Dangerous Exchange Students: Battle Royale and Transcultural Fans’ Intertextual Gatekeeping

This article examines transcultural fans of Battle Royale (Fukasaku 2000), building on limited empirical audience research into the Japanese cult hit, East Asian horror films, Asia Extreme Cinema, and Hollywood’s ‘remake ecology’. Analysing how online audiences value Battle Royale in relation to mainstream Western cinema, the article highlights fans’ complex intertextual readings between films, genres, industries, and cultures. This begins by fans framing the film’s violence as an ‘ugly concept’ that aesthetically and semiotically elevates Battle Royale above Hollywood spectacle. However, others draw thematic connections around teen-on-teen violence that revises preexisting East/West cultural binaries. Moreover, clustered within the Asia Extreme cycle, fans are both wary of a US remake of Battle Royale and want such industry adaptation to take place. Specifically, audiences discuss how revered North American horror creatives and ‘indiewood’ filmmakers could fix Battle Royale, complicating discourses around remakes as low cultural value rip-offs and cash-ins. Building on this, the article looks at shifting intertextual formations around The Hunger Games (Ross 2012) as an unacknowledged remake of Battle Royale. Anti-fans accuse Hunger Games’ writer Suzanne Collins of plagiarism while locating it within Hollywood whitewashing practices. Yet, others argue–positively and negatively–that Hunger Games blocked an official Western remake of Battle Royale. To conceptualise this, the article offers the term prophylactic intertextuality that addresses prototextual suspension. Finally, moving outside of niche circles, the article highlights other audiences’ discursive intertextual connections between the films via familial ‘gifting’ and ‘transfandom’, undermining subcultural gatekeeping and underground/mainstream distinctions that cult cinema studies frequently reproduce.