Word: ghosting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...beacon located halfway to Central Square. Wearing my H & M bikini briefs (they’re red and green—the colors of Christmas), I closed my eyes and let the faux sunlight singe my milky skin. I had almost forgotten about my worries when they arrived: The Ghost of Pre-Thesis Past, The Ghost of Thesis Present and the Ghost of Post-Thesis Future. They reminded me of what I was before dear Thesis entered my life, and warned me what would happen if I avoided her during this final stretch...
Taka Ichise has made a killing peddling screams and sleepless nights. Over the past six years he has spent $13 million to make nine Japanese ghost movies, which have raked in more than $100 million worldwide. So like any tycoon in a growth industry, Ichise is ramping up production. In October the 43-year-old producer released two new films in Japan: Infection (featuring a haunted hospital) and Premonition (about a newspaper that describes grisly events before they happen). Meanwhile, The Grudge?Ichise's Hollywood remake of his 2002 hit Ju-on?topped the U.S. box office when...
...Ichise can take much of the credit for this breakthrough. Returning to Japan in 1997 after a stint in Hollywood, he discovered a clique of talented young directors, including Ringu's Hideo Nakata and Ju-on's Takashi Shimizu, absorbed with making straight-to-video ghost stories. Working with budgets of about $10,000 per one-hour segment forced Asian horror's avant-gardists to rely on suspense instead of special effects. "With horror, bigger budgets don't necessarily mean better movies," says Ichise. "This group was making terrifying stuff on a shoestring. The Asian horror-movie boom that everybody...
...Inspired by the success of Japanese horror, other moviemakers around Asia have also embraced the genre. Most of the resulting films are ghost tales that overlay rustic superstitions onto a canvas of urban, middle-class life. They're populated by loners (like a suicidal psychic girl in Korea's The Uninvited), broken families (a traumatized single mother and her daughter in Nakata's Dark Water)?and the disheveled, raven-haired girl ghosts that have come to symbolize Asian horror. Settings are as alienating as the characters are alienated: cramped, paranoid visuals draw out the spooky possibilities of creaky old buildings...
...Even China, Asia's perennial pop-culture laggard, has hopped on the bandwagon. The upcoming The Ghost Inside?at $600,000, the country's most expensive scary movie?transplants the single-mom-in-a-creepy-apartment formula to an impersonal, rapidly modernizing mainland city. Despite the tight budget, its cast includes Beijing heartthrob Liu Ye and Taiwanese TV-drama princess Barbie Hsu. For now, though, the hotbed of Asian dread remains Japan, where Ichise presides over his assembly line of scares. In the next two years he plans to release at least four more Japanese ghost movies, including one each...