With The Eye currently in theaters and One Missed Call having just left them, it seemed like the right moment to catch up with David Kalat, the author of the incredibly comprehensive reference work J-Horror.  We asked him whether these American remakes will ever stop coming, why they generally aren't any good anymore, and what's up with all the "Dead Wet Girls" anyway…

In many ways, Kalat is the movie-lover's movie-lover:  his passion, range of interests, and uncanny way of making connections across not only genres, but also cultures and time periods, makes him an ideal tour guide for the cinema of the strange and obscure.  The author of books on Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, the Godzilla cycle, and the TV series Homicide, he also releases DVDs of notable "lost films" through his company All Day Entertainment.  Less than a year ago Vertical, Inc. published his J-Horror:The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge, And Beyond; it's the kind of book that as soon as you look through it, you realize how indispensable it is.  Tracing the origins and impact of what he prefers to call "The Haunted School" across multiple countries, Kalat comes across like a designer of treasure maps for genre fans—he renders the unfamiliar accessible and makes readers excited to continue exploring.

Firefox News:  Let me start by asking you to play devil's advocate—or Roy Lee—for a minute.  Are there any non-U.S. "Haunted School" titles that you'd actually like to see an American version of?  Or conversely, are there some that should never be attempted in the English language?  Personally, I'd love to see Kurosawa done right over here, but that's largely because I'd like to see him get wider recognition.

David Kalat:  That's an excellent question.  There are basically two approaches to remakes, generally, in Hollywood.  One is the taking of a movie and reworking it, adapting it, fixing what was wrong or updating it for a new mentality—and these kinds of remakes are usually the ones most satisfying to film enthusiasts.  The other approach is the blunt assessment that because a particular movie is old, or in B&W, or in a foreign language, that you can reach a wider audience by making it contemporary—sadly, these are the most common.  I wouldn't be surprised if Disney decided to remake HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL with a new crop of stars because Zac Efron's already so yesterday!

Ironically, the better American remakes of J-Horror properties are those that adhere to this second approach, and keep pretty much everything intact but redo it with American stars: THE RING, THE GRUDGE.  Meanwhile those that try to rethink the material (PULSE) go off the rails.  So, with that history in mind, I'd probably be best advised to choose a movie that worked perfectly in its original version, so that the remake only had to sub in some blond chicks and make no substantive changes—UZUMAKI maybe, or THE HYPNOTIST.  I agree that Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of the greatest filmmakers working today, but for that reason I wouldn't recommend any remakes, since his films are best remembered not for their stories per se but the distinctive way in which he makes them.  His work is very oblique and ambiguous, and that's not what Hollywood's about these days—they'd be all but certain to bleach out his ambiguity and make the films flatter and less effective—as with PULSE.  If I was to choose a film that could benefit from a substantial rethink, I'd go with Norio Tsuruta's PREMONITION.  It was a potentially interesting premise that I think was mishandled, and could have used some traditional American film techniques to really pull off.

Yes, I agree about the Kurosawa remakes—it was kind of irrational to suggest it, but it was born partly out of a desire to redeem the Pulse experience.  There's another category of remakes, though, or maybe it's a subset of your first category.  That's when a major filmmaker is inspired by the earlier work to put his or her own artistic stamp on the source material.  How about the Herzog Nosferatu?  That is, the Christopher Nolan of Memento and The Prestige might have a field day with the concepts and twists in something like Cure, but we'd also see the ratcheting up of other elements, so you're right, I wouldn't put any money on Kurosawa fans being happy with the results.  With Premonition, the premise is one of the trickiest parts of the deal—there have been so many things done on the theme of "a death foretold," and the newspaper device might strike many Americans as clichéd.  I really liked the ending, but felt that the opening—and this is true of other action scenes I've seen in Tsuruta's work—is very clumsy.  The parents are trying to save their child and it takes them about three years to cross a two-lane road.  Some blame goes to the editor, but I could imagine a Brian De Palma taking that scene and making it sing—or maybe I'm betraying my lack of appreciation for J-Horror subtlety.  Regarding Uzumaki, I'm not as big a fan as you—I find it at times to be a case of production design over substance—but I could see its quirky obsessiveness working in an indie à la Donnie Darko.  But the young David Lynches and Tim Burtons out there would probably develop their own stories, not rework a Japanese film, right?  Besides, I think Hollywood is attracted by the high concept, not the visionary and the unique.  Hence we now have One Missed Call and The Eye.

