The World is a Beautiful Place: The Eye (2002) and J-Horror

“I don’t want to go to bed terrified every night, then wake up to horrors every morning.”

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“Even without explicitly using [the term] ‘J-Horror,’ such branding reshaped its meaning in the West: a catch-all for supernatural Asian horror, stripped of cultural context and recast as a commercial signifier.”

That’s Julian Singleton, writing for Night Tide about the unlikely history of the J-Horror label, a term used both in Japan and in the West to describe a particular stylistic movement of Asian horror that became popular in the early 2000s, as exemplified by its two best-known exponents: Ring in 1998 (remade in the States as The Ring in 2002) and Ju-on in 2002 (itself already a remake of a remake, remade in America as The Grudge in ’04).

Everyone who was around and interested in horror at that time knows the basic elements of the J-Horror formula: Waterlogged specters with long black hair; a reliance on urban legends and mimetic curses; supernatural tales often set in modern cityscape environments.

“This semantic blurring was emblematic of larger trends,” Singlton writes, arguing that the term J-Horror itself “grew elastic – encompassing decades of Japanese horror far beyond Sadako’s well or the Ju-on house” – not to mention horror imported to the West from other Asian countries.

Few movies were more emblematic of this at the time than The Eye, a 2002 Hong Kong flick directed by brothers Danny and Oxide Pang. As much as any of the above tropes, J-Horror’s cinematic moment was marked by extensive English-language remakes. Starting with The Ring, a wide range of Asian horror films got Anglophone treatment – The Grudge (2004); Dark Water (2005); Pulse (2006); One Missed Call (2008); the 2003 South Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters got remade in 2008 as The Uninvited; and then, of course, there’s The Eye.

Starring Jessica Alba and helmed by the directing duo behind the 2006 New French Extremity-adjacent home invasion flick Them (not the giant ants one), the English-language version of The Eye is, I think, generally considered a low point, even among the steadily diminishing returns of J-Horror remakes. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a score of 22%.

The Hong Kong original, on the other hand, was looked at as something pretty special when it first premiered stateside. I still worked in a video store back then, and I remember with great fondness the wealth of Asian horror films that were being ported over by shingles such as Tartan Asia Extreme. Among these, The Eye left a lasting mark.

Back then, the particular movement known as J-Horror was at its peak, and the stuff that was coming out of Asia felt genuinely electrifying. In the years since, I’ve seen a lot more movies from Japan and surrounding nations – made both during and on either side of the J-Horror boom. I’ve also revisited a lot of the movies that left an impression on me from back then. Sometimes they hold up; sometimes they don’t.

I was curious to see how The Eye would stand the test of time when I popped in the new 4K release from Arrow Video. Pretty much all I remembered were the scare scenes and the cataclysmic Final Destination ending. Since watching the original, I had also seen at least one of its three Hong Kong sequels, not to mention the American remake, so I wasn’t entirely sure which of my memories were from the original movie and which weren’t.

The first surprise was how little of The Eye is actually dedicated to its ghosts. Around the memorable scare sequences the film packs in plenty of melodrama, following Wong Kar Mun (Angelica Lee), a violinist who has been blind since the age of two as she recovers her sight through a cornea transplant that, of course, also lets her see (and hear, for some reason) the dead.

Sure, much of that melodrama is dedicated to her struggles with her condition, but the film also spends considerable time on the orchestra for the blind in which she is no longer welcome now that she can see, her relationship with a young cancer patient in the hospital ward, the growing romantic feelings of the therapist tasked with helping her acclimate to life among the sighted, and so on – and that’s all before we add in the melodrama of the deceased cornea donor, whose unfinished business has to be set to rights before Mun can be at peace.

Even when the film is focused on its ghosts, it’s as apt to be about their own longings and pain as it is about them being scary. One of the odd things about The Eye is that the ghosts in it are truly, genuinely harmless. They cannot hurt or even interact with the world of the living, and only Mun and a few other people can see or hear them at all. While the dead are sometimes frightening, they are more often pitiful, and the act of laying them to rest is less about sparing the living than it is an act of mercy for the departed.

In the course of exploring these themes, the film also becomes a sort of suicide prevention PSA. Suicide seems to be a major cause of the dead still sticking around, doomed to repeat the moment of their demise until something is done to rectify the conditions which led to it. It’s honestly a surprisingly humane way of looking at the consequences of self-harm, placing the onus of fixing the problem on the living, not the dead.