Why I like The Ring

Why I like The Ring

1) The first time I saw the movie, I remember getting ready to leave once Rachel had discovered Samara's body and laid it to rest. She's back with her son Aiden and all appears well. Her son asks her what happened to Samara, Rachel responds that she helped the dead little girl find peace, and Aiden responds with terror. He says "you weren't supposed to help her," and ice cubes slid down my spine. The scene immediately afterward, where Samara kills Aiden's father, was one of the scariest moments in 2000s-era horror. Everything I knew about ghosts had been thrown out the window.  We were in dangerous territory.

2) The movie is gorgeous. It's got a watched-out gloomy blue and gray tone that reminds me of old Gothic horror films. I grew up in foggy San Francisco and the atmosphere of the film reminded me of home. Melancholy coastal towns work particularly well in creating a Gothic atmosphere, which fits the ghost story.

3) Horror works best when it's simple. If you watch this tape, you die seven days later. The only way to stay alive is to get someone else to watch the tape. Otherwise, a drowned girl crawls out of your TV and kills you.

4) The interesting thing about The Ring is that Rachel isn't actually that great of a mother. Horror fiction is full of overly caring, overly diligent parents and, while Rachel will do anything to keep her son safe from Samara's wrath, we get the sense that she's too preoccupied in her own life. Aiden refers to his mother by her first name, he's able to do a lot of things for himself, and he has the kind of self-assured maturity of someone who has to a lot of shit on his own. It creates a unique family dynamic, especially after we meet Aiden's father.

5) The movie is unrelentingly grim. The story is structured like a mystery, and deciphering the enigma of Samara's life makes her both sympathetic and terrifying. When you finally learn what happened to her, you realize why she will never stop hurting people.

6) The Ring has two of the most effective jump scares I've ever seen. I'm a sucker for frightening faces and the wreckage Samara leaves behind are among the most terrifying corpse effects I've ever seen. I imagine they're supposed to be waterlogged bodies left down in at the bottom of the well, but that doesn't account for the distended jaws. I also really like Noah's death. Rachel runs to save him, finds his body, and screams. We don't see what she sees until the big reveal later on, when his face is the final one we settle on.  It remains one of the most disturbing images ever captured on film.

7) The movie terrified me more than most horror films because it felt inescapable: Samara's vengeance was so lethal that the only way you could escape it was to feed other people to her. Samara looked like something otherworldly. Watching her crawl out of the well remains one of the greatest horror images of all time.

Conclusion: The Ring reprogrammed the way I viewed horror. It broke a lot of my expectations, it approached the genre with intelligence, and it created a monster that seeped into the dank basement of my subconscious. I saw Samara every time I turned off the lights. The Ring brought me back to my childhood fear and I'll love it forever.

Why I like Ju-on: The Grudge

Why I like Ju-on: The Grudge

1) Before we begin, a brief autobiographical digression. I was raised in a family that practiced Japanese Buddhism in San Francisco. My family hosted Japanese exchange students, my brother spent a lot of time in Japan, and I'm generally inclined to be favorable to all things Japanese horror. 

2) Ju-on is my favorite horror movie of all time. I've seen it dozens of times and I'm still scared by it. When I used to have closing duty at GameStop, I'd put Ju-on on the monitor to keep me company. I have watched as many Takashi Shimizu movies as I can get my hands on. I love the movie beyond all rational sense and perspective. I don't discuss it often because I really don't want to hear any dissenting opinion that might change my perspective. 

3) One of the scariest things about the film is that Kayako Saeki's rage cannot be stopped. As a person acclimated to the western idea of haunting, where a tormented spirit can be put to rest, there's no escape from Kayako's vengeance. What happened to her was so awful that no amount of appeasement will work. Her rage is a virus that infects and corrupts everything that it touches. 

4) Because a straightforward story about an unstoppable doom would be an exercise in futility, Ju-on is broken up into a nonlinear narrative about the first family to fall victim to the curse, the hospice worker that takes care of the invalid grandmother, and the police investigator that falls to the grisly aftermath. It effectively turns the film into a series of interconnected vignettes, short stories tied together by a monster. The overarching story involving the poor hospice worker takes the final doom of the curse to a new and frightening place. 

5) The movie has a lot of scenes of people hiding in beds, being haunted in their sleep, or just having Kayako's spirit watching them as they lie huddled in fear. My childhood often involved burrowing under covers and doing my best to control my bladder. I recognize the fear of the dark and the safety/vulnerability of hiding in bed. Ju-on exploits this masterfully. 

6) We're never quite clear on what exactly happened to the Saeki family. We see all of their spirits in one form or another. The boy/cat seems to act as a harbingers. He doesn't act like a typical ghost child, standing and staring at people with a bloody head wound. Instead, his spirit has been fused with the cat. The hissing sound the boy makes renders him as even less than human. It reminds me of traditional obakemono demons, animal spirits that torment the unwary. 

7) The final scene between Kayako and Rika, where Rika lays paralyzed with fear and Kayako's freshly-murdered body crawls down the stairs after her is one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen in my life. The classic theory about horror is that it's often only scary when you can't see the monster, but the deliberate pacing, the horrible croaking sounds, and Kayako's vicious sense of purpose combine to make the scene one of the scariest things I've ever seen committed to film. It's a nightmare incarnate, and that's why it works so well with me. 

Conclusion: I'm more into creepy-horror than startle-horror. Most American horror films these days seem to be about creative a very specific rhythm of tension-shock-shock-break. I like movies that create a nightmarish atmosphere. Ju-on is utterly relentless, gloomy, and oddly beautiful. I have watched it dozens of times and I still find something new to discover in it's puzzle-box narrative and strange mysteries. It's my favorite horror film of all time.

