International Horror Film Directors: Global Fear

By Danny Shipka

Horror films have for decades commanded major global audiences, tapping into deep-rooted fears that cross national and cultural boundaries in their ability to spark terror. This book brings together a group of scholars to explore the ways that this fear is utilized and played upon by a wide range of filmmakers. Contributors take up such major figures as Guillermo del Toro, Lars Von Trier, and David Cronenberg, and they also offer introductions to lesser-known talents such as Richard Franklin, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Juan López Moctezuma, and Alexandre Aja. Scholars and fans alike dipping into this collection will discover plenty of insight into what chills us.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Dec 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783206551

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2017 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2017 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Typesetting: Contentra Technologies

Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-653-7

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-654-4

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-665-1

Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

Financial support was provided from the Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Oklahoma and the College of Arts and Sciences at Oklahoma State University.

This is a peer-reviewed publication.

Contents

Introduction: The Onset of Global Fear

Danny Shipka and Ralph Beliveau

Chapter 1: A Topology of Guillermo del Toro

Ralph Beliveau

Chapter 2: Richard Franklin: Ozploitation Auteur, Hitchcock Heir, Cinema Underdog

Ben Kooyman

Chapter 3: Kiyoshi Kurosawa: J-horror's Master Stylist

Leah Larson

Chapter 4: Madness and Eroticism: The Films of Juan López Moctezuma

Budd Wilkins

Chapter 5: The Serious Play of Alexandre Aja

Tracy Stephenson Shaffer

Chapter 6: The Sapphic, The Sadean, and Jess Franco

Will Dodson

Chapter 7: Sergio Martino: Master of the Filone

Mikel J. Koven

Chapter 8: At the Margins of Taste, in the Mouth of Madness: The Case of Lars von Trier

Linda Badley

Chapter 9: José Mojica Marins and Zé do Caix󀃣o: Nightmares of Frankenstein in Brazil's National Horror Story

Jerry Metz

Chapter 10: Dreaming Revolt: Jean Rollin and the French Fantastique in the Context of May 1968

Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare

Chapter 11: Acquiescence, Canadian Style. The Early Cinema of David Cronenberg

Danny Shipka

Notes on Contributors

Index

Introduction: The Onset of Global Fear

Danny Shipka and Ralph Beliveau

Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive …

Thích Nhất Hạnh

Across an increasingly interconnected global environment, changes in technology have made it easier to be exposed to cultures far different from our own. For filmmakers and their audiences this means sharing a vast, diverse assortment of kinds of storytelling that is a reflection of different cultures. One of the most resonant themes these filmmakers explore is fear: fear of the unknown, fear of assimilation, fear of disease, many different manifestations of an emotion that is essential to the survival of a particular culture. In this collection of essays, readers can experience some incredibly powerful thinking about how this fear is explored among horror filmmakers, horror film viewers, and even horror film scholars. These essays invite readers to consider the complex relationship that the filmmakers have to their different local contexts, while at the same time offering a broad canvas of what the intersection of all of these filmmakers means to the world of horror storytelling.

The filmmakers discussed have produced a substantial body of work in the genre, and are of interest because of the way they have maintained a probing relationship to horror over a long period of time. Some have left the genre for part of their creative output, but the vast majority of their work fits easily within the confines of horror. This is not meant to be an exhaustive survey, since arguments could be made for why someone is not discussed in these chapters, and scholars would hope to see those arguments made in print one day. The approach taken in this book is not a final word, but is instead intended to initiate a continuing conversation as audiences and scholars see changes in participation in global fear. The chapters here look at the past, but there are still locations in the world that can be brought into the conversation in the future.

In this space of contradiction between the local and the intercultural, horror storytelling encourages a shared space that recognizes the human experience along with the cacophony that comes from the jarring effects of cultural differences. Sometimes these differences are the source of anxiety itself. We also share horrors, both real and imagined, and while it might seem that horrors would cause us to turn away, they instead have the power to bring us together. The nightmares that are shared, while at first perhaps unfamiliar, come to be recognized as a fluid way to understand both a distant culture and a shared vision of humanity. In his book Mondo Macabro, which extolls the virtues of horror and other types of fringe cinema from around the world, Pete Tombs said:

The kind of films we’re looking at […] are usually avoided by heavyweight histories. Which is odd, because in our encounters with Filipino action heroes, Hong Kong horror stars, and Japanese bondage queens, we’ve learned far more about their respective countries than from any number of serious art films.

