A Record of Sweet Murder (2014)

Original title: Aru yasashiki satsujinsha no kiroku

Journalist Soyeon (Kim Kkobbi) is suddenly contacted by her old childhood friend Sangjoon (Yeon Je-wook). They haven’t seen each other for twenty years, ever since Sangjoon had been hospitalized in a mental institution, following some accident the film will get into eventually when they both were seven years old.

Sangjoon is out now, escaped, and has supposedly committed eighteen murders; still Soyeon agrees to meet him at a place of his choosing only accompanied by a Japanese cameraman (Koji Shiraishi playing a cameraman named Tashiro, as is his wont). Sangjoon is very insistent on the Japanese cameraman, for reasons he will explain later. When they meet up in an old, run-down apartment, Sangjoon quickly starts ranting and raving and tells an odd story: he hasn’t “only” committed eighteen murders but actually twenty-five, with two additional murders to come. He’s not killing for no reason, or so he explains. Ever since the childhood accident that killed one of his and Soyeon’s friends, God has spoken to Sangjoon, eventually convincing him that he has to murder twenty-seven people after his twenty-seventh birthday to bring their friend back from the dead. Sangjoon’s victims will apparently come back to life as well, or so God says. In his mind, Sangjoon connects all of this to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which actually will make some kind of sense later on, in a wonderfully perverse way.

Soyeon doesn’t believe Sangjoon’s story at first, of course, but further developments suggest at the very least that either something very weird is going, or the laws of causality are so broken, unpredictable things will as a matter of course happen exactly like Sangjoon predicted.

When other directors sleep, Japanese master of the highly individual and weird POV horror movie Koji Shiraishi shoots another movie, TV show, or direct to whatever thing. This is a fine example of the man’s style, not as brilliant or complicated as Noroi or Occult but still following many of the director’s thematic obsessions. These films, together with the Senritsu Kaiki series, do seem to take place in the same universe, not just because Shiraishi tends to pop up as the actual DP as well as the guy playing the camera operator in many of them, but because their cosmological and thematic elements seem so closely related. Even the design of the godhood(s) having their fun with Sangjoon belongs into the same conceptual world as those in much of Shiraishi’s other works, and A Record’s climax (which I don’t want to spoil) is very much in keeping with the later episodes of Senritsu Kaiki. Just that here, developments feel rather more serious and focussed, where the series tends to the consciously silly and eccentric.

In fact, A Record of Sweet Murder is a rather tight movie, setting up a situation, dropping a handful of characters into one room, and then letting madness, tension, and camera waving escalate. I’m pretty sure if he wanted, Shiraishi could be a successful director of mainstream thrillers and horror movies, he just chooses to be eccentric and individual; at least he’s as tight and controlled here as anyone could wish from this kind of movie. For Shiraishi, this is one of the bloodier and more exploitative movies of his career, which only irregularly dips into the nasty stuff. But even here, the ending’s not going to satisfy the more gore-minded viewer because the film takes one of those wild swings its director/writer/etc likes so much and ends on a completely different note than you’d probably expect.

A note I might have found rather annoying myself if the film hadn’t actually subtly prepared it very well throughout, and if it weren’t executed as well as it is.

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.

In short: Kidan Piece of Darkness (2015/16)

This is an anthology movie with ten short horror stories by six Japanese directors (and no, of course I have found nothing on the Net to help identify who did which segment), among them the three house favourites Koji Shiraishi, Yoshihiro Nakamura and Mari Asato, as well as Eisuke Naito, Hiroki Iwasawa and Hajime Ohata. Apparently, this is “based on Fuyumi Ono’s bestselling books”, but I can’t tell you if it’s the same Fuyumi Ono known for their manga and fantasy work, though I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m a source of great information today.

Given the number of segments in a 100 minute running time, it’ll probably surprise nobody that the stories are comparatively simple – though not necessarily straightforward – and based on or directly inspired by contemporary Japanese urban legends and/or early Japanese creepypasta (the borders between these realms have become rather vague once the Internet hit it big), so even if you’re like me and have no clue about Ono’s work, you’ll recognize the structures, beats and quite a few of the creatures haunting the tales. That’s not, however, much of a problem to me, for there’s always a place for the kind of short horror that understands itself as a form of folklore in my heart, particularly when it is as well realized as this one.

