By Andre FranciscoPLAY Writer
She stepped out of the TV, and Asian cinema stepped into America.
The Ring, a remake of the Japanese blockbuster Ringu, scared America so thoroughly we had to have more. Ever since, Asian films – predominantly horror – having been remade into enormous profits and thunderous American applause.
The studio that’s made almost every big remake is Vertigo Entertainment, led by Roy Lee. Vertigo has made the Ring series, the Grudge series and Dark Water. But they’ve also remade Asian movies in other genres, including Eight Below, Speed reunion vehicle The Lake House and probably the most-liked film of 2006, The Departed.
Vertigo has 15 movies in the works for 2007 and 2008, almost all of them either remakes – extensions of a remake series – of Asian films, according to IMDb. They’re also predominantly horror movies.
Is the remake craze because Americans just hate reading subtitles? Probably not, though Asian imports with the subtitles intact don’t do as well as their American counterparts at the box office.
The remakes have been hugely successful. The Departed was nominated for six Golden Globes, a handful of Oscars and raked in over $121 million.
The Ring more than doubled The Departed’s returns and spawned a trilogy. Though the second Ring didn’t live up to the orignal recipe’s standards, with a domestic gross of $75 million, there’s a third installment in the works. It’s tentatively scheduled for a 2008 release, but the crew is still “in talks” with key players David Dorfman (Aidan) and Kelly Stables (Evil Samara – the one that crawls out of your TV, not Daveigh Chase’s slightly less creepy/alive Samara).
Though it wasn’t as hyped, Eight Below made more money than both the Ring and the Grudge sequels, and more than Dark Water and The Lake House combined, Box Office Mojo says.
Communication sophomore Jason Klorfein attributes these movies’ succcss to the universal currency of screams.
“There are cultural differences between Japan and the United States. The scripts can be entirely different, but those images can still translate,” Klorfein says. “They can still be scary.”
Other imports, mostly Hong Kong action movies, began crossing the ocean after the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Recently, a series of Yimou Zhang-directed movies gained unaltered access to the American market. Zhang’s movies include Hero, House of Flying Daggers and the recent Shakespearian Curse of the Golden Flower. These movies’ bold color palettes cath the eye but it’s the jaw-dropping – though wire-assisted – fight scenes that bring in the average movie-goer. These scenes are reminiscent of Street Fighter battles you have with a button-masher, but their entertainment value outweighs the audience’s disbelief.
For Professor John Betke, a lecturer in Northwestern’s School of Communication, these action movies are naturally cross-culture.
“People understand action genre films. They don’t need to be translated and remade,” Betke says. “The masses get them and the educated film audience gets them.”
But most of Vertigo’s films return to classic horror themes: ghosts, haunted houses and sudden scares. They also focus on a single character, while recent American-originated films involve ensembles, like Turistas, the Saws and Primeval. When the audience can’t remember characters – much less remember if they’re alive – the movie loses some of its punch.
More importantly, Asian horror movies put the emphasis on horror, not just shock.
“Ju-on sacred the hell out of me,” Betke says. “I couldn’t turn the lights off in the hotel room I was so scared.” But when Betke saw the American version, The Grudge, he says the effect just wasn’t the same, though Takashi Shimizu directed both films.
American horror directors seem to put their energy into creating intricate ways of killing people at the expense of getting to the deaths in a creative way – all guts, no story. They try to scare and jolt audience, not make their skin crawl.
“There have always been two kinds of horror,” Klorfein says. “Hostel is a cheap, dirty B-movie, while The Ring has really good production values and actors like Brian Cox and Naomi Watts.
“I don’t know anyone in Hostel,” he adds.
This doesn’t mean American filmmakers haven’t jumped on the creepy-children-and-haunted-house wagon, but the success of gore-thriller-happy studios like Lions Gate makes the gore trend notable.
Not to worry, though, Asian remake fans. A remake of Battle Royale, the cult classic about Japanese schoolchildren killing each other, is in the works. Alongside their other announced projects, Vertigo is working on adapting the script of The Host, South Korea’s hugely popular family drama/monster movie, Variety says. But Betke isn’t going to stand in line for tickets. He won’t even Fandango them.
“I would be more likely to go track down the original and see that first,” he says.
But even without Betke’s money, creepy Asian children and tortured Americans will rake in the millions, evidence of the power of screams.
Medill sophomore Andre Francisco is a PLAY writer. He can be reached at [email protected].
