I haven't blogged much recently about Asian horror, one of my many interests, because I haven't had much to blog about. I have seen most of the good Japanese, Korean, and Chinese movies that have been pushing their way into American remakes. It looks as if that well may have run dry.
I just watched a low-end sample of the genre: Shikoku (1999). It was very badly written; but it is almost redeemed by the performance of Yui Natsukawa, who is so damn good an actor that she can carry any weight. She is also dreadfully beautiful, a kind of Japanese Cathrine Zeta-Jones.
The film did have some features that are worthy of thought. One of them was the magic by which a woman manages to resurrect her drowned daughter. Pilgrimages are common in Eastern religion as they are in Western Biblical traditions. It's a great way to generate tourism, and it feeds into two archetypal ideas: that travel may redeem the traveler, and that certain actions (prayer, bowing) repeated enough times can change reality. In this film, there is a tradition of making a pilgrimage around an Island, stopping at 80 or so temples. At each stop, one's spiritual passport gets marked. But here is the trick: pilgrims are supposed to go around the island counter-clockwise. This is supposed to seal off the realm of the realm of the dead from our world. The grieving woman completes the circuit sixteen times in the opposite direction. You can guess what happens.
The idea of the two realms is a relic of early religions in the West, largely eclipsed by Christianity, but it is still pretty near the surface in Asian drama. In Shikoku, the tension between ancient mythography and modern life comes down to the conflict between a husband and wife over raising their daughter. She wanted the daughter to continue the ancient family line of temple seers. He wanted her to get a modern education. She won.
Lastly, this might be the first Asian horror movie I have seen in which Buddhism was so much as mentioned. Taoist magic is prominent is several Japanese and Chinese films, but in this one it is a Buddhist priest who comes to the rescue and repairs the breach between worlds. "I have always believed in the Buddhas, living and dead," he says as he shakes a stick at the demonic daughter.
I am guessing that Buddhist religion is very weak in China and Japan. It survives, if barely, only because they have nothing else. Asian horror seems to be in decline as well. Its fans can only hope that Hollywood's recent appetite for translation will resurrect that ghost. I surely hope so. Horror movies are one of the most direct routes into the ancient history of the human heart.
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