Dark Water (1 point)

     Dark Water follows in the tradition of J-Horror focusing less on how scary the supernatural is and more on how it affects the protagonist's mental state. The film is less about a haunted apartment building and more about how it makes Yoshimi come off as paranoid and unstable while she's trying to keep custody of her child. That, combined with how selfish and cruel her ex-husband comes off as, make us empathize with her, which I think presents a key difference between this film and most mainstream American horror films. In many horror films we tend to watch, the characters act as a catalyst for us to experience scares. However, there has a been a turn in recent years with films like Hereditary, which are far more interested in the family drama than the supernatural elements. That's not to say American horror films were never catalysts for exploring character relationships, but it's more that films like these seem to be gaining more prominence in the mainstream again. More psychological horror films were popular back in the 1970s, but it seems like the 1980s trend of slasher films and horror blockbusters really affected how horror movies were made and consumed. Of course, independent horror movies have been focusing on psychology for decades, but it's more recently that Hollywood has started to care again. Maybe it's just because of what I've been exposed to, but it seems that in Japan and Korea psychological horror has always had more of a foothold. While I can see someone argue that kaiju films had a similar place as slasher films, I'd argue that. as a whole, popular kaiju films (mostly) stopped being horror films a long time ago and transitioned into something more akin to the current superhero movie boom. There are exceptions, of course, like Shin Godzilla, which is definitely a horror film and uses Godzilla as a stand in for various disasters that hit Tokyo in the past decades. The kaiju boom, however, seems to have fizzled out in Japan and is making its way to America, which has nothing to do with Dark Water. 

    What does have to do with Dark Water, however, is my fascination with how non-violent it is for a horror movie. While not entirely unheard of, it's rare over here to see an effective PG-13 horror movie, but Dark Water is effective because, again, it focuses far more on the psychological aspect. It also takes something we take for granted (water) and makes it unsafe for the characters. The water is disgusting and uncontrollable, and its through the simple visuals of a bathtub not turning off when you turn the knob or hair coming out of a sink that we feel most unsettled. When the film does start to have more overtly supernatural moments, it feels completely earned because it's been built up to so well. In a way, I was relieved when the ghost was revealed because it meant Yoshimi was right to be so scared the whole time. That poor woman.

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