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The Scary Screen
DOI link for The Scary Screen
The Scary Screen book
The Scary Screen
DOI link for The Scary Screen
The Scary Screen book
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ABSTRACT
In 1991, the publication of Koji Suzuki's Ring, the first novel of a bestselling trilogy, inaugurated a tremendous outpouring of cultural production in Japan, Korea, and the United States. Just as the subject of the book is the deadly viral reproduction of a VHS tape, so, too, is the vast proliferation of text and cinematic productions suggestive of an airborne contagion with a life of its own. Analyzing the extraordinary trans-cultural popularity of the Ring phenomenon, The Scary Screen locates much of its power in the ways in which the books and films astutely graft contemporary cultural preoccupations onto the generic elements of the ghost story”in particular, the Japanese ghost story. At the same time, the contributors demonstrate, these cultural concerns are themselves underwritten by a range of anxieties triggered by the advent of new communications and media technologies, perhaps most significantly, the shift from analog to digital. Mimicking the phenomenon it seeks to understand, the collection's power comes from its commitment to the full range of Ring-related output and its embrace of a wide variety of interpretive approaches, as the contributors chart the mutations of the Ring narrative from author to author, from medium to medium, and from Japan to Korea to the United States.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |2 pages
Part I Spreading the Word
chapter 1|16 pages
The Horror of Media: Technology and Spirituality in the Ringu Films
chapter 2|18 pages
Tracing the Transference of a Cross-Cultural Media Virus: The Evolution of Ring
chapter 3|16 pages
From Gene to Meme: The Rhetoric of Thought Contagion in Koji Suzuki’s Ring Cycle
part |2 pages
Part II Loss in Translation
chapter 4|16 pages
Cultural Constructions of the Supernatural: The Case of Ringu and The Ring
chapter 6|26 pages
“Before You Die, You See The Ring”:Notes on the Imminent Obsolescence of VHS
chapter 7|18 pages
Bleeding Through, or We Are Living in a Digital World and I Am an Analog Girl
part |2 pages
Part III Techno-Human Reproductions