Japan is a scary place. It has inspired masters of horror over three centuries, from Akinari Ueda in the 1700s (¡°Ugetsu Monogatari¡°) to Lafcadio Hearn (¡°Kwaidan¡°) in the late 1800s, all the way to the 1990s, when Kiyoshi Kurosawa¡¯s ¡°Cure¡± and Hideo Nakata¡¯s ¡°Ringu¡± were released, spawning a new homgreown genre that came to be known as ¡°J-horror.¡±
An Oct. 28 event at this year¡¯s Tokyo International Film Festival called ¡°Masters of J-Horror¡± will show four landmark films from the genre at Piccadilly Theater in Shinjuku, including Nakata¡¯s latest release, ¡°Gekijo-rei¡± (¡°Ghost Theater¡°), and one of his earliest films, ¡°Joyu-rei¡± (¡°Don¡¯t Look Up¡°), which was released in 1996. Both stories are about actresses struggling against evil forces, invoked by long-festering grudges (¡°Don¡¯t Look Up¡°) or a sinister doll come to life (¡°Ghost Theater¡°). Nakata fans will be gratified to see that ¡°Don¡¯t Look Up¡± features the director¡¯s signature touches ¡ª long black hair covering the face of a young girl, a white dress that symbolizes innocence, weird sounds in the middle of the night, etc. ¡ª that later appeared in ¡°Ringu,¡± the film that launched Nakata to international stardom.
The 20-year gap between ¡°Don¡¯t Look Up¡± and ¡°Ghost Theater¡± shows, in many ways, that Nakata is a director who values his roots. Certainly he has remained a master at drawing out the underlying fears of a young woman, and deploying her terror to full effect.
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