Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque

250 Pages·2016·3.366 MB·English

by  Sophia Siddique, Raphael Raphael (eds.)

Edited by Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael
TRANSNATIONAL
HORROR CINEMA
Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque
Transnational Horror Cinema
Sophia Siddique • Raphael Raphael
Editors
Transnational Horror
Cinema
Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque
Editors
Sophia Siddique Raphael Raphael
Department of Film University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Vassar College Honolulu, USA
Poughkeepsie, New York, USA
ISBN 978-1-137-58416-8 ISBN 978-1-137-58417-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58417-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958101
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N C
otes oN oNtributors
Mary J. Ainslie is head of Film and Television programs at the University
of Nottingham Malaysia Campus in Kuala Lumpur. Her research focuses
upon the history and development of film in Thailand as well as the inter-
cultural links between East and Southeast Asia. She is the recipient of
several international grants and has published in Asian Cinema Journal,
Korea Journal, the Women’s Studies International Journal and several
edited collections. She also co-edited an edition of the Horror Studies
Journal and the edited collection The Korean Wave in Southeast Asia:
Consumption and Cultural Production.
Mike Dillon received his PhD in Critical Studies from the University of
Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and currently teaches film
studies at California State University, Fullerton. His research interests
include the study of human migration in relation to film genres, particu-
larly horror and science fiction. His publications appear in South Asian Film
and Media Studies, Reconstruction, Film & History, among other venues;
his forthcoming work includes the Bloomsbury anthology Exploiting East
Asian Cinema (co-edited with Ken Provencher) and a chapter in the
McGill-Queens anthology Negative Cosmopolitanisms.
Moritz Fink is a media scholar and author. He holds a doctoral degree in
American Studies from the University of Munich. His areas of interest
include television, film and media studies, cultural studies, disability studies,
visual culture, political humor and satire. He has published in the Journal of
Literary & Cultural Disability Studies and is co-editor of the collection
Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (2017).
v
vi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Julia Gruson-Wood is a PhD candidate in the Science and Technology
Studies Program at York University. Her publications have examined rep-
resentations of disability, health, and illness in various facets of popular
culture. Currently, she is completing her doctoral thesis on the culture of
evidence and applied behavioral therapy that governs autism services, and
the lives of autistic people, in Ontario. Julia also works in the field of
autism as an educator.
Stefan Sunandan Honisch holds a PhD in Education from the University
of British Columbia, as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Piano and
Composition from the University of Victoria, and University of British
Columbia. His research is situated at the intersection of Education, Disability
Studies, and Music. His publications include articles in Music Theory Online,
and International Journal of Inclusive Education, a chapter in The Oxford
Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, and a chapter (in press) in The
Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body. His dissertation Different Eyes,
Ears, and Bodies: Pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii and the Education of the Sensorium
Through Musical Performance explores the educative possibilities and limits
of performances by musicians with disabilities. Current research projects
include an exploration of Helen Keller’s articulation of a deaf-blind musical
subjectivity through her sense of touch.
Sangjoon Lee (PhD New York University) is Assistant Professor of Asian
Cinema at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information,
Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is co- editor of Hallyu
2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (2015) and is currently
editing Rediscovering Korean Cinema for University of Michigan Press.
His writing has appeared in such journals as Film History, Historical Journal
of Film, Radio, and Television, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema,
and Transnational Cinemas. He is currently working on a monograph ten-
