I am leaving for vacation to Japan in a few days.

Usually, when I travel to a new place, I spend the preceding months researching the place, sometimes studying the language, contacting locals for more information, talking to expats from that place, and reading many, many books about the place. For Tunisia, I spent an intense month of study; for my job in Japan, about seven months of research; for Ethiopia and the Navajo Reserve, about five months each.

Because I’ve gone through all the usual study for Japan - and because I cannot bear to pick up those daunting 1000+ page tomes on early Edo Period history - I decided to take a different approach for this trip. Instead of nonfiction books, I’ll be catching up on my Japanese horror in translation.

The Ring is one of my favourite horror movies. I love the idea of a purely supernatural creep. Those easily explicable serial killer psychopath types are everyday bores. I can read a newspaper and get the same story. But ghosts! Yowza. It turns out that before there was Ring the movie, there was Ring the novel.

Japan has quite a culture of interest in the supernatural. There are ghost-hunting tv shows, with annoying teen idols that explore abandoned buildings and exaggerate what they really see; summer horror films set in schools to thrill students during the summer heat; comics about demons; temples that exorcise evil dolls’ spirits; and a lengthy history of the creepy. In fact, summer as a whole is a season dedicated to horror stories. The chills one gets from listening to the stories is supposed to cool down the body.

When I first saw trailers for the Ring, back in the late 90s when I lived in Taiwan, I wanted to see this movie immediately. It turned out, of course, that the film was in Japanese with Chinese subtitles. My Chinese was ok, but those subtitles were a little too quick. I saw the movie three or four times in a week to try and figure out what was happening on screen. Once I got the gist of the story, I took my sister, who was visiting Taiwan, and knew no Mandarin or Japanese to see the Ring. I whispered the dialogue to her as fast as I could read the subtitles during the film.

Thus, for my first foray into translated Japanese horror, I picked up Koji Suzuki’s novel that was the basis for the film. Quite a few things leapt out at me: there was no female reporter - the protagonist is male; the professor is shockingly slimy; and Sadako is a bigger freak than I remember her being in the film.

Worse, the story is either awful, or the translators (Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Walley in my edition) only half-completed their work, or, as I suspect, both. Suzuki’s protagonist Kazuyuki Asakawa makes a few too many lucky assumptions. I am all too ready to believe in the supernatural between the covers of this book, but even I cannot believe that the answers should come so easily to the heroes. This book made me grimace many times.

Luckily for the book, it’s saving grace is that it is a quick read. I finished it in record time this afternoon, sitting in my car, at the edge of a mall parking lot under some trees. The coffee shop in which I originally intended to finish reading the novel, was too air-conditioned for comfortable reading. Just as the protagonist descends into the well to dredge up Sadako, a downpour started outside my car. Memories of the well scene in the movie still gives me the heebie jeebies. The rain pounding on my car roof helped set the mood.

Will I read the sequels to Ring? I really, really hated the film sequels. They were a garbled mess, with too many ideas thrown into the pot and no decent storyline to unify them. I will give Suzuki’s Dark Water a try, and, if his writing improves, might read the sequels out of sheer curiosity.

But not out of literary admiration.

In 2003, one of my friends went through a Jack the Ripper phase. Thanks to her interest in reading all about the Whitechapel murders and lengthy monologues about her horror at it all, I went away kind of curious. I ended up going through my own Jack the Ripper phase. Every now and then I still re-read the Wikipedia page on Jack and his victims.

For years I meant to pick up the From Hell graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. From Hell refers to one of the many letters Scotland Yard got from ghouls claiming they were Jack the Ripper; this letter is the only one suspected of having actually come from Jack himself. It arrived with a box containing a human kidney. The organ may have come from Catherine Eddowes, one of the murdered woman, who was found disembowelled and missing a kidney.

From Hell pulls together the various suspicions and characters associated with the Jack the Ripper murders. The story works from the premise that the murders were committed as part of a conspiracy, not by one lone psychopathic murderer. Everyone, it seems, has a part to play. Walter Sickert, John Pizer (or Leather Apron), Prince Albert Victor, Montague John Druitt all make an appearance.

I most recommend Moore’s extensive appendix. I essentially read the book twice, once without the benefit of the notes, the second time, once I found the notes, I flipped back and forth to the referenced pages. Moore wrote the appendix with equal parts erudite bibliography and familial conversation. At times, he is modest (he supposes only one person would ever be reading his notes), apologetic (for forgetting from where a reference may have come), appalled (when referring to Ripper’s state of mind during Kelly’s murder), and chatty (his work area is tottering with books, please come and clean it).

