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The new wave of Korean cinema has presented a series of distinct genre productions, which are influenced by contemporary Japanese horror cinema and traditions of the Gothic. Ahn Byeong-ki is one of Korea‘s most notable horror film directors, having made four Gothic horrors between 2000 and 2006. These transnational horrors, tales of possession and avenging forces, have repeatedly been drawn to issues of modernity, loneliness, identity, gender, and suicide. Focusing on the figure of the ghostly woman, and the horrors of modern city life in Korea, this essay considers the style of filmmaking employed by Ahn Byeong-ki in depicting, in particular, the Gothic revelation.
This article reviews the exhibition _Gothic: Dark Glamour_, held at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, September 5 2008 – February 21 2009. It also considers the eponymous volume published alongside the exhibition by Valerie Steele and Jennifer Park. The exhibition was the first of international significance to identify and explore the influence of Gothic on contemporary fashion by both major label designers and small subcultural producers. The article hails the exhibition as a landmark event and investigates the various Gothic/fashion narratives it,puts forward, including veiling motifs, subcultural style, grotesque and perverse bodies, and the prevalence of British and Japanese design. The article concludes that the exhibition marks a moment in the glamorisation of the Gothic, in which it moves from being a minority to a mainstream interest.
The portrayal of Japan as ‘the nation of suicide’ is pervasive. In 1897, Émile Durkheim famously proclaimed that ‘the readiness of the Japanese to disembowel themselves for the slightest reason is well known’, 1 echoing the bushido tenet that ‘the Way of the Samurai is found in death’. 2 The notion of suicide as an attribute of manliness is inscribed into Japanese culture, the cultural normalisation of and permissive attitude towards it explained through the country’s religio
The Japanese playwright and novelist Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939) was a fearful man. His fear was dual in nature: both horror and reverence. Without the latter, he would have been no more impressive than Edgar Allan Poe, whose ‘The Tell-tale Heart’ ( 1843 ) takes us to a dark place (which is interesting) and leaves us there (which is not). Both writers were at times histrionic
and books appearing on new national and regional gothics, from Kiwi gothic to Florida gothic, Barcelona gothic to Japanese gothic, the wider context for this had not really been addressed. What were the conditions that had produced such a proliferation of gothics and what were the general implications of this proliferation for what the West had previously understood as ‘Gothic’? There was also
perpetrators. Ankoku butoh, literally the ‘dance of utter darkness’, was first performed in Japan by Tatsumi Hijikata and then developed by Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno (among others) into a global dance practice. Featuring dancers whose bodies appear as if they were cadavers refusing to die, butoh was born of death, or of many deaths: the death of a Japanese culture that was, in 1959, entering into a
of American gothic and the overlapping transition to a globalgothic in which America is but a part leads me to discuss two canonical, antebellum-era American gothic texts, and one contemporary instance with close ties to these, concluding with a final example of a globalgothic ‘America’ made in Japan. Each suggests the American nation state to be built atop unstable foundations, as representatives of
major studios: Little Nightmares Unlike much other survival horror, Alan Wake involves the gamer in constant combat with the various threats that confront the avatar/gamer, which can be said to be typical of a dominant American narrative and ludic tradition informed by hypermasculinity and gun violence. Other national or transnational Gothic gaming paradigms seldom give the gamer access to guns and they do not involve the gamer in the performance of hypermasculinity. For instance, Japanese and other
San Quentin prison near San Francisco. Surgeon Leo Stanley took testes from African-American, Japanese, and Mexican inmates for transplantation into white men, and consent was incentivised with sentence reduction or parole leniency. The most profitable transformations of tissue, however, have been cell lines developed from cancer cells for research, and here, too, African-American suffering has been central. The extraordinarily influential HeLa cell line was developed from the cells of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951
Suicide and the Gothic is the first protracted study of how the act of self-destruction recurs and functions within one of the most enduring and popular forms of fiction. Comprising eleven original essays and an authoritative introduction, this collection explores how the act of suicide has been portrayed, interrogated and pathologised from the eighteenth century to the present. The featured fictions include both the enduringly canonical and the less studied, and the geographical compass of the work embraces not merely British, European and American authors but also the highly pertinent issue of self-destruction in modern Japanese culture. Featuring detailed interventions into the understanding of texts as temporally distant as Thomas Percy’s Reliques and Patricia Highsmith’s crime fictions, and movements as diverse as Wertherism, Romanticism and fin-de-siècle decadence, Suicide and the Gothic provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of this recurrent crisis – a crisis that has personal, familial, religious, legal and medical implications – in fiction and culture. Suicide and the Gothic will prove a central – and provocative – resource for those engaged in the study of the genre from the eighteenth century onwards, but will also support scholars working in complementary literary fields from Romanticism to crime fiction and theoretical disciplines from the medical humanities to Queer Studies, as well as the broader fields of American and European studies. Its contents are as relevant to the undergraduate reader as they are to the advanced postgraduate and the faculty member: suicide is a crucial subject in culture as well as criticism.