With its terminal videotapes, sartorial hitmen, and contractually-stipulated bodycounts, East Asian Genre film now has a foothold in most of Ireland's video-rental outlets. Tony Keily examines the cultural phenomenon whose efficient, small-budget productions have sent Hollywood scrambling for the re-make rights.

Most of the world's premiere festivals have recently felt obliged to include an East Asian Genre component. Floating on its suppurating yellow lagoon, Venice 2005 presented films by Park Chan-wook, Takashi Miike, Tsui Hark, Andrew Lau and others. The EAG tag can seem loose and even offensive since the directors named have little in common apart from the fact that they're men born east of Krung Thep. But right now East Asian Genre means something quite concrete in global marketing terms: a sophisticated ability to mutate and reinterpret generic standards. Slim budgets and great efficiency behind the camera are yielding shadowy horror from Japan, philosophising thrillers from Korea, or Hong Kong sharp-suited sharpshooters waving nickel-plated pistols against a concrete and glass backdrop of postcolonial angst. East Asian Genre is hip.

The current receptivity to East Asian Genre film has complex origins, but you could speculate a couple of key moments. First in 1998 Hideo Nakata's Ring launched a new Japanese horror wave which has latterly both fed and fed off a worldwide horror boom. Second came the transnational popularity of Ang Lee's lame import substitute Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which lent an air of respectability of to the courtly Martial Arts genre invented by Tsui Hark. Ring opened international markets to high-concept Asian horror and created a pickup-and-remake niche for such fare in Hollywood. The critical and commercial success of CTHD on the other hand astonished Western cultural and business elites, who promptly began to heap awards on Chinese or Korean genre titles at major festivals, reserving a second ripple of astonishment for the realisation that the films often actually deserved them.

In what follows we will look at the backstory of the EAG phenomenon in some of its major territories, and ask what of value will be left when the storm blows over.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 107.