But does the American public even care that these are remakes?  In genre circles, yes, fans care.  In fact, can you comment on the cultural conflict within horror--more pronounced three or four years ago—caused by the success of J-Horror?  I'd sense some resentment, almost protectionist in tone, as in, "Hey, we have plenty of homegrown talents in horror—how about giving big budgets to them?"  And this resentment in turn tinged the Asian originals, so that fans of, say, quiet horror, would shake their heads dismissively if I suggested checking out Korean films.  Any thoughts?  Have you ever encountered this kind of push-back yourself as a proponent of the Haunted School?

One of the clearest examples of blow-back that I've personally encountered is the reaction of Americans to the recurrent imagery of these films.  I cover the J-Horror beat for Video Watchdog, but I'm not the only one—and so, from time to time, someone else will review a Haunted School flick and react with dismay and some contempt, "same ole dead wet girl stuff."  There's a great Simpsons bit where soccer comes to Springfield, and the American color commentators are describing the game in boredom and disappointment, "He holds the ball, holds it, holds it..." and then we cut over to the Brazilian commentator breathlessly shouting:  "He holds the ball—holds it!—holds it!!!"  Sometimes it's all in the inflection.

What people over here tend to miss is that these images—the long-haired ghost and the murky water and all that—are venerable aspects of a deeply resonant and ancient folklore.  If you think of the dead wet girl imagery as coming from THE RING, then all these other J-Horrors can look like pallid rip-offs rather than distinct works of their own.  And where I get frustrated is that so many of the people I write with, and for, don't have the same reaction when it comes to other genres.  When somebody sets out to make a Western, a lot of imagery comes part and parcel with the choice of genre, and very few filmmakers would lead off saying,"OK, let's not have any cowboys or horses or saloons or gunfights because those have all been done before."  That would be silly.  You don't have to mint a whole new set of images and themes to make a good movie.

So, where I see the blow-back, it's in this response that sees the long-haired ghost and stops there and concludes that the film in question is too derivative or unimaginative, without digging into how it uses those images for its own ends.  True, there are a lot of derivative and unimaginative J-Horrors coming out, but that could be said of any genre.  There was a point, around 2003-2004 or so, when the success of THE RING and THE GRUDGE and the influx of so many great Asian horror movies like them did seem to signal a new direction in American horror, towards a more suspense-driven and minimalist aesthetic.  And, yes, this trend was associated with heaping praise on the Asian filmmakers in a way that maybe ruffled some feathers.  What's striking to me is how American horror then suddenly broke off into a much gorier, more cruel direction with the torture-porn stuff.  J-Horror was in Japan conceived as a reaction against the gory slasher genre, a way to make scary movies that didn't rely on shocks and bloody effects.  The result was a form that had an unprecedented appeal to a wider audience, especially girls, a demographic long ignored by horror.  For a few years, J-Horror-inflected movies here similarly reached a wider, more mass audience, but the swing back into films about severed body parts has reversed that process and firmly entrenched the notion of horror movies as something for teenage boys and young men to occupy their time.  As a result, this too operates against J-Horror films in this country now.  Horror audiences here aren't as inclined to spend two hours watching slow-paced ambiguous suspense as they were a few years ago, they expect more immediate and visceral scares.

I agree, but I'm wondering if the pendulum is now starting to swing the other way again.  We'll see.   In any case, it's not just the recurrent visual motifs that can put American audiences off.  In your book you do a good job of not only pointing out the illogic in certain Asian horror films, but also where the best Hollywood remakes do just enough revising to meet the needs of American narrative conventions yet still leave an air of mystery.  But are those the exceptions that prove the rule?  That is, is there a fundamental acceptance of non-linear, non-expository storytelling among Asian audiences that inherently works to the original films' advantage?  Take Miike's One Missed Call.  A key point in the action occurs when a TV station broadcasts the death of one of the victims.  Supposedly millions of people know about it.  But the very next day we're back to our stock J-Horror device:  a couple of ordinary people investigating the past by themselves.  There's no public reaction to speak of to the tragedy we've seen.  It's kind of like in Pulse when civilization itself ends and no one seems to notice.  I'd argue that the powerful and "meaningful" irrationality of the Haunted School is one of its enduring contributions to horror.  But is that precisely the element that makes American remakes face a kind of uphill battle from the get-go?

