For anybody living in London and into Japanese films here’s something you may be interested in. When I was at the BFI London Film Festival I was subject to trailers for their Gothic season which has already started and one of the films screening for the Gothic season is Ringu in December at the BFI Southbank Centre. I forgot about it (I picked up a brochure) until a friend sent me the details. Seeing this on the big screen would be spine-chilling and perfect for December where the dark nights draw in quickly, cold weather pushes against the windows and scary movies get played. Even if you have seen it more than twice the shock moments should still retain their effectiveness. Plus the talk would be fascinating because the film is a very intelligent horror film in the way it mixes traditional yurei imagery with modern (for the time) technology.
I love this film and I love the novel it is based on I studied gothic fiction at university so I wish I could see it! Sometimes I hate not living in London so much I want to punch someone.
All of those awesome Asian films screened at cultural centres and embassies and film festivals. If only I worked in a gallery in London and I could finish work and head on over to a cinema… Sorry! Rambling… Back to the events:
The talk takes place on December 03rd at 6:20 PM. The film then screens on December 07th at 8:30 PM.
Thanks go out to Tired Paul for alerting me! Here’s the info on the talk followed by info for the film:
The latest in our series exploring film through a philosophical lens stages a theoretical intervention into our Gothic season, exploring the idea of media technologies as potentially horrific in their very nature, haunted by (sometimes monstrous) ghosts of the living. Through analysis of the 1998 Japanese horror film Ring, John Mullarkey (author of Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality) considers cinema’s capacity to establish macabre ties between the living and the inert, in a manner prompting both wonder and horror. He finds that in Ring, it is the ghostly image on a videotape that is itself monstrous, horrifically animated by media technology, with deadly effects on its spectators. After the screening and his talk, Mullarkey will be joined for a discussion by film scholar Lucy Bolton.
Tickets £11, concs £8.50 (Members pay £1.50 less)
Ring 
Japanese: リング
Romaji: Ringu
Running Time: 95 mins.
Release Date: January 31st, 1998
Director: Hideo Nakata
Writer: Hiroshi Takahashi (Screenplay), Koji Suzuki (Original Novel)
Starring: Nanako Matsushima, Hiroyuki Sanada, Miki Nakatani, Yuko Takeuchi, Hitomi Sato, Yutaka Matsushige, Yurei Yanagi, Yoko Oshima, Kiriko Shimizu
Reiko Asakawa (Matsushima) is a TV reporter and single-mother to Yoichi (Otaka). When she is drawn into an investigation into her teenage niece’s mysterious death she finds herself involved in an investigation centring on rumours of a video tape which school kids are all talking about. The tape has grainy images of a woman with long hair and a volcanic explosion and anyone who watches it gets cursed and dies a week later. Reiko tracks down the tape and watches it…
