The Eye - Asian remakes. Why?

New columnist Kate Weir returns this week to give an insight into the current culture of producing American remake of Asian horror movies.

A Koroke Burger with Fries Please: Culture to Go, the Zombie Horde of Asian Horror Re-makes.

‘You won’t believe her eyes’, is the catchy tag-line of the new re-make of Hong-Kong horror film ‘The Eye’. What you won’t believe is that yet another Asian horror has been culturally neutered. Moving the action to America and replacing Malaysian Anjelica Lee with American sweetheart Jessica Alba, the measured, contemplative film has been Hollywood-ified with choppy editing and pulsing shocks. The film seems a ghost of its former self (sorry..), but why this ongoing fascination with Asian horror and why the need to Americanize films for a mass audience?

Fascination with Asian horror is understandable due to the formulaic rehashing of American horror. Fear isn’t culturally specific so why not look overseas for a fresh take. Xavier Palud, director of ‘The Eye’, believes American horror is ‘logic and morality bound’; the product of a paranoid, God-fearing land, splattered with gore and set in a country remote and insane enough for ‘anything’ to happen (e.g. killer Ed Gein, an ill-educated, sexually repressed necrophiliac - the amalgamation of all moral panics and a huge box-office draw) Asian Horror derives from Buddhist spirituality and Confucianist ancestral worship. The belief that if funeral rites aren’t performed then the dead soul will become a ‘yurei’ (i.e. pissed off ghost), or if the person has been murdered or died with raging jealousy, anger or lust, leaving unfinished business, are all recurrent themes. The psychology of the ghost is rigorously examined and respectfully dealt with.

The image of the vengeful ‘girl-ghost’ is uniquely Asian, deriving from Kabuki theatre and folk tales such as ‘Bancho Sarayashiki’/'The Dish Mansion at Bancho’ (’Ringu’s inspiration where a girl is killed and thrown down a well) and ‘Yotsuya Kaidan’/'Ghost Story of Yotsuya’, which features the influential ghost Oiwa. The prototype for all pale skinned, dark haired ghouls, the white burial kimono, long dark hair (respectable women would only wear their hair down for burial) and Sadako’s deformed eye are all linked to her. The image of Oiwa’s mangled face, projected from a lantern to her murderous lover, has been up-dated into ghost-ridden cell-phones ‘(One Missed Call’) or video-tapes (’Ringu’). Electronic apparitions are also an attempt at reconciling past with present, referencing political troubles or archaic superstitions, whilst coming to terms with a hyper modernisation specific to Asia. Tradition is deeply ingrained; even in the modern world (in Hong Kong, ancestral bones are still exhumed and cleaned as a sign of respect) a trait mis-interpreted by ‘urban myth’ derived US horrors. Gore Verbinski’s ‘The Ring’ replaced Japanese iconography with images of the colonial West, for example, a dying horse, and a remote, ‘American Gothic’ style setting. Linking it to Western mythology helped the film gross $100 million worldwide. An astounding success, considering the rights were bought for a million. However, the story was simplified and loose-ends tied up for American audiences, notably the laughably clunky ‘How long do you think it would take to die in a well? (dramatic pause) Seven days….’

Re-makes are diminished returns in action; stretching universal narratives thin, they draw mass audiences because they are cultural comfort-zones. Asian horror remakes are a compromise, spoon-feeding new ideas to a largely uncertain audience, like Tarantino ‘presenting’ Kung Fu or Blaxploitation movies. Maybe it’s unfair to blame the crop of J-Horror on lack of originality. Condemning America’s capitalist stance on filmmaking is to ignore the fact that every country’s film industry is a commercial venture. Outrage is only directed to those films thought of as ‘art’ and high culture, however we forget that ‘The Ring’ has been re-made in Korea and has three Japanese sequels, and ‘The Eye’ has two Chinese sequels and a Bollywood remake called ‘Naina’. Foreign countries rarely re-make American films but it’s simply common sense since America is the pinnacle of distribution; although it does occur, take Werner Herzog’s ‘Nosferatu’ or ‘Fingers’ re-make ‘The Beat my Heart Skipped’. As John Lee (producer/betrayer of many Asian re-makes) and Tony Borg, head of Tartan ‘Asian Extreme’ note, ‘It’s great to see a Takashi Miike film in Wal-Mart’. Long-term, Asian directors will have more money to play around with and foreign cinema loses its stuffy and elitist reputation.

The issue lies in the jet-lagged tourist feel of re-makes. It’s arrogant to assume that an Asian setting lacking an American guide repels audiences. To replace Asian actresses with archetypal blondes such as Sarah-Michelle Gellar (’The Grudge’) or Naomi Watts (’The Ring’) favours a Western ideal. Much is lost in translation; where the Japanese recognise folk culture and beloved literary icons, an American audience sees the frightening and mysterious ‘other’, mired in pagan superstition. The superimposition of culture could simply be a lazy approach to subtitles (certainly true to some extent), but non-English speaking countries subtitle most American films so why not just market the original as you would the re-make? Naysayers see America as ill-educated and introverted in spite of its migrant past, and revising Asian horrors does little to dispel this notion. Comments on a website which accidentally uploaded the Japanese version of ‘One Missed Call’, instead of the remake, speak volumes, (spelling and grammar left as seen) ‘whats up with the jap version. were in america so i think we want to see american movies.’.

‘The Eye’s directors seem aware of the challenge facing them. Palud says, ‘Asian ghost stories are stuck in their culture, and we don’t have the same culture. We don’t live with ghosts like they do’, and they have decided to play it safe with a ‘Western mentality’ which may or may not give them a hit, with Alba potentially tipping the scales with her perky tits likeable demeanour. ‘Battle Royale’ looms on the horizon, and no doubt social commentary about Japan’s viciously competitive school system, will somehow turn into ‘American Pie’ with axes. One thing’s for sure, like Oiwa several thousand years before, the Asian-Horror re-make refuses to die.

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