What film got you hooked?

A continuing feature that asks prominent cinephiles "What film got you hooked on Japanese cinema?"


RING by Mandi Apple

The way I got into the Asian cult genre was just at the very beginning of the 'J-horror boom' in 2000, with Hideo Nakata's superb RING. I have personally always been a big horror fan, from early childhood, when I devoured ghost stories and all things creepy, and even persuaded my parents to hire 'Evil Dead' for me to show at my 12th birthday party, when it was still considered a 'video nasty'.

Alex and I were avid readers of the NME (British music paper) back in 2000, and we noticed a small paragraph about a new and incredible horror flick that was taking Japan by storm, RING (known in Japan at that time as "The Ring." of course), and that it was supposedly soon coming to the UK.

Just from that one six-line paragraph, I knew we had to see it, so we scoured the internet looking for a subtitled Japanese copy, which we simply couldn't find anywhere at all, not even an unsubtitled DVD was available anywhere. However, a few months down the line, Tartan released it here in the UK and Alex and I snapped it up instantly. One viewing had me totally hooked from the get-go! It was so fresh and different and properly psychologically scary: no reliance on gore, guts and grossness, something purely cerebral which haunted me for weeks after seeing it.

From there, of course, 2000 was a pretty good year for releases anyway - Audition was Tartan's second J-horror release, some six months after RING, and then the titles started coming thick and fast with all the classics popping up in Hong Kong DVD stores, like Kairo, Uzumaki, Battle Royale etc. I have to give a lot of credit to Tartan for giving us lucky folk our first taste of contemporary J-horror.

I feel really lucky to have been there right at the start of the boom, and whilst some might argue that a genre that's dead in the water now, I still feel it has so much to offer: one look at titles such as Strange Circus, Marebito, Nightmare Detective and Loft is enough to give me great optimism that it's still very much alive and kicking!

Since 2002 Mandi Apple has been one of the key online voices of the Asian extreme/ J-Horror explosion with her website Snowblood Apple (http://www.mandiapple.com/snowblood/index.html) where she's reviewed dozens of Japanese and Asian films. She is based out of Bristol, United Kingdom where she lives with her husband Alex.