By Mark Schilling
What do you do when you've just scored a $100-million-plus hit with your first Hollywood film? In the case of Takashi Shimizu, the director of The Grudge, the answer is -- go back to Japan and make a horror pic called Reincarnation for what, by Hollywood standards, is a middling-to-modest budget.
A come down? Not really, since the producer of Shimizu's new film, Taka Ichise, is also the production mastermind behind the Japanese horror boom, beginning with Hideo Nakata's seminal Ringu in 1998 and continuing with Shimizu's 2002 breakthrough, Ju-On. Ichise also involved in the latter film's remake as The Grudge, together with Hollywood horrormeister Sam Raimi.
Reincarnation is one of six films in Ichise's new J-Horror Theatre slate, which he is producing with six of the genre's leading directors. The first two films, Masayuiki Ochiai's Infections and Norio Tsuruta's Premonition, were released in Japan last October. Now Shimizu is making the third, Reincarnation, with backing by a seven company consortium, that includes Ichise's OZ which is handling production, and distributor Toho, which will release the film on January 7 in Japan. Meanwhile, interest in the slate from abroad is intense, with distribtion deals already concluded for more than 40 countries, including North America and most of Europe and Asia.
Based on an original script by Shimizu and Masanori Adachi, Reincarnation tells a story reminicent of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining -- but with several made-in-Japan twists. A young actrress (Yuka) is cast in a film about a mass murder at a tourist hotel in the early 1970s. As the start of production approaches, she begin to have nightmares, in which she sees the murders -- and feels the victims' desire for revenge. Then the director (Kippei Shiina) takes the cast and crew to the hotel where the incident actually occurred -- and the actress suspects she is the reincarnation of one of the victims.
"Something similar (to the incident in the film) actually happened many years ago when a father killed everyone in his family -- then taped his last words before killing himself," explains Shimizu. "We used this and other true incidents to come up with the story."
Despite his reputation as a Hollywood hitmaker and his consequent media celebrity in Japan, Shimizu found that making a horror film in his native country is still no cakewalk. "It's not like Hollywood, where horror is more respected as a genre -- in Japan it has a negative image," Shimizu explains "Several of the actors I approached were worried that, if they accepted a role in my film, they would lose status. Here horror is thought to be a genre for B-class actors."
Also, when Shimizu and his staff went location hunting in rural areas of Kyushu -- the southernmost of Japan's four main islands -- they ran into resistance from town fathers. "They asked us to go away -- they were afraid their town would get a bad image if we shot a horror movie there," Shimizu commented. "But once we became friendly with them, they turned out to be very cooperative."
Shimizu began principal photography in the Tokyo area on April 23, moving to the Toho studio in Tokyo on May 6, where he shot in a huge hotel set. On May 29, he went to Kyushu for location work, returning to the Toho studio on June 6. Shooting wrapped on June 28. This ten-week total was three weeks longer than Shimizu's shoot of The Grudge. Post production will continue until the latter part of September.
"The shoot has gone pretty smoothly," says Shimizu, after filming a scene with Yuka and Shiina in a cavernous Toho sound stage. One reason: The all-Japanese crew's willingness to work long hours when necessary. "They can do things the American crew on The Grudge couldn't do because of union rules," Shimizu explains.
Ichise adds that "there are both good side and bad sides" to Hollywood way of working. The good side: A high technical standard that he believes has had a positive impact on Shimizu and his crew, though it is costly to achieve. "The hotel set is one example," he says. "It's really built well, which not always the case here. Lighting is another example. We're getting excellent results on this film with the Hollywood methods we learned."
In developing the script, Shimizu and his collaborators "want to make it easy to understand for an international audience," said Shimizu. In other words, keep Buddhist doctrine about reincarnation in the background, keep the ghosts front and center. At the same time, Ichise added, they have tried to incorporate the sort of atmospherics and scares the world has come to recognize as J-Horror, "We don't want to betray the audience," he says.
One J-Horror -- and Shimizu -- trademark is making the most of low-tech and no-tech effects. Instead of CG-generation spooks, a little boy with white make-up and an unsettling gaze,. "Actually we did use a lot of CG in The Grudge -- but not so you could notice it," commented Ichise. "We are also using a lot of CG (on Reincarnation) to create effects that don't look like effects. That's more interesting."
What Ichise does not find all the interesting, however, is a Hollywood remake of Reincarnation. "I'd like to put a stop to that," says Ichise. "I'd like them to release the original in the US instead."
What next? For Ichise, another slate of J-Horror films is in the works, with production to start next year. He is also gearing up for his fourth film in the current slate, with Shimizu's mentor, Kiyoshi Kurosawa directing.
For Shimizu, more horror is on the horizon, including The Grudge 2 and Ju-On 3. The Grudge 2 set to start production this year. Perhaps by New Year's he'll be ready for a vacation -- but he'd better choose his hotel carefully.
