the part-talkie) The Last Warning (1929) --
yet the shared style, sets, influences, filmmakers and performers also makes
them in certain ways inseparable. Before sound, Universal had been a major
producer of films, but its financial difficulties both in the late 1920s and
the early 1930s led to its diminution. Its survival during the cinema of the
1930s, where it functioned as a studio weakened and in receivership, is
notably the period that has gained most attention².
³It would be wrong to view horror film production before the introduction of
sound as a developed genre; similarly, it is unwise to see such films of
this period as unattached to the movies which followed in the 1930s. Film
cycles are often easily isolated into decades, or neat social periods, which
can rupture any consideration of production continuity or association. The
Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, are not essentially
forgotten horrors, but they are disadvantaged by discussions of Universal's
productions which tend to circumscribe the genre².
³It is not the case that European filmmakers suddenly converged on Universal
in the early 1930s whereupon it made horror films; Universal had by then a
degree of horror heritage spanning almost a decade. And the studio's horror
production of the 1930s is not simply explained by the idea that an achieved
visual style, which lent itself to the genre, enabled an economic silent to
sound transition. A more precise understanding would cross the divide
created by the 1928-1930 industry changes and recognize the existence of
horror production in the silent film period. In particular, Universal's
releases in the late 1920s have to be seen as part of the history of the
production of horror movies with synchronized sound. For many of the
filmmakers who had been refining their craft working on such silent films,
later worked on sound productions.
            Charles D. Hall was the art director on the Universal horrors
Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Black Cat, and The Bride
of Frankenstein (1935); Jack P. Pierce, another respected technician,
devised the make-up effects for such Universal horrors as Frankenstein, The
Mummy, The Werewolf of London (1935), and The Tower of London (1939); whilst
Lew Landers (Louis Friedlander) directed The Raven. These Americans had
worked on the earlier horror The Man Who Laughs, which has been described as
"the most relentlessly Germanic film to come out of Hollywood". For this
production, Hall, who had previously worked on the set design for The
Phantom of the Opera (from illustrations by the French stage designer Ben
Carré), and The Cat and the Canary, was art director, Landers was an
assistant director, and Pierce, who had been the head of Universal's make-up
department since 1926, was responsible for creating the central character's
facial mutilation, the hideous permanent grin... The Man Who Laughs could be
viewed as "the most relentlessly Germanic film to come out of Hollywood",
though care must be taken before attributing this to just filmmakers who had
worked in Germany. Leni was a filmmaker of distinction, who had a particular
concern for visual detail developed during his period as a set designer on
German films; he was also working with a crew capable of technical
excellence and for his American films set design was the responsibility of
the Universal art department².
And in my conclusion ³Universal's trilogy of horror-spectaculars -- The
Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Man Who Laughs
-- were major productions that were part of its planned prestige pictures,
and its aim to gain a slice of the exhibition market. The Man Who Laughs is
remarkable not just as an example of a horror-spectacular, but as the
culmination of Universal's production of the silent epic. It is a film which
began pre-production at a time when the emphatic arrival of the talkie could
not have been imagined, and was completed at the point where silent cinema,
a then highly evolved style of production, gave way to the revolution in
sound. It stands at a crucial point in Universal's studio history. As a
horror-spectacular in the twilight of Universal's production of silent
movies, it was a film that the studio was never to repeat. With the
financial constraints that followed, it marks the demise of what Universal
termed a "Super-production" or "Super photodramatization", but it also
provides a valuable case study of a precursor to the 1930s monster movies.
    The Man Who Laughs is of importance for the continuity of personnel --
such as Charles D. Hall and Jack P. Pierce -- who worked on the production's
design and were to perpetuate their craft as technicians central to the
development of the horror film in the 1930s. With the coming of sound,
Universal drew on the ability of its technicians to construct a Gothic
style, and continued with the production of a cinema of the macabre, albeit
on a tighter budget. And if key figures of the silent horror film -- such as
Paul Leni, Conrad Veidt and Lon Chaney had not been lost -- the relationship
between the two periods would have been stronger with Universal stars such
as Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff not so exclusively associated with an
apparent new genre².

Apologies for quoting from my own work, but it seems the quickest thing to
do.
Ian


