Eastern fright fest

If you're looking for a good scare this week, go along to see

Horror is back in fashion and Hollywood is doing its darnedest to promote the fear factor. In the aftermath of the hugely successful (if somewhat overrated) Blair Witch Project we have had Thirteen Ghosts, Jeepers Creepers, Resident Evil and Frailty. Waiting in the wings to jump out and make you scream are My Little Eye, Feardotcom, Pulse, House Of 1,000 Corpses, 28 Days Later and many more.

But it is the Eastern film-makers of Japan and Hong Kong who are in the vanguard of this new wave of gore. As so often occurs when a foreign film makes ripples in the cineverse, the Hollywood version is not far behind and much of the upcoming American output consists of remakes of the Eastern crew's best work.

Hideo Nakata's spinechiller Ring - the superior spook film about a haunted videotape inspired by the M.R. James story Casting The Runes - is currently being remade by Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks studio. We can only hope they don't mess it up as comprehensively as the remake of the Spanish psycho/horror Open Your Eyes. When Tom Cruise got his well-manicured mitts on the latter and turned it into Vanilla Sky the result was bland and anaesthetised.

Alarmingly, the news is that the latest Hong Kong horror movie from the Pang brothers, The Eye, which is a genuinely terrifying experience, is also to be remade by Tom Cruise's company. Cruise has clearly got a thing about 'eye' movies, having made Eyes Wide Shut and remade Open Your Eyes.

The fact remains that the Japanese, the Hong Kong Chinese --and, to a lesser extent, the Koreans --are leading the field in the horror genre. Names like Takashi Ishii (Freeze Me, 2000 - rapist in freezer), Ki-duk Kim (The Isle, 2000 --hideous things happening to fish) and Kinji Fukasaku (Battle Royale, 2000 - 42 schoolchildren forced to kill each other on a desert island) are the names to drop in the company of aficionados.

Ever since I shivered through 1964's Onibaba - a hideous tale of cannibalism in 14th-century Japan - I have had a profound respect for Eastern horror movies. When American sophomore slashers fail to arouse that frisson of fear and British horrors disappear up their own fundaments, the Asian/Oriental film-makers can be relied upon to deliver the kind of shockfest sadly lacking in their occidental counterparts.

Why is it Eastern film-makers can consistently serve up screen horror fare that does exactly what it says on the poster, while we Westerners struggle to keep up? Without delving into the social anthropology, one can only conclude that they have been more faithful to their own cultural history and are fearless in the representation of all things diabolical.

The trouble is that most Western horror movies pander to their target audience (aged 15-25), who are weaned on MTV and computer games and have - it is assumed - the attention span of a gnat suffering from ADD. Plus, there is something wimpy about the way Americans in particular handle the genre. Not since Sam Raimi's Evil Dead has anyone had the guts to take the audience by the scruff of the neck and drag them kicking and screaming on a hell-bound ride of terror. When they go 'subtle', in films such as What Lies Beneath or The Sixth Sense, they rely more on narrative twists rather than nightmare images to sell the story.

Takashi Miike's infamous Audition (1999 - ballet dancer keeps writhing sack in her flat and tortures men) is a case in point. He takes his time over the plotting and character development, which makes it all the more potent when the screaming starts. Almost nothing awful occurs until about halfway through when the strangely bulging sack suddenly rolls across a room. You have to go back to The Shining or Polanski's Repulsion to find a similar shock to the nervous system.

The only American director capable of tapping into the subconscious for nightmarish imagery and who simultaneously possesses the filmmaking artistry to express his twisted vision is David Lynch. While few of his movies (Eraserhead excepted) might be classified as horror films, they are invariably extreme and almost always frightening.