Silk Scream Film Festival to bring new horrors

Real horror-film thrill-seekers know that leaving the U.S. can make for a bigger rush and louder screams. Silk Scream Film Festival

“Night Fishing” and “The Matrimony”

Chatham University, Eddy Theater

Thursday, Oct. 27, 8 p.m.

Hollywood Theater, Dormont

Friday, Oct. 28, 9 p.m.

$10 ($8 for students with valid ID)

Dreaming Ant

4525 Liberty Ave.

Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. to midnight

Saturday and Sunday, noon to midnight

Real horror-film thrill-seekers know that leaving the U.S. can make for a bigger rush and louder screams.

Grown-up scary movie buffs are now tapping directly into Asian horror cinema instead of relying on Americanized Hollywood remakes. In fact, two of the highest-grossing American horror films of all time — “The Ring” (2002) and “The Grudge” (2004) are remakes of Japanese movies from the 1990s. The exoticism of another culture mixed with the power of suggested violence makes for a different — and for many, a much scarier — film than do the usual Hollywood blockbusters.

But Dean Brandt, owner of the independent movie rental shop Dreaming Ant, thinks that even though the American remakes cater specifically to U.S. audiences, the originals — at least of “The Ring” (“Ringu,” 1998) and “The Grudge” (“Ju-on,” 2003) — are still scarier.

“Watching pale-faced Japanese kids running across the screen is a lot creepier than seeing Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he said, referring to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s role in “The Grudge.”

Horror fans ready to delve into something new can rent DVDs from Dreaming Ant in Bloomfield. Or if the big screen adds to the thrill, moviegoers can hit “Silk Scream: Asian American Horror Film Festival,” which is presented by the Silk Screen Asian Arts and Culture Organization. The festival will present double features this Thursday and Friday at Chatham University’s Eddy Theater  and the Hollywood Theater in Dormont, respectively.

Christina Szejk, the lead programmer of Silk Scream, agrees with Brandt that the original movies’ terror factors outpace those of the American remakes. 2008 American releases “The Eye” — adapted from Hong Kong’s original “Jian gui” (1994) — and “Shutter,”  — from the 2004 Thai film of the same name directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom — might have fared well in the box office, but critics cried that they were mediocre adaptations of the originals.

“Although someone somewhere thinks they’re accessible, I recommend people go to the source rather than the pale imitations that come out of Hollywood,” she said.

Those original Asian films share a theme that Szejk considers much scarier than the convoluted back stories and predictable tropes of Hollywood, and it’s one these foreign storylines often present: an evil force without a cause.

“There is nothing scarier than random evil,” Szejk said. “I think that when you compare a Hollywood remake to the Asian original, the original is much more unsettling and disturbing for a Western viewer — with some of the exoticism adding to the unknown element as well.”

Brandt himself found this to be the case when he watched the South Korean ghost story, “A Tale of Two Sisters” (“Janghwa, Hongryeon,” 2003) and felt terrified even while the subtitles on his defective DVD didn’t match up with the scenes. In fact, he didn’t even notice.

“I didn’t figure it out until afterwards, but that made it all the more creepy to me. It’s the element of unknown that scares us,” he said. “When you’re watching a movie from a different culture, you don’t grasp all the nuances. You don’t have all the details, and that leaves a space for fear.”

Those who shy away from the gratuitous gore in Hollywood films might also find the blood and guts in Asian cinema more mocking of the genre than actually disturbing, Szejk said.

“Some of the gore that I’ve seen in the Asian films is outrageous, but it’s meant to be ironic and shocking — like a B-movie,” she said. “It’s ridiculous, ludicrous and absurd, and serves as a commentary on violence in cinema as it is.”

Brandt said he thinks that the most frightening violence happens in our own heads. Movies like “Funny Games” and “Fight Club” leave us to imagine the consequences of violence, rather than witness them directly. South Korean director Park Chan-wook uses this tactic in a scene from his award-winning thriller “Oldboy,” (“Oldeuboi,” 2003) where a man is tortured by having his teeth pulled out with pliers. Brandt said the technique involves the camera pulling away before the violence happens and then moving to a reaction shot.

The trailer for one of Silk Scream’s featured films, Chan-wook’s “Night Fishing” (“Paranmanjang,” 2011), uses this angle of violence and imagined gore by briefly depicting a woman being dragged away by a fishing hook piercing her lips.

The 30-minute short is about a fisherman who pulls in a fish that turns into the body of a buried woman. At one point, the man awakens to see the woman wearing his clothing and calling him “father.”

The character reversal channels culturally significant themes of Korean beliefs in female shamanism and connections to ancestors. Some detailed scenes — such as one featuring the ringing of brass bells to summon spirits — allude to traditional rituals of many South Korean fishing villages.

Despite these cultural metaphors, Szejk notes that the supernatural plot of the film is similar to those of the “exorcist”-type narratives — stemming from Catholic traditions — that are so familiar to U.S. audiences.

“Most people don’t walk around worrying about demons anymore,” she said. “But demons and even ‘the devil’ himself are often the go-to narrative that we all immediately understand when presented with certain iconography and symbolism.”

But whereas  “Oldboy” had the benefit of a million-dollar budget, Chan-wook filmed “Night Fishing” with minimal funding. The short was shot entirely on an iPhone 4.

Chan-wook might be the first director to successfully execute a major-release film with a cell phone, but “handheld” horror is nothing new, and it’s stirred a painfully real sense of fear in audiences since films like 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project,”  and 2008’s “Cloverfield.”

“With handheld films, you are put in first-person point of view and see through the eyes of the filmmaker,” Brandt said. “It feels more real, like a documentary… When you see through a shaky camera, it puts you in a frame of mind that something could happen at any moment.”

Szejk said she sees how this technique could affect future films.

“It’s interesting that someone so established like him to go backwards almost in a sense on the scale of production,” Szejk said. “But it’s also a leap forward in technology to film with a cell phone.”

In addition to “Night Fishing,” the festival will screen “The Matrimony,” (“Xin zhong you gui,” 2007) — one of the first cinematic ghost stories to come out of China. Ghost stories have not appeared in Chinese cinema in the past because the industry in the country deals with something that Hollywood filmmakers in the U.S. don’t tend to think of — government censorship.

“The government censors are very careful about something considered too religious or too superstitious to be part of the cultural dialogue or to be exported for domestic consumption itself,” Szejk said. “It would be like the ‘old ways’ before communism.”

But writers Qianling Yang and Jialu Zhang set “The Matrimony” in the past — before the Cultural Revolution in China — and managed to gain critical success with audiences both at home and abroad.