For every low budget, independent gem like Session 9 or The Blair Witch Project there have been a host of movies scary for all the wrong reasons and for none of the right ones. The Haunting(1999), Thirteen Ghosts, and Darkness Falls are more recent examples of lame attempts at cashing in on the public's insatiable appetite (despite the many disappointments) for the heebee jeebees. Luckily for those of us whose interest in the horror genre isn't motivated by our libido or mere interest in FX technique, a new group of films has emerged from all across Asia which may very well represent the best in contemporary horror film that any country has to offer. Movies made in places from Hong Kong to South Korea and Japan have been tingling spines of savvy fans around the world for some time, reminding us that you don't have to be eight years old to feel a need to leave the light on when you go to sleep after watching a scary movie.

And, oh, to be eight years old and watching scary movies again... Because those of us who think of ourselves as horror movie fans, this is the goal, to be taken only where this genre can take us: to the late night scream and the assurance that "There's nothing in the closet," but knowing that somehow that assurance isn't strictly true. Evil is all around us, even when you're eight years old, and not just under the bed. Kids understand this instinctively: there is a chaotic quality to the world that even grown-ups can't control, a madness at the heart of things -- as surely as there is an order to the universe and a goodness that must and will ultimately triumph over that evil. "There are some things worse than death," says Dracula, and we all know he tells the truth. If there is a vein this new crop of Asian horror films bite into, it is this sure sense that taking evil seriously is a matter of soul survival. .

Films like Ringu, Cairo, Uzumaki and Three take horror conventions familiar to Western audiences to their base level using imagery in simple ways that Hollywood executives would inevitably doctor up in an effort to goose the audience. The horrors in these films sound almost banal; an unknown figure, face hidden by long black hair and wearing a white nightgown, creeps out of a well in a field, a clearly spectral female presence floats across a room towards a man hiding under a piece of furniture, an unexplained malevolent force manifests itself in a small town causing the inhabitants to mutilate themselves, transform into exotic creatures and go mad. Of such things many bad horror movies are made. .

But what if the camera doesn't flinch at the approaching ghost? What if the screen suddenly ceases to be a barrier between the viewer and the approaching monster? What if the camera movement, soundtrack and other elements of the film suggests that not only has the filmmaker taken a special delight in telling his tale of madness but has tasted of it himself and won't rest until you share it with him?

The ease with which Asian horror films embrace the supernatural speaks deeply to the reason their best horror films are so effective. These filmmakers want to frighten you but what they have to say is genuinely frightening.

REMOVING THE VEIL

I've been deliberately vague so as not to ruin the effect of any one film. Films like the ones mentioned above are best seen cold without a lot of firsthand knowledge of their content. But barring such analysis it's still possible to explain their effect. Any great film demolishes the screen stripping away the pretense that separates the worlds of the movie and the moviegoer. As the story progresses viewers are free to travel in both landscapes without have to exclusively dwell in either one. To say the world any film presents isn't real and that the world we live in is betrays one important fact. Films deal in the stuff of ultimate reality, the abstract truths that we must have concrete examples of, love, hate, forgiveness, redemption, evil. Film may be the stuff of light and shadow, but through it we understand the things that make life in the real world emotionally and spiritually navigable. And no less a luminary than Maxim Gorky described his first experience of film as a descent into a world of ghostly light and shadows where things were neither alive or dead but still moved.

When a horror film demolishes the screen, it opens our hearts to an understanding of the world worthy of our genuine fear and apprehension. Just as the religious believer cries out "open the eyes of my heart, Lord," the horror movie fan is desperate to keep his eyes open because he knows that the horror film's central themes are not only worthy of consideration, but that such consideration is central to the salvation of his very soul. Themes like isolation/alienation, madness as destiny, cosmic dread, the struggle of good and evil are the stuff nightmares are made of -- and not just nightmares. The supernatural is real, not just "reel". Vengeful bogeys, the irresistable qualities of moral confusion, the grave as a portal to damnation are matters of everybody's ultimate concern. But while here be dragons, here also lies hope: to be made aware of dark possibilities suggests further possibilities -- that escape might be plotted and, at the very least, no soul need be taken unaware. Some would go so far as to argue that the very shadow of the Valley of the Shadow is cast by light, and that redemption involves knowing the right direction out of the darkness into that light. In any case, darkness does not become any lighter by pretending it is not there. All these concerns, by their very nature are, besides being universal, also metaphysical, rooted in the abstract. Like the ghosts of any culture, Asian bogey's are not just "other" but the final "other", the bottom of the well in Ringu where the hair parts and the girl in the white dress reveals herself to be in complete and malevolent control of our very being. Embrace is inevitable, escape questionable at best. These ghosts are the possibility of being finally and fully claimed by all that is unholy. Our unblinking attention, despite our instinctual apprehension, is our admission that this is the real state of our world, that evil does exist, that some things are worthy of our fear and some paths better left untravelled. We are bearing witness.

