Cue a fast pan across Asia

The Pang brothers, Danny and Oxide, are identical twin co-directors, born in Hong Kong in 1965. But their pan-Asian horror hit “The Eye,” which opens in the U.S. this week, has given rise to some understandable confusion about their nationality.

The press kit for “The Eye” describes them as “Thai directors.” But Danny Pang, speaking his native Cantonese through an adept interpreter, brusquely rejects this: “We are 100% born and raised in Hong Kong.”

And then the film’s producer, Peter Chan Ho-sun, speaking by phone from the Hong Kong offices of Applause Pictures, suggests that there is some truth in both views. “They are Chinese,” he says, “but they are Thai directors. They moved there 12 years ago, and they had never worked in Hong Kong before they made ‘The Eye.’ ”

It was this “confusion” that attracted the attention of Applause, which Chan founded in 2000 to encourage crossovers and co-productions among the struggling film industries of Asia.

“The Pang brothers are exactly what we are trying to do,” Chan says. “Their movies are influenced by Hong Kong films, but local audiences and critics find that there is a freshness in their tempos and editing that comes from Thai cinema. At the same time, ‘The Eye’ became the highest-grossing Hong Kong movie ever in Thailand. The Thais seem to have forgotten that it was not a local film. It was made in Hong Kong, but it has Thai elements, so it works in both places.”

Applause’s recent productions have attempted to help create, by example, a new pan-Asian “fusion cinema.” The Eye” is a comparatively subtle example. The horror anthology film “Three” (2002) is more overt, with episodes filmed in South Korea, Thailand and Hong Kong (Chan’s own “Going Home,” the strongest of the three). No more foreign-looking in Korea or Thailand than in Hong Kong, it could be promoted as a local production in all three territories.

As genres go, of course, horror is famous for “traveling well.” For instance, imitations of “The Sixth Sense” and the 1998 Japanese shocker “The Ring” have sprouted across Asia in recent years, from South Korea’s “Ring” knockoffs “The Phone” and “Ring Virus,” to Hong Kong’s “Sixth Sense”-themed “My Left Eye Sees Ghosts.”

Hollywood has chosen the more overt route of purchasing remake rights to successful Asian creep shows: A U.S. revamp of “The Ring” was a major hit last year, and an American version of “The Eye” is already in the works, courtesy of Tom Cruise and Cruise Wagner Productions.

Set primarily in Hong Kong, “The Eye” tells the story of a young blind woman (Angelica Lee Sin-je) who undergoes a successful cornea transplant operation and, in the process, acquires the unknown donor’s power to see the lurking spirits of the restless dead. In the film’s third act, she travels to the donor’s hometown in rural Thailand to unravel the mystery.

At last year’s Hong Kong Film Awards, Lee won the best actress prize for her eloquent, thin-skinned performance. It lent immediacy to the film’s scariest moments, which are rooted in everyday anxieties.

“We found several memories that everybody can relate to,” says Danny Pang, eating a dismembered hotel hamburger with a knife and fork during a press stop in Los Angeles. “Everyone all over the world, in every culture, has a certain fear when they look in a mirror by themselves, or when they are in an elevator all alone at night. By using these two things, we got the audience to feel the fear at the same time as the actress.”

Despite its supernatural content, “The Eye” was inspired by two real events. One was the tragedy of a 16-year-old girl in Hong Kong who received a successful cornea transplant but committed suicide a week later. “I wondered what she could have seen in that one week,” Danny recalls, “that could have affected her so deeply that she chose to kill herself.”

The other was a disastrous accident in Thailand in which 200 people died. “ ‘The Eye’ is about fate,” co-director Oxide Pang explains by e-mail from Hong Kong, “and we wanted to include an incident that fully demonstrates the nature of fate -- ideally an implausible but real incident. We actually shot that scene at the place where the real event occurred.”

The Pang brothers’ films blend a Hong Kong-style flair for action with Thai film’s strong sense of the textures of ordinary life, Danny Pang says.

With this mix of sensibilities, Chan says, “we are introducing foreign filmmakers to our home audience in Hong Kong, but in a context that still feels like a local movie. At the same time, we are introducing Hong Kong filmmakers to audiences in other countries, in a context that is comfortable for them. Because the days when Hong Kong cinema was the mainstream in Asia are long gone.”

New markets on the rise

Up until the early 1990s, Hong Kong boasted the world’s third-biggest movie industry, after the U.S. and India. But by 2002, Hong Kong film revenues had declined from the equivalent of $150 million to about $45 million. “If it goes on like this,” action star Jackie Chan declared in a recent interview, “Hong Kong movies are finished.”

In the past, Hong Kong was the leading supplier of Chinese-language entertainment to immigrant communities around the world. “In the peak years in the 1980s,” says Peter Chan, “70% of our business came from overseas. That is down now to around 20%. The demand is no longer there. The younger generation is very Westernized. They can watch ‘When Harry Met Sally’ and imagine those characters as themselves. Hong Kong is simply too small a market to sustain a movie industry on its own.”

In contrast, the cinemas of South Korea and Thailand are on the rise. Since the mid-1990s, blockbuster Korean films such as “Joint Security Area” (2000) and “My Sassy Girl” (2001) have conquered first the local market (beating back a “free trade” invasion of foreign imports) and then East Asia. “Korean films today are where Hong Kong films were 12 years ago,” Chan says. “They are the movies that play everywhere.”

Thailand’s film industry experienced a similar surge in the late ‘90s, as a new wave of innovative directors emerged. Familiar with the latest snazzy visual techniques, and with comfortable day jobs making TV commercials, filmmakers such as Nonzee Nimibutr (“Nang Nak”) and Pen-ek Ratanaruang (“6ixty9”) began turning out convincing hits. As in Korea, home-court productions began to dominate the local box office for the first time in decades, and Thai films such as Wisit Sasanatieng’s “Tears of the Black Tiger” (2000) began to make waves at festivals.

The Pang brothers began working together in Thailand just as the new wave was gathering strength. Oxide, a digital colorist, took a job in 1992 at Kantana Film Lab, Bangkok’s top digital effects and post-production house. Meanwhile, Danny had established himself as one of Hong Kong’s top editors, winning a Hong Kong Film Award in 1998 for his work on the high-tech fantasy “The Stormriders.” When Oxide persuaded Kantana to finance his solo debut as a director, “Who’s Running?” (1997), Danny became its editor.

The brothers then teamed up to make “Bangkok Dangerous” (2000), a stylish John Woo-meets-MTV crime drama about a deaf-mute hit man. (They work together on the script and storyboards, then take turns directing; the brother who isn’t on the set on a given day is busy editing.)

Although it was “The Eye” -- with its Thai and Hong Kong locales -- that brought them the greatest success, they don’t profess to see a formula in the making.

“Not all of our films will be calculated in this way,” insists Danny Pang, who says one of his dream projects is a drama about identical twins. The brothers are writing a screenplay titled “Eye 2,” but, he says, the similarity between it and the original ends at the title.

“I don’t think cultural identity is a commodity you can detach or avoid,” adds Oxide Pang. “No matter how universal the stories seem, the storyteller will mark his interpretation with his own cultural idiosyncrasies. It all comes down to who is telling or retelling the story.”