From Moore’s notes, one fact above all stands out, making the book worth it. Canonical Ripper victim Polly Nicholls wakes up from sleep in the lowest form of Victorian accommodation. Sleepers sat on a bench for a penny, slept while held from falling forward by a rope stretched across their chests. In the morning, the proprietor unfastened the rope from one end and let the sleepers fall into wakefulness. Really, with this sort of knowledge, one could become a slum lord the likes of whom our lovely city has never seen.

Now for the spoilers.

It’s a good thing that Gull, as the Ripper, is not a sympathetic character. The women, even despite their occasional drunken sloppiness, are likeable. Nicholls can’t get her miserable penny lodgings because she has only a tuppence and is sent out into the night to earn her “doss money.” She is more pathetic as she tells her sad story to her customer Gull before he kills her. Then annie Chapman’s alarming illness before her death, as she drags herself around, thrown out from shelter to fend for herself. Eddowes’ own demise, when a complicit policeman reports her by her unfortunate alias - Mary Kelly - to Gull, is an awful case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong identity.

As anyone who watched the movie knows, the real Mary Kelly supposedly escaped and someone else killed in her place. This is not entirely sheer fancy on Moore’s part. At least two people saw Mary Kelly in the morning, after her death around 4 am and before the discovery of her body at 10:45 am. One of the witnesses, a Mrs. Caroline Maxwell, in this book claims that at 8:30 am Kelly stood outside her apartment, having barfed from having had “the horrors.” Obviously, Moore wants to imply that Mary Kelly had gone into her apartment. She saw another woman, one of her guests from previous pages (Julia, I believe, because of the curly hair), murdered in her place as she slept in Kelly’s bed. If you haven’t seen the horrors inflicted on whoever’s body lay in Mary Kelly’s bed that night, here’s a link to the crime scene photo.

The mutilation of the corpse was so extensive, contemporary forensics were so primitive, that, if it had not been Kelly but one of her friends, no one could verify the corpse’s identity.

Perhaps, having grown to rather like Mary Kelly, the reader might feel a sense of relief that she got away. However, when we really think about it, some other chick lost her life.

I may not have long to live. In case I die mysteriously during the night and found tomorrow morning as a rotting pod person wallowing in a labyrinth of red fungal matter, please use this blog post as a starting point for the investigation into my death.

For weeks, Matt and I have noticed red dust all over Ivan the cat’s bathroom. At first I blamed it on plastic. I suspected that our latest package of toilet paper was shedding the red ink printed on it. Once we finished that package of toilet paper and got a different brand, the red dust continued to pollute Ivan’s bathroom.

So I next laid the blame on the mushrooms. Below our window, hundreds of mushrooms sprouted during the recent rains. Pretty little things, with jaunty caps, as if you’d expect them to start dancing. Must’ve been their spores wafting through our open window.

But tonight, I found out. I stuck my finger, unwittingly, into the heart of the matter.

In a frenzy to clean out the pet supplies cabinet to get to my foot bath basin, I found long-forgotten packages of cat and hamster treats. I collected a handful for Lucian, then a handful for Ivan.

Then I opened Ivan’s container of Pounce. The Bigger Softer Bite. Beef flavoured. Never even remembered buying it.

The inside was a red dust. Yet, I didn’t quite believe it was red dust. I did not believe what I saw. I poked it.

My husband was horrified. “Oh, my god, that’s where all the red spores have been coming from!”

*****

If you remember grade twelve biology, you recall the five kingdoms of life forms: bacterial, protist, fungal, plant and animal. You know that antibiotics kill bacteria, that fungicides kill fungi, that neither can kill viruses because viruses do not quite fit into any of the five kingdoms nor are even living organisms.

Yet, after sticking my finger in the motherlode of red spores, my first reaction was to douse my hands with anti-bacterial soap and scrub away. With no bleach around, this was the first thing I saw that spelled salvation.

I even accidentally ripped off the scab over my recent burn, probably in the process infecting myself further with the red spores.

Now I am sitting here, awaiting fate.

The vector for a new and terrifying fungal disease, I will be patient zero of some awful epidemic. While it would be nice if I start a dramatic zombie plague and end up triggering armageddon, I’ll probably just fester into an oozing red slime. Not too ladylike, I’m afraid. Please, please, just don’t let my pod double be some sort of gelatinous freak with a dog body and Donald Sutherland’s head.

Good god, I already feel the mushrooms sprouting in my veins.

