And why do Asians find them so creepy?
Since picking up my new DVD player, I’ve been renting a lot more movies. Like seven in the past 6 days. All of them have been Asian films (coming from either China, Japan or Korea), and a couple of them have been horror movies. I really don’t get Asian ghosts though. They’re weird and all, but they’re just not that scary. The most common one is the “girl with hair over her face.” She showed up in Ringu (from Japan, remade in the US as The Ring) and Fox’s Stairs (that’s how the Korean translates, but the English title is Wishing Stairs).
That’s a pic of the one from Ringu. I mean, really, what’s so scary about that? It’s gotta be a cultural thing. I just don’t get it. There’s a variation on the theme in Korean ghost stories – the “egg-faced” ghost. That’s one (again, female) where everything’s like a regular person, but the ghost has no face. It’s just blank like an eggshell. Again, not scary to me. Then there’s the kid from Juon. Also, not scary. In his defense, though, he’s really fucking creepy. So much so that he takes the title of “creepiest kid in a movie” away from Haley Joel Osment in A.I.
That’s what he looks like. Not too creepy on the poster, but just check him out on screen. Freaky little bugger, he is.
I’ll have to ask one of my conversation classes about this. Maybe there’s some subtext or something that I’m just not getting. I mean, I dig the movies and all, but they’re just not having the impact on me that they seem to have on the Koreans I’ve spoken to. I’ll report my findings.