Glossary
Onryo: There are many different varieties of spirits in Japanese culture, but I focus on the Onryo, which is, according to the encyclopaedia of Japan, a vengeful spirit separated from a dead person that is feared to bring disaster. The spirit is not inherently gendered, though I use feminine pronouns due to the modern, Western association that has been formed, as well as because the ghosts shown in Japanese horror films around the turn of the century were almost exclusively vengeful, dead women.
Noh and Kabuki: Two forms of Japanese theatre and performance art.
Nenbutsu and Amida: Repetition of the name for the principle Buddha of Pure Land Buddhism (Amida).
Internationalisation and Globalisation: The processes undertaken by many countries during the 20th Century, where the country would experience rapid development, industrial growth, liberalisation, and connection to other countries across the globe either directly or indirectly assisted by dominant Western powers such as the USA. Sometimes, this is pejoratively referred to as Westernisation.
You sit down in the dark and you insert the tape. The VHS player whirrs into action and you don’t even need to click play before the infamous footage begins. Several seemingly incoherent images flash up on your television set: a girl brushing her hair, letters dancing across the screen, and a distant well in a forest. From this point on, you have seven days to pass on the tape, else you will meet your fate with a vengeful spirit.
Long, black, wet hair covers most of her front and poking out beneath it are deathly pale limbs clothed in a white dress. In modern times, Sadako, the murderous spirit from Ringu, is the most known iteration of this ghost, not only due to the international success of the film from which she stems, but also because she really was the first to properly tie the look with the effects of new media technologies and globalisation through the totally arresting image depicted above. There are few moments in horror as confounding as Sadako leaning into and through the TV set. Sadako could be seen as a modern take on the myth of the Onryo, a type of spirit belonging to a person who died with a grudge. The Onryo is now one of horror’s most ubiquitous monsters but not many people know just how far-reaching her history is. Besides Japanese horror classics such as Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) or Ringu (1998), this ghostly figure had its roots in Japanese myths and religious beliefs, was adopted into the theatrical arts, and now has been totally appropriated into cheap Hollywood remakes. This article traces the history of the vengeful spirit and how it came to be an embodiment of Japanese globalisation-anxiety by exploiting the trope of the ghost girl in horror.
Death has for a long time been regarded with a particular sense of dread and superstition in Japanese religion and mythology. A “bad death” in particular was deemed to be a pollutant to the world of the living. If, say, a person died with an unresolved grudge in their life, it was believed that they would be unable to pass on to the afterlife and thus would have to wander and haunt the world of the living, affecting especially their families.
Belief in these spirits rose to prominence during the Heian period (between 794 and 1185), beginning as a belief held amongst the higher classes of society and spreading to common people in the following centuries. These were the beginnings of the Onryo, and it was not necessarily a woman, though now it is so often associated in the West with the idea of a monstrous-woman. In fact, many battlefields were sites of religious practice where Buddhist priests would offer to pray Nenbutsu (a buddhist, often melodic prayer to Amida, the principal Buddha of Pure Land Buddhism) on dead or dying soldiers who wanted safe passage into Amida’s paradise. If a mother died during childbirth, this was also deemed to be unnatural and would turn her spirit into a very dangerous ghost, which shows early on there were grounds for engendering and highlighting the role of femininity or motherhood in the Onryo. Crucially, the Onryo was also believed to not only be responsible for their enemy’s death but also capable of causing disasters such as earthquakes. As we will see later on, these are key elements to understanding the millennial Onryo.
The myth of the Onryo became incorporated into noh theatre, a form of drama that involved various forms of expression from singing and dancing to storytelling and costume-making. The Onryo is one of the few key archetypes of mask in this form of theatre, alongside those like Jo and Kishin for elder characters and demons, respectively.The Onryo mask was designed to strike fear into the hearts of audiences, with its twisted features and glaring eyes. The mask draws inspiration from the myth, as often the strength of the spirit (and by extension its grudge) would affect the mask’s design and how snarled it was made to look.
