Word: ring
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Psychological or atmospheric horror is what's attracting audiences these days," says Roy Lee, the Korean American who sold The Ring and Ju-on to Hollywood. It attracts producers too, since atmospherics cost less than computer legerdemain. But you don't have to be Japanese to scare people smartly. You need only a potent idea and $200,000. That was the budget for Open Water, based on the true story of an American couple who were left behind on Australia's Great Barrier Reef by a scuba boat...
...have to credit M. Night Shyamalan for bringing horror back to the Hollywood mainstream," says Walter F. Parkes, the DreamWorks exec who produced the U.S. Ring movies and has optioned the Korean doomed-family epic The Tale of Two Sisters. "The Sixth Sense was beautifully shot, well written, with a mature approach to the genre." It also grossed $294 million at the North American box office. That number will scare up a lot of converts...
...year before The Sixth Sense, that Ringu (The Ring) became an Asia-wide smash. Hideo Nakata's movie had a surefire opening (a killer videocassette) and a double climax (our heroine confronts death down a well, and then her boyfriend is murdered when the dead girl in the video crawls out of a TV set). But Nakata, like all good dread auteurs, did more. He created a mood that informed every scene and adhered to the viewer long after the film ended...
...sharpest post-Ring cycle is Ju-on, two features on video and two on film written and directed by Takashi Shimizu. They detail the mischief that awaits anyone entering a house haunted by the ghosts of a man, his murdered wife and his son Toshio. The Ju-on series is a superbly orchestrated symphony of fear. A girl crawls under bedsheets to escape the wraiths and feels a tug on her leg; she lifts the covers to see a grimacing ghoul, climbing closer...
Hollywood studios often remake foreign films but rarely with the original directors. Yet Nakata is directing The Ring 2 and Shimizu is remaking Ju-on (as The Grudge). They may well be the first Japanese directors to make major studio films in America. Another Nakata film--Dark Water, his best--is being remade by Walter Salles, with Jennifer Connelly as a mother who gets traumatized and very wet in a haunted apartment building...