Selling Screams

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Taka Ichise has made a killing peddling screams and sleepless nights. Over the past six years he has spent $13 million to make nine Japanese ghost movies, which have raked in more than $100 million worldwide. So like any tycoon in a growth industry, Ichise is ramping up production. In October the 43-year-old producer released two new films in Japan: Infection (featuring a haunted hospital) and Premonition (about a newspaper that describes grisly events before they happen). Meanwhile, The Grudge—Ichise's Hollywood remake of his 2002 hit Ju-on—topped the U.S. box office when it was released a month ago. "All I have to do is mention that I want to make another movie and studios line up to buy the rights," he gloats.

Until recently, Asian horror movies—with titles like Chinese Torture Chamber Story and Reborn From Hell: Samurai Armageddon—were geared to what are politely referred to as niche audiences. That all changed in 1998 with Ichise's stylishly creepy Ringu, which Hollywood remade as The Ring. Ringu earned nearly $20 million, the sequel took in double that, and the Hollywood remake grossed $230 million. Viewers found themselves face to face with a new Asian beast: scare flicks that kept them suspended in fear, instead of grossed out by gore. As a result, says Danny Pang, co-director of the Hong Kong horror blockbuster The Eye, "People realized that horror movies don't have to be B movies. They've finally broken into the mainstream."

Ichise can take much of the credit for this breakthrough. Returning to Japan in 1997 after a stint in Hollywood, he discovered a clique of talented young directors, including Ringu's Hideo Nakata and Ju-on's Takashi Shimizu, absorbed with making straight-to-video ghost stories. Working with budgets of about $10,000 per one-hour segment forced Asian horror's avant-gardists to rely on suspense instead of special effects. "With horror, bigger budgets don't necessarily mean better movies," says Ichise. "This group was making terrifying stuff on a shoestring. The Asian horror-movie boom that everybody's talking about grew out of that scene." To make Ringu, Ichise cobbled together $1.4 million for Nakata, who was then scraping by on a small studio salary while living in a dingy Tokyo dorm room. Few shared Ichise's faith in the project. "Most of the stars I approached for the lead roles didn't want anything to do with horror," he recalls. The refuseniks are now kicking themselves while Nakata and Shimizu have migrated to big-money Hollywood jobs remaking their own movies.

Inspired by the success of Japanese horror, other moviemakers around Asia have also embraced the genre. Most of the resulting films are ghost tales that overlay rustic superstitions onto a canvas of urban, middle-class life. They're populated by loners (like a suicidal psychic girl in Korea's The Uninvited), broken families (a traumatized single mother and her daughter in Nakata's Dark Water)—and the disheveled, raven-haired girl ghosts that have come to symbolize Asian horror. Settings are as alienating as the characters are alienated: cramped, paranoid visuals draw out the spooky possibilities of creaky old buildings and antiseptic new ones. In short, these are movies tailor-made for societies hurtling into an uncertain future, trailing the baggage of a traditional past. South Korea's most original offering—A Tale of Two Sisters by director Kim Ji Woon—is a case in point. Oh Ki Min, the movie's producer, describes this saga of domestic murder and madness as "a Korean version of American Beauty ... a tale of middle-class family dysfunctionality for a country still under the yoke of Confucian patriarchy." Made for just $3.7 million, the film drew more viewers last year than any horror movie in the country's history.

Even China, Asia's perennial pop-culture laggard, has hopped on the bandwagon. The upcoming The Ghost Inside—at $600,000, the country's most expensive scary movie—transplants the single-mom-in-a-creepy-apartment formula to an impersonal, rapidly modernizing mainland city. Despite the tight budget, its cast includes Beijing heartthrob Liu Ye and Taiwanese TV-drama princess Barbie Hsu. For now, though, the hotbed of Asian dread remains Japan, where Ichise presides over his assembly line of scares. In the next two years he plans to release at least four more Japanese ghost movies, including one each by Nakata and Shimizu. "The day after I announced the new movies, a Hollywood studio offered to buy the remake rights to all of them," he chuckles. "I turned them down—it wasn't time to sell quite yet." In horror, after all, timing is everything.