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The introduction introduces the scope and approach of this book. It underscores the significance of a genealogical method that adequately accounts for the co-production as a “technology of production,” one that negotiates an assemblage of production scales, fissured marketplaces, and relational locations, imaginaries, and media capitals in East Asia.

This chapter examines the “Asia Extreme” label of London-based Tartan Films and its relation with recent East Asian horror films. It examines Tartan's marketing strategies and its aspiration to expand to global markets including the U.S. It focuses on its horror titles, not only because they have become the most prominent and leading examples of the label, but also because the rise of Asia Extreme has coincided with the phenomenal success of “Asian horror” with branches such as “J-horror” and “K-horror,” which have been celebrated as producing the most original and innovative horror movies of the last decade. It examines the critical reception of the most “notorious” Asia Extreme titles —Audition, The Isle, and Oldboy in the UK and the US to understand the different discourses through which the Asia Extreme films are evaluated and mediated.

Chapter five investigates the valences and uses of “scale” and “place” through which regional co-productions have been predominantly billed from the turn of the millennium, as they negotiate the imperatives of “working through China” as an untapped market, seemingly unlimited production resource, and desired shooting location for Asian production.

Chapter four explores the contexts and practices through which Japanese independent and culture industry projects produced Tokyo as the central media capital through which to “conduct” or “organize” Asian film and media production from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tensions between consolidation and difference are evident in their efforts toward producing a more “locally” inclusive, yet convergent “Asian” film and media.

Chapter one approaches a series of popular widescreen international romance co-productions made among Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the early to mid 1960s. Against the “bright” ideals of newfound regional and transnational connectivity they signaled, this chapter examines their relations of visibility and loss–an imperialized haunting that lurks at the moment of connection across film and media technologies.

This chapter traces the development of film institutions within the formal colonies of Taiwan and Korea and its extension to the semicolonial film market of Manchuria. It examines how legislation, production, exhibition, and reception conditions differed in each territory and considers salient shifts in official and popular perceptions by Japanese film journalists and filmmakers. It considers the ways in which the colonial government used film education programs to assimilate indigenous Taiwanese populations while combating the undermining influence of Chinese films. It also explores the role of colonial film censorship in the struggle to maintain social order in Korea, along with popular Japanese perceptions of the Korean film industry in the domestic Japanese market. Finally, it analyzes the film Vow in the Desert (Nessa no chikai, 1940) and how ideology shifted away from organized institutional concepts of Japanese empire to the more indeterminate idea of the Greater East Asian Film Sphere.

Chapter two contests the terms through which Japan has occupied center stage as a locus of development and modernity by considering a range of Hong Kong-Japan co-productions made from the 1950s to the 1970s. In specific, it interrogates the Hong Kong’s “copy” and “transfer” of new film technologies, rationalized production methods, genres, and styles linked to Japan.

The conclusion offers a brief reflection upon the co-production support structures that have been recently established by cultural industries based in East Asian media capitals. It considers how these arrangements impinge upon the kinds of new regional geographies that are in the process of becoming for East Asia.

This introduction to Hong Kong Horror Cinema introduces Hong Kong horror from a variety of perspectives, charting the history and development of the genre and citing key films and filmmakers; it puts Hong Kong horror in the context of East Asian horror more broadly, discussing some of the cultural specificities of Hong Kong horror that differentiate it from the popular and historical horror cycles from Japan, South Korea, Thailand and China; it provides a brief overview of horror studies within the field of academic theory, and suggests ways in which Hong Kong horror films can contribute new perspectives to these well-rehearsed arguments. A brief survey of literature covers the major related works from the fields of Hong Kong cinema and horror film history, and in doing so, makes a case for the importance, timeliness and originality of this anthology. The introduction also includes a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Hong Kong Horror Cinema, explaining the division of chapters into sections and drawing pertinent connections between the varied studies that follow.

Chapter three addresses so-called Sino-Japanese Friendship co-productions in relation to their production of “technological presence.” First initiated in Japan’s postwar reengagement with the PRC in the early 1970s, I explicate the ways in which these co-productions’ terms for overcoming a recent geopolitical past were aligned with the possibilities of new developments in film and media technologies.