Ghost in the Well: The Hidden History of Horror Films in Japan by Michael Crandol (review)

The J-horror genre peaked fairly quickly, beginning in the 1990s and mostly fading from prominence by the early 2000s, but it has left a lasting impact in the form of aesthetics, character types, and international remakes. Films like Ringu (The Ring; 1998), Ju-on (The Grudge; 2002), and Kairo (Pulse; 2001) have spurred substantial English-language scholarship in film studies, Japanese cinema studies, media studies, and Japanese popular culture studies. Less attention, though, has been paid to the popular Japanese kaiki films from the 1920s to the 1960s, which were often inspired by traditional ghost stories (kaidan) and kabuki or bunraku plays. Michael Crandol's Ghost in the Well: The Hidden History of Horror Films in Japan seeks to fill that gap, presenting detailed historical research on how the changing shape of horror cinema in Japan would eventually lead to the development of J-horror in the late 1990s.

In the early 2000s much was written in English on key J-horror films like The Ring and the films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Shimizu Takashi, as well as on the subject of "media horror" and the frightening nature of technology, a frequent focus of these films. But this scholarship rarely placed these films or the genre within the context of Japanese cinema history and scholarship, often overlooking the wealth of writing on J-horror by film critics and writer-director-scholars like Kurosawa and Takahashi Hiroshi. It also tended to define J-horror fairly broadly, including films that were never categorized as horror in Japan. In the past ten years, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Baryon Tensor Posadas, Chika Kinoshita, and Steven T. Brown, among others, have sought to offer new historical and theoretical contexts for J-horror¹ Crandol thus joins a group of scholars who are interested in how Japanese audiences and film critics have conceived of not only J-horror but the idea of horror films since the early twentieth century. While discussions of J-horror's influence on the non-Japanese film world are widespread, Crandol's book is one of the first to examine the influence of English-language horror, particularly early films, on Japanese horror cinema.

Ghost in the Well traces the journey of horror cinema in Japan from the late 1910s to the J-horror boom of the 1990s, beginning with the juxtaposition of two images. The first is the familiar figure of Sadako, the vengeful spirit at the center of the Ring franchise, who emerges from a well and then through a television screen. The second is the ghost of Okiku from a fragment of a no longer extant version of the film Banchō sarayashiki (The Dish Mansion at Bancho), likely from the late 1910s, which was based on a famous kaidan tale of a woman who was thrown into a well and who rises every night to haunt her killers. Connecting these two images and their respective historical contexts, Crandol argues that Sadako and the motifs of J-horror films from the late 1990s and early 2000s reflect a wide variety of film, theater, and folk influences. In particular, he aims to "broaden the discussion of Japanese horror cinema via a positioning of American and European horror cinema in the discourse of kaiki" (p. 10). Crandol's focus is less "the history of Japanese horror films" and more "the history of horror films in Japan," examining audience and critical perceptions of the genre in Japan to reveal the "inherently transnational nature of popular commercial film in the global market" (p. 10).

The first chapter begins with an analysis of the many words associated with "horror" in Japanese, including kaiki, which usually means "strange, weird, or bizarre," but has frequently been translated as "horror" (hence, kaiki eiga: horror films). Crandol points out that kaiki eiga were very specific types of horror films, usually those...