The Silent Screams of Asian Cinematic Cultural Crossings

Growing up in Korea and Japan, I watched the Asian gothic films about fox spirits with nine tails that were usually girls, ladies or women wanting respect, friends and love. . .

However, the men worked so hard for companies that the matriarchy found themselves alone in the world. I grew up and taught classes like Asian Gothic at the university. I wrote about these fox spirits and called them Asian vampires.

In Asia, evil is not forever, because often demons become gods and gods can fall and become demonic. Karma is neither good nor evil, it is simply about the action of events. . . .

Hollywood has embraced and adopted Asian horror films with limited success, like Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998) adaptation into the Ring (2000); Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on (2003) into The Grudge (2004); and the Pang Brother's Gin Gwai (2002) into The Eye (2008).

Tales of the Strange or "Xiaoshuo"

The original Asian versions of these films were not released for mass consumption to Western audiences but did manage to find a limited "cult"  following via straight to DVD release. To a large extent, the Asian sense of evil or shock does not translate well into Western standards of evil or shock. 

According to  Patrick Galloway: "Traditional Christianity simply won't tolerate certain types of exploration in thought, deed, or art, the resultant baffles and filters are so inculcated in our popular culture that it isn't until you watch a film from a country without such conventions that you begin to see what, perhaps, you didn't even know you were missing! "(11).

To reiterate, when Asian audiences experience a Western film of horror, the standards for evil, terror, fear, and shock are different. These differences occur because the inner speech decodes the outer speech differently to use a Vygotskyan theory of language. "A word without meaning is an empty sound . . . "(212).

Since everything is text, certain aspects from Western films do not translate at all for Asian audiences trying to read the visual cues. Lev Vygotsky provides an explanation that can work to explain this reaction, "In our speech, there is always the hidden thought, the subtext" (251).

Asian ghost stories are full of tales about undead ghosts, not realizing they are dead. Hence, Asian audiences look within their own traditions of undead narratives, within their own inner Eastern speech/text traditions to decode the message of Western horror, the outer Western speech/text traditions.

An examination of Asian tales of the strange will present problems of narrative transparency because of heteroglossia that occur in defining an Asian moral authenticity. 

Works Cited

Galloway, Patrick.  Asia Shock: Horror and Dark Cinema from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2006.

Vygotsky, Lev. Thought and Language. Trans. Alex Kozulin.  Cambridge: MIT Press,  1986.

[1] A version of these notes entitled "The Blood of Hybridity in Postmodern Cinematic Asian Vampire"  was presented at the Popular Culture Conference in Boston, Massachusetts on April 4, 2007.