The Monstrous-Feminine in the Millennial Japanese Horror Film

Abstract

…the monstrous child is ultimately depicted as a creation of the psychotic, dominating mother. Ringu, Honogurai mizu no soko kara, and Ju-on are three representative texts of the millennial Japanese horror film. Released around the turn of the millennium, these films, which revolve around mysterious maternal figures and monstrous children, attracted global attention and played a role in resurrecting cinematic interest in the figure of the malevolent ghost. My investigation interrogates these Japanese cinematic treatments of mothers and children through the lens of Barbara Creed’s psychoanalytic framework of the monstrous feminine. I propose to delve beneath the obvious assertion that the terrifying women in these films are castrating figures and that their children are extensions of their mothers’ far-reaching destructive powers to explore the deeper resonances and implications of these characters’ links to the uncanny, the abject, and the monstrous. Furthermore, by examining these films against the specific political, social, and cultural contexts that shaped their creation, I consider how the complexity and ambiguity of these films’ treatments of the female, the maternal, and the (m)Other align with the anxieties that dominated Japan in the millennium.