Meaningful and genre shifts in Alien series always entail metapoetic consequences. In the end Alien³ Ripley's words are heard (Sigourney Weaver) from Alien, at the beginning Alien: Resurrection (Alien: Resurrection, 1997) quotes little Newt from Aliens: as is fincher took Scott's horror setting and then led to a nihilistic conclusion, so it Jean Pierre Jeunet relied on the key Cameronovo thesis, and he further radicalized it and thereby made it perverse. Namely, for both Jeunet and Cameron, the alien saga is an opportunity to note the gender politics of both the genre and the numerous semantic implications that arise from the existential conflict between the Same and the Other: however, while the director Aliens portrayed this battle as a showdown between two types of matriarchy (human, based on adoption, and alien, which is exclusively reproductive), in Alien: Resurrection - in the futuristic description of the apocalyptic repercussions of the cloning experiment - clear boundaries between existential regions are erased, since Ripley, not only symbolically, but also in the closest possible metonymic connection, becomes - the mother of the monster. Due to such an interiorization of the basic genre dichotomy, Alien: Resurrection, including Aliens, essentially breaks out of the horror framework, but Cameron's action here is replaced by the drama of a genetic melting pot.
A nightmare from the beginning Aliens u Aliens: Resurrection comes true: Ripley 'gives birth' to an alien, but the terrifying fluctuation through the once impenetrable boundary that separated different species does not stop there. Ripley is an internal and external paradox: both a human being and a clone, a woman who has both human and alien characteristics and, which is for Jeunet the basis for destabilizing the very structure of the series, both a child and a mother, a being who is the foundation of monstrous (partheno)genesis, a bond that makes the Other 'kinship' close. In short, she is a stranger, no longer a point of identification, a bearer of a saving intervention. Because of this positioning of Ripley, it is not even necessary to mention that the function of the mother (her main opponent in Aliens) becomes irrelevant: after all, the monstrous birth ends up choosing 'its' true parent. That is why Alien: Resurrection precisely haunted by the female imagery of the sexual-reproductive cycle in which the unrestrained feminine power has abandoned the givens of Oedipus.
Another film has entered into a productive elaboration and transformation of the classic monster concept: although the realization Roger Donaldson formally relies on Scott's exemplary prose, Species (Vrste, 1995) is in one important dimension actually an innovative antithesis or upgrade Alien series. In short, while the concept of the monster in Alien originally conventional (but also visually spectacular), Species offers - again with artistic help HR Gigera - only a seemingly similar interaction between a human and an alien being: the monster in Donaldson's film is not a mere colonizer, an aggressor, now the human factor is not destroyed, it is integrated into the final form of the predator.
Also, this leads us to an interesting disproportion between Species i Aliens which is significantly reflected in the different potential of plural s in the names of films: in Cameron, the plural is numerical in character, in Donaldson it is qualitative, related to the interpenetration that emerges between different ontological entities. Thus, already in the title Species announced Copernican crafts: evil together create a human and an alien element, so the Force (Natasha Henstridge) possesses - in a monstrous synthesis - the fundamentals of both natures. And which of them is worse, or more dangerous, more destructive? In the hidden point, Species it can also be a film with an increased capacity for anthropological criticism.
By the end of the decade, Japanese horror had moved into the epicenter of genre interest, offering an unexpected injection of inspiration that served as one of the main sources of renovation for already languishing narratives of terror and horror.
All this thanks to the famous achievement Hidea Nakata, Ringu (Krug, 1998), which is deliberately created within the tradition of the most fruitful Japanese subgenre, that of ghosts: a solid reworking of classical folk mythology has in this case also acquired serious contemporary connotations, especially in its intersection with the technological principle.
But, precisely because of this recontextualization of certain archetypes, Ringu could have been painlessly placed in some other framework: like all good horror, Nakata's film rests on a universally valid story and, consequently, the inevitable intersubjectivity that precisely genre-sanctioned horror possesses. Ringu tells the story of an enigmatic videotape: anyone who watches it dies after seven days. Of course, the plot itself would not be so threatening if it were not enriched by an adequate mise-en-scène.
U Ringu Nakata essentially insists on an almost mimetic procedure that depicts a Japanese reality where supernatural evil lurks beneath the surface, which results in an extraordinarily well-drawn tense atmosphere. Nakata achieves a special iconographic and semantic effect of horror when the Other suddenly, substantially intrudes into the realistic perspective thus set up. This is visually best done metapoetically in the sequence when Sadako, the girl who is the seat of evil, comes out of the television set and kills Ryûji (Sanada Hiroyuki). Written on paper, the scene probably sounds funny or trivial, but in Ringu, thanks to Nakata's imagination, it is transformed into a chilling depiction of ontological and media disruption.
However, the most intriguing and best J-horror is the work Miike Takashi: dishon (Audition, 1999), the director's most complex work, a lucid essay on male-female relations, a work that deliberately evokes multiple and even contradictory readings. Is it Miike's distant association with pinku violence films from the early seventies or works with long-haired ghosts, since in these 'trash' frames a completely - for Japanese circumstances - extraordinary poetics of female revenge developed? Or is it a horror that finds the source of horror in the sudden and complete reversal of the traditional gender constellation? A feminist-inspired reaction to the subordinate position of women in Japanese history that watches with undisguised pleasure how the ideal finally turns into a nightmare?
Odishon is all of that, but much more, especially in the elaboration of the film's numerous semantic layers, in the apocryphal expansion of possible implications and conclusions. Perhaps the most effective emphasis on the constitutional multidimensionality of his work is achieved by Miike's insistence on the male masochistic enunciatory position: moreover, the 'rupture' within Odishon - the relatively calm, mimetic first three quarters, and then the 'surreal' violent explosion in the last quarter of the film, a realistic introduction and elaboration followed by a 'fantasy' point - indicates that the 'objective' vision is transformed into a subjective immersion in a masculinist space of sexual insecurity and fears. The phantasmagoric quality of the film lies in its shocking ending - Run, run, run (Deeper, deeper, deeper) - precisely testifies that the shift in intonation and action (more precisely, torture) came as a product or projection the main character Aoyama (Ishibashi Ryo) in whom desire and guilt, sexual lust and remorse are radically mixed.
Impossible love - whether the 'transgression' was realized through consumption or subsequent loss - ends in masochistic self-punishment.
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