Word: horror
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...daughter, but that hasn't nearly the dramatic heft needed to fill in the cracks around the disintegrating main story. What you get is a lot of impotent anger, people walking into harm's way and the sniper-like picking off of supporting players - all the dumbest tropes of horror movies, without the robust scares a good thrill-fest delivers. It's a sorry enough spectacle to make admirers of The Sixth Sense wonder if they didn't overrate that movie, and the director's whole oeuvre? Is Shyamalan a sham...
...small power producers within our cells. We remember them, if at all, as blobs in cell diagrams from biology class. But, by controlling cell differentiation, movement, death and growth, they are crucial to keeping us alive. And in the surreal, over-the-top and often unintentionally humorous biomedical horror Parasite Eve, Japanese novelist Hideaki Sena depicts them as sentient beings - so indignant over our indifference that they want to wipe us out and take over the world. Of course the notion is far-fetched, but the endosymbiotic theory of mitochondria, which posits that the organelles evolved from ancient bacteria, provides...
...Sena was a pharmacology Ph.D. student at Tohoku University in the northern Japanese city of Sendai when he wrote Parasite Eve, his first published novel and the recipient of the first Japan Horror Novel Prize. The book was partly inspired by mitochondria research he was pursuing at the time. He also felt encouraged by the way in which the public's imagination had been gripped by the "African Eve" hypothesis (which argues that we are descended from an ancient African woman whose mitochondrial DNA we all share...
...Parasite Eve was first published in Japanese in 1995, and together with Koji Suzuki's Ring helped to launch a new wave of Japanese horror - both novels were made into movies. Director Hideo Nakata's adaptation of Ring enjoyed more domestic success than the Fuji TV-produced Parasite Eve, but Sena's story reached a broader audience outside Japan through a Sony PlayStation video-game adaptation that shifted the tale to New York City and ratcheted up the gore - most fantastically in the mass spontaneous combustion of an opera audience at Carnegie Hall. There are also two Japanese manga versions...
...fewer than 15% knew for certain that they had actually killed a member of the enemy in return. That imbalance between seeing the price of war up close and yet not feeling able to do much about it, the survey suggests, contributes to feelings of "intense fear, helplessness or horror" that plant the seeds of mental distress. "A friend was liquefied in the driver's position on a tank, and I saw everything," was a typical comment. Another: "A huge f______ bomb blew my friend's head off like 50 meters from me." Such indelible scenes - and wondering when...