J-horror and kimchi western: Mobile genres in East Asian cinemas

Writings on East Asian cinemas, or non-Western cinemas in general, have tended to focus on the representation or contestation of the nation, and the negotiation between indigenous traditions and what were considered “modern” cinematic codes in the evolution of film art. Chinese cinema scholarship has produced a fascinating account of how these various positions are argued, debated, rethought and revised, particularly the controversy over the exact meaning of the “nation” and the “national” when applied to Chinese or any non-Western cinema in today’s globalized world (e.g. Zhang 2004; Berry and Farquhar 2006; Lu and Yeh 2005).1 In the early 1990s, the “New Korean cinema” came into being against a long history of political repression and state interference. This history, Julian Stringer (2005) notes, is also a narrative that “encompass[es] the experience of successive national traumas.” Beginning with the political democratization in 1992, the massive program of commercialization and globalization orchestrated by the state and large multinational corporations (chaebols in Korean) has given rise to the phenomenon of “record-breakers” or Korean blockbusters,2 a number of which have gained arthouse respectability.