The Big Picture
There are a few watershed moments in horror history, with the Asian horror movie boom of the late ’90s and early 2000s being one of them. This was an era that saw the release of one classic after another. When you have movies like Ringu, Ju-On: The Grudge, Dark Water, and Audition dropping one after another, this was a time when audiences were being terrified at every turn in ways that they never had been. But what was it in particular that Asian filmmakers were tapping into at this time? How were they managing to capture fears that we didn’t even know that we had, and what was inspiring them to go into these corners of the genre? Western filmmakers attempted to recapture this magic with an incredibly mediocre-to-garbage wave of remakes, but even they couldn’t crack the code. Whatever it was, this time proved that horror wasn’t dead — it was back from the grave.
By the time the 21st century rolled around, horror had been riding a dry spell for the better part of a decade. There were a few solid releases with movies like Candyman and Scream, but after the slasher boom of the ’80s, it seemed as though Western filmmakers had exhausted all of their spookiest ideas. Folks were treading the same waters with killers in masks and reviving the Universal Horror Monsters with movies like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The genre had spent the better part of the 20th century innovating itself at a rapid pace, but suddenly, there was nowhere left to go. Apart from The Blair Witch Project, new grounds were hardly being broken at all.
Asian Horror Movies Leaned Into the Times
Meanwhile, something very special was happening with Asian horror movies. While there were a few indie hits here and there, most Western hemisphere horror movies were being made in the studio system on a pretty penny. Asian filmmakers, on the other hand, kept in mind that the rawer the scare, the better. These projects were usually being made on a low budget and preyed on the ’90s boom in media technology, but often relied on simple ghost stories and curses for their premises. Home video, cell phone technology, and security surveillance footage were key to some of these movies’ stories, but in the end, most of them are bare-bones supernatural movies, just made electronically and brought into suburbia or the big city. Grainy footage and distorted audio were regularly used to give audiences a glimpse at something sinister, but wouldn’t give you a completely clear idea.
It’s not that the wheel was actively being reinvented here, these movies were just paving new ways for horror that had nothing to do with knives or re-animation. Even if it was a ghost story or one of a serial killer being told, the types of movies that we’ve seen a thousand times, then you at least had a certain style of filmmaking to look forward to. The pace was always kept slow and steady, building a sense of dread through patient editing, locked down, static cinematography, and very little music. You’re being made to feel as close to the real world as possible. To add to this grounded feeling and help spice things up, the Asian horror boom was making items in our homes and the places that we live in terrifying. It’s an approach that pre-dates what we’ve seen in recent years with the analog horror movement online. A lot of people see The Blair Witch Project as the birth of that subgenre, but that movie was released in 1999. Ringu rooted its horror story in late 20th-century technology a year earlier!
Asian Horror Movies Kept It Simple
Simplicity is key to almost all the greatest horror movies, but this is especially the case here. Most of the projects from this period could have their plots summed up with an elevator pitch kind of description. If you watch a cursed VHS tape, you’ll die in seven days. A girl and her mother move into a creepy, old apartment complex where they begin experiencing the supernatural. People are receiving voicemails from their future selves, warning them of their deaths. While Western audiences were busy digging up bland versions of classic horror tales or tearing apart different parts of the genre for parody, Asian filmmakers didn’t overthink it. They continued telling the same horror stories, just with an edge that leaned all the way into the modern world.
‘Ringu’ is the Best of This Era
If you’re looking for a place to start with this era in Asian horror, you can’t go wrong with Ringu. This tale of a cursed VHS tape that curses you to die in seven days if you watch it was a massive deal when it came out. Ringu has all the film grain, creepy atmosphere, urban legend plot, and slow-burn horror that would come to be so popular in this movement. Nanako Matsushima is highly engaging as the lead character, Reiko Asakawa, and has a believable and sympathetic character dynamic with her son Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka), one that is sure to get you emotionally invested. If you’ve only seen the Gore Verbinski remake, don’t stop there. That movie polishes off the grainy look of Ringu, gets way over the top with the CGI, and stretches out the runtime to almost two hours. It might be a good movie, but it doesn’t stack up to the original.
More Spooky Picks From Asian Horror’s Heyday
Director Hideo Nakata proves himself to be the king of this moment in Asian horror, not only with his incredible grasp on crafting scares in Ringu, but also with his 2002 classic, Dark Water. Both films have a wonderful urban legend feel to them and lean into ghost stories that feel possible in the modern world, all with a steady edit, gray, grainy cinematography, and minimal sound design. Aside from Nakata’s films, if you are looking to dive into more of what this era has to offer, there’s plenty more to choose from. You can never go wrong with Ju-On: The Grudge, a fantastic haunted house movie with an iconic villain at its center. There’s also One Missed Call, which has a wonderfully 21st-century premise that follows people receiving voicemails from their dying future selves. Then there’s Audition, which might not be supernatural, but it does have all the other trademarks of this era, and has one of the most disturbing finales to any horror movie ever.
The Wave of Garbage North American Remakes
If only we knew how good we actually had it with the North American remake of Ringu. Hollywood did everything they could to capitalize on this moment in Asian horror, but boy did they miss the mark. While The Ring kicked off this Asian horror remake trend with a good bit of success in 2002, the mid to late 2000s saw a flood of atrocious attempts at recapturing the glory of their original movies. The Grudge is begrudgingly average, One Missed Call is one missed opportunity (that’s putting it nicely), Dark Waters sunk to the bottom of anyone’s memory, and no one invited The Uninvited to be made. These movies were way too over the top in trying to deliver scares, relied way too much on CGI, forgot the analog horror aspects, and left slow-burn horror in the dust in favor of loud jump scares. Aside from The Ring and some bits of The Grudge, these movies are all garbage. As Bong Joon-Ho stated while accepting his Best Picture Oscar for Parasite, “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” Steer clear of these North American remakes, y’all.
If you think that the ’90s and early 2000s were a rough period in horror, you just haven’t dug into that era’s Asian horror movement. If you’re fresh to the scene, then you have a whole slew of classics to dig through. Throw these movies on and brave them if you can, but if the phone rings when the credits start rolling, whatever you do, don’t answer it.
