Contemporary Asian horror films seem to be particularly fond of resorting to various techniques of visual recording. This paper focuses in more detail on two such relatively recent films: a Hong Kong production Abnormal Beauty (2004), directed/produced by Oxide and Danny Pang and a Thai film Shutter (2004), directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, both of which feature professional photographers as main protagonists and resort consequently to the notion of photography as a key concept for the narrative structure and the films’ visual organisation. The paper will examine the ways the two films exploit photography’s specific relation to death and the afterlife, raising the question whether the theoretical discourse of photography can potentially “westernise” the narrative technique of an Asian film.
Tag: technology
Spiritus ex machina: Spectral technologies in Asian horror film
This paper examines the notion of spiritual technologies, understood in a twofold manner. On the one hand, based on an analysis of a number of contemporary East Asian and South East Asian horror films, the discussion will focus on the ways modern technologies, particularly visual and media technologies, have contributed to a shift in understanding the concept of the ghost. On the other hand, this paper will focus in more detail on the case of Thai horror cinema, where ghosts have become a narrative technique and ghost stories seem to have contributed to the development of cinematic technologies in general.
Ghosts and the machines: Spectres of technological revolution
This article draws on the need to examine the ways new media and visual technologies affect the representation of ghosts in contemporary Asian horror film, in effect producing a new variety of spirits.These new spirits materialise within photographic and video images, transmit themselves through television frequency waves, become embedded in an electronic code, scramble the signal of video surveillance cameras, clone themselves using cellular technologies, replicate through text messages and emails, hack computer systems and infect the cyberspace better than any computer viruses known to man. No longer wrapped in proverbial bedsheets and clinking chains, these new ghosts call for a redefinition of certain concepts that Gothic and Horror have learnt to take for granted.
Ringu and the vortex of horror: Contemporary Japanese Horror and the technology of chaos
This article focuses on the four most significant Japanese Ringu movies, mapping out contemporary Japanese horror as a culturally-fostered response to the fear of chaos in the techno-centric orderly system. The representations of chaos, whether affecting spatial and temporal reality, psyche, or social structures can be seen in virtually every contemporary Japanese horror film, while technology re-emerges as a channel for the supernatural and a site of supernatural materialisation. Sadako Yamamura, Chaos personified, may serve as a perfect example of the above.