LOST AND FOUND: THE FOUND FOOTAGE PHENOMENON AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN SUPERNATURAL HORROR FILM

Found footage horror is neither a particularly new nor necessarily a low-budget phenomenon. While the first experiments with the format may have been cheap, the proliferation of found footage horror films in the last decade has led to a significant spike in their production costs. Box office figures demonstrate, that at least some of these productions have been appreciated by the audiences. In Asian cinemas, retrieving digital images of ghosts recorded on computer screens, videotapes, CCTV, or mobile phone photo-messages have been a staple feature in a sizeable portion of J-horror productions, but it is only recently that found footage films have started being made in Southeast Asia. This paper offers a brief historical and theoretical overview of found footage films and their contribution to the horror genre, and focuses in more detail on four Southeast Asian productions of the kind made between 2009-2012: Keramat (directed by Monty Tiwa, 2009, Indonesia), Seru (directed by Mohd Pierre Andre and Woo Ming Jin, 2011, Malaysia), Haunted Changi (directed by Tony Kern and Andrew Lau, 2010, Singapore), and Darkest Night (directed by Noel Tan, 2012, Philippines), all of which can be viewed as an alternative to the mainstream local horror cinema. The paper argues that the two most common strategies used by found footage horror films (including the four films in question) are the techniques that effectively authenticate the horror experience: inducing a heightened perception of realism in the audience and a contradictory to it feeling of perceptive subjectivity.

Published in Plaridel 12.2 (2015)

MEDICAL MYSTERIES: MADNESS, MAGIC, MALEVOLENT DOCTORS IN CONTEMPORARY THAI HORROR FILM

For some inexplicable reason, contemporary Thai horror films seem to be obsessively featuring members of medical profession as central figures of evil, capable of committing unspeakable crimes and not even once presenting them in a more positive light. By doing so, the films in question upset the typical horror balance of good doctors vs. mad/evil doctors and make one wonder about the possible rationale behind such negative representation of the profession. This article argues that the negative portrayal of medical professionals in contemporary Thai horror is to a certain extent reminiscent of the tensions between the official and popular attitudes to Western bio-medicine and Traditional Thai Medicine (TTM) in Thai society. The article will also discuss the possibility that medical doctors, together with other members of the professional community, such as for instance architects, or journalists, represent a relatively high level in the Thai social hierarchy which can be openly criticized without much fear that the films will be cut by censors. Last but not least, the article will look in more detail on Paween Purijitpanya’s debut feature The Body #19 (2006). Set within the less-than-glamorous world of medical professionals, the film toys with the concept of the mental disease (schizophrenia), which in traditional Thai folk medicine has consequently been attributed to spiritual possession. This dual spiritual/medical nature of the mental disease in Thai popular perception, has allowed the filmmakers to create a film that can be seen as simultaneously repeating and breaking the established Thai horror formulas. At the same time, while directing our attention to the notion of disease, the film offers an interesting, though subtle (= strict censorship) representation of the disintegration of the traditional hierarchical Thai society and its values.

Published in Orbis Linguarium 40 (2014).

GHOSTS, REVENANTS AND SPECTRES: THE SIDE EFFECTS OF DYING

This article focuses on the popular representation of the afterlife, or our belief in such, as embodied in the idea of a ghost, a revenant, or a spectre, or in other words, the spirit of the deceased, as contrasted with the more animistic spiritual beings epitomising the powers of the natural world. For the lack of suitable research materials, the paper is geographically limited to the areas influenced by the major religious systems of beliefs, out of which Christianity (particularly Catholicism), Buddhism and Taoism seem to be particularly spirit-friendly, and to the areas culturally abounding in literary and cinematic representations of the spiritual encounters between the living and the dead. At the time when inter-cultural communication has become a hot topic to discuss, we become aware that even the dead are expected to resolve their cultural differences. One way to bring harmony to the culturally diverse world of contemporary spirits, as this paper suggests, is to see them as subject to the same process of globalisation and informatization as the living. Today’s ghosts do not linger aimlessly in deserted castles, nor do they hover impatiently over burial places. More and more often we see them invade virtual worlds of the new media, haunting computers and telecommunication devices, feeling very much at home within the immaterial realms of modern technology we have come to take for granted. If the ghosts were created in our image, ironically, living in the age of information and hyper-reality pushes us to embrace the unseen (now legitimised by science). While the rationality of the industrial age denied the existence of the supernatural, such a simple claim is no longer easy to uphold in the times when we are expected to believe in artificial intelligence, virtual reality and online banking involving invisible funds. No wonder then that in our contemporary world of ghosts, ghosts have become more real than ever.

Published in Facing Finality: Cognitive and Cultural Studies on Death and Dying. Ed. Erich A. Berendt. Louisville: University of Louisville, 2011.