It can’t be long now.

Ok, ok, I am calming down from the news.

28 Days Later has a sequel. 28 Weeks Later is coming out in the next month. Yay! More zombies! Er, more zombie-like* induced armageddons! Yay!

You can see the trailer here. Ha ha. More humans get it. Features lots of running around by protagonists, with no really secure place to hide.

Just as pleasing is that there are at least four other zombie movies at some stage of production or script work right now:

• reader input requested for the second draft of the Autumn script;
• a Dawn of the Dead remake sequel called Army of the Dead;
• Diary of the Dead, a new George Romero one that goes back to the first, low level zombie outbreak (as seen in Night of the Living Dead), this time following around a group of film students;
• Day of the Dead, which is presumably a remake of Romero’s 1985 Day of Dead and starring the Dawn of the Dead remake’s Ving Rhames;
• a scriptwriter is doing a go-over on World War Z, written by Mel Brooks’ son Max (who is, of course, the author of the Zombie Survival Guide).

To tide me over for when these movies come out, my DVD player has been regurgitating the original Romero trilogy and I’ve been revisiting the remake Dawn of the Dead on Youtube. This week my favourites are Tumble-weed Studios remake dubs. The hilarious episodes are here, then here and the latest installation here. Thanks to Proxy Indian.

Over Christmas, I read David Wellington’s novels Monster Island and Monster Nation, and Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead. While I’m not a big fan of talking zombies, I appreciate that the zombies at least shambled about. My really big fear is thinking zombies that can run. That’s a no-no. Anyhow, I have a review written on these books in one of my journals that I can’t locate. I’ll probably find it some time in the next six months.

PS I bought a house. It can be zombie-proofed in about half an hour.

*The infected in 28 Days Later are not technical Hollywood zombies (i.e. flesh-eating ghouls). They are not Caribbean zombies (i.e. people enslaved by magic). The 28 Days Later infected are simply crazy homicidal maniacs (boo). But they do run amok and turn everyone they bite into one of them (scary!).

**Zombie movies need to stop recycling zombie movie names.

In my craze for all things zombie, I’ve neglected the majestic mummy!

If nothing is done, experts say, the Egyptian mummy will soon go the way of the Bavarian lycanthrope or the Transylvanian vampire, and vanish forever.

…..

“My grandchildren have still never seen a mummy,” said [Afterlife Preservation Society president James Amarcas], who vividly recalls his first mummy sighting in 1947, when he was just 3 years old. “These terrible monsters are little more than a legend to them. It’s sad to think they might never see the bloodthirsty march of an undead Egyptian prince on a cool, calm night.”

…..

In response, a coalition group has proposed the so-called Mummy Conservation Act to the Egyptian Parliament, which aims to create a refuge to protect mummies, relocating them to reserves where they can guard their stone amulets in peace.

“In addition, inhabited tombs would be put on 24-hour surveillance, mummies would be tagged with tracking collars, and many items would be banned from all tombs,” Amarcas said. “Especially torches, as mummies are very susceptible to fire.”

From here.

I finished reading Arthur Lenning’s The Count: The Life and Films of Bela “Dracula” Lugosi about a week ago. Lennig, a child fan of Lugosi’s, met his hero and actually became friends with the Hungarian actor in the 1940s.

Lennig’s biography of Béla (pronounced “Bay-la”) is what you would expect from a friend who wants to salvage something of his hero’s reputation. The writer spends little time on the five wives and how the first four became ex Mrs. Lugosis: one returns to Hungary and the reader never hears from her again. When did the divorce happen? Or was Lugosi a bigamist when he remarried a year later?

Then there is Lugosi’s drug addiction. The actor, after his fourth divorce and the loss of his wife’s help in curbing his drug use, committed himself to Los Angeles General Hospital’s mental health and hygiene department on April 21, 1955 (a year before his death).

It’s not clear when Lugosi’s addiction to morphine blossomed: he himself hinted at the years 1935, 1938, 1944 and 1948. Lennig, though, a true friend, estimates the last year (page 275), to stress that the strain of his failed career was what drove him to drugs.

What really did in the vestiges of Lugosi’s career was was the 1943 Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Playing Frankenstein’s monster with the brain of Ygor implanted in his head, Lugosi performed the part of Shelley’s original talking monster. However, Universal ultimately removed his spoken scenes from the film, leaving plot holes that studio heads then blamed on Lugosi. Thus, Lugosi’s career with that studio came to an end.