(1997, 7)

As filmmakers have grown and shared their cinematic nightmares over the past half century or so, audiences have learned to enjoy both the similarities and the differences. Even though the ideas may come from other cultures, audiences seek to explore different cultures and learn how to make sense of these shared stories. At the same time, as discussed by Lobato and Ryan, the horror genre benefits from a production/distribution feedback loop:

(F)oregrounding the role of distribution within genre production generates a rather different model of how screen cultures and industries operate. In contrast to the conventional structural typology production => distribution => reception, a series of feedback loops originating in distribution and feeding back into production also become visible.

(2011, 200)

While the essays in this volume are organized around particular directors, the sources for their creative output and the industrial machinery that enables them, demonstrate the influence of distribution networks. Even though creative horror filmmakers are influenced by distribution, and distribution is influenced by technologies, successful distribution ultimately depends on the shared recognition of story-driven characteristics of the horror genre among audiences that encourage global fear.

At their core, audiences share many of the same fears—birth, death, sex, disease, terror, insanity, pain, mortality, monstrosity—and audiences explore them in all their cultural variations. The essays in this book argue that murder, mayhem, monstrosity, suffering innocents, and the grotesque are inescapable aspects of the very commonalities that can draw the audience’s experiences together.

The power of that attraction lies in an ancient proverb: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Word travels about the common enemies of lives, bodies, relationships, and cultures. Horror storytelling reaches across boundaries to offer a shared experience. These essays can be seen as a conversation between the filmmaker’s point of origin and the many and varied points of intersection. This collection of essays continues the work encouraged in the Introduction to Schneider and Williams’ book Horror International. They argued that the expansion of global film distribution means that:

characterizations of the nature of horror films (narratively, thematically, stylistically, and economically) from various geographical and cultural locations are more fluid and transitional than ever before […] (But) recognition of this fact does not mean denying the existence of national features that affect and are reflected in particular horror films, whether from an artistic or reception standpoint. Instead, we must respect and seek to identify the diversity of factors bearing on specific works, as well as draw attention to neglected social, cultural, and ideological aspects of the horror genre’s appearance in its various national cinematic contexts.

(2005, 3–4)

Across cultures audiences are exposed to the essence of the other’s fears and—in the truly uncanny sense—they are recognizable and often shared, a collective fear, regardless of cultural boundaries. This does not mean doing violence to the individual characteristics of different cultures, as if to minimize their individuality. Instead, this is to recognize the common fears that help an audience understand the shape of any individual culture.

It is equally important to note that the careers discussed here are of men. This reflects historical conditions that have quite sadly limited who has participated in the genre over the course of a career. Women directors have been highly marginalized in the genre, as they have been in film production in its entirety. But this does not mean that there are no significant works that merit discussion, reaching back to silent cinema and across many different cultures. More work needs to be done in the filmmaking world to encourage the creation of horror by women, and in the scholarly world to analyze the meaning of this lack of work contextually, politically, and aesthetically.

Most of the focus in this volume is on the ways that directors have taken advantage of sharing their fears with the world. In the U.S. context, for example, the economy of film distribution and the need for cheap programming gave audiences the opportunity to view horror coming from other cultural perspectives. Dubbed horror from Spain, Italy, Mexico, France, and Germany as well as the un-dubbed work from England and Canada were in circulation in America, along with the American horror of Universal in the 1930s, American International in the 1950s, and a bunch of small Hollywood startups in between. (Subtitling would have to wait.) In this collection, these early years are where the work of Martino, Marins, and Franco find their first U.S. audiences. These directors were drawing on a combination of influences from German, American, and British horror, particularly the aesthetics of German Expressionism, its resonance in Universal, and the success of American International and Hammer Films.

But in every case, what the authors here find interesting is how these directors produce a synthesis of these global fears retold from their own history and contexts. Despite the importance of Universal and Hammer and the ability of both companies to produce and distribute a large amount of product, care needs to be taken not to lose sight of the deep and broad traditions of horror that each culture has in itself, and that since that time they have brought to share.

The horror film directors in this volume are, through their geographical origins, inevitably working out their political and social intersections via the films that they create. These filmmakers were affected in some way by their social and political environment. They used horror as a way to understand and deal with their own fears or the perceived fears of the society they lived in. It is important to acknowledge the repressive nature of the Franco regime in Spain on Jess Franco; or the changing urban tech world on Kurosawa; or the experiences of the sexual revolution on Cronenberg; or the cloistered nature of Brazilian society on Marins.

