J-Horror Boom inspired by rejected traditional dance1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWith the 00’s behind us and a new decade just beginning it seems like a logical time to take stock of the path that Japanese film has taken in the first ten years of the 21st-century.
While it has now been maligned by many, one simply cannot dismiss the importance of what came to be known as the J-Horror Boom during this time.
The irony of the huge mainstream success of characters such as The Grudge, Ring and Ju-On was that they were brought to life by practitioners of a modern dance form that had long been rejected by the mainstream in Japan – Butoh.
One of Butoh’s founders, Tatsumi Hijikata, was in fact famously quoted as having describing the dance as “a corpse trying desperately to stand upright,” an evocative but deceptively simple image that doesn’t take into account the avant-garde art and theatre, zen-like (and sometimes nihilistic) philosophy, radical social politics, and extreme physical discipline that Butoh was a synthesis of.
