Transnational studies of popular film genres too often impose a Hollywood-derived understanding of generic categories on another culture’s cinema, or else conceive of national genres as essentially separate from Hollywood’s hegemony. In practice, however, any given culture’s popular film genres consist of a commingling of native traditions and international influences, with the generic corpus composed of foreign as well as domestic specimens. For example, the Japanese filmic category of frightening and monstrous material known as kaiki eiga – a phrase often translated as “horror movies” but more literally meaning “strange” or “bizarre” films – encompasses both domestically made adaptations of traditional Japanese ghost stories as well as foreign horror film series like Dracula and Frankenstein, contextualizing the genre within transnational pop culture.
In light of this, it is tempting to think of the kaiki genre as merely the Japanese analogue to the Anglophone “horror movie.” To date there has been little if any attempt in either English or Japanese scholarship to theorize a difference between kaiki and horror film, despite conspicuous cases in which the definitions diverge. Most notably, Western academics, critics, and fans continue to ascribe a privileged place to Godzilla (Gojira, 1954) as a seminal work of Japanese horror film despite the fact that the Godzilla franchise has historically not been understood to be part of the kaiki genre in Japan. To demonstrate how kaiki both aligns with and deviates from the Anglophone category of horror film – as well as the importance of examining the presence of foreign film in any discussion of “national genres” – I will consider the Japanese critical reception of Godzilla during the late 1950s in light of the concurrent and immense popularity in Japan of the United Kingdom’s Hammer horror films – notably Horror of Dracula (1958). Peter Cushing’s Dr. Frankenstein and Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula took Japan by storm at a time when the kaiki genre was going through an identity crisis brought on by atomic age science fiction horrors like Godzilla. The mass popularity of the Hammer films in Japan – with their period settings and shocking acts of personal, bodily violence – played a pivotal role in re-asserting the traditional gothic, suspenseful markers of kaiki, effectively banishing the more conspicuously postmodern Godzilla from the genre.