How Japanese Horror Films Have Influenced Hollywood

Recently in Hollywood there has been a growing trend of taking successful Japanese horror films and remaking them for an American audience. Recent examples of this trend would be movies such as The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water. Many people wonder why Hollywood is suddenly taking an interest in Japanese horror films. Japanese horror films have repeatedly shown they are more innovative and are more scary and than recent Hollywood horror films such as House of Wax.

Since the beginning of Hollywood, audiences have loved horror films. Classic Universal horror movies such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf-Man were considered scary and frightening by the people of that time period. These old horror movies didn’t contain excessive violence or gore mostly because of how the strict the censorship boards were back then. So the directors had to use atmosphere to create an effective scary movie. Horror movies continued to do this through the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1960, two horror films changed and influenced the genre for years to come. These movies were Psycho and Peeping Tom. Psycho dealt with issues that moviegoers had not seen in movies before. Issues such as necrophelia and voyeurism shocked audiences and many were frightened by the infamous shower scene where Janet Leigh’s
character is stabbed to death in the shower. 

Peeping Tom was about a young man who murdered women and used a movie camera to film them dying. People were shocked by the kind of behavior displayed by the killers in these two films. Psycho influenced a group of slasher horror films such as the Halloween and Friday the 13th films.