Course Description: Since the mid-1990s, horror and fantasy films from East Asia have gained international popularity, inspiring audiences and filmmakers the world over. To what extent are the monsters in these films and the anxieties they articulate culturally specific? In this class we will be looking at horror and fantasy films from Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea alongside traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ghost stories and folklore dealing with the supernatural, and readings relating horror to contemporary social and cultural issues. We will be considering the following questions: How do these films draw on (or depart from) local folklore or ghost stories? How do they rework techniques and tropes from other horror and supernatural traditions in a local context? How can the invisible be visualized in cinema?

Course Objectives: Students will get an overview of the folklore traditions of China, Japan, and Korea, in addition to the historical development of the horror genre in Hong Kong, Japanese, and South Korean cinema. Students will further how to analyze films in terms of their formal construction and the ways that they elicit responses from viewers (i.e., how horror films can scare people). They will further learn how to contextualize their analyses of films and spectator response in terms of their historical, cultural, and industrial context.

Required Books:

• Pu Songling—Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Trans. John Minford.

• Ueda Akinari—Tales of Moonlight and Rain. Trans. Anthony H. Chambers.

• Zong In-sob—Folk Tales from Korea

All other books will be made available on the course Canvas site.

Complete syllabus and teaching evaluations available upon request.