[Dr.Kelvinstein]

I've bought around 700 DVDs in the last three yrs. The Asian stuff is all of John Woo's movies, all Kurosawa's samurai movies, the Better Tomorrow sequels without Woo, Bride With White Hair 1 and 2, Stacy, Junk, Wild Zero, Audition, The Swordsman series and unfortunately I picked up Versus before I rented it. Most other suff I've either rented or have video bootlegs of. The biggest bulk of the rest is American and European horror. Here is my problem with Asian horror (and yes, I can see why people think they're cool--but I'm talking horror as a GENRE)---Horror archetypes evolved out of European legends and English Gothic novels. That IS monster culture as we know it. You can sit down and trace everything from TCM to Deep Red back to The Castle of Otranto, the first horror novel marketed as such. That is why Asian horror will never be anything except a footnote or at best a slim chapter in any English-language film book. With a very few exceptions, and most of them demonstrating foreign filmmakers' takes on American horror movie archetypes, Asian horror should be considered in context with the exploitation film or with Asian filmmaking in general and not with the history of the horror film.