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This book examines the global processes embedded in a regional formation of screen culture. It demonstrates that national specificities are differently manifest in horror films from the East Asian region. In the case of Japanese horror films, technology seems to be the most crucial aspect as iconography and for narrative development, such as the cursed videotape in Ringu. The horror films from South Korea are often concerned with adolescent sensibility, which can be seen within the Whispering Corridors series (1998–2003), while recent Hong Kong horror films seem to be tied to the Chinese national identity, and reveal Hong Kong's oscillation between desire for and anxiety toward China.

This chapter focuses on the growing number of horror films across East Asia. It highlights Ringu (1998), a film which incorporates local and aesthetic preferences in a manner that thrilled audiences throughout East Asia and is considered as the origin of a powerful Asian cycle of ghost films. The chapter also examines box office films in the ghost genre, such as Double Vision (2002), Sorum (2001), A Single Spark (1995), 3-Iron (2004), and Tropical Malady (2004).

This chapter illustrates that drawing on the Japanese onryou or vengeful ghost narrative, Ringu, and later The Ring, was intimately concerned with traumatic dislocations to national self-image and the ways in which the media may promulgate ideologically dominant models of national identity for the internalisation of individuals who, as one has seen in the case of post-war Germany, nonetheless remain gravely wounded by the events of the historic past. Since the 1960s, Japanese horror cinema repeatedly had the female corpse return from the dead to demand retribution for the hitherto concealed wounds inflicted on the nation by unpunished historical crimes. This chapter also highlights the most commercially successful and culturally resonant, The Ring, Gore Verbinski's 2002 remake of Nakata Hideo's Ringu of 1998 (which is itself an adaptation of a Suzuki Koji novel of 1991), a film that has earned gross international revenues of over $229 million and became the seventh-highest grossing horror film in history. Furthermore, it explains the generic conventions of the onryou that may be seen to undermine the imperialistic agendas of both twentieth-century Japan and the twenty first-century United States.

In the years leading to and including the turn of the millennium, components of the video apparatus, including TV sets, VCRs, video cameras, editing equipment, and videotapes, came to resemble artifacts from an era whose images could no longer be replayed. As a technology of vanishing and itself a vanishing technology, the image of the video apparatus engenders a total displacement of space and time and of the bodies that inhabit them. Video reveals an end of the world; in its end video takes the world with it, leaving behind a space filled only with video ether. This chapter examines the representation of the obsolete, analog video technology in the Ringu series of Japanese supernatural horror films and their Hollywood copies. Here the obsolete VHS videotape returns as a lost object and ghost to replicate itself in both the filmic narratives and our contemporary mediascape, virally contaminating both with its video ether.