J-horror. It doesn’t even take a Rue Morgue


reader to list off all of its visual characteristics. So mercilessly was the genre milked in the space of a few years that spooky little girls with stringy black hair eventually began popping up everywhere.


It really all started back in 1993, when video company em-


ployee Norio Tsuruta came up with a way to cheaply and ef- fectively produce horror movies for the video market. “I actually got the idea for a horror piece when I talked to a


video store employee, and he told me about a kind of docu- mentary on ghosts called A Tour to Famous Haunted Places that was renting really well,” Tsuruta said in an interview with Nicholas Rucka. His Scary True Stories, which created the tem- plate of the J-horror formula, became such a hit that copycats began to pop up within weeks of its release, some directed by such virtual unknowns as Hideo Nakata and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. J-horror was virtually born self-cannibalistic. What dragged the genre out of the VHS ghetto and into


the multiplexes, though, was 1998’s Ringu, adapted from a Koji Suzuki novel, directed by Nakata and produced by Taka Ichise. Ringu relaunched the age-old tradition of the horror film as date movie when it became a massive hit amongst teens, a demographic that was poorly catered to by Japan- ese films until then. Norio Tsuruta, who would go on to direct the second sequel,


Ring 0: Birthday, had mixed feelings at first: “In 1998 Ringu was a big hit, and when I saw it, honestly speaking, I thought, ‘This looks exactly like what I have been doing!’ It was a real shock. It was really exactly like what I had done in [Scary True Stories], right down to [ghost charac- ter] Sadako’s way of moving.” Although the size of the screen had changed, the


attitude of producers hadn’t. Sequels, cash-ins, TV spinoffs, and other Suzuki adaptations began to appear thick and fast, and by the dawn of the new millennium (around the time the West had caught wind of what was going on through festivals and bootlegs), such high- end entries as Masato Harada’s Inugami and Kurosawa’s Pulse had already suf- fered the fate of indifference, playing to largely empty cinemas at home. What happened next was a fortuitous


but not entirely unrelated series of events: Takashi Miike’s Audition, made in 1999 at the height of J-horror fever in Japan, is released in North America and Europe in 2001 and sends audiences running for the exits in fright. A few reputed Ameri- can film critics with their finger on the Asian pulse start a buzz about Takashi Shimizu’s straight-to-video two-parter Juon (the bigger budget redo Ju-on was featured on the cover of RM#40 in 2003),


OCTOBER 2004 Anne Rice declares in a Newsweek article that henceforth she would “write only for the Lord.”


R 34M


OCTOBER 29, 2004 If it’s Halloween, it must be time for Saw! The first installment in the series is released.


calling them “the scariest movies” they’ve ever seen. Enter producer Roy Lee, Hollywood’s resident voodoo priest, who re- generated the already rotting corpse of Ringu and set up the American remake helmed by Gore Verbinski. J-horror the global phenomenon was upon us. (“J-horror” was, by the way, never a pejorative term, since the Japanese themselves have been using the “J-” prefix to designate “cool” new develop- ments in everything from literature to soccer.) But how did a genre that one of its best-known practition-


ers, Kurosawa, defines as “a uniquely Japanese way of ex- pressing fear” manage to capture the world’s imagination? According to Japanese film authority and midnighteye.com


co-creator Jasper Sharp, its central theme of technology ver- sus ancient traditions spoke to just about anyone: “J-horror appeals to universal fears, which is why the films have trav- elled as far as they have and why producers such as Taka Ichise have been so successful at specifically targeting his films at overseas audiences.” Indeed, while most of the writing on the genre seemed to


make a point about how “Japanese” its characteristics were and how different it was from what Hollywood horror was of- fering at the time, its creators had in fact plundered Western horror cinema to their hearts’ content. Sharp: “Japanese genre fiction has always benefitted from this cross-fertilization be- tween its own myth and folklore and that of outside. Nakata himself was quick to admit the influences foreign titles like The Haunting and Poltergeist had on his seminal version of Ringu.” In this light, the debt Takashi Shimizu’s “departure” from J-


horror, The Stranger from Afar (2004), owes to H.P. Lovecraft is perhaps not so surprising. There are few greater masters of tales about ancient fears bursting through the veneer of modern civilization than writers such as Lovecraft and Arthur Machen. That the latest entry in the ongoing saga of Japanese horror is an adaptation of Machen’s 1894 novella The Great God Pan by Ringu scribe Hiroshi Takahashi that should dispel the notion that in horror there exists such a thing as a “uniquely Japanese” film. Further case in point is the recent spate


of tongue-in-cheek splatter of The Ma- chine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police and Frankenstein Girl vs. Vampire Girl. All spawning from the stable of producer Yoshinori Chiba, the man behind Miike’s outrageous Fudoh: The New Generation (1997), these films are wild concoc- tions of every genre trope imaginable except J-horror. From the outset they were aimed at the North American market, which also holds true for genre legend Shinya Tsukamoto’s long- awaited third Tetsuo film, Tetsuo: The Bullet Man, which stars Tokyo-based American actor Eric Bossick. After years


of the West looking toward the East for its scares, the tables appear to be turning again.


FEBRUARY 14, 2005 YouTube.com emerges to give the horror directors of tomorrow a place to gain fans and test their chops.


MARCH 2005 Rue Morgue goes to eleven issues a year.


1


YOUNG ADULT HORROR


While children’s stories have been around for hundreds of years, the market catego- rization of “young adult” is a relatively new phenomenon. R.L. Stine certainly opened the doors for teen horror in the 1990s with his phenomenally successful Fear Street series, but YA sales didn’t truly skyrocket until the release of the Harry Potter novels and the horror-lite Twilight books, which are notable for having as wide a readership amongst adults as youths. In their wake, the floodgate of YA fiction has split wide open, with teen titles now being amongst literature’s fastest- growing sales demographic. Of course, this has led to a new influx of genre titles – everything from tepid Twilight rip-offs to the much darker, bloodier offerings of Darren Shan (the Cirque du Freak and Demonata series) and Scott Westerfeld (Peeps).


2


INDIE PUBLISHING As the internet came of age, so did print- on-demand services – essentially compa- nies that would produce small runs of novels for small presses and individuals alike. This allowing aspiring authors, much like independent bands before them, to re- lease professional-looking works without being beholden to a publisher. Furthermore, with home computers now powerful enough to run high-end graphics and layout software, almost anyone can start their own small press. While this undoubtedly resulted in a certain amount of unedited crap, it also gave several up-and-coming scribes their first break, such as David Moody, who pub- lished his horror novel Hater through his own imprint and subsequently sold the film rights to it within months of its release.


3


NOVEL PODCASTING/ BLOGGING


The podcasting and blogging of novels, usually as daily or weekly serials, opened yet another avenue for horror scribes to get their tales to readers sans publisher. The in- teresting thing about this movement, of course, is just how many of its pioneers ended up with traditional publishing deals in the end, among them David Wellington (Monster Island), Cherie Priest (Four and Twenty Blackbirds), Scott Sigler (EarthCore) and David Wong (John Dies at the End).


APRIL 26, 2005 The godfather of psychobilly, Hasil Adkins, dies at age 67.


JUNE 24, 2005 George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead is the first of three new Dead films from the zombiemaster.


PRINT-ON-DEMAND AND THE RISE OF


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