STILL DEATHS: THE DIALECTICS OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN HORROR FILM

The article discusses the representation of photography in two relatively recent Asian horror movies: a Hong Kong production Abnormal Beauty (2004), directed/produced by Oxide and Danny Pang and a Thai film Shutter (2004), directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, focusing in particular on the specific context of photography in a horror movie, used to record death and afterlife. Both Abnormal Beauty and Shutter feature professional photographers/photography students as main protagonists. In both cases the notion of photography as a medium and a theoretical/academic discourse of photography are significant for the narrative structure and the films’ visual organisation. The article will examine the ways the two films exploit photography’s specific relation to death and afterlife in a cross-cultural perspective, raising the question whether the theoretical discourse of photography can potentially “westernise” the narrative technique of an Asian film. The article is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the understanding of death from Chinese and Buddhist perspectives and its incompatibility with the western notion of death fetishism, seen here as underlying the narrative of Abnormal Beauty. The second section examines a number of influential critical theories discussing photography in terms of a death metaphor and suggests that structuring the narrative of Abnormal Beauty around theoretical concept of photography infused with psychoanalytical thought inevitably leads to the film’s westernisation and alienates it from its cultural context. The final section addresses a more traditionally eastern model of utilising photography in a horror movie, i.e. capturing the spirits, which is discussed in the context of spiritualism, spirit photography and exposing the supernatural in Shutter.

Published in Gothic NEWS. Eds. Max Duperray and Gilles Menegaldo. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2011.

SPIRITUS EX MACHINA: SPECTRAL TECHNOLOGIES IN ASIAN HORROR FILM

Difficult as it may be to talk about a unified category of “Asian Horror Film,” this article originates from an observation that in a great majority of Asian horror films (exemplified in this research by Japanese, South Korean, Hong Kong, Chinese, Thai, Taiwanese, Singaporean and Vietnamese films) the horror film is almost equivalent with the “ghost” film. At the same time, it is relatively easy to notice that the celluloid representations of Asian spirits frequently do not comply with the Hollywood-established patterns, easily recognisable to a Western horror fan. This, to a certain extent can be said to reflect local religious beliefs, customs and traditions, as well as numerous Eastern aesthetic and philosophical values. Recently, however, many Asian horror films seem to convey a message that the spiritual world is in need of a technological upgrade. This, in turn, has a direct effect on the popular understanding and representation of the supernatural, as observed in everyday life in the said Asian cultures, and the idea of “the ghost” evolves. This paper examines the notion of spiritual technologies, understood in a twofold manner. On the one hand, based on an analysis of a number of contemporary East Asian and South East Asian horror films, the discussion will focus on the ways modern technologies, particularly visual and media technologies, have contributed to a shift in understanding the concept of the ghost. On the other hand, this paper will focus in more detail on the case of Thai horror cinema, where ghosts have become a narrative technique and ghost stories seem to have contributed to the development of cinematic technologies in general.

Published in Asian Journal of Literature, Culture and Society 3.1-3.2. Bangkok: Assumption University Press, 2009.

GHOSTS AND THE MACHINES: SPECTRES OF TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

In popular imagination, ghosts, or the spirits of the departed have always existed as traces of the past. But today, like anything else in this world, if they want to survive they need to adjust to the present, if not future. Nowhere is this more visible than in contemporary Asian horror cinema, perhaps to a certain extent also because unlike in the rationally repressive west, many Asian cultures do not rush to deny spiritualism, but rather negotiate the ways in which spiritual experiences can apply to media and technology-infused global societies. This article focuses on examining the ways new media and visual technologies affect the representation of ghosts in contemporary Asian horror film, in effect producing a new variety of spirits, named here “ghosts in the machines.” These new spirits materialise within photographic and video images, transmit themselves through television frequency waves, become embedded in an electronic code, scramble the signal of video surveillance cameras, clone themselves using cellular technologies, replicate through text messages and emails, hack computer systems and infect the cyberspace better than any computer viruses known to man. Since the described phenomenon can be seen as a feature characteristic of contemporary Japanese horror cinema, this article will focus mostly on Japanese horror films and those Korean, Hong Kong and Thai films that seem to follow the Japanese model or exist in intertextual relations to it.

Published in Asian Journal of Literature, Culture and Society 2.2. Bangkok: Assumption University Press, 2008.

VIOLATING THE VISUAL: CONTEMPORARY ART AND VISUAL MISREPRESENTATION

The article explores the work of several contemporary visual artists who frequently choose as their medium video installations or video performance. Their works probe into the nature of perception and representation, examining the relation between the visible and the seer, and involving the seer in a variety of visual games. More often than not they are concerned with visual representation as the distortion of reality, or indeed the misrepresentation of the real. The versatility of modern technologies has allowed contemporary artists for recreating many a theoretical speculation, making their artwork an interesting supplement to the numerous theories of perception.

Published in Wor(l)ds in Transition. Eds. E. Borkowska and A. Lyda. Katowice: WSZMiJO, 2004.