Each director brings a different voice into the conversation about fear, a voice produced by a series of context and historically significant moments. Adam Lowenstein’s Shocking Representation makes a similar argument, seeing horror films tied to allegorical moments of national trauma. Lowenstein argues that the allegorical moment attempts to shift cinema’s relation to history from compensation to confrontation […] the films do not redeem traumatic experience through art; instead they call into question this very desire for redemption (Lowenstein 2005, 8). This isn’t to say that these filmmakers are only interested in serious political discussion, or that they have picked a side in whether horror increases or reduces fear.

International horror film directors by their very nature are exploiters of cultural and representative fear. They boldly (and bodily) tackle issues that other filmmakers shy away from and they package this communal fear in a way that (hopefully) pushes the audience’s buttons in the most fundamental ways. Each director came from a complex political system and translated this complexity into a genre that is both accessible and extreme. Due to these political realities, filmmakers relied on certain tropes like sex, the grotesque, misogyny, and nihilism as tools of the horror genre to work out their own issues with society in effective ways.

So what is it about this filmmaking world in the last 50 years that allows horror to have such a deep resonance over such different contexts? The key is how the availability of this work has changed. The network of places to access films, along with the massive amount of fan culture information and discussion about global horror, has fundamentally transformed the audience experience. These changes have allowed distributors access to a much wider audience who, for their part, are finding ways to internationalize their own personal global fears.

At the same time that the audience has been expanding, many of the films discussed in this volume have had a rough history with critics. In many cases, this new global interconnectedness saw a proliferation of derivative films. But the originality of this material was changing, partly as the result of cultures that were learning to take cinema culture more seriously. In the United States, film schools were producing a generation of writers and directors who were deeply interested in global cinema. They were watching film from all over the world without the condescending attitude of quality being tied to the conventions of Hollywood A list pictures.

Several members of this generation were working with Roger Corman, a producer devoted to many different varieties of exploitation films. Corman’s business model in the economics of horror films meant that he could produce a variety of work that was cheap and quick, but varied in quality. Some work that was more polished (though still pretty quick, like his Poe films), and work that was already done and bought internationally, could be taken off the shelf, cheaply acquired, and modified to work in an international marketplace. Possibly inspired by the Americanized recut of Godzilla (1956), Corman acquired the rights to completed science-fiction films from Russia and redeployed them:

Well, it was a new form, I’m not certain it was a new art form! What I was doing with the Russian science fiction films […] I’d seen one of them and American science fiction films were very popular – I made a number of them myself – but we were making them on very low budgets and I’d seen this Russian film, which was clearly made on a big budget, a giant budget. It had wonderful sets and wonderful special effects, far superior to what we were doing. They only problem was the anti-American propaganda, so I wasn’t so much re-cutting the films as such, I was removing the anti-American sentiment. That was Francis Ford Coppola’s first job – cutting the propaganda out of Russian science fiction films. (italics in original)

(Fitch 2013)

The 1962 Russian science-fiction films Niebo Zowiet/The Heavens Call (Karzhukov and Kozyr 1959) and Planeta Bur/Storm Planet (Klushantsev 1962), for example, were supplemented with some additional footage and recut to make four different films between 1963 and 1968: Battle Beyond the Sun (Colchart (Coppola) 1963), Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (Harrington 1965), Queen of Blood (Harrington 1966), and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (Bogdanovich 1968). Even more complex and convoluted was the transformation of a Yugoslavian crime film shot in 1963 called Operacija Ticijan/Operation: Titian into three different films, which combined the original footage with some re-shoots and some story reconstruction. The result is either:

–about a forged painting and the man so obsessed with it he will commit murder ( Portrait in Terror , 1965, directed by Rados Novakovic, released straight to television), or

–about a lunatic artist who kills his models (Jack Hill’s Blood Bath , 1964, unreleased), or

–about a murderer who is also a vampire (Stephanie Rothman’s Blood Bath , 1966), or

–about a murderer who is a vampire, but with additional footage added ( Track of the Vampire , 1966, credited to both Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman).

For American audiences, especially those who were seeing much of this work from other countries in strange malformations on television, such viewing experiences were exciting adventures outside the familiar American and British work.

