CAREER INJ ECTION

The horror of J-Horror.

If it did exist, it would be all over the internet,” says a professor in 2016’s super-ghost mash-up Sadako Vs Kayako, commenting on the Ringu films’ VHS curse. Yet in 2017’s US threequel/reboot (threeboot?) Rings, the vengeful wraith – Sadako in Japan, Samara in America – assaulted digi-tech with no noticeable box-office boost. Sadako seems finished. And Japanese horror’s looking peaky, too.

Why Rings failed to scare up any interest is debatable. Hideo Nakata’s original Ringu (1998) merged folk-tale terrors with tech jitters, but the tech fears it toyed with are now either obsolete or part of our wallpaper: too dated to shock, too familiar to terrify. And the same goes, perhaps, for many of J-horror’s moves.

The genre stretches back further than Ringu. Roots in folk-lore, woodblock prints and kabuki plays aside, films including 1953’s Ugetsu and 1964’s Kwaidan set templates. Later, Norio Tsuruta’s 1991 series

Scary True Stories laid precedents for the boom years. By the late-’90s, dank basements, vengeful women, jerky ghost children and ambient noises came oozing out of Japan. In Ringu, Sadako crawled from a well and into global notoriety. J-horror proliferated: Audition, Dark Water, Ju-On:

The Grudge, Noroi and Pulse ( Kairo) all wedded folk-terrors to modern fears.

The talent drawn to Hollywood’s remakes demonstrated their appeal. Gore Verbinski’s The Ring lacked Ringu’s subtlety but offered Lynch-class casting in Naomi Watts; Sarah Michelle Gellar built on Buffy-love in The Grudge. But Walter Salles’ Dark Water drowned the original’s ambiguities, and by the time of 2006’s Pulse and 2008’s One Missed

Call, Hollywood had drained the well. So, it seemed, had Japan. Takashi Shimizu kept revisiting Ju-On, while Sadako haunted sequels, prequels and remakes. In 2016’s stare-off between the Ringu/Ju-On leads, only one avenue seemed left: Sadako Vs Kayako might have been fun, but self-parody was its only option.

The answer? Try something else. Shimizu did with Reincarnation and Marebito, both superior to his Ju-Ons; Kairo director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy majored in Hitchcockian suspense; Audition’s Takashi Miike played wicked games with J-horror’s kabuki play roots with Over Your Dead Body. If Sadako’s force is spent, let’s have a change of Ringu tone.