Japan Notes I: J-Horror and the Bong
Last night I was watching the tape replay of Game 2 in the Mavs-Heat NBA finals at my favorite sports bar in Tokyo, along with my friends Rie and K-Gonn of the highly recommended Japanese NBA blog 24 Seconds, when the topic of J-Horror films came up. The recent spate of Japanese horror films has been anchored in large part around the conceit of vengeful ghosts, spirits, creepy child figures coming out of mundane, everyday technology: videotapes in Nakata Hideo's Ringu, cellphones in the Chakushin Ari, and so forth. Stephen King's Christine had something similar with a Plymouth Fury possessed by the devil or something, but since the target audience of horror films is basically teenagers, it's not clear where American comparative advantage lies. Films like Saw and Hostel are nasty, grisly affairs, but they don't have the same uumph as creepy ghosts popping out of TVs.
And it occurred to me, while we were chatting, that the only arena in which American teens are far ahead of their Japanese counterparts in consumer technology is the bong. In his performance No Cure for Cancer, Dennis Leary pointed out that American teens can make bongs out of apples, oranges, their own heads, whatever: "They say marijuana leads to other drugs. No it doesn't, it leads to fucking carpentry."
So how scary would a ghost trapped in a bong actually be? My concern is that it would be too sleepy to actually menace the teens much, sort of like if Freddy Krueger were played by Owen Wilson. The only way the spirit might actually get angry enough to decapitate the captain of the football team or whoever would be if the victim failed to pass the Cheez Doodles. Still, a possibility.
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