Like Roger Corman, K. Gordon Murray had a hand in internationalizing the U.S. horror experience. Murray’s original success came from the re-dubbing and distribution of children’s fairy tale films from other countries. He eventually discovered that the same process would work for Mexican horror films, like La momia azteca contra el robot humano/The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy (Portillo 1958), as well as the hybrid Mexican-masked wrestler/horror films like Las luchadoras contra la momia/Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy (Cardona 1964). So he went about acquiring, dubbing, and distributing Mexican horror to television.

Another strain of films that were part of this expansion of international distribution were the Krimi, a term for a series of German films produced between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, based mostly (but not exclusively) on the novels of British writer Edgar Wallace. These films were mystery thrillers, but often involved such bizarre violence that they fell in with horror films, such as Die blaue Hand/Creature with the Blue Hand (Vohrer 1967) or Der Teufel kam aus Akasava/The Devil Came From Akasava (Franco 1970). Few of these films saw theatrical release in the United States, but their distribution to television meant they were seen alongside both Murray’s Mexican horror films and Corman’s various projects.

And no account of this would be complete without mentioning the presence of Japan’s daikaiju (giant monster) films. Gojira/Godzilla (Honda 1954), released in Japan in November 1954 was dubbed into English and scenes featuring Raymond Burr were added. Reconstructed under the title Godzilla, King of the Monsters, it was released in the United States in April 1956. This opened the door to a great number of daikaiju that were released theatrically and to television. Some films, such as Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (Honda 1962)/King Kong vs. Godzilla (Honda 1963) and Daikaiju Gamera (Yuasa 1965)/Gamera, the Invincible (Yuasa 1966), were extensively recut with an American perspective, while others would be shown virtually edit free.

This history is worth mentioning because of the way it allowed a U.S. audience to experience a wider variety of horror material. The context where these films were shown was another important aspect of their presence. They were packaged with American (Universal) and British (Hammer) films for TV distribution, and frequently appeared on locally produced and locally hosted horror film slots. These program hosts traded in low-budget humor, suggesting that what they were offering was thought to be low-quality films. But many in the audience were both in on the joke, and found the films captivating, thrilling, sometimes even scary. But it was also allowing the audiences to tap into the possibilities of horror from other parts of the world.

These television outlets were soon overtaken, however, by different developments in terms of U.S. access to horror’s global variety. First, cable television grew very quickly through the 1980s, offering a large number of channels to homes, and helping to create a need for programming. Second, home video playback and recording technology—VHS and Betamax—had started in the mid to late 1970s, but in the 1980s became more affordable. In this early period, VHS tapes of films were rather expensive, leading to a boom in VHS video rental stores. As the prices of VHS films fell, rental was supplemented by a home video library of films that were owned rather than rented.

But access also was changing because there was no formal rating system overseeing access to rented or purchased video. Rental stores essentially created their own rules for who could access films on video. The popularity of some video stores was based on the wide variety of titles they could offer for rent. Sensing a great market opportunity, video labels snatched up foreign product—including significant amounts of horror—and made it available to home video rental customers. In order to make these films more accessible, distributors changed titles to connect with local audiences.

But this move to change titles to make them more familiar had a history of its own. From the outset of the 1950s, genre film distributors often tried to manipulate or hide the different national origins of the films in order to secure an audience. This is why films like Mario Bava’s Italian giallo masterpiece Sei donne per l’assassino (1964) does not become its literal translation 6 Women for the Killer, which too would have made it sound too foreign, but Blood and Black Lace, which sounded lurid enough and eerily similar to other American films, such as Horrors of the Black Museum (Crabtree 1959) and A Bucket of Blood (Corman 1959) so that it would entice unsuspecting moviegoers into the theatre. But it wasn’t just film titles that distributors changed. In the first three decades of the global horror phenomenon, actors, writers, and directors often had their names changed in order to give a different appearance to these films. Spanish director Jess Franco had a double-digit number of pseudonyms—some he chose himself (like taking the name of jazz great Clifford Brown), and some were bestowed on him by distributors, making it all but impossible for people to connect the film with the filmmaker.