Another form of theatre called kabuki established the most popular depiction of the Onryo, and it is the one that we would recognise even today. The design goes as far back as the Edo period (1603-1868) and was important in allowing the audience to distinguish between characters, since kabuki was mostly played by one actor (originally either male or female but gradually becoming more male-dominant). A white burial kimono, long, black, wild hair, and make-up that made the ghost look pale with accentuated blue features to make the face as striking as possible. This trend popularised the Onryo as feminine and as villainous, since the make-up look was similar to the depictions of villains in kabuki, too. Kabuki proved to be a great space for the Onryo to rise in popularity; the plays were often about moral conflict and relationships of the heart, while the stages were equipped with gadgets such as trapdoors to allow the ghost to appear suddenly. Oiwa is the Onryo in Japan’s famous ghost story Yotsuya kaidan. The tale has been performed on stage, film, and beyond, by telling the story of a woman brutally murdered by her husband returning as a ghost to seek revenge. The story’s influence on the modern Onryo cannot be understated. The visual aspect and narrative structure are crucial to the way Sadako, for one, was created. Also, the tale is accompanied by the legend of a curse; retelling the story, it has been told, leads to suffering, while in Ringu the tape haunted by Sadako can be passed on to avoid death. Another very famous tale of the Onryo involves three real men who were said to have become vengeful spirits after their political power was stripped from them. Sugawara no Michizane, born in 845, was one of them and the belief was that anyone who plotted against him died suspiciously. This shows that as much as the stereotype drifted towards feminising the Onryo, its roots are not so gendered.
Ringu is certainly the most famous cinematic depiction of the Onryo. Not only did it become the highest grossing horror in Japan, it also was a hit in the home media market, which made films much more easily exportable to the UK and US. Sadako is the vengeful spirit in question and she holds her grudge due to her childhood trauma caused by adults exploiting her extrasensory perception powers that allow her to be telekinetic. While still a child, she was murdered by an ESP doctor who was investigating her case. In the present day, her curse spreads through a video tape that is passed around by young people. Reiko is a journalist who is investigating these mysterious and brutal deaths caused by the tape, and she enlists the help of her ex-husband to track down the Onryo, involuntarily exposing their son to their dangerous work. Sadako invokes many of the antiquated myths of the Onryo: she looks like the kabuki representation of the ghost and holds a deep grudge against those who wronged her, while also being capable of harming anyone who dares watch her cursed video tape. The modernistic aspect of Sadako comes in with the fact she occupies and lives through technology; technology literally re-generates the myth of the Onryo into the present day. She embodies very relevant anxieties surrounding Japanese identity in a modernised/Westernised world.
After World War II, Japan was occupied by allied forces, mostly Americans, and entered a rapid process known as internationalisation. After millennia of mostly being an isolated and individualistic empire, Japan had quite suddenly become exposed to a lot of new influences on many levels of society, most importantly on an economic level. Through foreign, freed trade, Japan became a leader in information technologies and in various media spaces. Japanese horror was an offspring of that development. On the other hand, Japanese culture, films and all, quickly began flowing into Western homes. This offered film critics and academics a space to explore how these films expressed the fears of the neo-liberalised reality from which they spawned.
The Onryo herself then serves as an amalgam of Japanese culture and some Hollywood horror tropes. Ironically, the Japanese film industry was, in its infancy, very opposed to Hollywood’s influences and much more aligned with Kabuki lighting and staging. However, blockbuster horror and its psychosexual ideology left a clear mark on the construction of the filmic Onryo. For decades, psychoanalysis and feminist readings had dominated academic discourse on horror films, so naturally a new feminine monster will catch the attention of critics.
