PAINTED SCREEN DEMONS AND HUNGRY GHOSTS
ALL COILED ABOUT A SPIRAL.

A REFLECTION

by Stephen Studach

Spiral

by Koji Suzuki
HarperCollins
2005.
Paperback.
460 Pages.
$ 24.95

Fine black hair tendrils, drifting in a night ocean, floating through air, drifting, drifting.

I’m channeling a well, a well not filled with water but with hair. And bone. Bones buried under masses of the dead matter that is hair. Black water. Black hair. Strands of hair being pulled out from between a woman’s lips, more and more, thicker and thicker, till she regurgitates the hair like ropy, coarse vomit.

A television set in an empty room suddenly turns itself on with a dull burst of effervescent static, the bare room lit by the fuzzing electronic snow on the screen . . .

And there is a sound . . . like the single sweep of a rusty metal swing in a child’s play park; stroking the night with its brief, plaintive cry.

Can I share something with you? When I was a kid I never really liked the Japanese Horror and S.F. movies.

When the newspaper TV guide was eagerly checked and anything that looked like a product of the Japanese dream factories was seen there in that black and white programme one groaned inwardly, sometimes outwardly, and planned an alternative.

It was the curse of Toho. The ludicrous and reviled Starman, Star Prince and Supergiant (Super Jaianto) series. Invasion of the Neptune Men. The Kaiju Eiga and Daikaiju Eiga: the Godzilla (Gojira) and Mothra (Mosura) fantasies. Sure, the idea of Mothra was neat and the Son of Godzilla cute, but it was a case of too much fantasy, not enough horror. They were just way too childish for this child; who had once adored The Samurai series with Shintaro and the serial cliff-hanger adventures of The Phantom Agents. I was raised on one of the early landmarks of  Japanimation and Manga: the original Astro Boy. Then there was that quite odd character, known in Australia as Phantoma (Ōgon Bat) a violent Japanese cartoon that seemed to disappear after just one or two episodes. Cancelled due to violence?  Most kids, like me, would have loved it! These were supposed to be Horror films, they were, after all, appearing on shows with titles like Creature Feature (Friday nights) and (oft appropriately) The Aweful Movie (Saturday nights, hosted by the legendary Deadly Earnest), and they just didn’t fill requirements. These were not the American manufactured masterpieces, not the, even in B&W, lurid and professional Hammer offerings, they were not the Italian nor the Spanish shockers and creep fests. They were not the Universal classics, not The Creature from The Black Lagoon films, not Planet of the Vampires, not Sound of Horror nor Terror Creatures from the Grave. Not worthy of flickering late at night from the modest old black and white television set in the corner of my parents’ lounge room.

No matter how sympathetic the Son of Godzilla was, and how it warmed the heart to see him romping on Monster Island, or cheering and hopping on the sidelines as he viewed the action in the epic Destroy All Monsters (full page ad in the newspaper for the cinema release of that one fondly remembered), no matter the attractions of the Japanese Fantasy aspects of these movies, the childish wonder, they were just not right. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Blob, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, The Thing from Another World, Island of Terror, Tarantula, It! The Terror From Beyond Space, Five Million Years to Earth, Forbidden Planet these were science fictions. These were horror films. The Japanese examples . . . They were just . . . well . . . childish. And, more offensively . . . boring.

That species of child that later came to be known as nerds liked ‘em of course. The type of kids that, in a shoot ‘em up, would simply not fall down even when repeatedly shot. The kind of kids that used a forefinger, only, as a pistol, jeez! Let me tell ya, when I used a ‘hand’gun in any of those many, many, imaginary gunfights, when my six or eight were out I... reloaded. And for the record it’s two fingers closest to thumb extended, other two fingers tucked in, thumb, or hammer, cocked up.
 
The only Japanese offering that travelled to the out-of-the-way outpost that my childhood had marooned me in and that came anywhere near my type of aesthetic was Attack of the Mushroom People (aka Matango aka Matango Fungus of Terror) from 1963. Directed by the busy Ishirō Honda. With its different look and atmosphere and W.H. Hodgson spirit it came close but was still poisoned by inability.

We didn’t get to see Jigoku (1960), Kwaidan (1964), Onibaba (1964), Moju (1969) (based, as a number of other Asian genre films have been, upon a work by Edogawa Rampo),The Hundred Monsters (1969) and so many others.

Just as I had to wait a few more years to appreciate the Toho product for what it was, so too did I have to wait several decades to get the premium Japanese Horror goods. For then came Ring.

Funny that to evolve cinematically, in my eyes, all the Japanese Horror makers had to do was dip into their own heritage. A deep, dark well indeed.

The modern crop of Japanese Horror Films that haunted cinema from 1998 at their root drew upon myths as old as Asian culture. Akin to the early days of the 50’s and 60’s, when U.S. producers bought the films and inserted new American scenes, it eventually became a lucrative partnership of remakes with the stale, out of ideas, Western nightmare factories. This braid of skin crawling night hair stretched back even beyond the efforts of Lafcadio Hearn, and Kabuki Theatre, which borrows heavily from ghost lore, into the mists of Japanese legendry. The fearful, and at the same time attractive, shape of the Ring cycle’s Sadako is derived from the Onryō spirits of Japanese lore. She also calls to mind the demon occupied Regan of The Exorcist. Now what a pair (or trio, or multitude) they’d make.
 