In the same year, Lugosi filmed Columbia’s The Return of the Vampire. This film ran afoul of the critics, driving another stake into Lugosi’s career.

It was only in 1948 that Lugosi’s agent, Don Marlowe, convinced Universal president to hire Lugosi for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Marlowe “barged” into the president’s office, explained that Lugosi had saved the studio in 1931, that he only made $3500 off the classic film, while Universal reaped millions, and that the studio owed the old man. The studio laid off Ian Keith from the role and replaced him with Lugosi. This meagre offering would be Lugosi’s last major studio role.

One can appreciate Lennig’s efforts in tracking down Lugosi’s oeuvre and the gusto with which he describes the plot of each film, lovingly detailing how Lugosi would pronounce every cheesy mad scientist cliche with theatrical reverence.

Béla Lugosi not only defined the role of Dracula, starred in the first zombie movie, and perfected the mad scientist, he was also the first Ygor, in 1939’s Son of Frankenstein.

In the end, Lugosi’s contributions to American culture have created a career for Gary Larson; spawned movies, songs, books, toys, postage stamps; gave Transylvania’s tourism board a raison d’être; and permanently removed Dracula’s moustache.

Some highlights from the biography and the quirky scripts:

• Premiering on December 19, 1926, was The Devil in the Cheese, in which Lugosi appeared a Greek bandit masquerading as a priest. Worth noting is the synopsis of the play that Arthur Lennig describes: “The father, to find out what makes his daughter tick, eats a bit of mummified Egyptian cheese and so frees the little god Min, who subsequently takes Quigley into his daughter Goldina’s head.” If only her head contained anything of interest: “She dreams of adventure with her young hero on the South Seas, on a desert island, and finally in New York; she also envisions cooking, having babies, nursing, and some politicking from which her husband becomes president.”
• In the 1937 S.O.S. Coast Guard, Bela Lugosi played the mad inventor Bornoff who’s involved in the disintegration gas weapons trade with Morovania (page 208). Who cares about the show. It’s Morovania I want to fixate upon. Morovania is obviously a combination of Moldova and Romania, in the spirit of Molvanîa and Syldavia (Transylvania + Moldova - though more Balkanized than the real Romanian countries). In 1943, he finally played a real Romanian in The Return of the Vampire.
• Another script to drool over is 1941’s The Devil Bat: “Bristling with passionate resentment as only Lugosi can, he seeks revenge by breeding giant bats and giving his enemies a shaving lotion that attracts the creatures.”

Oh the possibilities! Lennig recalls, on page 241, the old adage that “No one would ever go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

(P.S. Dear Béla, though some people claim you have some sort of double-chinned-ness happening, I have to disagree. You were one sexy bastard and you stole the show in Dracula. Love, FG Maktaaq.)

Three months late, our little book club finally met tonight. The book for October had been Dracula. To celebrate the book, MaikoPunk, MaikoPunk’s Husband, Matt and I held six commemorative activities:

1. We made a batch of mămăligă, which Jonathan Harker ate in Klausenburgh (or Cluj in northwestern Romania) a day before he met the count. Mămăligă is cornmeal (grits to southerners and polenta to Italians), which I served with sour cream and goaty feta cheese. If any had been left over, I could have eaten the rest with cold milk in the morning.

2. We made Bat Bites, a rum-and-cranberry concoction.

3. We made burnt rum punch. When Renfield meets Arthur Holmwood in chapter XVIII, he blurts out, of Arthur’s father, “He was a man loved and honoured by all who knew him; and in his youth was, I have heard, the inventor of a burnt rum punch, much patronised on Derby night.”

The Annotated Dracula provided a burnt rum punch recipe from The Art of British Cooking by Theodora FitzGibbon:

5 lemons
1/2 pound lump sugar
1 piece cinnamon stick
2 cups water
1 bottle rum

Rub lemons with the lumps of sugar until you have removed all the yellow zest. Put the lemony sugar into a saucepan with the lemon juice and the cinnamon stick; pour over the water and bring just to a boil. See that the lumps of sugar dissolve. Then add the rum, heat up, but do not boil, for fear of destroying the strength of the rum. Remove the cinnamon stick and serve hot.

I thought that, unlike paprika hendl (or paprika chicken) or impletata (”eggplant stuffed with forcemeat,” or patlagele impulute, according to the Annotated Dracula), mentioned, with mămăligă, early in the novel, burnt rum punch sounded like something worth attempting.

No, it isn’t. Burnt rum punch tastes like Vicks Cough Syrup.

