East Asian Gothic: a definition

Abstract

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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Gordon Chan, China/Hong Kong/Singapore, 2008) and the low-budget, low fi, The Extreme Fox (dir. 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.