Ian Conrich
Roehampton University


> 
> Japanese horror since the mid-eighties has certainly been increasingly
> influenced by Western horror, but that covers a multitude of cultural
> backgrounds with no single identity. But in the best cases this isn't simply a
> grafting of foreign ideas onto domestic ones, it's considerably more complex
> than that. You end up with a product that deserves consideration as something
> new, rather than just playing spot-the-influence.
>   
>  
>   
> As for the first American horror boom, the Universal years, look at the
> central figures: actors like Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lionel Atwill, George
> Zucco, Claude Rains, Basil Rathbone, directors like Tod Browning, Roy Neill,
> and James Whale, scriptwriter Curt Siodmak and his director brother Robert
> Siodmak, even Universal head man Carl Laemle Sr- all the big names, and every
> one of them European. Only Lon Chaney and the Carradines were American, so
> even the first great boom was heavily dependant upon European  talent.
>   
>  
>   
> Jim.
>   
> 
> "J.sharp" <j.sharp at hpo.net> wrote:
>   
>> I think it is a mistake to analyse this in terms of a basic dichotomy
>> between East and West as represented by the two extremes of Japan and
>> Hollywood. Horror as a global cinematic genre has over its history received
>> inspiration from all sorts of diverse sources, and had a long and
>> interesting history long before Hollywood belatedly discovered how
>> profitable it could be with its coffee-table horros like Rosemary's Baby and
>> The Omen.
>> 
>> 
>> Firstly, horror is most certainly not an exclusively all-American genre. In
>> its most simple model, its literary origins, the writings of Stoker,
>> Shelley, Conan Doyle, Le Fanu et al are British or Irish (with the exception
>> of Poe). Its cinematic origins, the expressive use of light and  shadow and
>> camera movement was brought by the Germans in films like Caligari, Faust and
>> Nosferatu. These elements were first combined and applied in a commercial
>> formula in the Universal films from the 1931 adaptations of Dracula,
>> Frankenstein and the Invisible Man onwards. But the first American horror
>> boom from Universal was pretty short, barely lasting into the 40s where it
>> came to an ignoble end with all those ridiculous House of Frankenstein type
>> mad monster conventions, where they'd throw in Dracula, the mummy, the
>> wolfman, Frankenstein and the rest of them into one 70-minute film. For the
>> 50s, Hollywood was more concerned with paranoid "reds under the bed"
>> fantasies, with the Russians represented by flying saucers or giant
>> radioactive insects crawling around Arizona. Horror was effectively replaced
>> by science fiction in America after the war.
>> 
>> But this I think makes the synchronous arrival of the groundbreaking  genre
>> films of Terence Fisher at Hammer studios and Nobuo Nakagawa at Shintoho
>> all the more interesting.
>> Why did two countries at opposite sides of the world begin work in a genre
>> they had never really touched before (ok, there were British horrors in the
>> 30s, but it was never a hugely successful market) but which was to become so
>> lucrative to their industries (albeit at different points in history). Part
>> of the answer is probably due to a relaxation in censorship after the war -
>> weren't horror films banned in the UK during the war?
>> 
>> One thing that I have always been unclear on is the question of where Nobuo
>> Nakagawa's increasingly bloody Kaidan films like Ghost of Yotsuya were in
>> anyway influenced by Hammers films, or in other words, were Hammer films
>> ever released in Japan during the late 50s. I don't think they could have
>> been, because most of these works were being made at exactly the same time.
>> Its just a  coincidence.
>> 
>> Anyway, during the 60s horror was pretty much dominated by the Europeans -
>> mainly the Italians, Germans and British. America had a few notable
>> additions later on in the decade, namely Rosemary's Baby and Night of the
>> Living Dead, but for the most part its contributions were either forgotton
>> z-grade exploitation films for the drive-in market or in the case of Roger
>> Corman's Poe adaptations, emulations of European films.
>> 
>> The Japanese horror film in the 60s boasts one interesting sounding title I
>> have never seen, entitled Ghost of the Hunchback / Kaidan Semushi Otoko
>> (1965), directed by Hajime Sato for Toei . The Aurum Encyclopedia of Horror
>> describes this as belonging to a gothic tradition then very prevalent in
>> Italy "with lighting and costumes and modelled on the gothic films of Mario
>> Bava and Antonio Margeriti". Could this really be true? Were Bava's films
>> released in Japan in the early 60s?
>> 
>> So in other  words, rather than looking at J-horror vis-a-vis American horror
>> traditions, its necessary to look at the whole picture and ask questions
>> like why did Italy start making horror films the same time as Britain and
>> Japan. Did these countries continue making horrorf films perhaps because
>> they were easy to sell to the American market? Which American, British,
>> Italian German or whatever horror films were actually screened in Japan
>> around the same time they were released?
>> 
>> Regarding the second point, Nakata has never denied his influence from
>> Hollywood films, both in Videodrone, The Haunting, Poltergeist for the first
>> Ring, and Exorcist 2 in the second - he always in interviews cites these as
>> explicit influences. As the genre's strongest proponent in Japan, Kiyoshi
>> Kurosawa has very eclectic viewing habits for example, and I know that he is
>> as big a fan of Italian gothic films by the likes of Mario Bava as he is of
>> the work of Jean-Luc  Godard, and he certainly watches a lot of American
>> horror too.
>> 
>> 
>> This is just my view of the complex picture to counter all these articles
>> about J-horror and threads I keep seeing on film websites to the effect of
>> "Japan is a new source of inspiration for Hollywood but thats ok because
>> they have been stealing ideas from Hollywood for decades".
>> 
>> Any thoughts on this, anyone?
>> 
>> Jasper
>> 
> 
> 
> http://www.flipsidemovies.com
> http://jimharper.blogspot.com
> 
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