But I have noted that the ghosts and figments of Japanese cinema are not exclusive to that old culture, they, or at least stray hair strands of them, are globally primal. I surely would not be the only creator of dark dreams who can look at his own works, predating any knowledge of modern Asian Horror cinema of any effectiveness, and note the haunting female figure with face obscuring long black hair, the lair of an old well, the wicked child wraith, the spectres of loss and grief and guilt.

Odd, how a ghostly form from a foreign culture (Onryō is a class of Yurei or earth connected spirits bound by strong emotion) can manifest in a Western author’s creations, an author largely ignorant of the foreign culture’s database of legends. Or, maybe, not odd at all. Horror will out. Legends carry. The mud of myth spatters up and sticks in the mind’s collecting filters. They are there, lurking deep in the wrinkled canyons, in the convoluted folds of the more primitive regions of our brains, in the curse-seared images, staring out with white faces from the black print.

The motifs and elements of Asian Supernatural Cinema are clear. Anger, revenge, wrong doings not set right, curses. It is also concerned, if not obsessed, with hair, water, female wraiths, mystically endowed inanimate objects. And of course ghost stories. The films often want to tell, perpetuate, their own takes upon night whispers that could be older than written histories, or spread their own bedtime tales and warnings via celluloid, optical film and audio.

One could also add to the steaming wok of Asian genre film the ingredients of mutilation and abnormality as well as simulacra (the Japanese seem particularly obsessed with creating androids).

A rusting, roof top water cistern on metal legs and iron and concrete, running with water. Overflowing with more than that, but the liquid will carry the load, the charge. Down below, beneath an abandoned (but not empty), waterlogged apartment, a damp patch of ceiling drips, slowly, incontinently, spirit water torture . . . .

Open your mouth and a ghost will come out. You can call it, summon one up. I did when I was a kid. Try it. Open, don’t even exhale just let it emerge—slooo—www—llly—shape it with your lips—and listen to the secret language of the dead, that we all carry.

A conspiracy of angry ghosts.

Faceless, crawling women. Hair screened. And behind such curtaining dark . . . .

Oral/Aural effects, ghost conspiracy and crawling women can all be found in The Grudge (Juon). My closest "round eyes" comparison would be the films produced by Val Lewton in the 40’s. Shimizu Takashi in his direction comes across a bit like an Asian Jacques Tourneur. Cat People has a brief, but effective, woman on all fours scene. No, it’s not Simone Simon, watch it and see.
  
These hungry ghosts and the crimes that made them can work their wills through books and phones, clothing and cameras, tapes and televisions. Glimpse them in reflective surfaces. They can share a lift ride with you. You can watch them on surveillance equipment, but they can see you too. They lurk in bodies of water; from a dripping tap or a bowl to rivers, lakes, oceans. They can inhabit shadows, sacks and boxes, can reside in ceilings, under the sink, the floor or in closets. They can even, uninvited, share your bed. Their true origin and habitat is, of course, the closet of the dark-obsessed mind.

The Horror classic Ring (Ringu) from 1998, directed by Hideo Nakata, started the whole modern wave. It was remade in what became the first of an assembly line strategy of Japanese to American knock-offs in 2002 as The Ring. This Gore Verbinski film carried well up until (oddly enough) the appearance of the vengeful psychic force that is Sadako (named Samara in the remake). The lame CGI ghost really let the whole film down.

Neither the two Japanese lensed sequels nor the prequel nor the second U.S. attempt (directed by Nakata) matched the unique power of the original.

In what might have been a good move the American machine brought the original directors over to rework their magic on big budget versions of their triumphs. Whilst undeniably good for a director’s career it did not prove a recipe for better films.

Ringu also opened the way for a number of other fine Asian works concerned with the supernatural and the monstrous. Dark Water, Juon, A Tale of Two Sisters, One Missed Call, The Eye, The Eye 2, Shutter, Marebito, Audition, Three Extremes (including Dumplings later released as a stand alone film), Three Extremes 2, Kairo, The Host, to name a few of the more interesting examples.

Of course Asian genre cinema has its low rent, direct to video, entries too, in abundance.  But even there you can find worthy viewing.

The best of these films have a sedately paced power about them. They do not over-rev the motor, clash gears noisily and rapid-fire edit like the American film makers. They proceed at a cautious walking pace towards the disturbing and the fearfully horrific, or coast along on slickly oiled silent wheels, save there are no brakes.

Helming these and associated genre vehicles you’ll find Nakata, Shimizu, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Miike, Danny and Oxide Pang, Kim Ji-woon, Fruit Chan, Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom.  An incantational list of names.

Spiral is the second book from Koji Suzuki, the man who wrote the book that the Ring film (the first spectre out of the modern Asian spook cabinet) was based upon. Other Suzuki works have been filmed including his novelette Floating Water filmed as Dark Water.
 
