Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 20, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
I hate to be vulgar, and I don’t mean to single this particular film out, but the timing of Shutter’s release marks this as the precise moment when the Asian-horror-remake trend has officially disappeared up its own asshole. It’s the third movie in as many months (after One Missed Call and The Eye) to redux a Far East fright feature that itself rehashes themes and imagery from previous Japanese fright fare. Ghosts with long hair and grudges with long-lasting aftereffects—it has all become so deadeningly familiar that it’s hard to recall those days when the original Ringu (or the original Ring, depending on where you got your start) seemed so startlingly fresh and so inescapably frightening.
Perhaps the biggest mistake involved with the new Shutter was to set the story in Japan, with the result that the imagery—from the black-tressed Asian female specter on down—has no chance to make a fresh impact. (Why not set it in the Midwest, and make the ghost a redhead?) The protagonists in Luke Dawson’s screenplay are newlyweds Ben and Jane Shaw (Joshua Jackson and Rachael Taylor), who spend a few days’ honeymoon in the countryside near Mt. Fuji before Ben takes a fashion-photography job in Tokyo. While driving on a lonely road late one night, they seem to hit a young woman before crashing their car—but there’s no sign of a body, and in any case, weird ghostly images turn up in photos Ben snapped even before the accident, suggesting the girl was already a spirit. (In the original Thai Shutter, the victim is flesh-and-blood, but the producers of the remake apparently felt audiences wouldn’t sympathize with horror-film characters who commit a hit-and-run, the successful evidence of I Know What You Did Last Summer notwithstanding.)
Jane quickly cottons to the fact that something paranormally wrong is going on, and Ben becomes convinced once an unwanted guest turns up in the prints from his modeling shoot. They and the audience are soon introduced to the concept of spirit photography, a phenomenon in which the visages of the dead show up on film—but this phantom soon begins making her presence felt in the real world, too. Clearly, somebody’s hiding a guilty secret, with the haunting presumably triggered by the Shaws’ arrival in Japan—except that that idea is negated by a revelatory scene in the film’s final reels. That’s not the only way the narrative trips itself up at the finish line; not to give too much away, but the story’s entire resolution hangs on a key character being unbelievably negligent about disposing of evidence that they never should have procured in the first place.
Shutter 2008 was directed by Masayuki Ochiai, one of the few contemporary Japanese horror specialists who has not previously helmed a traditional ghost film; his credits include the more sci-fi-oriented Parasite Eve and Infection and the over-the-top The Hypnotist (which does eventually feature a long-dark-haired girl). His work here is technically polished, with fine cinematography by Battle Royale’s Katsumi Yanagishima, but stylistically too indebted to this movie’s many forebears, right down to the obligatory false jump-scares accompanied by loud blasts of Nathan Barr’s score. The actors, both English-speaking and Japanese, are all supercompetent in roles that aren’t especially demanding beyond the requirements of appearing terrified; the only edge comes from John Hensley, playing a sort of higher-class variation on his sleazebag role in Teeth.
There’s little more to say about Shutter that hasn’t already been said about the aforementioned and other recent examples of J-, T- and K-horror recycling. With reduxes of A Tale of Two Sisters, Mirrors, The Echo et al. waiting in the wings, it’s clear that, like the genre’s omnipresent ghosts, this bandwagon isn’t going to go away, and will keep rolling on for at least another couple of years. Horror fans can only hope that, unlike the genre’s protagonists, the makers of the upcoming films can avoid succumbing to the mistakes of the past.
