Originally Posted by Epoch
Yeah, I'll concede that. There's not much character development or central.... theme to the madness, but I prefer how japanese horror plays on the perception of reality and illicits fear in me from presenting supernaturally unnatural situations. Lots of American horror attempts to produce these reactions by showing increasingly realistic and gruesome situations, and showing how fearsome humanity is when one loses their grasp on their morals. I prefer the asian approach of dropping the realism and using the supernatural to describe these horrors.
I will give it that. It does have a style all it's own, I mean one of my favorite slashers was Ichi the Killer, but the follow up to it was highly unimpressive.
The you have the US versions such as Ring which was not the least bit scary, but then Ringu really did nothing for me either. aside from the effective use of disorienting camera angles to cause the psychological reaction of discomfort rather effectivley, once that has lost it's effect and the viewer is used to seeing that then there is nothing else there to hold the viewer.
I still watch them and I find some merit in a few of them but as a whole I don't think the Japanese are very effective in the market. Now if you want to see some really screwed up shit find some German horror flicks, most of them are fairly light in story but it is well defined still, and the camera work is more film noir, but the gore factor is straight up shock cinema. It is hard to watch sometimes (depends on the movie of course) but tends to hold together pretty well until about the last bit of the movies when it falls apart (general rule).