Terror Tracks - Music, Sound and Horror Cinema - Philip Hayward

Terror Tracks - Music, Sound and Horror Cinema - Philip Hayward

The Ghostly Noise of J-Horror: Roots and Ramifications

Terror Tracks - Music, Sound and Horror Cinema - Philip Hayward

James Wierzbicki [+-]
University of Michigan
James Wierzbicki is a musicologist who teaches at the University of Michigan and serves as executive editor of the MUSA (Music of the United States of America) series of scholarly editions.

Description

This chapter looks at a peculiar sonority of J-Horror such as the “metallic screeching”, a “grating” or “ripping” sound that often announces the presence of ghosts and links the tradition to historical Japanese genres and animist beliefs and looks at the work of recent composers Kenji Kawai (Ringu, Honogurai mizu) and Shiro Sato (Ju-on) known for Hollywood remakes. It argues that their recent film music is characterized both by ‘timbral transformation’ and by ‘substantial silence’, and insofar as it relates to on-screen yûrei it seems strongly redolent of kabuki convention. For theatrical presentations of Japanese ghost stories, the combination of subtly shifting sound colours and purposeful ma has done the trick for centuries. Knowingly or not, Kawai and Sato with their scores for J-horror films have tapped into longstanding Japanese tradition. Perhaps instinctively, but more likely because they realized they were dealing with subject matter far removed from western culture, the composers assigned to the Hollywood remakes have gravitated towards a time-tested Japanese model.

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Citation

Wierzbicki, James. The Ghostly Noise of J-Horror: Roots and Ramifications. Terror Tracks - Music, Sound and Horror Cinema. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 249 - 267 Jul 2009. ISBN 9781845532024. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=19136. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.19136. Jul 2009

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