Tuesday, October 4, 2016

31 Days of Night, Day 3: Dead Waves

Tonight's film, Dead Waves, has a somewhat darker tone than the previous films that we've talked about in this year's series. It eschews the anthology format for what we would consider a more traditional sort of horror story - a television director, desperate for ratings, makes a series of decisions that draw him deeper into evils both supernatural and mundane.

Guest Reviewers: +Mark Parker , +Frank Fernandez , +Jesse Anderson , +Michael Watkins and the Masked Wrestler El Periquito

Like our last film, Cursed, this film touches on themes of infection - the idea of a curse that spreads like a disease is pervasive in Japanese horror. Here, we even have an incidental moment where - on an internet message board - someone asks "Can I be cursed if I see images of the paranormal on television?", touching on a number of superstitions common in Japan involving cursed images and ghost pictures.

Unlike the other film, though, Dead Waves' curse doesn't seem to simply spread by random chance. Those infected create a vector for it through their own guilt - either the very real guilt suffered by the main protagonist and his antithesis, or the feelings of guilt and self-loathing associated with depression. Depression is, itself, a major theme in the film, as is mental illness as a general topic. While I hesitate to say whether it addressed it well or poorly, as I'm not a native of the culture for whom the movie was made, I will say that some of the images and themes in the film may be problematic or upsetting for those who deal with depression and suicidal ideation, as a warning.

Although the curse in Dead Waves infects us through our guilt, the vector by which it is transmitted is much more mundane - radio waves, specifically those used in television, transmit the titular "dead waves", creating the conditions by which the curse spreads. As in Ringu and Kairo (and other films such as Speak to the Dead in Japan or Are you there? in China), the symbolic link between the ephemeral nature of the way in which modern society communicates and the supernatural is a strong thematic element.

What I realized as I was watching this film, though, has less to do with the specifics of the supernatural disease and more to do with one of the cornerstones of "why am I doing these reviews?", and that's because of my firm belief in the universal nature of horror. Both in talking about Dead Waves and the previous film, Cursed, I discussed the idea of a supernatural curse that attacks indiscriminately, infecting those around it like a disease, in the specific context of Japanese culture, and it's certainly valid to consider that the specific expression found in those and other films wouldn't exist outside that culture's specific mix of germaphobia, social constructs and concepts of religious or spiritual purity.

That being said, however, the idea of an indiscriminate curse or evil that attacks based not on who you are or what you've done, but simply because you filled certain conditions, is not unique to Japan, or even to other cultures in east Asia. Jason doesn't care that the counselors he kills aren't the ones that allowed him to die all those years ago, and Michael Meyers doesn't stop killing once his family members are dead - he targets anyone who sets foot in his family home. Going back even further, fairy tales about people who encounter terrible curses for breaking obscure laws or crossing hidden boundaries are universal throughout European culture, and the idea of spiritual pollution isn't that far behind it.

When addressing horror as a genre of film or literature, I feel it's important to keep in mind that while culture is a part of what informs the writer's mind (the filter as Stephen King put it in his wonderful essays on writing), the tools of horror - or, rather, its roots - are universal. It can be strange, perhaps, to say that horror can bring people together, but fear and the need to confront and understand it are concepts that are universal to the human condition as we understand it.

As we go forward and explore more of the excellent films (and some that are simply so bad they're good), I'll continue to talk about how they relate to the cultures that produce them, but for this film, I think the important takeaway - for myself at least - was that the things we fear are universal. The protagonist of Dead Waves forgot this - he allowed his own concerns to cloud his empathy for those around him, and in the end suffered for it even though he tried to make amends, and the startling lack of empathy he showed right until the very end was perhaps the scariest part of the entire experience.

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