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The Japanese film industry began in the late 1800s with its most proflific films from the 1920s to the 1970s being made through its studio system.[1] Following World War II, Donald Richie noted that directors and screenwriters were no longer as interested in subjects that promoted a rosy future. This led to development of ghost story and monster movies being made in Japan during the 1950s.[2] The term "horror" as a genre, only began circulating in Japan in the 1960s in press and everyday language. Prior to this, horror fiction as it may be known was referred to with terms like "mystery", "terror", and "dread".[3] According to manga author and critic Yoshihiro Yonezawa, the first boom of horror manga with the success of the Kaiki shōsetsu zenshū' and the success of the British horror films from Hammer Films which began circulating in Japan and gaining popularity.[4] Due to the circulation of these magazines, a growing interest in the supernatural developed, inspired by traditional Japanese ghost stories (kaidan) such as Yotsuya Kaidan as well as classical Japanese woodcut prints with themes of Japanese ghosts.[5][6]

Colette Balmain in her book Introduction to Japanese Horror Film stated the two most important films that would influence the growth of the horror genre were Ugetsu (1953), exploring fears around modernization, and Godzilla (1954), with its monster and its atomic breath reminding about the devastation caused by nuclear weapons.[7] Ugetsu would also lay the groundwork for several forms of Japanese horror films. This included gothic ghost stories which accounted for most of Japanese horror films of the 1950s and 1960s, the erotic-themed ghost story films of the as well as later Japanese ghost story films like Ring (1998) and Ju-On: The Grudge.[8][9] Ugetsu would borrow from traditional Japanese theatre forms such as Kabuki and Noh .[1] [10][8] Noh was marked for estrained understatement and abstraction with more focus on emotion than narrative of dialogue which would be reflected in later Japanese films like Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968).[11]

In 1964, Shochiku released Daydream, the first Japanese New Wave to have a blatantly erotic story.[12] These films later became known as pink films, a term of American origin applied to low-budget and low-profile films. These softcore films helped struggling studios with the first wave of them being between 1964 and 1972.[12] One sub-genre of these films was the erotic ghost story, which were less explicit than the usual pink cinema. These films often featured wronged women, such as the vengeful ghostly cat woman in Kuroneko (1968).[13] Stories of ghost cats and similar creatures were part of the sub-genre known as bakeneko mono, or monster-cat tales starting with The Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (1960).[14]

In 1985, the Japanese film producer Ogura Satoru developed the series and directed the first installment: Guinea Pig: Devil's Experiment.[15] The series was controversial in Japan, due in part to the public scrutiny the videos faced after the capture of Tsutomu Miyazaki, a child murderer who had the films in his collection.[16] The series circulated enough within horror film fan circles that in a March 1994 issue of Fangoria, a fan wrote in to ask the magazine to shift its toward underground films such as "the notorious gorefests from Japan [...] the infamous Guinea Pig series." The magazine responded that the the independent film market was fading away and that major studios had taken over the b-film industry and "that is where the power - and commercial success - lies. Guinea Pig is not the future of horror."[17] Jay McRoy, author of Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema declared that films like Toshiharu Ikeda's Evil Dead Trap (1988) and Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) "spurred the emergence of an increasingly visceral and graphically violent wave of Japanese horror films" with the lattter film being "one of the most influential Japanese horror films ever produced.[18]

Author and critic Kim Newman described the release of Hideo Nakata's Ring (1998) as one of the major "cultural phenomenons" in the horror film in the late 1990s.[19] Along with the South Korean film Whispering Corridors (1998), it was a major hit across Asia leading to sequels and similar ghost stories from Asian countries.[19] With more than 24 million sales worldwide, the Resident Evil video game franchise began in 1996. Several Japanese productions involving zombies followed the games success, such as Wild Zero (1999) and Versus (2000), and Junk (2000).[20] These films zombies resembled the monsters from the 1970s such Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Zombi 2 (1979).[21] In 2003, independent films had overtaken studio-produced films with 234 of the 287 total films released in 2003 were independent.[22] The independent Japanese zombie film One Cut of the Dead (2017) became a sleeper hit in Japan, receiving general acclaim worldwide and making Japanese box office history by earning over a thousand times its budget.[23][24]

References

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  1. ^ a b Balmain 2008, p. 12.
  2. ^ Balmain 2008, p. 25.
  3. ^ La Marca 2024, p. 1.
  4. ^ La Marca 2024, p. 3.
  5. ^ La Marca, p. 2.
  6. ^ La Marca 2024, p. 5.
  7. ^ Balmain 2008, p. 31.
  8. ^ a b Balmain 2008, p. 32.
  9. ^ Balmain 2008, p. 51.
  10. ^ Balmain 2008, p. 15.
  11. ^ Balmain 2008, p. 18.
  12. ^ a b Balmain 2008, p. 71.
  13. ^ Balmain 2008, p. 72.
  14. ^ Balmain 2008, p. 73.
  15. ^ Jurgess 2022, p. 88.
  16. ^ Jurgess 2022, p. 89.
  17. ^ Jurgess 2022, p. 90.
  18. ^ McRoy 2008, p. 8.
  19. ^ a b Marriott & Newman 2018, p. 275.
  20. ^ Balmain 2008, p. 113.
  21. ^ Balmain 2008, p. 114-115.
  22. ^ Balmain 2008, p. 14.
  23. ^ Nguyen 2018.
  24. ^ "One Cut of the Dead (Kamera o tomeru na!) (2017)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2 March 2019.

Sources

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