This is one of those canards that crops up so much in discussion of American reactions versus anybody and everybody else.  The fact is, I am unconvinced that Americans as a culture genuinely have this knee-jerk reaction against illogic or ambiguity.  You could easily cite any number of popular serial dramas over the years that traded in those very values: TWIN PEAKS, THE X-FILES, LOST... I think it is more likely the case that Hollywood movies by virtue of being such expensive investments have a lot of non-creative people second-guessing their content and fretting over what elements may represent a risk to reaching a wide, happy audience.  Making stories seamlessly logical and coherent is the sort of thing you’d do if you wanted to avoid risking alienating anybody—the Asian originals of these movies are made for a fraction of the cost and have a better built-in audience, and can therefore take greater artistic risks.  I agree that ONE MISSED CALL misses an opportunity to open its story into new directions and have a larger social response to this curse once it has been shown on live TV—but in the end, the thrust of the story (in Miike’s original at least) is much more personal and small.  

There’s this question of why a particular person is the subject of a haunting.  In Korean films it is almost always the case that the person experiencing ghosts has been directly involved in some way with the crime that caused the ghost to come into being, and the haunting is a sort of cosmic justice sorting out guilt and punishment.  In Japanese films it is often the case that the victims stumble ass-backwards into their predicaments—as in THE GRUDGE—but this is not always the case.  In THE RING, the source point of the curse is a family tragedy and an abandoned, misused child; her attack on the world then involves a single parent whose own child is often left alone or taken for granted.  The past tragedy and present conflict are mirroring each other.  The same thing drives ONE MISSED CALL, where an instance of child abuse triggers the ghost but the curse only starts to flower when another abused child enters the picture and causes a sort of feedback-loop.  You’re right, the rest of the world is implicated in this cycle of killer phone calls, but at root this is Kou Shibaski’s personal story, her demon to exorcise.

What you're doing here is very valuable, and it's a distinction I wouldn't have made:  you're pointing out that just because the narrative presentation in such films is not always straightforward, that doesn't mean there isn't a deeper logic to them, especially thematically.  But I still have to take issue with what you're calling the canard about American audiences.  Yes, I agree that corporate gatekeepers in Hollywood strongly influence the "artistic" product that U.S. audiences are exposed to—that makes a lot of sense.  So when I say American audiences don't have such a high tolerance of ambiguity or the paranormal not following clear rules/motivations made explicit early on, I don't mean that it's something inherent to U.S. sensibilities.  I'm talking about it as a direct consequence of the commercial fare the public is handed, both in and outside of horror, and which it has internalized as an aesthetic preference.  The truth is, culture is "manufactured" as much as it "created," so I don't think we disagree too much here.

You’re absolutely correct that what audiences come to expect from entertainment is a direct result of what they’ve become accustomed to.  In some ways, this is why Japanese audiences seem to be more receptive to ambiguity: they’ve grown to be forgiving of some very sloppy storytelling.  We’ve talked about “good” examples of narrative ambiguity (the JU-ON cycle, PULSE), but there are also “bad” examples, such as the aspect of ONE MISSED CALL you mentioned previously where a nationally televised supernatural event produces no cultural reaction.  From time to time, genre filmmakers over-prioritize the “fun stuff” of their movies—ghosts, giant monsters battling robots, vampires that time travel, etc.—and spend too little time writing a solid dramatic structure that contains those goodies.  As long as audiences go along and don’t seem to care, there’s little incentive for the industry to be more conscientious in that regard.  I was at the Shedd Aquarium the other day and there was an exhibit that led visitors through and under a massive tank, with fish swimming overhead.  I was reminded of a scene in GODZILLA VS DESTROYAH in which the Oxygen Destroyer triggers the disintegration of fish in an aquarium while a frightened security guard panics.  It’s a cool moment visually, but it makes no sense at all—if there was a device that stripped the oxygen out of water, it would atomize individual animal organisms in the water, it’d destroy the water’s molecular make-up and leave Tokyo Bay a toxic, water-less wasteland.  But that’d be a different movie altogether, and people paid to see Kenpachiro Satsuma in a rubber suit, so the scientific logic didn’t matter.

I once asked Wataru Mimura, screenwriter of many recent Godzilla films, why it was that American screenwriters working on monster movies will spend the first couple of reels gradually establishing the existence of monsters to the skeptical main characters, whereas Japanese monster films simply take it all for granted and let the mayhem begin right away.  I was expecting an answer about how Japan is a culture steeped in spiritualism, where the average person experiences contact with a larger world of ghosts and spirits on a daily and even casual basis, and so unlike the more skeptical West just comes at the situation from a different mindset.  But, far from it, Mimura just stared at me and said baldly, “Well, it’s a monster movie.  Of course it has monsters in it.  If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a monster movie.”  I suspect a fair number of J-Horrors are written under the same sentiments:it’s a ghost story, so it has ghosts, no further explanation needed.