There are quite a few projects with a similar approach to this dribbling in from Japan, and most of them are rather enjoyable, but they do tend to have a rather cheap look and feel, whereas Kidan seems definitely more upmarket. Not the big cinema kind of upmarket, but the one where things don’t look actively cheap and impoverished. The experienced and highly capable group of directors helps there too, of course, milking every ounce of atmosphere they can out of the handful of scenes every story has to work with, building tension and a surprising amount of creepiness out of the well-known tropes involved.

There’s an eerie kind of weirdness surrounding most of these tales, the convictions of talented storytellers that help make some of the more preposterous ideas here disturbing and even somewhat horrifying, never giving a viewer the space and time to look at things and sneer. It’s lovely work, really.


The film turns out to be a bit more cleverly structured than typical of this sort of project, starting out with pretty traditional urban legends and becoming stranger with each episode, culminating in a final trio of stories that are so quietly strange as to delight my old hard heart quite immensely. Atypical of anthology movies, there’s no bad middle tale here, either, every director bringing full focus to their little story or stories, making a small project feel rather impressive.

In short: Teketeke 2 (2009)

One year after the end of the first Teketeke, poor Kana (Yuko Oshima), now barely functional and spending most of her time in her darkened room without any red things, does have her final encounter with Teketeke, the legless wonder, on the same overpass. The grad student who had helped a little with the research in the first film is so struck by her death that he begins to obsess over Teketeke, trying to find out what the basis of the urban legend truly is, in the hopes to eventually stop the curse.

When we don’t spend time with his research, we pop over to a group of high school students. One bullied girl meets Teketeke and somehow manages to control her into killing the girls who bully her one after the other.

I am a big fan of director Koji Shiraishi, but this quick-shot sequel to Teketeke just isn’t very good at all. Despite a running time of 73 minutes (with four minutes or so spent recapping the first film), the whole affair feels bloated and overlong, all the jumping between the two plotlines giving the film a disjointed quality. And it’s not as if much of what the film jumps to is terribly interesting: grad student guy is basically revisiting the places our intrepid heroines in the first movie investigated and learning a tiny bit more, while the high school plotline has to fight its damn obviousness, as well as some pretty bad acting by half a dozen young women with little to none acting experience. Even the horror scenes don’t really come together, Shiraishi, for some godawful reason, deciding to show way too much of Teketeke herself, turning what was weird and creepy (if a bit silly, or perhaps even because it’s a bit silly) in the first film into a crap special effect.


The only actual cool bit – and totally fitting in tone with the sort of thing Shiraishi loves to put into his films’ mythologies - is the final explanation as to why Teketeke kills certain people, but others not: let’s just say she’s a yurei with a somewhat scholarly approach to things.

Teketeke (2009)

aka Teke Teke

Original title: テケテケ

A rather nasty spirit (who is indeed the star of various real world urban legends in the country with the best urban legends) known by the onomatopoetic moniker of Teketeke after the skittering noises it makes when it comes after you, haunts an overpass in the city of Nagoya. The thing takes the form of the upper half of a woman’s body moving around on her hands with high speed, and has the habit of slicing anyone in half horizontally who looks at her after hearing the noises she makes, mirroring whatever happened to herself before she became a supernatural creature. Apparently, even when you manage to escape, Teketeke will come and finish the job exactly (jurei are nothing if not punctually) three days later.

After a bit of a row about a boy, high school student Kana’s (Yuko Oshima) best friend Ayaka (Mai Nishida) takes the unaccustomed way across the overpass and is promptly killed by Teketeke. The manner of Ayaka’s death, the way it fits the urban legend of Teketeke, and a quite a bit of guilt do leave Kana with more than a few questions and doubts about what happened to her friend. When she visits the overpass where Ayaka died to lay flowers on the little shrine put up in her memory there, she encounters Teketeke herself. Unlike Ayaka, Kana manages to escape the thing; but now that she’s seen Teketeke, she can’t disbelief the rest of the urban legend, so she has only three days left to find some way, any way, to get rid of it. Fortunately, she doesn’t only have the local library to help her out, but also an older cousin named Rie (Mami Yamasaki) who is a grad student in cultural anthropology, and will turn out to have a vested interest in this particular urban legend herself.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, in my eyes Koji Shiraishi is one of the best Japanese horror directors of the post-Ringu generation. Like all of these guys (and at least one gal), Shiraishi has to fight against ever tinier budgets and a market that prefers its horror with idols instead of actual actresses in the lead. Shiraishi usually manages to squeeze good to astonishing things out of these production vagaries, getting decent and often much better performances out of the idol of the week, usually suggesting that many of them are only a bit of luck, a system change in the Japanese entertainment industry, and some acting lessons away from better ways to show their talents than bikini shots, variety shows and J-Pop.

