UNDERRATED ASIAN HORRORS

What Asian horror cinema seemed to understand a lot better than Hollywood horror ever will is that fear is irrational and the more irrational things get, the more terrifying things are. The pull Asian horror always had with me, aside from obligatory defiance to the hegemonic narratives, are the specific varieties of irrational unease that have become rough ordinance with most Asian horror cinema but which Hollywood has nothing but disdain for, perhaps residue from how Eastern cultures have a more pervasive, more insidious spiritual firmament than America: the spatial displacement, the overhang of dread, the dreamlike languor and casual surrealism, the often brutal lack of closure and this gnawing sense that the supernatural was a matter of fact. Asian horror isn’t above solving its own mysteries, sure, but Hollywood horror seems in the grip of a compulsion to constantly whip the mask off the monster to reveal a backstory. Indian burial grounds, Scooby Doo endings, whistling past graveyards, all that. Western critics gregariously upheld the heady, volcanic surge of Asian horror films in the 90s as a “new wave” poised to rehabilitate and reinvigorate the genre, which it was and which it did, even if the exaltation smacked of hegemony and hubris, if only for the implication that Asian horror had somehow “caught up” and that Hollywood was somehow “in charge” of the genre to waylay it, circumventing the fact that Asian horror has been trumping Hollywood horror for decades, and still does. I’d go so far as argue that the two 90s horror films that game-changed the genre didn’t come out of Hollywood, Myrick and Sanchez’s Blair Witch Project and Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, and that most post-90s horror films run on the modified engines of either of these two films, and sometimes, oftentimes a confluence of both. Japan, Thailand and Korea has been undergoing fluctuations in quality since. The combined output of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia is still occasional at best. The Philippines, meanwhile, remains stupidly, stubbornly determined to bash out the same old wine without even bothering to put it in new bottles, mainly vengeful spirits terrorizing young actors that no amount of workshopping can make worthy of being called one.

Despite this, Asian horror cinema is still an embarrassment of riches, if you know where to look and what to look for. The list below is meant to be a spanner in the works, throwing props long overdue and much deserved, but also as an index of possible new pleasures. Obviously, they barely scratch the surface, but if you’ve had it with the same old and your curiosity is piqued by the list, here’s a few more to look up, of varying quality and flavors and temperaments: Mystics In Bali (H. Tjut Djalil), Wild Zero (Tetsuro Takeuchi), Pasiyam (Erik Matti), Exte: Hair Extensions (Sion Sono), How To Disappear Completely (Raya Martin), The Red Shoes (Kim Yong Gyun), The Forbidden Door (Joko Anwar), Pridyider (Rico Ilarde), Salvage (Sherad Sanchez), Matangtubig (Jet Leyco), Dream Home (Pang Ho Cheung) and Noroi (Koji Shiraishi).

 Akumu Tantei (Nightmare Detective) (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2005, Japan) Pivots on the pulpiest of setups: an emotionally crippled and borderline suicidal young man who has the ability to walk into people’s dreams and somehow fix them is recruited by the police to thwart a creepy serial killer who has the ability to walk into people’s dreams and coerce them into suicide. The surprise here is not that Shinya Tsukamoto would take on such relatively straightforward material. Nor is it in the way he finds much to mine within the parameters of his outlandish premise, not least being its discomfiting overlaps between waking life and dream state. But rather, it’s the fearful symmetry he strikes between his usual transgressive surrealism and his newfound pop efficiency. Tsumakoto, of course, also made the Tetsuo movies, which is to say that the few times he does, he makes the sort of superhero movies we deserve: deranged, chaotic, resonant, thrilling as fuck.

