In Japanese horror, the anthology film is a staple of the genre. American horror anthologies have become popular over the years thanks to the V/H/S series, but occupy a much smaller part of the horror genre than they do elsewhere, so we'll probably see quite a few films like tonight's in the coming month.
Tonight's film is titled Four Roads to Hell, or Tales of Terror from Japan. Last year, on Day 6 of this project, I reviewed some similar films and my assessment of the style's place in the genre remains pretty much the same: the anthology genre, such as the film we're watching, has its roots all the way back to the Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, and is probably one of the oldest parts of Japanese horror culture still in practice today.
Without further ado, however, tonight's film:
Four Roads, from a purely technical standpoint, is reminiscent in quality to an American made for TV film. This isn't entirely unusual, though, as Japanese film budgets tend to be more comparable to television budgets than you'd find in America. The shorts themselves are arranged by different directors, and range from horror-comedy (such as Another One, where the narrator is troubled by an oddly polite, track-suit wearing ghost and The Promise, about a young man's relationship with his grandmother following her death), to more standard horror premises (Overtime, about an office building where young men who work overtime find their lives endangered by the ghost of an office lady or Breath of Mononoke, which bookends the series with the story of a young woman being chased through a car park by a creature which at least one of the reviewers insists is a bear) to the outright surreal (Second Round, the story of a late night cab driver, or Men in Black, which touches on the Japanese fascination with alien mythology, or UMAs).
As might be evinced by the range of styles and stories, there's not a lot of coherence in the arrangement of shorts. At first, I considered the possibility that they might be arranged in such a way as to become progressively scarier over time, but the placement of The Promise upsets that theory. It occurred to me only after the film was over (our first foray this month is less than an hour long, which lends to the TV length feel of the production values) that the placement and "scariness" of the individual shorts didn't particularly matter. What was intriguing about Four Roads to Hell was the way in which they encapsulated so many different styles of story and creature - there were aliens, several ghosts, a bear(?), strange curses, whimsical hauntings and mysteries that remained unexplained even after we'd already moved on to the next tale.
The thing that the stories in Four Roads did have in common, though, was their abrupt endings. All of the reviewers commented on them, and I think that the true horror effect comes from there - the movie is remarkably light on jump scares or body horror, but where it's openly scary (as in Breath of Mononoke or Overtime), it drives home the inevitability of its protagonists' demise, and where it's whimsical or surreal, it ends abruptly, offering little explanation and no closure. A story like The Promise might leave us laughing, but it also leaves us with a seed of unsettling implications to dwell on long after the movie's over.
As a rule, I try not to dwell too much on whether a movie is good or bad - I tend to focus on whether a film succeeded in the goals it set out to achieve. In that arena, I feel like Four Roads has managed it. Even the stories that dipped heavily into comedy (already, as I've said before, a close companion to horror anyway), did so in a way that could easily veer into the unsettling and surreal, and - perhaps aware of the limitations of the medium in which they were working - the writers and directors arranged the shorts in a way to let us lead ourselves into that landscape through implication and consideration. This is actually a relatively common technique in a lot of Japanese storytelling, which often relies on the audience to fill in the blanks from context and their own imaginations, rather than leading them to a single core conclusion.
As we go through the month, we will likely touch on at least one or two other anthology films, but I think this one has an important lesson to teach regarding the way in which Japanese horror differs from its American counterparts - while they often draw from the same well (many of the visual elements of the Koji Suzuki novel, The Ring, draw heavily on 80s American horror stories), Japanese culture has a very different idea of how a story can and should end, which can often seem to be somewhat unsatisfying to an American audience.
No comments:
Post a Comment