Feature: China bans horror movies
Updated: 2008-03-25 11:57
Chinese scary movie fans are really scared this time when the state censor - the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP) -- banned last month all horror or supernatural films from sale.
"It's sort of like The Mummy Returns (2001)," says a fan.
Last year, when the GAPP banned the popular Death Note books and films, the movie goers were reminded of The Mummy, the 1999 film about the awakening of a being from a bygone age who sets out to wreak havoc.
Just like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead (1978), the ban will only make more illegal horror movies keep on coming, whatever the GAPP can throw at them, says Yang Yang, the creator and editor of the Horror Paradise fan website.
The 21-year-old student at Beijing City University says he and millions of his Chinese peers find the thrill of a good fright just too much fun to let the censors spoil it.
"The ban won't make much difference," says Yang. "We'll just download out movies from the Internet."
Yang thinks of the ban as irrational. "Don't they remember that they're supposed to be promoting the concept of letting one hundred flowers bloom in the garden? " he says rhetorically.
He still remembers the film adapted from Liao Zhai Zhi Yi, or Strange Tales from a Scholar's Studio, a collection of ghost stories written by Chinese literary master Pu Songling in the Qing Dynasty (1616-1911).
"As a three-year-old, I was scared out of my wits, but that thrill still excites me as an adult."
In the 1990s, he trawled video shops looking for the latest films from Hong Kong. "Some of them were pretty coarse, but I enjoyed them."
In middle school, his passion for horror developed and in the past ten years, he has collected and watched more than 1,000 horror movies, mostly from the US, Europe,South Korea and Japan.
Initially, he enjoyed brutality and gore, but he has come to appreciate the psychological element of horror moves. "Watching them is an effective release from outside pressure, in an instant way.It's a fantastic feeling that nothing else can offer."
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