With a deep reservoir of films to choose from and video store owners clamoring for product, secondhand video companies were able to capitalize on the early glut in the market and offer consumers a slew of international genre titles that weren’t possible to see in local movie theatres or drive-in screens. Along with titles for major films like On Golden Pond (Rydell 1981) and Ordinary People (Redford 1980), most local video stores would line the shelves—if not encumbered by state and/or local censorship laws like the BBFC in Britain—with titles like Anthropophagus/The Grim Reaper (D’Amato 1981), Apocalypse domani/Cannibal Apocalypse (Margheriti, credited as Dawson 1980), and Zombi 2/Zombie (Fulci 1979), all designed with covers and titles meant to make consumers feel as if they were watching something that wouldn’t take them too far outside of their cultural expectations. These films usually did not contain recognizable stars, or ones that weren’t way past their prime, and were not situated in locations that were familiar to most viewers. Many (if not most) of these films were treated with very little respect from critics. Some versions in distribution were poor transfers with awkward dubbing, which only added to the viewers’ disorientation. It didn’t matter though, as these films became the staple of most video rental stores in the 1980s. As satellite and cable system technologies grew, genre movies began showing up on cable television systems around the world. They usually contained the same Anglicized names, and, though providing these films with the largest audiences they had ever seen, many genre directors were still not benefiting from the global popularity of their films.

So a related market developed for magazines and books that would list and review these films from everywhere, such as Video Watchdog (1980–present) edited by Tim Lucas or Psychotronic Video (1989–2006) edited by Michael J. Weldon. In their pages, audiences could deepen their knowledge of history, production, and distribution contexts. The publications provided a forum where an idea of horror in one place could be understood and appreciated in another. Nothing quite beats a first-time viewer’s exposure to jiangshi films, such as Jiangshi Xiansheng/Mr. Vampire (Lau 1985), which feature a Chinese hopping vampire, or seeing a protagonist in an Indonesian film being chased by a Penanggalan (also called a Leyak)—a woman’s head with the spinal cord and internal organs still attached, flying around as seen in Leak/Mystics in Bali (Djalil 1981). Then again, this was exactly what was revealed in the British science-fiction/horror film, Fiend Without a Face (Crabtree 1958). In 1983 Weldon published a compilation of reviews in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. Tim Lucas did the same, publishing his reviews in the compilation volume The Video Watchdog Book in 1992.

In 1984 Phil Hardy published the third volume of a multi-volume film encyclopedia; this third volume was dedicated to horror films. The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror (Hagging and Hardy 1983) gave many readers their first fairly comprehensive guide to international horror films. It was published for the United States market by Overlook in 1986, who changed the title to The Overlook Encyclopedia of Film: Horror. A second slightly expanded edition was offered in 1993.

San Francisco publisher RE/Search Publications, who had developed out of the DIY and punk publishing movement, began putting out a series of large format magazines that turned essentially into books. Following a book on J. G. Ballard, RE/Search published an issue in 1985 called RE/Search No. 10: Incredibly Strange Films (Morton 1985), followed by a revised version the next year (Morton 1986). This issue’s focus on exploitation horror films gave viewers who were seeking films out of the commercial mainstream another list of things to look for. Though the majority of what was covered was from the American underground, it helped to highlight the path of international material that was not going to make it to the local multiplex, and perhaps might not even make it to the mainstream-oriented cable channels. (Though, for an alternative sense of what was possible on cable television in the formative years, it is worth considering the Z-Channel, which between 1974 and 1989 ran an eclectic mix of fare for cinephiles and experimental and exploitation fans. They were quite innovative, featuring the first cablecasting of director’s cut versions of films, and letterboxing films to preserve the intended screen ratios and compositions. Their history can be seen in the documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession [Cassavetes 2004]).

The growth of American cable television meant that channels looking for material were importing British programs into the market, such as The Incredibly Strange Film Show and The Son of the Incredibly Strange Film Show, a Channel 4 program hosted by Jonathan Ross. These programs were originally aired in the United Kingdom in 1988–1989, and were then broadcast in the United States on the Discovery Channel in the 1990s. Each series presented six episodes, usually focused on one or two filmmakers or a theme. Included were episodes on El Santo, the Mexican wrestler, and Tsui Hark, who figured prominently in the wave of Honk Kong imported films that further broadened the range of what was sought in video stores. Jonathan Ross also produced a series called Japanorama (2002, 2006, and 2007), which included much material on Japanese horror films, and Asian Invasion (2006), a series that discussed Japanese, Hong Kong, and Korean films. All of these developments broadened the conversation among fans and critics who were interested intellectually and invested emotionally in this material, finding themselves exposed to the wider world of horror.

