9th Global Conference
Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness

Monday 10th March - Thursday 13th March 2008
Salzburg, Austria

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Session 1: “…and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, VERY BAD Hair Day!”
Chair: Robert Butler

It’s Alive! Disorderly Hair and Danger in Japanese Horror Cinema
Colette Balmain
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, United Kingdom

In his writings on Japan, Lafcadio Hearn points out that ‘The myth of Medusa has many a counterpart in Japanese folk-lore’, as in the beautiful young woman whose hair turns into serpents at night or the hair of the wife and the concubine of Kato Sayemon Shigenji which at night turn ‘into vipers, writhing together and hissing and biting.’ (2006: 44). Hair in Japanese religion is ‘at once attractive and frightening, desirable and potentially dangerous’ (Ebersole, 1998: 78). With the potential to be possessed by malevolent kami (spirits), it is little surprise that disorderly and dangerous hair, which possesses the power to attack and kill the living, provides a source of horror in Japanese cinema and is one of its most identifiable tropes. While, until recently, censorship of female pubic hair functioned to ‘construct and circulate […] an ideology of male dominance (Allison, 1998: 214), unbound and embodied female hair subverts such ideology and instead functions as a mark of insurrection against traditional gender categories which construct woman as Other in terms of respectability and filial duty. This paper examines the use of hair symbolism as a mode of feminine/female protest in Japanese horror cinema with reference to three films: Kaidan (Kwaidan, Kobayashi: 1964), Miike’s One Missed Call (Chakushin ari: 2003), and Apartment 1303 (Oikawa: 2007).

Wanton Women and Wicked Witches: The Stunning Hair of Pre-Raphaelite Women
Lois Drawmer
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

No abstract is presently available

Christ the Barber: Hair as Virtue and Vice in Paulinus of Nola
Stephen Morris
Independent Scholar, New York, USA

No abstract is presently available

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