Great anecdote!  So much for highbrow cultural analysis.  What I'm learning, then, is that it's American screenwriters, not me, who may be misjudging their audiences.  An example is the Dark Water remake.  An actress/filmmaker was telling me how disappointed in it she was because she didn't know why Jennifer Connelly didn't just leave that apartment—it was "unrealistic" for her to stay.  I pointed out that the U.S. version seems to spend a lot of time explaining why she's there with logical reasons whereas the original didn't much care—that's her apartment, period:  "It's a ghost story, so someone needs to be in a place where there could be ghosts."  That is, because it didn't dwell on real-world logistics, the viewer didn't either, and went along for the ride.
  
But let's move away from differences and look at commonalities.  Your book does a very thoughtful job of noting the changes and latent anxieties in today's family in advanced industrial societies such as Japan and the U.S.  So that seems to explain why so many J-Horror themes resonate on both sides of the Pacific.  You also undertake the very welcome task of elucidating the folkloric roots of much J-Horror imagery.  This is all a big tee-up because I want to nudge you to go somewhere that the book didn't, and which it didn't need to, being essentially a reference work and a history.  Namely, why would a "Dead Wet Girl" with long black hair in front of her face strike such a chord with non-Asian audiences who don't share its culture of origin?   Here are some possible interpretations.  A Jungian approach might see the figure as the Shadow.  Instead of a "good girl" with her hair so neat and tidy, the unruliness represents an overthrow of the socially acceptable persona and that's terrifying, much like Regan in The Exorcist.  I like a reading of the horror iconography better, though:  the hair in front of the face is scary for the same reason that masks are scary or dolls are scary—these are the universal "totems" of horror.  The mask hides something but hints at it at the same time.  Finally, an old school Freudian would analyze the sexual imagery of the hair and its concealing function and suggest that the "Dead Wet Girl" is a symbol of, ahem, female genitalia, maybe even creating "castration anxiety" in male viewers...  That said, what's your take on why this image is so powerful and uncanny?   

Well, I can’t let the DARK WATER comment pass without remark—the key difference between the Japanese and American versions has to do with the whole underlying issue of logic and explanations.  The original is very vague about whether the supernatural experiences of the main character are real (in which case she should get out, or seek help) or are hoaxes perpetuated by her ex-husband (in which case reacting to them only plays into his sadistic desires) or are evidence of her crumbling sanity (and the more she mentions them to outsiders the more she risks losing custody).  In other words, the horror of the situation isn’t the ghosts themselves, but her awkward uncertainty in relationship to them—her reactions could be either right or wrong depending on whether she’s losing her mind or seeing real spirits.  And so, whether or not to leave the apartment is a charged question that directly addresses her fitness as a mother, and her paralysis comes from not knowing what response she should have.  The American film stupidly flattens all of that out and makes it plain to the audience that, yup, there are ghosts, and so all of the hidden psychological drama simply vanishes.  Yeah, in the American film she should leave the apartment—in the Japanese one, I’m not so sure.

But on to your main point: the dead wet girl.  I’ll cross off the Freudian analysis, since I’ve never had a lot of patience for that kind of thinking, but the Jungian “untidiness” is certainly one of the things going through the Japanese response to the image (I think I have an email from Norio Tsuruta here somewhere where he basically says that very thing, and Hideo Nakata said something like it in an interview, too).  The biggest resonance, though, for Americans is probably the most ironic—what was in keeping with ancient folkloric traditions in Asia resonated there because it was familiar, but it “clicked” here precisely for the opposite reason. Nobody had really seen that kind of image before, at least not with that potency, and so it took off initially by virtue of being innovative and new.  Now that it has become more familiar from other films, Americans are tiring of it and increasingly likely to (mis)read it as stolen from THE RING.

The Western icon for a ghost, in its crudest form, is something any kid with a sheet and a pair of scissors can cook up for Halloween.  With a little more elegance, it becomes a spectral wraith, a shimmering incandescence.  Taken further, and a Western idea of a ghost is a recognizable person but somewhat transparent.  Our ghosts follow our religious beliefs, and tend to look like disembodied souls.  The long-haired ghost in Asia is just as venerable and common an image as Casper is here, it’s just unfamiliar for being foreign.