Of course, this still  leaves a film like Teketeke with a budget that can only afford a couple of appearances of its titular creature and needs to fill the rest of its short 70 minute runtime with anything a filmmaker can come up with. It has to be said that the creature design when we get to see it is actually pretty creepy, and thanks to some excellent directorial framing choices, its absurd way of running around doesn’t feel as ridiculous as it might be but rather strange and otherworldly. Generally, the scenes where Teketeke scuttles and skitters and around work very well, Shiraishi using all the tricks in the low budget handbook to produce menace and excitement, never showing too much of the creature for too long.

This still leaves about fifty minutes of movie. About half of it Shiraishi fills with little character moments that don’t exactly pull these women away from being the obvious clichés you expect them to be but make them sympathetic and likeable and provide them at least with a bit of an inner and outer life beyond being horror movie characters, and give Oshima and Yamasaki some room to demonstrate decent basic acting chops. The other half is spent, like in any proper ghost story, following our heroines doing research about the whys and wherefores of Teketeke, trying to find a way to understand the thing and hopefully come up with a way to dispel it. I’m getting quite a bit out of scenes of characters hitting the books and interviewing people about the background of ghosts, so this sort of thing is nearly always enjoyable to me, as indeed is the case here as well.


All of this adds up to a somewhat lightweight horror movie without too much emotional heft. However the combination of a simple yet not brain-dead and effective script, the lovely urban legend it uses, Shiraishi’s directing chops as well as the chutzpa of a guy who can base a suspense sequence on a spelling mistake do make it a fun time. Sure, Shiraishi has made far more impressive movies than Teketeke, but given the constraints he’s working with, I’d still call this an artistic success.

Past Misdeeds: Occult (2009)

Original title: Okurato

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Director Koji Shiraishi (in not the only moment of meta in the film played by Occult's very own director, writer, cinematographer and editor Koji Shiraishi; he actually has played himself now in so many of his movies we may see them as their own sub-genre) is shooting a documentary about a spree killing that happened a few years ago at a picturesque tourist spot. During the course of the project, Shiraishi and his small crew interview survivors and bereaved, and stumble upon strange events surrounding these people. More than one of the victims has heard voices enticing them to the place of the massacre, and the bereaved have strange dreams of their loved ones; one of them even has a new photo of his dead girlfriend looking very much alive to show.

Shiraishi's investigation into the matter soon centres on a man named Eno. The killer didn't use his knife on Eno to kill him like his other victims, but carved strange symbols into his body, telling him that "now it's your turn". Eno clearly hasn't been the same ever since. He's barely surviving through temp work, spends his nights sleeping in manga cafes, and just doesn't seem to be quite right in his head anymore. Eno insists that ever since the attack on his life, he's been witnessing "miracles": UFOs, objects in his surroundings moving on their own accord, that sort of thing. Oh, and he also hears a voice talking to him, though he doesn't understand what it's trying to tell him, or so he says. The only thing he is sure of is that the spree killing was some sort of ceremony to please a god, and - though he's not really clear about it - Eno does seem to have ideas about a ceremony of his own.

Once Shiraishi has witnessed one of the poltergeist phenomena that are a daily occurrence to Eno, he and his team start researching the symbol. Turns out Eno's attacker had the same symbol on his body as a birthmark. Shiraishi doesn't realize yet that he himself has a connection to these symbols, but that will come to him soon enough, as well as the truth about the "ceremony" Eno plans.

With Noroi and A Slit-Mouthed Woman (aka Carved), Koji Shiraishi made two of my favourite Japanese horror movies of the post-2000 era. Both are films mixing modern and more traditional Japanese mythology with the horrors of contemporary life. What I have been able to see of Shiraishi's last few films - which isn't always easy, for neither English nor German language DVD labels seem to be much enamoured of his films - has been a bit frustrating, culminating in the "girl group screeches forever" horror of Shirome, until now (I wrote this in 2012 –future me) the last film of the director.

Occult was made two years earlier, and it shows the director in much better form, again using the fake documentary format that served him so well in Noroi and would later serve him so badly when filming the exciting ghost adventures of a Momoide Clover. For its first half hour or so the film feels a bit disjointed and silly, with Shiraishi seemingly hell-bent to squeeze in every paranormal phenomenon he can think of, from UFOs, to telekinesis to blobs on the camera. But once the film begins to concentrate on Eno and the things happening around him, it begins to make more sense, developing focus and even the sort of narrative drive you don't usually get from the fake documentary format.