4. We watched Nosferatu, the third-known film treatment of the novel. A 1920 Russian version and a 1921 Hungarian version by Karoly Lafthay called Drakula preceded the 1922 F. W. Murnau film. Most of us had seen this best of Dracula adapations numerous times; however, how can one not watch the classic again?

5. We watched Bela Lugosi’s film White Zombie, which he filmed two years after he made Dracula. Tonight’s crowd had all watched the 1931 film last October, so it was too soon for a re-viewing. White Zombie, however, was new to almost everybody except myself.

With Bela starring as zombie overlord ‘Murder’ Legendre, the Bela Lugosi school of acting is very much in evidence in this 1932 film. Lost until the 1960s, it is also currently the first known zombie film, albeit the zombies are of the voodoo variety and not the revenant ghouls.

6. We watched Freaks, directed by Tod Browning, the man who also did Dracula with Bela Lugosi. Of the treachery of trapeze artist Cleopatra, Matt said, “Seems like there’s a special level of hell reserved for stealing a midget woman’s man.”

As for the real sideshow cast, in Cleopatra’s words, “Great jumping Christmas!” Conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton learned self-hypnosis from Harry Houdini so they could spend time alone; Mexican pinhead Schlitze (or Simon Metz) dressed as a girl for most of his career; despite having no arms or legs, Prince Randian could really roll and light his cigarettes as seen in the film (he could also shave and paint). We all marvelled at the Half-Boy’s grace (played by Johnny Eck). Browning himself was once a circus contortionist. He made only four more movies after Freaks.

*****

I was not able to find any of Bela Lugosi’s other landmark films, Murders in the Rue Morgue or The Raven. I even went through Matt’s WC Fields DVDs to try and find the 1933 International House in which, as General Nicholas Petronovich, Bela finally had the chance to break out of stereotype and act in a comedic role. No luck.

I do regret not borrowing the Spanish Drácula from the library. In 1930, while Bela and Browning were shooting the familiar Dracula during the day, a Spanish-language version with Spanish actors used the same set by night. Starring Carlos Villarías (who looks like Bela himself or Nicholas Cage, depending on the source) in the title role, the film’s director George Melford knew no Spanish whatsoever.

Oddly enough, tonight we never got to doing the usual book club thing. We ran out of time to discuss What elements of the gothic genre are found in Dracula?, What is the significance of blood in Dracula? and What are the ways Dracula remains an icon in today’s popular culture?

Oh well.

Our next book is Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. On with the crotch-grabbing!

*****

Our previous bookclub meetings and books:

June: Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (and here)
July: Evelyne Lever’s Marie Antoinette (not documented) with an initial foray into the attractiveness of Madame du Barry, some Zamor bashing, the deaths of Princesse de Lamballe and the Duc de Brissac, and the current vogue for Marie Antoinette.
August: Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down
September: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (not documented)
October: Bram Stoker’s Dracula with literary surprises and a Halloween diatribe.

As a Transylvanian, it’s about time I read Dracula, watch the movie(s), and understand this business. You all know Transylvania is a real place; it’s time I learned what the fantasy Transylvania is all about.

I am 100 pages from finishing the novel, first published in 1897, watched both the 1931 Bela Lugosi Dracula, as well as Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu remake (the 1922 Nosferatu has long been one of my favourite movies). I also took out four books of Dracula literary criticism out from the library, to nail this bugger in the heart, for once and for all. And here I thought that I was forever converted to zombies.

So while the extraordinary shock that armadillos live in Transylvania subsides, I picked up the Annotated Dracula (edited by Leonard Wold and dedicated to Bela Lugosi) to backtrack through the footnotes. The discoveries, hitherto obscured by a century’s linguistic and societal changes, stretch beyond the minor surprises at Dracula’s mustachioed face and Lucy’s brunette-ness.

Those of you who’ve yet to read the novel know the drill: spoilers ahead.

