Round and round and round and round and round

I don't venture into Japanese DVD shops these days. When I first got here I was super-excited to see all the strange stuff I could never watch or understand, but then after a few trips the "could never watch or understand" part sinks in and you kind of give up. But when I used to pop in on my way back from work, the thing that I was drawn to the most was the horror section.

I'm not that interested in horror, generally. I've got nothing against it, but like photography or knitting, it's a whole realm of study that I'd like to get around to exploring if I had infinite time on my hands; knowing that I don't, I'd rather write it off entirely than try and force myself to dedicate time to it out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Having said that, I love the aesthetic of Japanese horror. Even the act of browsing DVD covers is like walking through a particularly pungent nightmare; something about the combination of colours, faces, and the bare strikingness of the written characters hits you around the head and pushes needles into the more primitive realms of your brain. If I had to compare it to something - and my knowledge of horror is hardly encyclopedic - I guess it's the gunginess of Cronenberg crossed with the "something feels horribly wrong but I can't explain why" sensibility of David Lynch. But it's something all of its own, really - gungy, grungy, vaguely crass and usually cheap-looking, yet at the same time subtle and artful in its terrifyingness.

Enough meandering. I recently watched Uzumaki, a film made in 2000 based on a popular manga series. The story follows a town which appears to be under some sort of curse, which causes people to become obsessed with spiral shapes (Uzumaki translates as 'spiral', 'vortex' or 'whirlpool'):

First of all, I want to clarify that I haven't read the manga which I am told is far better than the film. The film is certainly flawed; the ending is unsatisfying, and not the good kind of unsatisfying you get with, say, No Country for Old Men. (The film was actually made before the manga was finished.) The story doesn't really hang together nicely and it feels like there's unfulfilled potential. It's not a masterpiece by any means. However, it made my hungry for more Japanese horror and there were definitely things about it I really liked (though of course a lot of that's down to the source material, which I very much want to read now). I love the idea of the enemy being something as vague and unknowable as a type of shape. You'll never get a Paranormal Activity where the ghost turns out to be a triangle. The fact that there's no bodily villain makes the whole thing so creepy, because you don't actually know what it is you're supposed to be afraid of. There are references to a 'curse' and standard horror-trope moments where you see an investigative journalist looking up old newspaper clippings in a library, but unless I missed something there's never anything remotely approaching an explanation, or any hint by which we could identify the evil. We just know that people start being haunted by the idea of spirals, and later reach various horrible fates relating to the shapes of spirals. (Yeah, it's hard to explain.) The fragmentary nature of the story sometimes comes across as bad plotting; other times as a deliberate move to make the film more mystifying and unknowable. Like a lot of Japanese media, the film also looks a little cheap compared to Hollywood fare, but again, I quite like that. The special effects are squelchy and in-your-face; even the crappy CGI looks distinctive and interesting in its conspicuousness. And I like the general aura of wrongness. Even from the beginning, when everything should seemingly be fine, the world is darkly lit and sparse and people behave in ways they shouldn't. Overall it's very different from standard mainstream Western horror, which feels sterile by comparison. I'm sure there's better things out there, but I'm glad I watched it.

Now if you will excuse me, I'm off to look at some snails.