The J-Horror Virus - Directors interview on Fangoria

Ask any horror fan what country makes the scariest horror movies, and they'll likely say Japan. Among the slasher reboots and “torture porn” surge of the late 90s and early 2000s, one subgenre from further afield crept into the minds and nightmares of horror fans, a subgenre that prioritized subtle scares and eschewed gore in favor of atmospheric ghost stories. Despite only lasting a few years, this genre – referred to as J-horror – changed the horror landscape forever and sparked a slew of American remakes – yet it remains one of the most misunderstood, understudied and underseen parts of horror's vast ouvre.

Sarah Appleton: For me personally I had just made The Found Footage Phenomenon and was thinking about what was next. I met Jasper prior to that film, and Jasper obviously has a long history with Japanese film and I felt like this documentary was a great chance to combine our skills. Personally, I’ve loved J-horror since I was a kid. My dad wrote a book about it when I was 10 (Denis Meikle's The Ring Companion) so I watched a lot of the films that perhaps other people might not have watched at that point and was very aware of the genre. 

Jasper Sharp: I’ve been writing about Japanese cinema for a long time, and you quickly realize there are so many different genres within the genre as a whole. I knew J-Horror was a genre that needed discussing because I felt that the full story hadn’t been told properly. When I started Midnight Eye with Tom Mes, we owed a lot of our success to this wave of J-horror –  we started the site up at the same time as Ring and Battle Royale and when all those types of films were coming out.

Although these films were kind of the beginnings of the consciousness for Western audiences, there’s an entire backstory that hadn’t been told. It’s all about telling that story, getting back to the origins and using the abilities we have and the connections we’d made that other documentary makers might not have access to.

The J-Horror Virus details how there's a lot of confusion and misconceptions around the term J-horror, with some people incorrectly using it to refer to any and all Japanese horror. How would you define the term more specifically?

SA: J-horror is a subgenre in itself, it just so happens to be labelled with a broader term. It’s a genre that started at the very end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s with a lot of recognisable tropes, and the noticeable factor is that its films all made by the same group of people who were all taking influence from each other. That’s why the films all have similar tropes – a young girl with long black hair, a white dress, the moody atmosphere, a lot of water.

Ring made such an impact overseas in a way that no other Japanese film really had before in the West, so you can understand where the term comes from, but J-horror is its own thing. It doesn’t include Godzilla for example, or a Japanese body horror like Tetsuo: The Iron Man.

JS: I remember when the term was coined on an English language Internet forum. Lots of films like Ring were coming out, and J-pop had just started to become more popular in the West, so the J- prefix was applied. But when we interviewed the filmmakers for The J-Horror Virus, a lot of them weren’t aware that they were operating in a genre. They didn’t know where the label came from, because it didn’t come from Japan. The producer of Ring, Takashige Ichise, later did the J-Horror Theater series after becoming aware there was a foreign market for this genre.

...The J-Horror Virus hits Shudder on November 4.

Read the rest of the interview on Fangoria

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