Overview

Contemporary Japanese horror is deeply rooted in the folklore of its culture, with fairy tales-like ghost stories embedded deeply into the social, cultural, and religious fabric. Ever since the emergence of the J-horror phenomenon in the late 1990s with the opening and critical success of films such as Hideo Nakata’s The Ring (Ringu, 1998) or Takashi Miike’s Audition (Ôdishon, 1999), Japanese horror has been a staple of both film studies and Western culture. Scholars and fans alike throughout the world have been keen to observe and analyze the popularity and roots of the phenomenon that took the horror scene by storm, producing a corpus of cultural artefacts that still resonate today. Further, Japanese horror is symptomatic of its social and cultural context, celebrating the fantastic through female ghosts, mutated lizards, posthuman bodies, and other figures. Encompassing a range of genres and media including cinema, manga, video games, and anime, this book investigates and analyzes Japanese horror in relation with trauma studies (including the figure of Godzilla), the non-human (via grotesque bodies), and hybridity with Western narratives (including the linkages with Hollywood), thus illuminating overlooked aspects of this cultural phenomenon.

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9781793647078

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Reviews

Japanese Horror Culture is a surprising read that ties together a wide variety of fields. The 14 essays show how culture, history, religion, folklore, social anxieties, and expectations shape the Japanese horror genre and how, in return, Japanese horror influences film and art across the globe…. Each essay includes thorough references, and some essays have additional notes. Horror fans will appreciate the many references to horror films, literature, and video games, but the squeamish may find the occasional details of some film scenes uncomfortable—even though the contributors do an excellent job tying these scenes to outside factors and anxieties. This reviewer gained a much greater understanding of and appreciation for the complexities and influences of J-horror. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * Choice Reviews * The editors of Japanese Horror: Critical Essays on Film, Literature, Anime, Video Games have assembled an incisive, wide-ranging, and politically informed collection on a topic as timely as it is fascinating. Delving into the complex interconnections among film, video, manga, and local cultures, this volume will be of tremendous interest to students of both horror cinema and modern Japanese history. -- Andrew Grossman, author of Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade An indispensable anthology for Japanese/Film/Cultural studies courses, this book examines J-Horror's dominant political, cultural, aesthetic underpinnings and its place in Japanese folklore, religion and Japan's overall socio-cultural fabric. -- Matthew Edwards, editor of The Atomic Bomb in Japanese Cinema

Author Information

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns is assistant professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Subashish Bhattacharjee is assistant professor of English at the University of North Bengal. Ananya Saha is PhD scholar in the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

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