This new crop of Asian films has gone under different names the most notable being J-Horror in reference to those films that come from Japan, but classification doesn't come easy. What sets apart the horror of Asia from the general corpus of American films is as elusive as a comprehensive understanding of Asian culture itself. Asia has a vast and ancient literature of the supernatural, and a large legacy of supernatural and fantasy based film that that could easily encompass a lifetime of study. Ghosts, demons, forest Gods, sprites, and spiritual forces galore haunt every facet of Asian film culture. Even and especially the Martial Arts film, has utilized supernatural themes and characters either lifting them directly from ancient Asian legends and myths or re-imagining them in new forms to address the same concerns in modern settings. Relatively recent action films like Akira, Rin Taro's 2002 update of Metropolis (interpreted for the screen from the manga source), and Miyazaki's Spirited Away bear this out and though none of these films are horror films their concerns with spiritual, the importance of ritual, technology "magic", and apocalyptic destiny are the same as many of the films reviewed here.

For instance all of the above films deal heavily in transformation. In Spirited Away the parents are transformed into pigs yet the little girl undergoes a subtler metaphysical transformation past preteen anxiety and into young adulthood, In Metropolis machines take on human qualities challenging the human characters to redefine and refocus their self-concepts, and in Akira a military technocracy's progress, and it's corrupt influence are laid waste, by the foolish things- little children and delinquent teenagers who in the end have a foot in both the material and the spiritual world.

In Asian horror film, as in most compelling examples of the horror genre, transformation is at the root of what we fear. In Battle Royale a ninth grade class is drugged on their senior trip and dropped off on an island. Waking up they find that they have been chosen by lottery to participate in a kill or be killed game which can only have one survivor. The once genial classmates degenerate into a frenzied mob while the military observers broadcast the carnage back home to a Japanese society that has created the lottery as a means of instilling fear of authority in it's increasingly delinquent youth.

Although violent death plays heavily against teens powerful sense of invulnerability it's clear that what tortures many of the characters here is what they and their friends must become in order to have even a chance of survival. They will never be the same. Also figuring heavily in Asian horror are culturally-based themes such as violated honor, along with a decidedly non-Western respect for the supernatural. In Western horror stories, the Skeptic is often the most important character. Telling a story involving the paranormal in our scientized and materialistic culture necessarily involves getting past this gatekeeper. And doubt, if real and not just masked cynicism, creates its own special flavor of suspense and -- when dashed by the reality of the supernatural -- its own special terror. Curse of the Demon (1957), Burn Witch Burn (1962) and The Haunting (1963) fall into this category. Asian horror films have their own skeptics but they are skeptics who come from a culture steeped with supernatural imagery and symbols. They are skeptical, yes, but without the sneer of the skeptics in film from the more arrogantly-technopolized West. There is a taken-for-grantedness about the reality of a non-material world that is both refreshing, and -- practically speaking -- gets us into the story quicker. From a genre standpoint, the difference is similar to the difference between science fiction -- which has to stop now and then and rationalize its magic with technobabble -- and fantasy, in which the hocus pocus is already established and accepted from the start -- without the need for explanation.

Ringu, The Eye, Dark Waters, all feature skeptics, but they are skeptics born of their times, of the transition that was made in their society before they were even born. As these skeptics are quickly converted by the supernatural events around them it isn't into a new paradigm but into a respect for the old- that there is more to the world than our senses, our sciences can ever tell us, that the need for justice, ability to fully love, the nature of evil, the value of suffering and the need to be transformed beyond our own capacity to do or experience any of these things is what really compels us to live at all. In Cairo, a ghost story about the end of the world, people kill themselves after encountering ghosts not because of the fear the ghosts bring but of what the ghosts share about the despairing truth that is the afterlife.