Mitsuo Ando is a coroner at the Tokyo Medical Examiner’s office and a lecturer in Forensic Medicine. He has lost his beloved three year-old son in an accident at sea. Separated from his embittered, traumatised wife, she is pushing for a divorce.

After carrying out the autopsy upon an old college friend who has died in odd circumstances, having stuffed the emptied body cavity with newspaper Mitsuo finds that the dead have news for him. A corner of one page of news sheet protrudes from the stitched up incision on the corpse. Upon this paper corner are six numbers arranged in two rows of three. A code?
 
The deceased friend had been a whiz at creating codes.

And so, it begins.

Ando, a young woman and a number of colleagues and collaborators with Mitsuo Ando are drawn into the vortex of the mystery of the accursed videotape, the making of which and the marrying of it with the malignant virus may not so much be purposeful as unfortunate accidents, the elemental results of bad deeds and feelings. Malific mutations.
  
We have the perfect urban legend in the form of the chain-letter curse that is the video tape in question.

Code-breaking and mutation ensue. Empty corridors, flesh prickling foreshadowing, ghostly mischief at a cellular level.

The mark 2 Sadako can leave a message, take in a movie or two, make love in the darkness, enjoy ice-cream. Ejaculate. Ovulate. Grant wishes. Write a nice note.

Suzuki has taken his fine creation and overclocked her into a monster of annihilating potentials.

Once upon a time, Godzilla was considered a dire threat.

It’s the evolution of horror. The self creation of a mass media monster.

The inevitability of mass dissemination – in multiples on a bank of televisions in a store display and even through the printed word, is, of course, addressed in book and films.

Billed as a stand alone sequel to Ring, Spiral fills in more of the gaps of the legend of Sadako Yamamura. The book seems to be a melding of the prequel and some new ideas of its own. An Uncanny Medical Mystery. A combining of science and the supernatural into a fatally viral haunting. Rings and broken rings, hearts and double helixes.

I can’t really comment on the translation, though it seems smooth enough. The writing is neatly conservative, workman-like, bordering on the pedestrian, without any great flourishes of metaphor or descriptives.

Billing Suzuki as "the Japanese Stephen King" is, of course, silly, and based more on publishers’ dreams of sales figures and page counts than anything to do with comparative writing styles.

Don’t expect an action packed novel of rollicking horror and multiple scare sequences. This one is more cognitive based. Definite intelligence here. The mystery and the rationale in cracking that mystery are the prime movers in this book.

If you want a literary continuance of the films you may not find it here, though Spiral is another adjunct to the Rings franchise. If you would like to see the Ring legend extrapolated a little—try it out.

The primary twist in the tale (or helix) is self referential. Closing the loop, the ring comes full circle and meets itself.

The filmed version Spiral, slightly adjusted from the book, was a devitalised offering. Not common knowledge in the West; it was released at the same time, and with, Ring. The huge success of the latter and the drastic failure of the former led to the filming of Ring 2, under Nakata’s direction, and Spiral became known as "The Forgotten Sequel".
 
The films of the books differ in a number of respects. At core the books seem to have genetic and biological science at the root of the matter, thus the term ‘The Ring Virus’ whereas the primary films are solely supernatural excursions. Thus, more purely Horror films.

There is apparently a Japanese-Korean co-production entitled The Ring Virus that follows this book more closely.

Rings a short bridging piece between the first and second American version films has the interesting turn of a club or society of young people "ringers" using the tape in a type of game of chicken. To see who, having viewed the tape, can go the longest without "passing it on" before their decreed seven days are up and the vengeful Sadako will definitively call.
 
In terms of Suzuki’s books Loop and the three stories of The Birthday see out the Ring cycle, at least thus far.

Here, just for fun, try this black wig on, it’s made from real human hair, at least I think it’s human . . . Now, the kimono, yes it’s very old, just drape it on you . . . What, the wig seems to grip your scalp?  Don’t be alarmed. Slip on these red shoes, don’t worry, they’ll fit . . . Yes, that’s blood on them . . . Click the heels?  I don’t know, but if you try it you might end up somewhere that is nothing like Kansas or Oz...

Tokyo (and Neo Tokyo) threatened by every thing from Godzilla to Akira and beyond falls under a spiritual apocalypse in Kairo (aka Pulse) and becomes a literal city of ghosts. In Naked Blood (directed by Hisayasu Sato) it’s a man-made chemical. In Uzumaki (another, different, Spiral threat, directed by Higuchinsky) it’s spirals and vortices.

Not many years into this new millennium the circle, or ring, had looped completely, the cinematic serpent devouring its tail. For, as Japanese fantasmic film of past decades had, joyously and in often high spirits, borrowed heavily from the United States, now America was buying and remaking anything successful in the genre from the Asian market place, showing how denuded and bereft the Hollywood machine truly was. Yet, better that than the wasteland of endless bad versions of bad old television shows.
 
The big biting Yankee machine god is going to, ultimately, regret the partnership though, the tendrils will clog the gears, it’s going to choke on black hair.

Of course different Asian countries also remake each others films as well.

For those who have not yet discovered Asian Horror Cinema—a Pandora’s Box of delights awaits you. You will find that looking to the East is a refreshing and entertaining change indeed.