horror, page 66 of 66

I spent most of Sunday reading Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, which I bought back in December of last year, because of the Philip Pullman quote on the front: “One of the greatest ghost stories in the language.” Once bought, it sat on my to-read shelf for about six months while I furiously disbelieved Mr Pullman and regretted buying it. It’s literary fiction — how can it be a great ghost story? Literary fiction most often doesn’t do stories, let alone ghosts, and when they do, they have to be all ironic and meta-para-textual about it.

But I saw Hilary Mantel interviewed on BBC2’s Culture Show a few weeks ago, and felt sufficiently re-enthused when it turned out she’d seen something like a ghost when she was a kid, so I picked up the book and gave it a go.

However, I didn’t spend so much of Sunday reading Beyond Black because it was necessarily page-turning. (It is well written, and quietly humorous.) Rather, it was because the middle section was a bit dull plot-wise and I wanted to get it over with so I could start Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. However, it did at last repay the effort, as the ending provided a real sense of chill, as well as the possibility of emotional release for its long-suffering heroine, the psychic and medium, Alison Hart. (Real name Alison Cheatham. “I changed it,” she says. “Think about it.”)

The story really gets going when Alison’s live-in manager/business partner, the non-psychic and somewhat sour Colette, suggests they write a book to “flog” at the various psychic fayres and gigs Alison makes her living from. Taping interviews with Alison proves problematic, as her voice can sometimes be drowned out, on playback, by all sorts of whistles and whoops and other ethereal noises. But Colette pushes on, and we start to hear of Alison’s awful childhood. (The full revelation has to wait to the end of the book, as certain parts are a mystery to Alison herself.) Neglected by her prostitute mother, sexually and physically abused by the coterie of male hangers-on (all of them petty criminals) — this, most of all, is what haunts the sensitive Alison, as well as the feeling that she herself did something terrible, which has driven her, all her life, to try to do something equally good to balance it out.

Though humorous, it’s hardly a feel-good book. The language is generally soaked in a feeling of the drab futility of things, the essential difficulty and lack of fulfilment of life. But what came through for me was Alison’s faith in human nature and the need to do good despite all the wrong that has been done to her. The central idea, of Alison as a medium surrounded by so many spirits of the dead, is really used well by Mantel to bring out the emotional truth of her main character’s situation.

Worth it in the end.

Having just watched Dark Tales of Japan, my 15th Asian horror DVD, I thought I’d provide a roundup of what’s good and what’s not in this sub-genre. I’ll start with the best:

Although obviously lower in budget than, say, the US remake (The Ring, 2002), Ring (Ringu, 1998, Japan) works because for the most part it keeps its horrors subtle, and when they aren’t subtle, they’re often surreal, thus bypassing the stock responses of a jaded genre audience by simply being so strange and new. The cursed videotape itself is a perfect example. When you get to see it, you really feel what the protagonist Reiko feels: first of all a startled, “Was that it?” Then it sinks in. “Oh my god, I’ve just watched it… But what did it mean?” There’s a real build-up to the central terror, without the usual teen-horror necessity of providing cheap jump-thrills at set intervals. It has some genuinely chilly moments. The most famous, when the terrifying Sadako comes for Ryuji, struck me as being both horrific and beautiful at the same time, something I’ve only ever experienced before when watching H R Giger’s monster uncoil out of the darkness of the escape pod at the end of Alien. My one criticism is the film’s reliance on one of its main characters having psychic powers, which distracts from the central horror, making it feel less universal, less threatening to the (presumably non-psychic) viewer. But fortunately it isn’t foregrounded enough to really impinge on the film. The sequels, Ring 2 and Ring 0, are no way near as close to the power of the original. If you’re going to watch just one Asian horror, make it Ring. (The US remake overcomplicated the plot and took all the subtlety out of the main emotional theme of neglected childhood. Avoid!)

If you’re going to watch one more Asian horror than Ring, choose from either the South Korean A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) or Audition (1999, Japanese). Both stretch horror in the direction of the subtle and surreal; both are also shocking and bloody. Of the two, Audition is the more extreme, though anyone watching the first half may think they’re in the midst of nothing worse than a slightly odd but gentle family drama, in which a middle-aged widower is encouraged by his son to find a new wife. His best friend suggests going through the casting process of an invented film to find a mate. Then, suddenly, halfway through things just go weird. A man in a bag. A severed tongue flapping on the floor. Cheeswire and ankles… A Tale of Two Sisters, on the other hand, is a bit more human. Two sisters return to their family home after a stay in some sort of institute. But the family, including a verging-on-a-breakdown stepmother and resigned, defeated father, have obviously got secrets, and the pressure of things not said gets unbearable, till it breaks out in horrific moments and strange terrors. A Tale of Two Sisters is stylish and mysterious, where Audition is like a nice romantic dinner followed by a spiked sledgehammer to the back of the head. Take your pick.

