Browsing by Subject "Horror"

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    Nightmares from the Past: 'Kaiki eiga' and the Dawn of Japanese Horror Cinema
    (2015-08) Crandol, Michael
    While the global popularity of Japanese horror movies of the past twenty years such as Ring (Ringu, 1998) and Ju-on: The Grudge (Ju-on, 2002) has made these films the subject of much academic attention, the previous nine decades of popular Japanese horror cinema remain an understudied area of film history. Known as kaiki eiga or "strange films," domestic horror movies based on classic Edo period (1603-1868) ghost stories, as well as imported pictures like Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), were a mainstay of commercial genre cinema in Japan from the silent era through the 1960s, and wielded an influence on the so-called "J-horror" pictures that achieved worldwide success at the turn of the millennium. This dissertation examines the history of kaiki as a category of popular film, the similarities and differences between kaiki and the English-language concept of "horror film," and the large body of kaiki cinema produced in Japan during the prewar and postwar era that has, until now, remained virtually unknown to Western scholarship. I trace the development of the kaiki aesthetic and the discourse of kaiki eiga in Japan and its relationship to American and European horror cinema as well as native traditions of the fantastic and grotesque. Attention is given to the role of actress Suzuki Sumiko, the nation's first horror movie star, in establishing the visual portrayal of kaiki monsters onscreen, and the work of the Shint?h? studio and director Nakagawa Nobuo, who brought the domestic kaiki film to the pinnacle of its critical respect and anticipated much of the style of the later J-horror pictures. The dissertation concludes with a brief look at the ways in which the kaiki genre influenced the J-horror movement, and the ways contemporary filmmakers like Kurosawa Kiyoshi retain kaiki elements like the vengeful spirit in the creation of the unique aesthetic known as J-horror.
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    Po Mo: modernism and the politics of Gothic adaptation.
    (2010-06) Curtright, Lauren
    This dissertation demonstrates that images of Edgar Allan Poe have shaped his position in the literature and popular imaginary of the United States, that Poe's writings evidence his interest in photography and anticipate cinema, and that Poe's function as a technology has enabled politically diverse, international adaptations of his works and themes. To evaluate the politics of works of "Poe modernism," I interpret their engagement with what Walter Benjamin famously identified as the dual potential of technological reproducibility, or the ways in which photographic imaging has been alternately used to serve reactionary or progressive ends. At the turn of the twentieth century, American journalist Thomas Dimmock and film directors D. W. Griffith and Charles Brabin used technologies of reproducibility to remake Poe from his tarnished image. Narrative accounts of photographic images of Poe published in The Century Magazine and romanticizations of Poe in the films The Avenging Conscience, or 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' and The Raven transform Poe into a model of white, middle-class masculinity. Tracing the etiology of this reconstruction of Poe to the work of William Abbott Pratt, a Gothic Revivalist architect and daguerreotypist, who served as Confederate emissary to England, I historicize and theorize the reproduction of racism within a largely unacknowledged strain of the Southern gothic. Into his fiction, Poe incorporates techniques modeled on the first form of photography. Like other nineteenth-century writers, Poe characterized the daguerreotype as both more "magical" and more "truthful" than previous media. He took advantage of this paradoxical conception of photography to equivocate about the reality of race. Poe's stories suggest that daguerreotypy increased anxiety about the tenability of racial categories in the United States at the same time as they indicate that this arguably protocinematic technology was used to reconfigure a racial hierarchy based on invisible properties. Poe's recognition of the significance of photography to ideology ensured attention to his works by filmmakers committed to social critique. European émigrés Robert Florey and Edgar G. Ulmer adapted Poe's writings to counter both Nazism and American racism. Similarly, reconfigurations of Poe in modern Japan link imaging technologies to constructed hierarchies of nation, race, gender, and sexuality. Specifically, I analyze Poe's influence on Japanese gothic from ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense)--specifically, Midori Ozaki's fiction--to Ishiro Honda's Gojira to Nagisa Oshima's Max mon amour to the contemporary Ring cycle, adapted from Koji Suzuki's novel series. Finally, I consider the consequences of the modernist fascination with instantaneity as manifested in, among other texts, Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum's multimedia exhibits on the first atomic bombing. The Peace Museum adapts gothic tropes to represent the horrific instantaneity of nuclear attack and to resist the racism that informed the United States' rationalization for deploying atomic bombs on Japan. In sum, this dissertation places Poe within a nexus of creators of textual and visual media all of whom are concerned with technology's effects on human life, perception, and representation.