Sarah Frances Dawson MA Candidate Capturing Ghosts and Making Them Speak: Genre and the Asian Horror Film Remake Durban, South Africa 2013 1 Abstract This thesis takes up the genre of the “Asian horror film remake” as a nexus for the illustration of the intersection between two significant theoretical perspectives that inform contemporary film theory: Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuzian transcendental empiricism. It employs concepts such as Lacan’s registers of the Real and Symbolic alongside Deleuze (and Guattari’s) theories on the actual present and the virtual past to interrogate terms such as ‘originality’, ‘authenticity’, ‘repetition’, and ‘difference’ in an attempt to account for the role of genre in the production of meaningful reality, both within the bounds of the text and in cultural life more generally. It first deconstructs the term genre as it has been employed throughout classical, structuralist and post-structuralist genre theory, in order to reveal its ephemeral nature, and to show it to be worthy of investigation in its own right as a central component of language, more than simply a critical tool. It goes on to elaborate the contingency of discourse that constructs verisimilitudinous reality, and explicates these ideas through analysis of the Asian horror remake films. It then turns to Lacan’s division between the registers of the Symbolic and the Real in order to explore the function of the repetition that is visible in generic film in relation to the subject’s experience of a coherent and authentic reality. Finally, it proceeds to engage with Deleuze’s ideas regarding virtuality and asignification and argues, with reference to the Asian horror remake, that it is the perpetual tension between sameness and difference that sustains meaningful life. 2 Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MA in Media and Cultural Studies in the Graduate Programme in the College of Humanities, University of KwaZulu- Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. DECLARATIONS I, SARAH DAWSON declare that 1. The research reported in this thesis, except where otherwise indicated, is my original work. 2. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or examination at any other university. 3. This thesis does not contain text, data, pictures, graphs or other information obtained from another person or source, unless specifically acknowledged as being so obtained. 4. This thesis does not contain any other person’s writing, unless specifically acknowledged. Where such written sources have been used then they have always been acknowledged through the use of in-text quotation marks or indented paragraphs with accompanying in-text references and in the bibliography. 5. This thesis does not contain text, graphics or tables copied and pasted from the Internet, unless specifically acknowledged through in-text references and in the bibliography. Student Name: SARAH DAWSON Signature:__________________________________ Date: _______________ As the supervisor, I acknowledge that this research dissertation/thesis is ready for examination. Name: ANTON VAN DER HOVEN Signature:__________________________________ Date: ________________ 3 Table of Contents Introduction Pg. 6 Chapter 1: The Asian Horror Film Remake and Genre Theory Pg. 20 Chapter 2: The Asian Horror Film Remake and Repetition Pg. 48 Chapter 3: The Asian Horror Film Remake and Change Pg. 79 Conclusion Pg. 134 Bibliography Pg. 138 Appendices Pg. 145 4 Acknowledgements I extend my sincerest thanks to my supervisors Anton and Jill for helping me to bring this work to fruition, and to my very patient loved ones (especially Mom and Dad) for all their support. 5 INTRODUCTION I The traditional approach to a postgraduate work such as this would be to select a sample object of interest within the broad domain of the discipline within which one works, and a set of theoretical principles that seem likely to be able to provide an account thereof. The expectation exists that one should then progress through a pre-ordained, systematised process involving a review of the literature, a justification for the use of certain established methodologies, and the application of these to the sample. Certainly, this work began with the earnest intention of this kind of orthodoxy – it was meant to be a simple genre study that might shed some light on the phenomenon of the proliferation of the “remake”, and my interest in the theoretical approaches to genre was never especially complex. However, as I began synthesising the various components of this study into one work – the sample texts, the theoretical text, the institutional requirements of academia – it wasn’t long before the dissertation veered towards a more self-reflexive meditation on available theoretical perspectives as much as the sample texts, and the nature of performing research in the broad domain of culture altogether. To be very honest, I can’t really be certain of what it was that drew me to the idea of taking up the subject of the “Asian horror film remake” as a topic of research. In retrospect, it does seem a little silly. At the outset, it didn’t seem a bad idea at all. A lifetime in the digital age and an education in critical theory instilled in me an insatiable urge to excavate “low culture”. Since my rebellious teens, I’d had a taste for the subversively gory, and had been an unashamed fan of the lowest grades of horror film. It wasn’t long into my university education before this aesthetic interest was swept up into an emerging interest in things like identity politics and feminist theory, and I became intrigued with theory on horror that engaged with the interrelation between the body and signifying practice. As I progressed in the education that has brought me to this point, my personal interest in global cinema increased – most likely because the pull of an academic specialisation, but also driven by my own sheer curiosity and love for cinema, as well as, admittedly, a desire to become “cultured”. As such, my taste in foreign horror fare also increased, and therefore my discussions on the topic in the world generally. Around this time, there had been a recent spate of films that had originally been produced in South East Asia, and especially Japan for 6 South East Asian audiences, which were remade as Hollywood-based productions for (primarily American) western audiences. I had heard often amongst friends and fellow fans of the horror genre that, for some ethereal reason, the original was always “so much better” than the remake, and every time I heard, or sometimes even uttered, this claim, it niggled at something in the recesses of my mind. Why was it better? How would one measure such a thing? What are the implications of a distinction between an “original” and an “imitation”? Is a “better” horror film one that achieves a greater effect of horror, and how could one possibly compare two unique experiences in this way? Why does Hollywood need to remake the films at all? What happens to the common narratives when you culturally transpose them? How do we even relate them to each other? Do the original and the remake belong to the same genre? What connects them at all? Such questions floated about in my thoughts until, eventually, they timeously crystallised into loose topic for this research. This is the abbreviated, chronological, narrative account of how I arrived at the point of writing this thesis on such a very particular thing; it includes some of the key narrative turning points of my academic career thus far, which have presently culminated in my writing this introduction to a thesis that holds “the Asian horror film remake” as its supposed object of analysis. But there exist other possible accounts for why I am currently doing what I am doing: for example, a different account might acknowledge more strongly the fact that the choice to settle on this area of research emanated simply from an ideologically fuelled notion that having an overtly “postmodern” research specialisation would make me a more valuable citizen in the contemporary age. Another totally valid account might state that the reason I embarked on this study was simply that I thought it might be rather fun. Perhaps, even, the reason might be that I wholeheartedly believe that incorporating chance and contingency into theoretical engagement offers ample possibility for expanding one’s thinking around what it is to be a living subject in shifting culture, and if this was where my attention had alighted, it might prove fruitful to explore how it interacted with my critical thinking. Or maybe it was as flippant as not being able to find a good reason not to probe a subject which both sparked my intellectual intrigue and seemed as full of interest, meaning and truth as any other potential object of study I’d ever encountered. All this possibly trivial information isn’t something that’s being provided for the sake of entertainment (though it does help create a nonchalant tone), but rather it serves the purpose of highlighting the extent to which any object of study, a locus of symbolic interest, is as simultaneously arbitrary and specific as that which was recounted above, and will, perhaps, on some deep level always be trivial. A series of random, disparate, contingent 7 events in a variety of different spheres have resulted in this moment of my engaging in a mode and producing a work, both of which are at once highly specific and highly generic. This spark of interest in the so-called “Asian horror film remake” (a term that is gleaned from discussion amongst fans, who also use terms such as “J-Horror” and “K-Horror”, for example) was along the lines of a very general curiosity as to why indeed these remake films existed.