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Conclusion: Envelopes of Fear—The Temporality of Japanese Horror

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Abstract

Brown resituates the study’s findings in relation to questions of timing and temporality that are evoked by J-horror’s cinema of sensations. Taking into consideration the issue of timing understood not only as the duration of individual images and the durational relationships between and among images but also in terms of the concept of temporal envelopes with individual stages of attack, decay, sustain, and release, Brown reconceives how the slow attack and long release times of J-horror’s slow-burn style impact the affective dynamics of horror spectatorship.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kurosawa Kiyoshi, “Broken Circuits,” Kairo, directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi (2001), translated as Pulse, subtitled Blu-Ray (London, England: Arrow Video, 2017).

  2. 2.

    Takahashi Hiroshi, “Interview with Producer Hiroshi Takahashi,” Marebito, directed by Shimizu Takashi (2004), subtitled DVD (Los Angeles, CA: Tartan Video, 2006) (translation modified).

  3. 3.

    Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari , A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Gilles Deleuze , Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze , Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Deleuze conceives of cinema as the machinic assemblage of “matter-images [images-matière],” which has “as its correlate a collective assemblage of enunciation”(Cinema 1, 82, 85).

  4. 4.

    David Deamer , Deleuze , Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 25.

  5. 5.

    Thousand Plateaus, 94–99.

  6. 6.

    Ibid., 103.

  7. 7.

    Isabel Pinedo , Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1997), 53.

  8. 8.

    See my analysis in Chap. 4 of the important role played by color in Miike Takashi’s notorious Audition (Ōdishon, 1999, Japan).

  9. 9.

    Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari , What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 175, 168.

  10. 10.

    Susan L. Feagin , “Time and Timing,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, edited by Carl R. Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 168–169.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., 173–174.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 174.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 169.

  14. 14.

    See also David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 74–98.

  15. 15.

    Feagin , 168–170.

  16. 16.

    Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 59.

  17. 17.

    Omnisphere 2 Reference Guide, https://support.spectrasonics.net/manual/Omnisphere2/layer_page/envelopes/index.html (accessed July 2, 2017).

  18. 18.

    For a discussion of the concept of “sonorous envelopes” in a psychoanalytic context, see Didier Anzieu, “L’enveloppe sonore du Soi,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse no. 13 (1976): 161–179; Edith Lecourt, “The Musical Envelope,” in Psychic Envelopes, edited by D. Anzieu and translated by Daphne Briggs (London: Karnac, 1990), 211–235.

  19. 19.

    Kyu Hyun Kim, “Kyōfu,” in The Encyclopedia of Japanese Horror Films, edited by Salvador Murguia (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 187.

  20. 20.

    Kurosawa Kiyoshi , “Broken Circuits,” Kairo, directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi (2001), translated as Pulse, subtitled Blu-Ray (London, England: Arrow Video, 2017).

  21. 21.

    Coral Castillo, “A Slow Burn Into Your Soul: 13 Slow Burn Horror Movies,” The Lazy Audience, February 24, 2016, https://thelazyaudience.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/a-slow-burn-into-your-soul-13-slow-burn-horror-movies/ (accessed July 6, 2017). Needless to say, slow-burn horror also shares traits with “slow cinema.” On “slow cinema,” see Tiago De Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, eds., Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Justin Remes, Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); and Ira Jaffe, Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

  22. 22.

    Robert Spadoni , “Carl Dreyer’s Corpse: Horror Film Atmosphere and Narrative,” in A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff (Chichester, West Sussex, UK; Malden, MA, USA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 157–159.

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Brown, S.T. (2018). Conclusion: Envelopes of Fear—The Temporality of Japanese Horror. In: Japanese Horror and the Transnational Cinema of Sensations. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70629-0_6

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