Japanese Horror Films with Dr. Lindsay Nelson

Japanese horror films have long been concerned with "haunted media," from the haunted video production of Psychic Vision (Jaganrei, 1988) to the cursed video cassette of The Ring (Ringu, 1998). How do we think about haunted media, though, in a time when our lives are more dominated than ever by new media objects and devices? This talk examines the ways that cell phones, social media, and webcams figure not only in the narratives of recent Japanese horror films like Suicide Forest Village (Jukai Mura, 2021) and 2channel Curse (2channneru no noroi, 2010~2014), but how those same devices and objects are central to the films' marketing, circulation and consumption. In many contemporary Japanese horror films, which may be viewed via MX4D in a theater or on a tablet screen in one's own home, the blurred boundaries of the "virtual window" create another layer of fear and unease.  

Event moderated by Seung-hoon Jeong

 

Lindsay Nelson received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California, where her dissertation focused on the figure of the "monstrous child" in Japanese literature and film. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Economics at Meiji University in Tokyo, where she teaches English classes and classes on Japanese cinema and popular culture. Her research focuses on Japanese horror films, Japanese popular culture, and gender issues in Japanese media. Her work has appeared in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, and Japanese Studies. Her book, Circulating Fear: Fractured Realities, Japanese Horror, and New Media, is available for pre-order from Lexington Books (a division of Rowman and Littlefield).  

 

Watch a recording of the event with Dr. Lindsay Nelson