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3 The AMERICAN horror filM? Globalization and Transnational U.S.-Asian Genres —Christina Klein Scholars and fans alike tend to think about film genres as products of national film industries and as expressions of national culture. We talk about the American musical, the Hollywood Western, the Japanese samurai film, or the Chinese martial arts film. Yet as film industries around the world undergo the processes of economic globalization, they are gradually becoming less national and more transnational in everything from the workers they hire to the audiences they cater to. Commercial genres are among the best places to observe this process of transnationalization taking place, as bodies of visual and narrative conventions once strongly identified with one or perhaps two national film industries are appropriated , revised, and remade across the globe. In recent years the once unambiguously “American” horror film has been challenged—in the marketplace and in fans’ affections —by films that have been profoundly shaped by Hollywood, both directly and indirectly, but that cannot be classified as American in any simple way. Like other genres that are undergoing a similar process, the horror film is becoming—and is being recognized—as a transnational genre. Today, scholars of genre are increasingly extending the geographic scope of their analyses and focusing attention on the transnational inflections within American martial arts films, German and Thai Westerns, Korean monster movies, crime and war films, and Hong Kong gangster and action films.1 To truly understand the changes that are taking place in the horror film today, therefore, we have to extend our critical vision beyond the films themselves. We must pay attention to the changes taking place in film industries around the world and recognize how the transnationalization of the genre is a function of the larger transnationalization of the industries that produce these films. The very nature of genre films—their structural balance of repetition and variation ,rigidityandflexibility,familiarityandinnovation—makesthemidealcandidates for this process of transnationalization. Because of their formulaic construction and chriSTina klein 4 their derivation from other films, they do not demand from viewers a deep familiarity with a foreign culture or cinematic tradition, but rather a more easily acquired mastery of a recurring set of conventions. Modular in construction, genre films also localize well. Their “Lego pieces”—as Jeanine Basinger calls the recurring bits of story, setting, and character out of which genre films are composed—are often ideologically neutral, capable of expressing a range of meanings depending on how they are arranged and how they resonate with the world outside the film. Once absorbed into a new film culture, these Lego pieces can be combined by local filmmakers in fresh ways to carry locally specific meanings. Hollywood today is a global film industry headquartered in Los Angeles, not an American one. Hollywood, of course, has operated globally since the 1910s. But its global reach expanded dramatically in the 1980s,as the forces of economic globalization —including the opening up of formerly socialist economies, the worldwide reduction in trade barriers, the diffusion of digital technologies—combined to create a globally integrated capitalist economy.Suddenly,the Hollywood studios—now the prime content providers for global media conglomerates—were scooping up the lion’s share of viewers and box office earnings in most countries around the world. Today, Hollywood’s working parameters—its financing, its stories, its workers, its production and post-production locations, its markets, its profits—are increasingly global in scope. And Americans are a shrinking sector of its audience: in 2007, the twenty-three highest-grossing Hollywood films earned $4 billion in the United States—and $6 billion overseas (Hollinger). Filmmakers around the world, unprepared for the onslaught of Hollywood filmsthataccompaniedtheeconomictransformationsof globalization,werestunned by declines in their industries’ box office revenues and the subsequent drops in film production rates. But many of them didn’t stay stunned and they didn’t accept the domination of their markets by Hollywood as a given of the new economic order. Instead,they began searching for ways they could globalize their own industries and move beyond the limits of the nation in their thinking about production, markets, and financing. They also began to reconsider the terms of their relationship with Hollywood, and many filmmakers came to embrace the idea of both collaborating with Hollywood and competing more vigorously against it. Hollywood’s global expansion and other industries’ responses to it constitute the material terrain on which the transnationalization of the horror film (and other genres as well) has taken place. In what...

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