#2 papers part 1 Video analysis

Compare Japanese horror movies and American horror movies


Horror movie is one important genre in the movie industry. There is always a group of people that like to “abuse” themselves (that’s what my mother said to me). I watched many horror movies, especially enjoy Japanese horror movies, and I will introduce the differences between Japanese horror movies and American horror movies.


American horror movies use visual horrible scenes to scare audiences. In American movies, you always see the ghost’s terrible face through entire movies, and victim’s blood which is because they are slaughtered by monsters or ghosts. American horror movie, in my opinion, is extraordinary disgusting; in the movie, people are hunted and captured just like the quarry, and they are cut, boiled. A strategy that American directors like to use is that they give the face of monsters or ghosts a large feature, so that audiences could see their tooth, with the whole mouth of victim’s blood. However, you seldom see these bloody scenes in the beginning or the middle of the Japanese horror movies; instead, you are brought into a designed environment which is so common in daily life that you feel like you are truly in this environment when watching. Ghost is invisible or unapparent, but you know it exists and is watching you somewhere. The most extremely horrible scene usually happens at the end of movie when you are immersed and trapped in this story which is designed by the director. One example is The Ring, which is one of the most successful Japanese horror movies in the world. In the last part of this movie, the actor finally failed to escape from the curse; His TV turned on automatically and showed a video that a "girl" wore white pure dress who had died thirty years ago came out of a dumb well , scrambled to the TV, and finally moved out of show to be real! The actor was so scared that he was difficult to scream, he even could not stand up to run, but scrambled to the door for escape. You can see that the "girl" didn't crash to the man, but slowly walked with weired shaking. Compare to the American ghosts that are aggressively crashing to split out the victim, Asian ghosts, just like the "girl" did, are more likely to give the victim mental pressure, which makes Asian people more scared. I believe this is because Asian people usually think implicitly that are used to looking for something behind what they see, not like American people that think directly and decidedly.