Dark Water: The J-Horror of My Youth

Like most kids of a certain age, I went to Blockbuster often. I’d beg my dad to drive me over there after a long day at work and rent games I shouldn’t have been playing. Same goes for movies. As much as I enjoyed taking over Vice City and learning about serial killers reanimated as gingerbread men, few of these early incursions touched my regular life. One did.

Sitting in my grandmother’s apartment with a close friend, we played our rented copy of the American The Ring (2002). As the protagonist leafed through the pages of a newspaper looking for clues, there it was, emblazoned in the top-right corner of an otherwise unremarkable page: Garwood. The name of the town I grew up in. I’d never seen it or heard it spoken outside my bubble. Most of my friends didn’t even live in Garwood; its 4000 people occupied under a square mile of space. And yet, there it was: Garwood.

I about crawled out of my skin and down the stairs, ready to slither home to a confused pair of parents (Why aren’t you at grandma’s? Where’s your skin?). While The Ring stung violently, I recall all those J-Horror remakes needling me. Back then, nothing—and I mean nothing—filled our hearts with fear like the creeping black hair of the little girl from The Grudge (2004). The handful of such remakes—even the unambiguously bad ones—enjoyed a stranglehold on our young minds. The slasher kept on, slamming into an increasingly ridiculous dome of its own construction. The Saw franchise (2004-Present) was just getting started. The age of the home invasion flick was not yet upon us. We had J-Horror.

I’ve now gone on to see many of the (substantially better) originals. But one remained outside my ken, at least until this week: Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water (2002). It’s brilliant. Nakata, building off his work in Ring (1998), hits all the right notes. The plotting is slow but tense; the environments horrify in their drabness and bewildering emptiness. His toolkit is sparse but effective. Moments of deep love and affection find themselves undercut again and again by quick bursts of pure fright. Unlike many contemporary horror films, it walks the tightrope between narrative and social commentary well. One could indicate themes (generational trauma, sacrifice, loneliness in modern urban life, lost innocence), though they never overwhelm the subject matter. This isn’t an issues movie, a very special episode in the long run of cinematic excursions into horror.

My viewing experience, however, had little to do with the film as such. It unlocked memories like the one I shared above. It led me to ask: what was going on in aughts J-Horror and why did it grip us so tightly? As a child myself at the time, I can’t help but wonder about the degree to which ghostly (though not often traditionally violent) little girls might have played into my own subconscious fear of the opposite sex. Now, these girls—usually abandoned or forgotten to the point of their own doom—code differently; they are reminders of how many stories of regret and pain we suppress.

These kids figure the uncountable and unnamable tragedies that mark our society, one that never stops, one that does not allow us to mourn or think. They memorialize the millions our time won’t and can’t remember. In Dark Water, the antagonist is a little girl left to face a slow, lonely death; the water dripping from the upstairs apartment serves as the lone remainder that she ever existed. Similarly in Ring, the “antagonist” dies unhappily, sealed away from the light of the earth. In both cases, the world simply goes on; horror is precisely the ineliminable remainder, the thing that won’t allow us to forget.

I could go on about the Dot-com bubble and the failed promise of a more connected world. I could add to this mix the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, which, while they enjoyed less fame in the US, testify to this same alienation. What matters, however—or rather what I am now realizing—is that these films matter as much now as they did then. The repressed, the repressed always finds a way.