• My first surprise was to finally be interested in Jonathan Harker’s journal. Not in the narrative, but in the mechanics. The last time I picked up Dracula, in high school, I only liked the journal; when the action switched from Transylvania to Lucy and her beaus, I trudged on hoping that the story would return to Harker. After Lucy’s Bloofer Lady suffered execution, I gave up waiting for the return to the fast-paced terror at the beginning and gave up on the novel. This time around, I’ve been intrigued that Jonathan Harker writes in shorthand, thus foiling Dracula, who most certainly rifled through the Englishman’s papers. Leonard Wolf, in the Annotated Dracula, guesses that Harker uses the Pitman method. Of course, I’ve looked up this method and, should I ever have time to spare for shorthand, this will be the method I’ll learn.
• I also am curious as to the gaps in the diary: Jonathan Harker was in Dracula’s castle for two months. There is a two-week gap when the imprisoned Harker writes nothing. Is this because there was truly nothing to tell? Or is it because the vampire hunters, later in the novel, omitted the irrelevant when typing up the various accounts about Dracula? What did Jonathan do during those lost two weeks?
• Klausenburgh, which Jonathan Harker visited on May 2, is my very favourite Cluj! Cluj, overlooked by too many tourists, is a perfect gem of elegant architecture, in full colour as opposed to Bucureşti’s blanched houses. Harker eats in Cluj some paprika hendl, which sounds like it might be our own tocăniţă.
• Quoting Emily Gerard and the 1900 Baedeker for Austria, the population of Transylvania contemporary with Dracula is 1,200,000 Romanians according to the former and 1,395,000 for the latter, to the 652,221 and 765,000 Hungarians respectively. At two Romanians for every Hungarian and the numbers provided by foreigners, I wonder who took the census. Nevermind why I wonder - hey, look, both sources say there were 8,400 Armenians in Transylvania at the time! How’d they get to Romania?
• The impletata, the “eggplant stuffed with forcemeat,” may be patlagele impulute. Whatever that is. I’ll have to ask my mother if I’ve ever eaten any.
• Leonard Wolf points out that midnight marks the witching hour. But, again I’ll have to consult with my parents, because I recall that either 2 am or 3 am was the really devilish time of the day in Transylvania.
• The Stoker Dracula really said, “Listen to them - the children of the night. What music they make!” I had always thought it was a movie cliche, non-existent in the book. Indeed, its companion phrase, “I never drink wine,” does not exist except on film.

That’s enough for tonight. Halloween is almost over. My bat wings are off and soon my bat ears will come off. Good night!

Tottering on the verge to becoming one of my favourite films ever, is the 2003 Korean horror film Janghwa, Hongryeon, or A Tale of Two Sisters in English.

Matt first noticed the great cinematography; I loved the eerie story based on a Korean folktale. The original story has a stepmother, a skinned rat, abortion, drownings, and dismemberments. Can’t really go wrong in my book.

The story goes something like this (from the DVD cover):

Something strange is happening when Su-mi and her younger sister, Su-yeon, come home to their fathers large but dark and somewhat foreboding house after a stay in the hospital. Their dad is taciturn and burdened, and their stepmother, Eun-joo, greets them with forced enthusiasm and more than a little sense of irritation. But that’s nothing compared to what happens when bedtime rolls around.

I intend to delight my friends with personal screenings once I get my copy of the deluxe edition DVD, so I can’t give away too much here.

However, I can’t hold back from showing off some delightful tidbits from the film.

Let’s start with the trail of blood and bare feet walking over it - this is why one should always wear slippers indoors:

A bloody sack in the much-dreaded wardrobe - take that CS Lewis and your honking wardrobe filled with bare-chested fauns and biblical allegories:

The very atmospheric kitchen, simmering with enough menstrual imagery to sell a hundred thousand tampons:

The film’s set is also full of dark wallpaper with floral patterns that, instead of giving off a hint of harmless spring, overwhelm with ominous feminity, reminding us of the original tale’s two girls, called Rose Flower and Red Lotus, and hammering home the father’s passivity in this house of women.

The creepy house where it all takes place:

Writer and director Ji-woon Kim says in the commentary that the house was merely a set but that, after shooting ended, the local government requested that it not be torn down. A monument to Korean horror cinema and, if I could find out where the house is, an addition to the top ten list of Asian horror sightseeing.

The DVD cover also has some commenting value. The edition we rented, had the non-bloody version of this poster:

Everyone in the non-bloody version was in the same position but the girls were clean. When we took our DVD to the counter, the video store clerk flipped open the box to show us the bloody version inside.

Then there is this version of the poster, with Soo-yeon’s arm rigidly at her side, making the sisters symmetrical:

Finally, a publicity shot of the sisters with their stepmother, Eun-joo, clutching the two girls:

The movie twists the original story around into a brilliant psychological thriller, with enough blood and ghosts that Matt and I had to take frequent breaks to recuperate from our fear. The film’s many interpretations - not your typical Korean supernatural revenge psychological horror flick - also had us staying up late reading other viewers’ theories.

Unfortunately, Hollywood is planning a remake, probably with some vapid blonde again. My recommendation is to see the original before the remake obliterates its freshness.