That the ghost does have her face obscured by hair is as you said like a mask, and connects with a universal human dread of semi-humanity:  clowns, robots, mannequins, anything close enough to human but not quite generally gets us somewhere deep in the gut.  

There are some J-Horrors that take this so far that they just have hair, nothing else.  RED EYE (not the one about an airplane, but a Korean film about a train full of ghosts) has a bit where the heroine is menaced by a wig.  It’s played for laughs, but the idea is there, that after a while the hair starts to develop connotations separate from the rest of the ghost, just as a “whoooo-oooo” sound connotes ghosts over here.

I remember your comments about Dark Water in the book, but I guess the development teams behind the remakes aren't reading the insights of folks like you—the consensus on this winter's Hollywood versions hasn't been too kind.  So in closing I'm wondering if at any point these remakes will cease, or whether there's too much money to be made with them overseas even if they tank at home.  Actually, I'm wondering about a deeper issue.  Will J-Horror ever be viewed as a phase that is over and done?  Or will it always be around as a "school" of horror as you've correctly termed it, and people will just point to 1998-2004 as its heyday?  I'm thinking that it will simply become one more stylistic identifier, the way we use "gothic" or "splatter."  So maybe we won't see so many theatrical releases in the U.S. that are overtly J-Horror but rather feel its lasting influence in a host of other movies.  I'm thinking of The Orphanage with its brilliant video surveillance sequence in the middle of a haunted house flick.  That is, will J-Horror simply evolve into new, slightly different forms—the same way some people say that dinosaurs never really went away, they just became birds?

Yeah, I know—here I am, sittin’ by my phone, ready to consult on one of these remakes, and ain’t nobody called yet.  Oh well, their loss.

I would love it if J-Horror persists as a genre unto itself, even if it fades from currency, just like Spaghetti Westerns.  Fans of zombie flicks had to wait a long time after that genre seemed to dry up before things like 28 DAYS LATER came along to goose it back into vogue.  The thing to remember is that these movies are not especially expensive to make.  A lackluster showing for THE GOLDEN COMPASS is going to make studio execs seriously stop and think if the big fantasy adventure/children’s classic literature field has been grazed to the roots yet, but it won’t be hard for ONE MISSED CALL to turn a profit, regardless of reviews.  Meanwhile, back East, the originals are even cheaper to make, and so they continue to pour out, creating more potential remake fodder.  

We talked before about the prospects of Hollywood visionaries taking J-Horror and doing their own thing with it—and I’m eager to see THE ORPHANAGE to see how it fits in to this discussion.  The other thing to look for is how Japanese (and other Asian) filmmakers fare in Hollywood.  I understand Hideo Nakata is doing a remake of THE ENTITY—this is intriguing, not just because the idea of a Japanese filmmaker remaking an American horror film for American consumption is a fine Mobius strip of reflexivity, but also because THE ENTITY is a particularly crazy premise that was ennobled by very careful and sensitive direction by Sidney Furie.  I can easily imagine Nakata’s style meshing nicely with that story and producing something quite mainstream.  The Pang Brothers would appear to be very Hollywood in their technique and attitude, but their first foray into American filmmaking was a sorry misfire.  THE MESSENGERS was boring and silly, and not at all worthy of the mad geniuses who made RE-CYCLE (if you haven’t seen this, but you have seen SILENT HILL, just imagine SILENT HILL but kookier).  The only Japanese director of this breed who has so far completely conquered the American market and maintained his soul is Takashi Shimizu, and I just hope his peers go over to his house once in a while and ask him how he did it.

Although I'd love to see a revised version of J-Horror every few years, I'm sure you have moved on to other projects.  What are some ways that film buffs can catch up with your work, both as it relates to J-Horror and more generally?

I continue to write reviews of J-Horror titles (and other films) for Video Watchdog, which is one of the best ways for fans to stay current on movies released since the book went to press.  Of course, I continue to restore lost and forgotten movies through the auspices of All Day Entertainment.  Just a few weeks ago I released a four-disc collection of previously lost silent comedies by the extraordinary minimalist comic Harry Langdon, and I’ve got more silent comedy collections coming next summer.  Not that these are J-Horrors, of course, but I figure people who seek out obscure cinema in one genre are predisposed to the joys of other genres as well.

Well, you're right about that in my case, and I'm sure I'm not alone.  At any rate, thank you for spending so much time with us and for sharing your expertise like this.  This was certainly a learning experience for me.