For those who believe the afterlife is not inevitably one of despair a key distinction is that the afterlife in Cairo is a metaphor in much the same way the foothills of heaven are in C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. And like Lewis' tale this metaphor rings true if taken as a reflection of our intense desire to believe there is more to our individual existence than our time on this earthly plane. Despair would indeed be the logical option of living in a supernatural but ambivalent universe.

For those who impatiently demand that horror films provide them with a theology rather than a story of themes and ideas and thought provoking "what ifs" the horror fan can only wonder if such desire is mostly born of the insecurity of living in a supernatural world where we ourselves are not God.

Any brand of horror film, East or West, sets out in some measure to shock its audience. One, somewhat accidental, way that Asian horror may shock a Western viewer is in generating the sense of Otherness that comes of being suddenly immersed in such an Other tradition of narrative and imagery. Yet more nuanced and universal, even primal, shocks are to be found below this surface. Of course, it should be noted that not all-violent or grotesque or disturbing imagery should ever be classed as "nuanced". The best of Asian horror, however, goes beyond even these in provoking that instinctual response akin to what critic Julia Kristeva calls "the abject." Kristeva was a psychoanalyst/writer primarily interested in the way identity is formed. She grappled with the idea that the things we throw away or cannot bear to be in contact with help us, to define self. It's helpful here to utilize a French term, propre moi or proper me- clean me. In other words if this is undesirable, unclean, disgusting, dirty -- abject and it is not me, on me or near me -- then I am propre moi.

Kristeva was especially interested in this brand of shock as it pertained to the body -- a truly trans-cultural category. Fecal matter, urine, blood, dead skin, mucus phlegm, vomit, and other things not part of us such as dead bodies, maggots even food whose taste or texture we can't stand are all things that we can remove from ourselves, or struggle to keep distant and in that struggle forms our idea of the me. Conversely our sense of the Other, particularly any sort of Otherness that might be deemed threatening or unbearable is immediately identified with all that we find so. .

There is a strong sense of awareness of this notion of the abject in these Asian films. Characters stand speechless unable to move, die with their faces contorted into grimacing shrieks and back instinctively away from the approaching other. The fear isn't just of physical death but of ultimate abjectivity involving every aspect of being. The I becomes eternally lost in the Other -- no longer able to define itself except by the desire for that which is also unbearable.

A word of warning- there's a hefty thread of more vulgar shocks in Asian horror: many of the films exhibit ultra (and we mean ULTRA) violence, sadomasochistic excess and downright pornographic material. So before you venture into your cities local Chinatown district or do too much online window-shopping, allow us to introduce you to what is easily the cream of the pan Asian horror crop.

In closing I'm reminded of an experience I had as a child. While walking downstairs with a number of carefully balanced paper plates on my arms I stopped suddenly on my way to the chair where I was to settle in for a long night of Creature Feature watching. The film that night was The Invisible Woman but it wasn't the images (or lack thereof) on the TV that stopped me with an icy chill. Where there should have been nothing on my favorite chair there was, clearly visible, a head shaped mass of woman's hair suspended in mid air on top of the chair and a pair of women's gloves on either arm that I swore looked like they were being worn although I couldn't see any arms coming out of them. I lost most of my snacks and my drink on the floor but managed to come to my senses prior to bolting out of the room.

A closer inspection revealed that my mother had left one of her wigs and a pair of her dress gloves out and the angle of my sight, the dark room, and a young boys imagination did the rest. Yet I can't help but wondering why I threw the wig so violently when I discovered I'd been wrong in my assumptions. A little bit of anger, hurt pride, but if I'm to be honest, a sense that it had finally happened. My carefully constructed world, built by parents with their assurances that there was nothing under the bed, was coming apart to be replaced by something that was as far beyond me as the grave. As a last nervous gesture before sitting down with new snacks to watch my movie it seemed as appropriate as a knock on wood, incense at an altar, a light left on, or a prayer before bedtime.