So viewers of horror who in the previous generation gained exposure through television distribution now had access to an increasingly assorted array of genre material discussing a wider world of filmmaking. The idea of new also shifted a bit, from an emphasis on what was newly produced to an emphasis on what was newly available. As media consumption diversified in the 1990s, access became even easier through the Internet, specialized online services, and DVDs. Prices for a film on a disc had steadily dropped. Availability meant that viewers could now own the films they had heard or read about so often from the likes of Phil Hardy, Tim Lucas, or Michael Weldon and actually see what the fuss was all about. More importantly, these films were now being shown in their original states without the bad dubbing, or sub-standard transfers. Genre directors after being in the proverbial celluloid closet were now being sought out, and their works were being re-explored around the world, with audiences arriving at the remarkable fact that what scares us is universal. We share the fear.

This distribution meant that work by Martino, Marins, and Franco offered a hint of what the world was afraid of and to what extent that fear was global. Not only did this change what one could see, but it meant that the conventions that might at first seem absurd became more familiar through a different context, and the absurd became part of a broader understanding of the genre. In other words, the idea of what counted as a good film became much more contested since the whole set of conventions was redefined by these intersections.

It became more complex as these early directors were succeeded by new generations, and newer films were treated with parallel serious critical attention as Scorsese or Wong Kar Wai. The films of Von Trier and Cronenberg, discussed in this volume, have benefitted from the legitimacy of diverse critical attention. Still, underneath, these are directors that trade in fear, and are not afraid to go into areas that most filmmakers shy away from. In his early years, Cronenberg used the cold Canadian landscapes of modern geography to tell stories just as much as Franco used coastal Spanish locations. Von Trier also used his Danish sense of space and color to tell elaborate stories about institutions and their way of displacing what we find to be comfortably human.

These directors are worth considering because of the combination of attention they have paid to the genre over their career, and their apparently obsessive relationship with their own sets of fears. Most of these filmmakers would take as a compliment the idea that their relationship with storytelling is obsessive. These chapters are about how these directors maintain their balance on the fine line between the collective experience of fear and the unique vision that has allowed them to bring their impressions to screens internationally. They are negotiating three relationships: the first is between the genre conventions and their own individual way of contextualizing and shaping them; the second is between the local and the global. This territory is something that we all might have experienced when we have chosen to tell a story of an experience (real or fictional) that has given us a chill. We assume that our listeners will indulge in sharing our story, our vision, and our moment of uncanny recognition.

And there lies the third negotiation; even if the storyteller is an auteur, the genre demands that the stories are in some sense the property of the audience. Intellectual property and copyright might enable an idea that the horror tale is someone’s product, but the tradition of fairy tales, horror stories, and folktale-telling works when the story is also ours. The urban folktale works best when it is localized. For the editors of this book, being Chicagoans means that the vanishing hitchhiker is Resurrection Mary, hitchhiking off of Archer Avenue on the Southwest side of the city, even though we know full well the story is centuries old and internationally known. We make this story our own, but still know of its universality. One senses in the directors discussed in these chapters a combination of similar themes, but rewritten and re-understood through their local sensibilities and histories.

Frequently the question for global fear comes down to first asking what fears do we share? The spheres of religion, medicine, technology, and bodily experience are expressed as what Tracy Shaffer calls "metamimicry" (Chapter 5). We are afraid; sometimes of ourselves, sometimes of the things within us, where the outer appearance shields an inner psychosis. Sometimes we are afraid of the environment … what we have done to it, what it can do to us, how it unpredictably finds ways to protect itself and at the same time punish us for a combination of hubris and a lack of understanding of the consequences of our actions. We fear that we might deserve to be cleansed in a horrific apocalypse, whether religious or of our own making. We are afraid that our cultures, towns, and families might be in a state of decay or collapse. This might reflect a history of Gothic sensibilities, taken into the urban and suburban world in the 1960s and 1970s.

The directors included in this volume have each contributed in their own way to the propagation of global fear from their own cultural perspective. Each director here has a cultural predisposition toward certain types of fear. The authors of these chapters bring attention to the unique contribution that each director makes.

Capitalizing on the same cultural themes of ghosts and supernatural that were popular in Japan in the early 1960s, Mexico became a huge exporter of horror to global audiences. Proximity to the American horror industry may have aided in developing financially viable subject matter in Mexican horror cinema,