 Di Ingon Nato (Brandon Relucio and Ivan Zaldarriaga, 2011, Philippines) Rough around the edges, sure, but you can argue that it’s more appropriately primitive because of it, given how everything hinges on its transposition of First World zombie tropes into far-flung Third World boondocks, where people get around on cheap mopeds, an under-manned and under-equipped clinic passes for a hospital, combat-readiness boils down to jungle knives and single-shot rifles and no one knows zombie lore enough to go for a head shot, not to mention that the zombies here are not the undead of legend, the sort these superstitious folk have names for and dispatch with magic, but rather the ones borne of contagion, the sort these medically naïve folk can’t quite fathom. The first half, set in a remote forest, is all bucolic desolation. The second, almost meta-recursive apocalyptic desperation. For all their social-realist pontifications, I can’t think of a single poverty porn indie that has tapped as potently into how fatally ill-prepared we are for calamity quite like this under-seen zombie riff has. 

Marebito (Takashi Shimizu, 2004, Japan) . No pun intended but I slot this in here grudgingly if only because the nonchalant misogyny bugs me still but also because it is a terribly flawed and terribly shallow work and one I hesitate to recommend heartily. Approach with caution, then. But after thrashing this the first time I saw it, calling Takashi Shimzu the Gore Verbinski of J-Horror of all things, though I’m not sure if that’s unfair to Shimizu or to Verbinski, I’ve reconsidered my position and now go as far as claiming that I might actually prefer its Lovecraftian dissonance to the routine spookiness of his beloved, and certainly more polished, Ju-on/ Grudge films. The anxiety and displacement evoked by the subterranean world the perverted cameraman hero stumbles on remains every bit as distressing as the last time I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

Pascalina (Pam Miras, 2012, Philippines) Pascalina, the eponymous social klutz, is a fuck-up of the poignant sort, well-meaning and down on her luck. Her aunt is the only one who loves her enough to say it, but is not only dying but may or may not be a monster, which means she may or may not be a monster, too. Pam Miras tends to rub her fluency with the genre against her bigger fish to fry, harnessing horror tropes to slant the realities she wants to confront at an angle, for a view that’s oddly purer and truer the more heightened it gets. Shooting with a toy camera comes off as outlaw impulse at first blush, but the jittery muck it attains becomes both verisimilitude and metaphor, elucidating the dance her stumblebum heroine does with the devil she knows, as she comes into her own by springing the catch on her own secret monstrosity. The film won a Best Picture prize then all but vanished without a trace. That’s one way to boost your underrated stock. Another is to be as good a debut feature as it is.

 The Unseeable (Wisit Sasanatieng, 2006, Thailand) Atypical Wisit Sasanatieng but only if you go by the velocity with which his candyland visuals ran riot in his last two films before this. But look at Tears of the Black Tiger and Citizen Dog again and you realize what he really has a knack for is the way he twists over-familiar environments into weird off-key shapes, like balloon animals. If this rather traditional ghost story is a lot more sedated, the mood dripping rather than shouting, that’s mostly out of how ghost stories are supposed to get by on the sedated drip of mood alone. The gorgeous crumble of that haunted countryside manse, and its sprawling garden, may be a calmer palette than we’re used to from Wisit but is every bit as florid and intoxicating an artifice as any he's ever manipulated. Oldfangled but thick with feed.

Uzumaki (Higuchinsky, 2000, Japan) Lazy as it sometimes is to brand Junji Ito as the Japanese Lovecraft, it’s also rather apt, right down to how much of a bitch it is to adapt his work to film. Those ubiquitous Tomie films, about a dead schoolgirl who regenerates over the centuries to wreak all manner of revenge, often feel homogenized, and as gorgeous as Kakashi was, it was a little too complacent, even for a film about haunted scarecrows. Uzumaki is by far the only film taken from his work that perfectly nails all his potencies: the bleak nihilism, the demented strangeness, the psychedelic rot. This is the one about the seaside town driven mad by an invasion of spirals, and there really is no way to approach any work that boils down to that synopsis except to take it literally.

*Originally published by CNN.

HORRORS IN THE SLIPSTREAM

What’s a slipstream? A category, but one that constantly resists being one, reaching to go beyond making one necessary. The science fiction writer Bruce Sterling coined it to codify the interstices, mongrel works that hover between speculative and realist fiction, that mash up genre tropes with mainstream temperaments.

