Dark Water
by Koji Suzuki
Genre: J-Horror
Buy on Amazon
I have more than a few friends that believe wholeheartedly that Japanese horror is, has, and always will be superior to American horror, and that any film adaptation of Japanese horror by an American director will subsequently fall flat on its face. Other than The Ring (based on a horror series by Koji Suzuki) I’d be inclined to agree, but after reading the actual books used to inspire those films I realized that Suzuki’s writing isn’t really adapted well, at least not for the slasher film template that Japanese horror is often forcefully shoehorned into in American cinema.
If anything, I have to subscribe to the idea that American horror is best described as scary while Japanese horror is more along the lines of creepy. Scary will keep you up for a couple of nights, but you can turn the lights on and tell yourself that there aren’t any leatherfaced serial killers armed with flaming chainsaws waiting under your bed for you to get drunk and have sex so they can get on with killing you. Creepy on the other hand is more of a slow burn, and often takes something that was once innocuous and stains it in your mind.
This is why I didn’t find Dark Water all that scary. If anything, it was like reading a plot treatment for an episode of The Twilight Zone. The set-up is solid: a single mother and her daughter live in a tiny apartment in a largely vacant building and the mother is struggling to make ends meet as well as get over the memory of her ex-husband. Everything’s relatively normal save the emptiness of the building and the nasty aftertaste the tap water has. Then the weird thing happens, namely an unexplained set of beach toys appearing on the roof, the mother investigates as far as she’s willing to let herself, her daughter starts hearing voices, and eventually the terrible truth is revealed: a little girl drowned in the rain tower and her body was never found, and her decay has trickled into the building’s water supply. There’s set-up, build-up, climax, and twist, just like a classic episode from the Zone. The only thing missing was Rod Serling.
This isn’t a weakness though. If anything, it helps to underline the differences between American and Japanese horror. To begin, Suzuki’s heroes often lack an important trait in horror: stupidity. How many countless people have died in American horror movies for reasons that cause the viewer to yell at the screen? In Suzuki’s stories, Dark Water included, the characters are intelligent, reasoned, and cowardly exactly when they need to be. When presented with paranormal happenings, they do research and investigate as far as they need to. The mother in Dark Water deduces that the dead little girl is in the water tower and promptly calls the police, and then moves out to place without a dead girl in the water supply. In the American movie version, the mother literally goes into the water tower, into the titular dark water, and confronts the ghost directly.
The difference is tension. There’s hardly any in Suzuki’s work. There’s a mental puzzle to be worked out and you never truly feel that the characters are in danger. The mother knows that at any time she can just pack up and go, and in the end she actually does. Only her curiosity keeps her there. Even in The Ring, where the main character has only seven days to live, the tension remains low even on the seventh day, even for the character himself. His investigation continues on with little concern that the clock is literally running out on his life.
Maybe this is just an example of the difference between what’s read and what’s seen, how the shock needs to be increased when there’s only two hours or less to get the plot finished before the audience gets bored or exhausted. I suppose it could also be a difference between creepy and scary. With scary, there’s a final confrontation or a dramatic escape, or both. With creepy, there’s almost always a definite twist at the end, to the point where it’s practically expected and the seasoned viewer or reader will be looking for the twist before it’s ever revealed, and will be disappointed if it doesn’t occur (which is what I believe helped contribute to the fall of M. Night Shaylaman).