Perspectives on Evil 2008 Colette Balmain It’s Alive: Disorderly and dangerous hair in Japanese Horror Cinema Introduction Social and political order thus asserts its claims through “codes for and social scripts for the domestication of the individual body” (Scheper- Hughes and Lock 1987: 26) 1 . One of the most identifiable characteristics of [female] vengeful ghosts that populate recent Japanese horror films, such as Ring and Ju-on: The Grudge, is their long and luxuriant dark hair, which partially or fully obscures the ghost’s features. Iwasaka and Toelken write that the visual codes of ghosts in Japanese culture are ‘long (often dishevelled) hair, white kimono, a pained or angry expression, tongues of fire nearby.’ 2 In addition, at times, hair seems almost to operate independently of the bearer, as in Miike’s recent One Missed Call, or totally by itself as in the ‘Black Hair’ segment of the award- winning Kwaidan. In addition, excessive hair is often equated with “Otherness” – the Western invader/colonialiser – in East and South East Asian popular mythology. For example, in Evil of Dracula (Chi o suu bara, Michio Yamamoto: 1974), Dracula comes from the West to Japan in the 1600s and takes up residency as the Headmaster at a [girl’s] boarding school where his legacy is handed over to subsequent Headmasters. Here it is Dracula’s whiteness that is utilised to codify cultural anxieties over Westernisation. In the flashback sequences to Dracula’s arrival, he is depicted with dishevelled hair and is heavily bearded. Just as female ghosts, or yūrei, are coded iconographically in terms of their visual appearance and through an 1