tatively titled The Asian Cinema Network: The Asian Film Festival and the
Cultural Cold War in Asia.
Paul Rae Marchbanks is an Associate Professor of English at California
Polytechnic State University. He teaches an array of undergraduate and
graduate courses concerned with Occidental representations of non-nor-
mative bodies and minds. Figures of particular interest at present include
Catalan painter Salvador Dalí, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, and
American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, all of whom figure in his
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS vii
book-in- progress, Grace and the Grotesque. In recent years, he has
published articles examining representations of disability in works by Mary
Shelley, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Anne, and Emily),
Robert Browning, and Liam O’Flaherty.
Raphael Raphael’s writings include Transnational Stardom: International
Celebrity in Film and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) with Russell
Meeuf and Let’s Get Social: The Educator’s Guide to Edmodo (International
Society for Technology in Education [ISTE], 2015) with Ginger Carlson.
He is also associate editor for the journal Review of Disability Studies and
lectures for the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He is currently working on
a book drawing connections between disability studies and film studies. His
film and media scholarship is informed by his own practice as digital artist.
Sophia Siddique is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of
Film, Vassar College. Her research interests include Contemporary Southeast
Asian Cinemas, cyborg cinema, and Asian horror. She has published in
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Singapore Journal
of Tropical Geography and Asian Cinema. Her book, Screening Singapore:
Sensuous Citizenship Formations and the National is under contract with
Amsterdam University Press.
Kevin Wynter is a Visiting Scholar in Film and Critical Studies at the
California Institute of the Arts. His research interests include violence, wear-
able screens, phenomenology, and African-American popular culture. He is
completing a monograph on transnational millennial horror films titled,
Feeling Absence: Horror in Cinema from Post War to Post-Wall. He is also the
editor of Interstice: Journal for the Video Essay.
C
oNteNts
1 Introduction 1
Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael
Part I Questions of Genre 17
2 Butchered in Translation: A Transnational “Grotesuqe” 19
Mike Dillon
3 An Introduction to the Continental Horror Film 43
Kevin Wynter
4 Dracula, Vampires, and Kung Fu Fighters: The Legend
of the Seven Golden Vampires and Transnational Horror
Co-production in 1970s Hong Kong 65
Sangjoon Lee
Part II The Horrific Body (Disability and Horror) 81
5 Dead Meat: Horror, Disability, and Eating Rituals 83
Julia Gruson-Wood
ix
x CONTENTS
6 Music, Sound, and Noise as Bodily Disorders: Disabling
the Filmic Diegesis in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore
Verbinski’s The Ring 113
Stefan Sunandan Honisch
7 An Eyepatch of Courage: Battle-Scarred Amazon
Warriors in the Movies of Robert Rodriguez and
Quentin Tarantino 133
Moritz Fink
8 Scary Truths: Morality and the Differently Abled Mind
in Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom 159
Paul Rae Marchbanks
Part III Responses to Trauma 177
9 Towards a Southeast Asian Model of Horror:
Thai Horror Cinema in Malaysia, Urbanization,
and Cultural Proximity 179
Mary J. Ainslie
10 Planet Kong: Transnational Flows of King Kong (1933)
in Japan and East Asia 205
Raphael Raphael
11 Embodying Spectral Vision in The Eye 221
Sophia Siddique
Index 235
L f
ist of igures
Fig. 2.1 Grotesque’s unrated DVD cover 24
Fig. 2.2 Grotesque unauthorized UK DVD cover 25
Fig. 2.3 Hostel sample poster art 26
Fig. 2.4 Samples of European films falsely translated into Saw-like
DVD covers 31
Fig. 2.5 Saw sample poster art 32
Fig. 7.1 Low-angle shot of Madeleine (“One Eye”) in the cathedral
scene featuring a red eyepatch 143
Fig. 7.2 Long shot of One Eye holding a sawn-off shotgun
and ammunition right before the final shootout 143
Fig. 7.3 Low-angle shot of Elle Driver whistling as she is going
to kill The Bride 144
Fig. 7.4 Medium close-up of Elle Driver in a nurse costume
as she prepares to kill The Bride 145
Fig. 7.5 Low-angle shot of Shé after Machete’s final shootout 147
Fig. 7.6 Long shot of Cherry Darling after Planet Terror’s final
shootout 149
Fig. 10.1 The monster in the South Korean-American “bad kong”
A*P*E (1976) confronts the military 214
Fig. 10.2 The final moment of Mighty Peking Man (1977) 217
xi