Japanese horror
[2] Media in which the genre of Japanese horror fiction can be found include artwork, theater, literature, film, anime and video games.
[5] Later, the term yōkai evolved to refer to vengeful states that kami ("gods" or spirits in the Shinto religion) would morph into when disrespected or neglected by people living around their shrines.
[7] Kabuki and Noh, forms of traditional Japanese theater, often depict horror tales of revenge and ghastly appearances.
"[5] The subject matter often portrayed in original Noh theater include vengeful spirits, demon plays, stories of death, and others.
The Oiwa story centers around betrayal and revenge, wherein the devoted wife is killed by her disreputable husband and her ghost appears and torments and tricks him.
After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Japanese horror cinema would mainly consist of vengeful ghosts, radiation mutants, and kaiju (giant irradiated monsters) starting with Godzilla (1954).
[10] Additionally, Kwaidan showcases one commonality seen in various Japanese horror films, that being the recurring imagery of the woman with long, unkempt hair falling over her face.
[11] Another notable film worth mentioning is House, which is a surreal horror movie about a group of schoolgirls who visit their aunt in the country.
In the 1980s, there was a distinct shift away from gory, slasher-style films of violent spectacle, towards the psychologically thrilling and intensely atmospheric type, led by the director Norio Tsuruta.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood horror had largely been dominated by the slasher sub-genre, which relied on on-screen violence, shock tactics, and gore.
Ring, whose release in Japan roughly coincided with The Blair Witch Project in the United States, helped to revitalise the genre by taking a more restrained approach to horror, leaving much of the terror to the audience's imagination.
[16] In addition to Japanese productions, this boom also managed to bring attention to similar films made in other East Asian nations at the same time, such as South Korea (A Tale of Two Sisters) and Hong Kong (The Eye).
One of the earliest Japanese zombie films with considerable gore and violence was Battle Girl: The Living Dead in Tokyo Bay (1991) directed by Kazuo Komizu.
[27] According to Kim Newman in the book Nightmare Movies (2011), the "zombie revival began in the Far East" during the late 1990s, largely inspired by two Japanese zombie games released in 1996: Resident Evil, which started the Resident Evil video game series, and Sega's arcade shooter House of the Dead.
[29][30][32] In 2013, George Romero said it was the video games Resident Evil and House of the Dead "more than anything else" that popularised his zombie concept in early 21st century popular culture.
[36] Horror manga are a modern evolution of serialized stories produced as texts in wood block print form during the Edo period.
Examples of horror anime include Death Note, Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories and Boogiepop Phantom.
Examples of Japanese horror based video games include Resident Evil, Ghost House, Castlevania, Silent Hill and Fatal Frame.
