2005年NPR美国国家公共电台七月-Ghosts, Chills and 'Dark Water' from Japa（在线收听）

The film "Dark Water" directed by Walter Salice opened over the weekend. It is the latest in a wave of American remakes of Japanese horror-films. In fact two of the most successful horror movies in recent years were adaptations of films from Japan: The Ring and The Grudge. At least half a dozen more American remakes of Asian horror films are on the way. NPR's Neda Ulaby reports on the cross-cultural appeal of these psychological ghost stories:

James McRoy studies horror movies for a living. So he doesn’t scare easily. But then the University of Wisconsin professor watched the Japanese version of Dark Water.

There was a moment when I was watching Dark Water, I was watching it in my house, in my basement, you know, in the dark all by myself, where, I, actually, “jumped”!

Dark Water is about a newly single mom who’s moved into a suspiciously cheap apartment with her small daughter.
Yukajia!
Mama..
It’s in a sort of dilapidated building, and water has been seeping down from her ceiling into her bedroom, and water actually uh, particularly stained and seeping water in Japanese culture is often associated with sickness and illness and, and decay.

Water drips spookily throughout a torrent of Japanese movies from the late 1990s. Fans call the genre “J-Horror”.

It’s movies with dead wet girls in them, yeah. That’ how you know them. They always have some historic ch* in her wedding dress, who looks like she just got pushed in the pool.

Grady Hendricks runs New York’s Asian Film Festival. He says J-horror introduced American audiences to a new vocabulary of “fear”. The Grudge, The Ring and Dark Water all feature dead wet girls, vengeful spirits who menace young women and their families.

Dead wet girls are now a staple in horror films from Hong Kong, Korea, and Thailand. Hendricks says they are usually dressed in white.

White is uh, in most Asian countries a funeral color. You know. And hair’s always been sort of a woogy thing, and it pops above all over the place.

Woogy hair imagery isn't exactly new. Hendricks says ghosts with long drifting hair appear in Japanese folklore.

And hair is just a little gross. These movies really go to * with that, culminaing in sort of a ****, a giant wig attacks some people.

Finding malevolence in the ordinary and every day is a familiar horror trope.
Koji Suzuki says the best horror taps into something universal. A bump in the dark, a parent's fear for a child. Suzuki wrote the short story on which Dark Water is based. He says fear is not culturally specific, it's not even species specific.

Take the mouse, you don't know if the mouse laughs, or if it feels moved once in a while, but we do know it's capable of feeling fear.

Suzuki is known as the Japanese Steven King. He also wrote a book called Ringu, that was made into movies in Japan, Korea, and the United States. The American film's found the current remake craze, here it's called The Ring.

Have you heard about this videotape that kills you when you watch it.
What kind of a tape?

A tape, a regular tape, people rent it I don't know. You start to play it, and it's like somebody's nightmare.

Nightmares have been on every country's cinematic canvas from the beginning, says film historian David S. But he says there is one main reason why horror films translate so easily from one culture to another.

The most memorable sequences in horror movies since the beginning of time have usually not involved dialogue.

Silent horror movies from Germany deeply influenced Hollywood in the 1920s, in what S calls an early example of transglobal cinematic cross-pollination.
Yeah, the American entertainment industry cannibalizes anything from anywhere.
For its latest J-horror remake, Hollywood turned to a Brazilian.

Ghost stories and horror films question first and foremost immortality. I mean does it end here? Is there anything beyond the oblivion, when this life ceases, or not.

Walter Salles directed last year’s art house hit, The Motorcycle Diaries. He says he found a spiritual kinship in the way the Brazilians and the Japanese respect the dead, and how they understand the after-life.

I was surprised in seeing how much this question of the after-life is present in their stories. It is something that is much more ingrained in their daily culture, the discussion of that, than it is in Western culture. But in Brazil, thanks to the African influence, this is something that is also present, and this may be...this was a starting point for me.

It may also be what appeals to Western audiences—the mystery, and the psychology. There’s also a real sadness you don’t see in an American horror. Conversely, Grady Hendricks says J-Horror lacks something that in American scare movies is a constant: sex.

One will say that a movie where there’s a wet girl, covered with water and hair everywhere, and she won’t leave you alone, has a sexual component to it. It probably does, but it is subtexted.

Some might find it refreshing to see horror movies where sex and carnage aren’t linked by cause and effect. J-horror is never punitive. People are just in the wrong place, at the wrong time. And maybe, that’s even scarier.
That’s a ghost pleading for help in the movie Pulse—the latest J-horror film to see a US release. It’s coming out here in August. The Hollywood remake is already under way. In Pulse, the after-life has run out of room, so the souls of the dead take up residence on the Internet. Grady Hendricks says in Asia, J-horror has pretty much run its course, Still, it’s brought innovation to a tired genre.

The old scares in horror movies don’t work. And although there’s such a thing as “classic horror movie”, there is really not. Look at the universal horror films from the 30s, I mean, you’d have to be a bit of simple then to be scared by those these days. And the point of a horror movie is to scare you.

It scares me.

Director Walter S says it’s not ghosts.

The difficulty of cultures to communicate scares me. The capacity to understand the ones who are different from who we are.

How curious, that horror seems to be a medium in which cultures find ways of talking to each other, and expressing their worst fears. Neda Ulaby, NPR news.

If you dare, see a clip from the original Dar Water, also one from The Ring, at npr.org.
  原文地址：http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/NPR2005/40568.html