There’s a surge of interstitial activity in horror cinema of late, its own neither-here-nor-there slipstream hovering between genre and arthouse, and someone less clever and less adept with words went and gave it names, too: Post Horror, Elevated Horror, all that. Like any genre, horror is bordered by its own perimeter fence, rigid with protocols, The Rules, as they’re called. But Post/Elevated Horror isn’t some new strain, all it means is horror that doesn’t play by The Rules, and it’s been going on for decades: Lang, Roeg, Teshigahara, Bergman, Lynch. The new films are fine: It Comes At Night, A Ghost Story, Personal Shopper, Beyond The Hills, Neon Demon. OK, maybe not Neon Demon. The tinge of condescension does bug me, the implication that horror needs “elevating”, but then again, when asked why I make horror films, my answer was how porous and fluid and pliant it was, how I could bend it to any shape I saw fit, how it lends itself to be , ummm. . .elevated. Yeah. I should talk.

But it’s a different sort of interstitial horror film I want to talk about here, the sort Clive Barker and Peter Atkins were talking about when they sought to expand the genre, finding trace elements of horror in films that were ostensibly not, settling on the intent to horrify and make us complicit in the perversity of that intent as the crucial pre-condition. They name-checked Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Fassbinder’s Fox And His Friends and Bergman’s Shame as tangential horror films. I agree. You don’t gauge your responses to these films the way you would, say, The Exorcist. But anyone familiar with the genre is bound to taste similar flavours in the soup. Here are five more.


 A Field In England (Ben Wheatley, 2013): A war film, a period film, a drug film, a fever dream, a hallucination. By virtue of Wheatley being a “horror” filmmaker, some circles make no bones over slapping the label on this. Suffice to say, it isn’t The Conjuring. That’s a sales pitch, incidentally, not a disclaimer. Also, I like how the title is also its location brief.

Kynodontas (Dogtooth) (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009): You can see this through the cracked prisms of its metaphors, sure, and it has many, from the claustrophobia of families to the subtle totalitarianism of home schooling, but better to come in without blinders and let the weirdness snowball in all its excruciating languor until it smothers you. The last shot still gets under my skin in ways few horror films can.

Leviathan (Lucien Castiang-Taylor, Veronica Pevel, 2012): A documentary that fulfills the terms of the form, immersing itself thoroughly in the environment it’s observing, but by doing so to the degree that it does, planting cameras in the oddest crannies of a fishing trawler, discarding the annotative comforts of talking heads and an editorial that holds your hand as it walks you through, it leaves us open to harm, making a routine night of fishing in the open sea feel like a descent into Hell.

Medusae (Pam Miras, 2017): A young documentarist and her cranky albino son go to an island to make a film about a mysterious cult that summons firstborns as offerings to the ocean. Two thirds of the way in is the point where you recognize Pam Miras, when the strangeness seeps into the mundane with disarming stealth, and disarming poetry, and inexorably takes over the piece. The horror was a lot more overt in her Pascalina, though, perhaps out of how this has a lot more on its mind, and perhaps, too, out of how it taps into a horror that’s too real for her: the horrors of motherhood. Misunderstood and uncategorizable. In other words, totally slipstream.

Mula sa Kung Ano Ang Noon (Lav Diaz, 2014): Lav Diaz has incurred debts to the genre throughout his career in spurts but here, as if to buffer us from the palpable horror that was Martial Law, his allusive, lo-fi parable, perhaps the most daring, and certainly the most poignant, of his post-Norte renaissance, comes suffused with strange goings-on: a constant hum of existential dread, mysterious cattle mutilations, rumors of an aswang on the prowl and a town that eats itself. . .sort of. The quietly spine-tingling ending to his short Nang Matapos Ang Ulan evoked a quality of unease horror filmmakers would kill to evoke. The sequence here with the mentally-challenged girl writhing while the windows move by themselves one-ups that.


 *Originally published by Esquire