In short: Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi File 04: The Truth! Hanako-san in the toilet (2013) & Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Preface: True Theory, Yotsuya Kaidan, the Curse of Oiwa (2014)

Not to be dissuaded by comas, kappa possession and curses, director Kudo (Shigeo Ohsako), assistant Ichikawa (Chika Kuboyama) and camera guy Tashiro (Koji Shiraishi) follow yet another viewer tape into trouble. First, an exploration of one of my favourite urban legends, Toilet Hanako, quickly leads into an epic, cheap and confusing tale of time travel and parallel dimensions. Then, our protagonist take on the curse of Oiwa.

It’s at this part of the Senritsu Kaiki File series where Koji Shiraishi truly hits his stride for me. Both films are jam-packed with a very Shiraishi mixture of off-beat humour, Japanese folklore and folk culture, weird history High Strangeness and scenes of people running around like chicken with their heads cut off (which also happens to be how you can travel through time, apparently). There are quite a few moments in here where the director/writer (and so on) seems to have feverishly scratched down a number of crazy high concepts and ideas, realized that he’d need a Marvel budget to actually get them on screen believably, and decided to just go with them as far as he can get with some ultra cheap CGI that makes parallel dimensions look surprisingly close to the animations in Monty Python sketches (and I’m pretty sure he knows this), a handful of locations and actors, and a whole lot of crazed enthusiasm. Despite Shiraishi actually being a technically perfectly accomplished director, there’s obviously very little that is slick about the resulting films, but they are wild, raw and energetic, full of ideas – good, bad and absolutely bonkers – and feel a lot as if they were made in the spirit of punk rock.

Rather regularly, Shiraishi hits on an image or a scene that’s more creepy than crazy, as well, adding some genuine horror into a series that’s otherwise more interested in the capital-w Weird. Which is not a complaint from me, either way.

In short: Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 02: Shivering Ghost & File 03: Legend of a Human-Eating Kappa (2012)

In File 02, Director – I actually assume that’s his first name – Kudo (Shigeo Ohsako), assistant Ichikawa (Chika Kuboyama), and their camera man Tashiro (Koji Shiraishi) follow a new viewer’s video that supposedly shows a ghost haunting an abandoned school – all schools in the series seem abandoned, and look rather a lot like the same school. This quickly evolves into the search for a disappeared young woman, her curious relationship to an older man, and the occult significance of the Tokyo Skytree, culminating in a bit of High Strangeness.

File 03 leads our heroes into the countryside, where the search of what may or may not be a man-eating kappa ends up in a pretty ineffective banishing ritual.

The basic things I said about the formal cleverness and ultra-low budget creativity of the first Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi as well as my admiration for writer/director/actor Koji Shiraishi still apply. Both of these films actually seed quite a few concepts that will be important later on in the series, turning the whole series also into a bit of an Easter egg hunt once you’ve seen all of it.

These two are also the least effective films of the series seen without the context of the later films. File 02 suffers from being structured like an actual investigation, which means the moments of excitement here are surrounded by some scenes of the characters just observing or waiting around, something you simply can’t make look terribly exciting with the very low budget filmmaking technology Shiraishi has to work with here; however, Shiraishi being Shiraishi, there are also some suggestions of mind-blowing high concepts the rest of the series will heroically triple down on, a great no-budget climax, and moments of actual, simple strangeness that make this very much worthwhile.

File 03 is for my tastes the weakest part of the whole series. Apart from our protagonists, there’s no important connection to the rest of the series, and the kappa hunt tale itself is simply not all that interesting, even though I did appreciate how much stock Shiraishi puts into the importance of cucumbers. This film also has a fun enough final act with said banishing ritual, but most of what comes before is just too thinly stretched not to become a little bit dull.

From here on out, however, dullness is not a problem the Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! series will suffer under, because now, Shiraishi is going to be doing his crazy dance of High Strangeness, low budget, peculiar humour, can-do-even-if-can’t-afford spirit full-time.

Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 01: Operation Capture the Slit-Mouthed Woman (2012)

A tiny made-for-DVD (apparently) “true paranormal” show believes they have hit the big time with an audience video that shows a supposed encounter with the Kuchisake Onna, the Slit-Mouthed Woman, herself. Or at least, a woman of considerable height who likes to dress the part and can run astonishingly fast. Pasted scraps of paper and other clues lead the intrepid reporters – irascible and sometimes violent director Kudo (Shigeo Ohsako), his assistant Ichikawa (Chika Kuboyama) and their typically unseen cameraman Tashiro (director Koji Shiraishi) – on the trail of a mystery that involves curses, a magic school of dubious morals and village tragedy.

Mostly ignored by western distributors, the great Koji Shiraishi has spent several years in the 2010s on a series of connected made for home video/streaming/whatever POV horror movies about the misadventures of the trio of paranormal documentary filmmakers we first encounter here. By now, we’re up to nine films, with all but the last two of them fansubbed by some unsung heroes of the cause.

This early in the series, there’s just a hint of a larger meta plot in Kudo’s backstory as well as the way the occurrences here don’t quite resolve; not yet having seen any of the later films, I have no idea how or if any of this is going to be important later on, which makes me quite happy, actually.

As you may know, Shiraishi has turned into something of a specialist in the POV horror form, and has probably used the mode in more films than anyone else making horror movies right now. Not surprisingly, he is rather good at this sort of thing, using the stylistic elements of POV horror to disguise miniscule budgets, dodgy effects, and the sort of flaws that come with a tight shooting schedule, rather adeptly. Shiraishi also understands the use of POV horror as an actual aesthetic, the joy of hiding things in blurry backgrounds, or revealing them with slow motion and post-production zooms. In Shiraishi’s world, cheap digital media take on the same haunted quality as the VHS tape does for other filmmakers, and he’s using this to create a feeling of liminality.

Unlike other filmmakers of the style, Shiraishi clearly doesn’t believe in the necessity of keeping dull scenes during which little happens on for too long, so things zip along at a nice pace, the characters following the trails of their investigation from hint to hint, while things become increasingly creepy. It’s a budget-conscious kind of creepiness, of course, but one that’s wonderfully effective for a viewer willing to go with the film’s conceits and its aesthetic.

Even though the film does indeed feature a slit-mouthed woman, the backstory and the way she acts do not try to repeat Shiraishi’s first movie concerning the legend. They do seem to belong into the same kind of occult world the director’s POV masterpieces Noroi and Occult take place in, where urban myth, folklore, and those aspects of Japanese religions closest to what we in the West would call occultism blend into something that always feels close to the nihilism of certain types of cosmic horror to me. If the Senritsu Kaiki File films will completely go there in the end, I don’t know yet, but particularly the last act does suggest they may very well end up in that direction.

Putting on my Weird Fiction fan hat, I found myself particularly enjoying how much the film uses its cheap shot filmmakers as a group of occult detectives, though the sort neither with electrical pentacle nor much practical magical knowledge, who try to unravel an enticing mystery that seems to suggest strange vistas, and even seem to plan on some ill-advised ghost(?) busting.

All of this, particularly presented in Shiraishi’s carefully made to not look carefully made style, and showing much of the director’s interests, is very much catnip to me.