Terror Tracks - Music, Sound and Horror Cinema - Philip Hayward
The Ghostly Noise of J-Horror: Roots and Ramifications
Terror Tracks - Music, Sound and Horror Cinema - Philip Hayward
James Wierzbicki [+]
University of Michigan
Description
This chapter looks at a peculiar sonority of J-Horror such as the metallic screeching, a grating or ripping sound that often announces the presence of ghosts and links the tradition to historical Japanese genres and animist beliefs and looks at the work of recent composers Kenji Kawai (Ringu, Honogurai mizu) and Shiro Sato (Ju-on) known for Hollywood remakes. It argues that their recent film music is characterized both by timbral transformation and by substantial silence, and insofar as it relates to on-screen yûrei it seems strongly redolent of kabuki convention. For theatrical presentations of Japanese ghost stories, the combination of subtly shifting sound colours and purposeful ma has done the trick for centuries. Knowingly or not, Kawai and Sato with their scores for J-horror films have tapped into longstanding Japanese tradition. Perhaps instinctively, but more likely because they realized they were dealing with subject matter far removed from western culture, the composers assigned to the Hollywood remakes have gravitated towards a time-tested Japanese model.