Asia Extreme: Japanese cinema and British hype

Can hype, used by Thomas Austin, Mark Jancovich and Barbara Klinger to describe Hollywood marketing strategies, also help us understand the promotional activities of independent British film distributors who have been promoting mainly Japanese and South Korean genre films under a variety of Extreme Asia brands since 2001? This article will examine how these distributors and the print/broadcast media are involved in the process of discursively segmenting a variety of audience taste formations, and then recruiting these niche demographics to build an aggregate audience by generating multiple promises and invitations-to-view, or hype, around a film text. I will examine the various discourses used to constitute these niches, including those of cult subcultural identity, auteurism and other notions of authorship, textual alienation effects and Orientalist cultural essentialism. I will focus on those exceptional texts in which this multiplying process has been particularly successful, in particular Miike Takashi's Audition (1999).