Japanese Horror Culture: Critical Essays on Film, Literature, Anime, Video Games (Lexington Books Horror Studies)

Contemporary Japanese horror is deeply rooted in the folklore of its culture, with fairy tales-like ghost stories embedded deeply into the social, cultural, and religious fabric. Ever since the emergence of the J-horror phenomenon in the late 1990s with the opening and critical success of films such as Hideo Nakata's The Ring (Ringu, 1998) or Takashi Miike's Audition (Ôdishon, 1999), Japanese horror has been a staple of both film studies and Western culture. Scholars and fans alike throughout the world have been keen to observe and analyze the popularity and roots of the phenomenon that took the horror scene by storm, producing a corpus of cultural artefacts that still resonate today. Further, Japanese horror is symptomatic of its social and cultural context, celebrating the fantastic through female ghosts, mutated lizards, posthuman bodies, and other figures. Encompassing a range of genres and media including cinema, manga, video games, and anime, this book investigates and analyzes Japanese horror in relation with trauma studies (including the figure of Godzilla), the non-human (via grotesque bodies), and hybridity with Western narratives (including the linkages with Hollywood), thus illuminating overlooked aspects of this cultural phenomenon. Cover Contents Introduction National Traumas and Repressions The Ghost of Imperialism A Modern Monster Cultural Trauma, Cross-Flow of Aesthetics, and the Child Space, Smoke, and Mirrors The Dead Speak Posthuman Monsters and Grotesque Bodies “Love in a Chair” The Monstrous Feminine in Mari Asato J-Horror films Composite Corpses and Viruses of Viewing Spiral into Samsara in Junji Ito’s J-Horror Masterpiece Uzumaki Controlling the Inner Demon Cultural Flows The Transpacific Complicity of J-Horror and Hollywood Revisiting the Orphan Girl Narrative in Rule of Rose Idol Culture and Gradations of Reality in Japanese Found Footage Horror Films Obscure, Reveal, Repeat Index About the Editors About the Contributors "This book investigates the philosophical, socio-cultural, and artistic world of Japanese horror through a varied range of case studies, including video games (Rule of Rose), manga (Uzumaki), and anime (the classic Devilman). Film is represented with well-known works such as Ringu and overlooked filmmakers like Mari Asato"-- Provided by publisher