Why I like Fatal Frame

Why I like Fatal Frame

1) As I confessed during the Haunted Mansion post, I'm actually a gigantic chicken. I'm drawn to horror because it has a powerful impact on me, but I like the experience to be vicarious. Video games are about as close as I can come to getting directly involved with anything scary. 

2) I got into all the big horror games when they started coming out for the Playstation. Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Parasite Eve, I played them all. The only one that was almost too much for me was Fatal Frame. 

3) Video games are almost all power fantasies. You're usually a Space Marine or a SAS officer or an indomitable yellow eating machine or something like that. You're almost never a skinny teenage girl trapped in a haunted house looking for her missing brother. The only weapon you have to defend yourself with is the Camera Obscura, an old-style box camera that can capture the dead.

4) "Ropes! There are more ropes this time!"

5) Fatal Frame scared the bejeezus out of me. The game is one of my most intensely atmospheric horror scenarios I've ever played in my life. The ghosts you meet, the dark halls that you wander down, the horrific recordings you find, all create an unrelenting world of terror. I used to rush from save point to save point so I could take regular breaks. 

6) The ghosts are also the scariest ghosts I've ever seen in horror fiction. They're the restless spirits of the people who died following the disaster of the failed strangling ritual, and they wear their torments on their bodies. It's hard to pick which one is the worst, but I'm torn between the woman whose hanging went wrong and the woman who wore the blinding mask and is condemned to wander the halls of the Himuro mansion with blood-soaked bandages over her gouged eyes.  

7) I used to lose entire days playing this game. I'd play it broad daylight, with the windowshades open and plenty of people in the house. If I really lost my nerve, I'd mute the game and blare the Wu-Tang Clan through my stereo. I liked imagining the Ghostface Killah materializing before Miku Hinasaki like he did for Huey Freeman in that episode of The Boondocks, helping herto be strong and walk righteous. 

8) The gist of the story, from what I can tell, is about sacrifice. As abominable as the strangling ritual is, the consequences would be much worse if it was never performed. We feel bad for the poor shrine maiden, but sacrificing her keeps the world whole. The game's theme asks us to examine the horrible cost of duty.        

Conclusion: Fatal Frame is one of the things that sparked my love for Asian horror. It's atmospheric and emotionally rich in a way that western horror often can't compete with. The game is genuinely, relentlessly scary. I'm kind of sad that the newest game seems to have a focus on fan service, because Fatal Frame was the best survival horror franchise in video games.   

I Saw the Devil

So here's the fucked up thing about I Saw The Devil.

It's a film about how ultimately dehumanizing and unsatisfying vengeance can be. The movie is a revenge story through-and-through, and revenge stories exist to empower the powerless through fiction. Bad things happen in life and our sense of order demands that someone be punished for it. It's a nice power fantasy and most revenge films feature an average man empowered by rage.

Kyung-chul, the serial killer who murdered Soo-hyun's pregnant fiance, is about as evil as they come. He spends the entire movie kidnapping, raping, and murdering women. His only friend is a cannibal who invades homes and carves up the inhabitants for supper. They're both shabby and unattractive men, though Kyung-chul approaches his work with a steely eyed, world-weary assertiveness that's undeniably compelling to watch. They're both evil men but they're not quite devils. There's something petty and pathetic about them that puts me in the mind of something I read this week: "Most things that seem satanic or malevolent are really just wretchedness and frailty that’ve been allowed to put on muscle."   

Neither murderers have a chance against Soo-hyun. Soo-hyun is the perfect human agent of vengeance. Young, handsome, highly-trained, and brutal, Soo-hyun is basically a Korean Jason Bourne. After his fiancee's body is found at the bottom of a river (in one of the most chilling search-team scenes I've ever seen), Soo-hyun steals some spy gadgets from his office, takes a two-week vacation, and goes hunting. With the help of his fiancee's father, a former police commissioner, he quickly tracks down his fiancee's killer. The rest of the game is a brutal game of cat and mouse between the serial killer and the super agent. Soo-hyun refuses to turn his prey over to the police, preferring to prolong his quarry's torment, and Kyung-chul descends into depravity when faced by an opponent who outclasses him in every way.

This movie had been sitting in my Netflix queue for awhile because I felt like I could figure out how it would end from the synopsis: Soo-hyun would descend into Kyung-chul's level until the difference between the two men was almost nil. While Soo-hyun's revenge does eventually barrel over innocent people, the story is never that trite or obvious. No satisfying revenge can really be taken against Kyung-chul anyway. Soo-hyun can cause horrific physical pain to Kyung-chul (and some of his attacks run close to torture porn) but the effect is similar to Batman beating up the Joker in the interrogation room: a guy as crazy as Kyung-chul is eventually going to disconnect from what's happening to him and all you're left with is cutting flesh. Even torturing Kyung-chul inside his murder room fails to stir any empathy for his victims. Instead he goads Soo-hyun to kill him and treats Soo-hyun like he's wasting Kyung-chul's time.

So the film's title doesn't refer to Kyung-chul. Kyung-chul is essentially a selfish, ignorant creature of the id. The devil in the title is the realization that you can burn your entire life down to gain the object of your obsession and have it mean absolutely nothing. The movie ends without closure and with a sense of loss that's almost crippling. While researching this blog post, I came across the perfect one-sentence review for the film: "There is all the violent mayhem, for certain, but the thing that sets I Saw the Devil apart is its undercurrent of real emotion and how unrelentingly sad it can be."