Simulcra mania
A new breed of Japanese horror flicks

UZUMAKI
Directed by Higuchinsky
Sept. 6 - 9, 9 p.m.
Metro Cinema (Ziedler Hall, Citadel Theatre)
**** (out of five)

Call it the Babelfish Effect. And consider it shorthand for understanding the current wave of Japanese horror films.

For those unfamiliar, Babelfish is the Internet institution that translates English to and from a variety of languages. But often, between re-renderings, meaning gets lost, changed, rearranged, and reborn with strange results.

The same thing happens in the much heralded J-horror hybrids from the last few years, like The Ring series, much of the work of Miike Takashi (Fudoh: The Next Generation, Audition, The Happiness of the Katakuris), and without a doubt, Uzumaki.

Fledgling feature director and one-name-kinda-guy Higuchinsky has consumed the works of filmmakers like Cronenberg, Lynch, Burton, Raimi, Friedkin, Argento, Von Trier, and Peter Jackson, partially digested them, washed them down with distinctly Japanese-flavoured anxieties about technology, puberty and sexuality, and then disgorged them into something manic. Add his background as an award-winning music video director and you’ve got visuals ranging from flashy but meaningless, to subtle and unnerving, to outright shocking. And this is all in a horror film where the monstrosity comes in the twisted shape of the little ol’ spiral.

In some nondescript Japanese town, swirls are opening some kind of doorway into a demonic place. The results are stuff like a normally kindly father ignoring his family to spend hours filming a snail’s shell or making bizarre pottery, teens morphing into snails, and a contortionist suicide fad. It’s a swinging little berg where a Spirograph could cost you a king’s ransom and your sanity.

Comparisons to Lynch’s sleepy-creepy little town in Blue Velvet are apparent, with similar guttural waxing and waning noises on the soundtrack making for a perfectly edgy experience.

But instead of the evil welling up inside BV’s characters like Dennis Hopper’s Frank Black, spirally speaking, it drills right on through the surface into the serene population, making monsters you might find in the Exorcist, Dead Alive, Evil Dead or Videodrome.

Caught in the middle are Kirie (Eriko Hatsune) and Shuichi (Fhi Fan) – two lifelong friends contemplating eloping. The two teens do what little they can to stop their friends and family from getting sucked into the spiral, but as the giant swirling cloud over the town’s lake indicates, they’re in way over their heads. The best they can hope for is survival and a way out of town – a simple but useful story to hang the horrors on.

What makes Uzumaki and the other aforementioned films so successful at diverting your attention while getting under your skin is not only the extreme juxtaposition of the "real world" (very repressed and orderly Japanese society) with the chaos of the Id world, but also the director’s disregard for making all of the elements of the film subservient to the plot.

The wildly varied pacing, grab bag of special effects, unexplained phenomena, overpowering symbolism, and unexplained images are products of the music video age, and here they work most of the time. The aforementioned Japanese horror flicks, which are often more interested in expressing an overall feeling than getting the viewer from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible, have a tendency to both obsess on things that look cool but are meaningless and inspire a free-spirited energy that turns the expectations and clichés that kill most horror films inside-out.

Maybe it’s just a case of show-me-something-new-and-make-it-crazy, but if Japanese Babelfish filmmaking has found a new way of making horror fans’ heads spin – spirals or not – you owe it to yourself to see the new breed of beast from the East.