Dark Is The Water & other wyrd tales by Susan Earlam

This is not American horror in the sense that everything is not in your face blood, gore, and knife wielding psychos. The characters are not throw away fodder as in many modern American horror tales and there are some scenes that had me, a hardened horror veteran, wanting to squint my eyes at the television screen. It is a slow-burner with an unsettling tale and reveals itself subtlety. Dark Water itself is a nice little ghost story. It is these intangibles that the Asian horror scene has somehow mastered and the American scene has lost.

Even with a very talented actress in the lead role it still doesn't shine like the Japanese original, even though it possesses every required ingredient. The story is the same and many of the scenes are very similar but for some reason, some intangible reason, it is of remarkably lower quality. The American remake is really indicative of what is wrong with the industry in North America. Dark Water isn't necessarily one of the best Asian horror films to come out but it certainly is a good one. That is not to say that there aren't some very good American horror films to be produced since the 1980s but the more Asian horror that I watch the more I see that they have taken up the torch and are producing the best horror movies of the era. We get the same boring clichés and jump scares packaged under different titles with little originality. The American horror film scene has been getting staler and staler for the better part of two decades.

Dark Is The Water & other wyrd tales by Susan Earlam