Sadako represents a “return of the repressed,” a pivotal concept in horror developed by Barbara Creed. Sadako’s trauma caused her to become the Onryo as she died with a grudge. She is also an example of abject horror: something that shows the breakdown of borders, boundaries and natural order. Her corporeality comes to be only when she crawls through a TV screen, defying the ‘natural’ voyeuristic relationship between audience and screen, and in the climax of Ringu her abjection reaches a peak when she kills off Reiko’s ex-husband. These are both horror ideas associated with feminine sexuality in particular. Julia Kristeva’s analysis of abject horror highlights the evocation of birth giving as a form of abjection, as well as the connotations of penetration inherent to the slasher film, since the ‘psycho’ murderer is very often depicted as a sexually disturbed individual. Notable examples include Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees/his mother, Norman Bates, and Leatherface. Kristeva and many other critics of the genre point out the sexual dilemmas at the core of these films as characteristic of the genre, as well as of the broader gender-focused commentary within these films. Ringu is similar since it also shows the resummoning of a serial-killer-like character in Sadako, though the violence in the film occurs not through bloody, stabby rampages but through the act of looking, otherwise known as voyeurism. Voyeurism, the fetish of observation, is a myth closely tied to classical cinematic structure and film viewership. It is the unspoken rule of cinema that visual pleasure is what draws an audience to the cinema and the film frames the spectator, regardless of their gender, as masculine looking and holding power over what is on the screen. Sadako’s ‘rule’ that all who watch her tape, indulging in her traumatic past, must die is a counter-attack against the desire to look. This attack expands to Japan’s culture at large. In a now rapidly globalising country, Japanese people can feel the influence of the West laid upon them as well as the objectifying Orientalist gaze. Sadako is a sort of double-threat as both a response to these fears and the root of them. Her attacks on family and technology reflect the abject nature of Japanese modernity, through the filmic depictions of Japan’s borders and technology. It is no wonder that there are so many scenes in Japanese horror that take place on the coast.
Horror films often choose the targets of their deaths very carefully, and Reiko’s husband is no different. He is punished for representing a fracture in the traditional family unit: he is a divorcee, who prioritised uncovering the repressed narrative of Sadako, jeopardising the potential to get back together with his ex-wife, his co-sleuth in tracking down the origins of Sadako’s Onryo. The family unit was very much an important stake in Japanese horror, as family men, children, and homes are at the forefront of these narratives. This reflects the changing meaning of family life in Japan in the last century. Much like many Western countries after World War II, Japan saw an increase in divorce rates, particularly in the 1970s and 80s. Feminist movements prompted difficult conversations about coming to terms with liberalisation and its effects on the family unit. Other films that approach this topic include Audition (1999), which told the story of a single man looking to exploit young women in the acting business before meeting his untimely demise to a woman who was sexually traumatised in her childhood years. New media technologies also had a profound effect on Japanese horror narratives, as the video tape, though going out of fashion at the time, was used as a medium to bridge the Onryo with the terrifying present and the traumatic past. Other films like Ju-on: The Grudge also use TV screens to great effect in their diegesis.
The legacy left behind by the Onryo is important, as it shows a cruel, almost ironic turn of fate for her and what she stands for. For a split second, she became emblematic of the anxieties surrounding globalisation, but a few years and remakes later, she became just another commodity for the international film business to exploit. The Asia Extreme physical media label, for example, was the label that brought the films over to Western territories such as the UK and US, with some very bold marketing techniques. The founder of Tartan Films (owner of the label) was supposedly blown away by two landmark films in the J-Horror wave in Ringu and Audition, which inspired him to establish the label. Novelty items, problematic word association, and generating a sense of otherness and extremity linked to Asian filmmakers were some of the tricks used by the company to sell these films as aesthetically thrilling alternatives to what Hollywood put out. This had a lasting effect on the perceptions of violence in these films. For example, the horrific events that unfolded at the Virginia Tech University shooting in 2007 were discussed by the media as potentially motivated by a violent, action film from South Korea called Oldboy, solely based on the tenuous logic that two of twenty photographs sent by the perpetrator bore similarity to the film. This reflects two ideological problems in the way that Japanese horror, and perhaps Asian filmmaking more generally faced during this time when the West’s soft power was increasing globally. Imports were homogenised, stripped of their complexity and individuality. They were also marketed on whatever terms the West chose.
In the years after Japanese horror’s millennial peak, the myth was appropriated by Hollywood with mixed effectiveness. The inevitable remakes largely were mediocre and lost the deeper meaning behind the originals. From the myth to the movie, these ghosts developed a lot in their look and ideology, evolving to represent a “prosthetic trauma” in Japan. Her popularity evoked a general agreement that Japanese culture was under threat and it was too late to do anything but cash-in. In a way, what the Onryo came to represent, she came to be through American media. She even made appearances in some video games and merchandising. Commodified and boxed up, the Onryo now comfortably lives in the pantheon of horror monsters, though her legacy is much deeper than that.
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