In a similar manner to Fowler, Nakagawa in her insightful analysis of Village of Eight Gravestones (Yatsuhaka-mura dir. In these terms, East Asian Gothic cannot be reduced to a copy of an original-something which is imported into East Asia during the colonial period-but rather is an indigenous genre with similar themes and concerns to that of the Western Gothic: “one immediately sees East-West similarities in the psychosexual matrix through which the Gothic expresses the struggles of the spirit and the flesh” (Hughes, 2000, p 67). He argues for the Gothic as “a translation term for a similar tradition observable in both cultures” ( 2000, p 84). The most extensive analysis to date is that of Hughes in ‘Familiarity of the Strange: Japan’s Gothic Tradition’ ( 2000). Fowler points out that while the Gothic began as a “fixed genre”, it soon “yielded a gothic mode that outlasted it” ( 1982, p 109).Įxisting work on East Asian literature and cinema has utilised the Gothic as either a translation term, mode or as a meta-theory, acknowledging that the Gothic is a concept which is historically and culturally specific to the West. For example, Hogle in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature contends that “the Gothic is a form of Western fiction-making” ( 2002, p 7) while Baldick argues that the Gothic is “neither immemorial or global, but belongs specifically to the modern age of Europe and the Americas since the end of the eighteenth century” ( 1993, p 20). The Gothic is almost always understood as a specifically Western form which emerges as the underside of the Enlightenment. In a similar manner, Punter argues that paranoia, the barbaric and taboo are “the aspects to which Gothic constantly, and hauntedly, returns” ( 1995, p 184). He writes “Aesthetically excessive, Gothic productions were considered unnatural in their under-mining of physical laws with marvellous beings and fantastic beings” ( 1995, p 4). In his seminal study, Botting locates the Gothic as the monstrous, repressed past of Enlightenment rationality. Wellson Chin, Hong Kong, 2014) in order to map out the multiple border crossings which are constitutive of East Asian Gothic: while Painted Skin is representative of a global, or globalising trend, in East Asian Gothic Cinema, The Extreme Fox can be understood as resistant to globalisation through the emphasis on the local and the regional. Gordon Chan, China/Hong Kong/Singapore, 2008) and the low-budget, low fi, The Extreme Fox (dir. This paper explores the representation of the fox-spirit in contemporary Chinese cinema, at two ends of the spectrum in terms of budget and ambition, the big budget, CGI spectacular, Painted Skin ( Hua Pi dir. On screen, the fox-spirit (also known as the fox fairy) is either represented as a variation of the femme fatale or the sacrificial woman-or indeed both in some cases-creating a parallel between existing gender relation and the gothic imaginary. While much has been written about the vengeful ghost, little attention has been paid to that of the fox-spirit even though ‘she’ is ubiquitous in East Asian popular culture. In order to demonstrate the transnational and regional flows that form East Asian gothic cinema, this paper focuses in on one of the oldest and most enduring gothic figures found in literature and mythology across East Asia, the nine-tailed fox: known as the huli jin in China, gumiho in Korea and kitsune in Japan. This is in opposition to critical work which views East Asian gothic and horror films as extensions of Japanese horror, and therefore J-Horror as a meta-genre for example David Kalat in J-Horror ( 2007) and Axelle Carolyn in It Lives Again! Horror Films in the New Millennium ( 2008), or focus almost solely on the relationship between contemporary Western and East Asian Horror cinema through an analysis of the remake. East Asian Gothic is an umbrella term which encompasses the cinemas of PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, acknowledging the difficult histories and conflicts between the nations, as well as film making practices and industries. This paper offers a definition of East Asian Gothic cinema in which a shared cultural mythology, based upon cultural proximity and intra-regional homologies, provides a cinematic template of ghosts and ghouls together with a grotesque menagerie of shapeshifting animals, imagined as either deities or demons.
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