Where to go from there? I’ll be briefer from here on:

The Eye (2002, Hong Kong) has some really spooky effects, as a blind girl gets a cornea transplant that allows her to see the spirits of the dead. Plotwise, so-so.

Ju-On, or The Grudge (2000, Japan) is a sort of ‘J-Horror Greatest Hits’, being basically a series of spooky moments cludged together in a haunted house. If you don’t care about plot, but want to see a few low-budget chills, it’s a good one. You could just as well see the Hollywood remake, by the same director. There’s not much to choose between them.

Inugami (2001, Japan) is a slightly more serious attempt at marrying drama with horror. Its protagonist, Miki Bonomiya, is cursed by a violent Inugami, or dog-spirit, which is reawakened when she falls in love with a new-to-the-area teacher. The emphasis is as much on how the curse turns her into a social outcast as the horror itself.

Acacia (2003, South Korea), has a few chilly moments but loses its impact when it can’t decide whether to be a thrilly horror or supernaturally-tinged family drama.

Shikoku (1999, Japan) has a young woman returning to the village of her childhood to find her friend has been dead for several years. The friend’s mother, a sort of priestess or medium, has gone insane and is working towards bringing her daughter back from the dead. Not bad, not great.

Dark Water (2002, Japan) was directed by Ringu‘s Hideo Nakata, but, although moody, doesn’t have the thematic substance to really take its chills into the sort of horror you can feel in your bones. This is another one that’s been remade in Hollywoodland, but I haven’t seen the remake yet!

Isola (2000, Japan) has the wonderful subtitle “Multiple personality girl”. One of those personalities, of course, turns out to be a vengeful spirit. Again, pretty much standard stuff.

Uzumaki (2000, Japan) is set in a village whose inhabitants start to become obsessed with spirals in all their forms (the shell of a snail, the whirling of a washing machine). More surreal than your standard Asian horror, but without a real emotional core to the horror.

Phone (2002, South Korea) again has spooky moments but nothing to really grab you, and then the plot just gets too improbable and gothic. It’s the sort of horror film you know just had to be made. Someone just had to say, “I know, let’s have a horror film featuring… A haunted mobile phone!” Yeah. Let’s.

Dark Tales of Japan (2006) is a bit different, being a compilation of short horror tales taken from, I think, a TV horror series. Standout moments are the giant demon head that suddenly appears in the corner of the room, and the final tale whose protagonist gets stuck in a lift with three very peculiar individuals.

The Dreams in the Witch House has never been, for me, one of Lovecraft’s better stories, though more because it reads like a first draft, with no attempt to bring the story alive for the reader. Its main idea, that the dark powers of witchcraft can be linked with the then-cutting-edge mathematics of non-Euclidean geometry, is the bit that lingers in the memory (that and the creepy witch-familiar Brown Jenkin). Stuart Gordon’s adaptation updates the science (non-Euclidean geometry becomes String Theory — to which Brian Greene’s book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, is an excellent introduction), and of course can’t help but make the story more accessible in this, his contribution to the Masters of Horror series.

Gordon’s previous Lovecraft adaptations include Reanimator, From Beyond and Dagon (actually The Shadow Over Innsmouth). Although he could be described as the most faithful adaptor of Lovecraft’s work in terms of sticking to the events described in the text, he can’t exactly be said to be the most Lovecraftian in tone. You couldn’t, for instance, imagine him adapting The Colour Out Of Space, which is the real essence of Lovecraft’s bleak cosmic horror. But Gordon obviously has fun. The camp and humorous aspects of horror are never too far away, as he himself points out in the commentary for one scene where the protagonist wakes up to find himself in Arkham University’s Restricted Reading Room with a skin-bound copy of the Necronomicon on the table in front of him… in nothing but his underwear.

It’s interesting, actually, to see how the emphasis in a horror story changes when it’s adapted to film. Some ideas that read as horrific on the page (Brown Jenkin, a rat with a human face), come out as more humorous when actually seen. (Gordon’s Brown Jenkin works for me, but more in a dream-like than scary way.) Others, though, are suddenly more horrific. The aspect of child sacrifice comes across as pretty conventional in Lovecraft’s story, but here, where we actually get to see it, is almost unbearable. Gordon says, jokingly or not, that his wife threatened to divorce him because of this aspect of his 50-minute film, and I can quite believe it.