Japanese Remakes? Better or for Worse?

Perhaps the most annoying trend in recent American cinema has been the remake craze. Remakes seem to arrive in packs, such as the recent onslaught of 1970s horror movies and TV shows, reflecting the groupthink of most studio executives who are in the position of greenlighting new projects. These movies provide a certain degree of comfort for studios because they already have proven lucrative. But the logic behind the recent trend of American remakes of Japanese films is as much due to quality of filmmaking as it is to financial appeal.

Obvious examples of this trend can be seen in two recent remakes of Japanese horror movies: "The Ring" (based on the Japanese original "Ringu") and "The Grudge" (based on the Japanese film "Ju-on"). Both remakes have become successes in America, each grossing over $100 million. Yet, they also provide an interesting opportunity to examine the cannibalistic tendencies of movie studios, as well as the growing influence of Japanese cinema on mainstream American filmmaking.

The current trend of Japanese horror movies started in 1998 with director Hideo Nakata's "Ringu." The movie, based on a novel by Koji Suzuki, proved to be an instant sensation in Japan, warranting two sequels, and ushered in a taste for high-concept ghost stories reflecting the dominance of technology in the consumer lifestyle. This success resulted in the acquisition of the series by Dreamworks and the big-budget 2002 remake "The Ring," directed by Gore Verbinski, and starring Naomi Watts. While it retained much of the plot and some of the restrained tone from the original version, the American version "The Ring" also added elements from the parallel American trend of horror movies, including an emphasis on carnival-ride shocks and jumpy editing rather than a slowly mounting sense of dread. Nakata is now directing the American sequel for Dreamworks and will be directing other American projects as well.

Unlike the more mainstream "Ringu," "Ju-on" premiered in Japan in 2000 as a low budget direct-to-video series done by Takashi Shimizu. Rather than the complex supernatural mystery setup of "Ringu," "Ju-on" employs simple, straightforward scare tactics. A group of tenuously linked people all end up in a haunted house where they are eventually murdered by the ghosts of a boy and his mother. The chronology of events is jumbled to emphasize the importance of individual segments over a unified plot. There are even titles before each segment announcing the name of the person about to die. In a sense, "Ju-on" becomes an experiment that explores how long tension can be maintained in the viewer if he knows what will happen eventually.

With the aid of word-of-mouth marketing, the "Ju-on" series spawned two successful theatrical releases in 2003. Upon seeing the first movie, director and producer Sam Raimi (the "Evil Dead" and "Spider-Man" series) was so struck by it that he hired Shimizu to remake "Ju-on" in Japan, using the exact style but crafted for American audiences. When the American remake "The Grudge" came out in October, the film maintained the experimental formula of the original series, but was criticized by those who had seen the original for losing something in the translation of American actors to a Japanese setting. A sequel to the film, to be directed by Shimizu, is planned.

American studios' importing of directors from abroad to remake their own works is a fascinating process to observe. On the one hand, it is nice to see Japanese directors allowed to do justice to their own source material. This might be taken as a sign of respect toward the increasingly commercial Japanese film industry.