As already mentioned, Shiraishi is particularly good at mixing very Japanese feeling mythology (with hints of Lovecraft hanging in the background if you want to look at the film from a certain perspective) with very contemporary anxieties. The film does, after all, ask the question: "what if the cult-ish spree killers and suicide bombers were actually right and god is speaking to them?", only to then take the whole thing further and ask if the god speaking to the spree killers is actually telling the truth about its own nature or why it wants what it wants from its servants. What if their god is malevolent?

Occult also does some equally clever things with the meta elements it introduces, going far beyond the cameos of great director Kiyoshi Kurosawa and mangaka Peko Watanabe as themselves - or in Kurosawa's case as horror director and hobby archaeologist Kurosawa and in Watanabe's case as mangaka and automatic writer Watanabe. There's a really clever plot twist I don't have the heart to spoil based on Shiraishi's position as a character in his own film that demonstrates a clear eye for audience psychology, a sense of self-irony, and quite a degree of ruthlessness, and that really gave me the feeling of just having had the rug pulled from under my feet when it occurred. It also fits right in with the very quiet, and very dry sense of humour that's also running through the film.

The only element of Occult that just does not work at all are its special effects. These are just plain atrocious, looking as if the effects budget had consisted of the spare change Shiraishi found in his trouser pockets, and really ruin at least one final moment that should have been supremely creepy but turns out to be rather hilarious in just the wrong way. Fortunately, the film doesn't need the effects to be convincing for most of its running time - its effect on a given viewer is much more based on its own intelligence working with the viewer's imagination. Still, it would have been nice if someone had provided Shiraishi with the $500 he could have used to upgrade the effects from ridiculously bad to horrible.


The problem of its "special" effects notwithstanding, Occult is a film that should delight anyone interested in Japanese low budget horror with a brain. It's a film well worth ignoring its effects, and digging up the fansubs to understand what's going on in it.

Sadako vs. Kayako (2016)

Original title: 貞子 vs. 伽椰子

College students Yuri (Mizuki Yamamoto) and Natsumi (Aimi Satsukawa) stumble upon one of those good old cursed video tapes containing the curse of Sadako of Ringu fame. Obviously, things do not develop into a pleasant direction for them from there, and soon they have to seek help from their urban myths teacher (Masahiro Komoto), who, it turns out, is totally okay with dying if it proves his favourite urban legend actually exists. At least he knows an exorcist.

While the girls have a bad time of it, the film from time to time pops in with high schooler Suzuka (Tina Tamashiro), whose family has just moved in next to the Ju-On ghost house. Obviously, the girl gets in trouble with the ghost population there.

Fortunately, rogue exorcist Keizo (Masanobu Ando) gets on the case – for a lot of money – bringing with him a bad attitude, a blind little girl medium, and a genius plan to get rid of both ghostly menaces that surely won’t have any chance of backfiring rather badly, as well as a back-up plan that’s even worse. Spoilers, I guess?

As you’ll probably have realized by now, the monster mashing first crossover between the ailing (at least quality-wise) Ringu and Ju-On franchises is pretty damn cartoony (anime-esque?) in tone. But then, this is the hundredth film in two franchises that never were terribly ideal for the franchise game in any case (Ringu giving us three and Ju-On four worthwhile movies and a lot of crap afterwards), and if you have to do a monster mash, you really can’t go for a subtle and deep horror style.

Fortunately, the film is directed and written by Koji Shiraishi, one of the truly underrated horror filmmakers in Japan, a guy who on a good day can make a decent film out of idols screeching into a cellphone camera, so he has experience in getting decent performances out of his lead idols (which he does). Shiraishi apparently enjoys the higher than usual budget he’s working on here, using the opportunity to smuggle in an exorcist/shaman character who is very much like the one in his own Cult, and even a formless tentacle thing as featured in at least half of his films.

As an old pro with this sort of thing, Shiraishi realizes that, if you have a set-up quite this silly, and one that has to climax in something as absurd as a beat down between two pissed-off female ghosts to boot, you have only two choices: either turn it into a meta comedy or treat everything with the straightest of faces, using all the powers of moody camera work and classic shock techniques, as well as Hideo Nakata’s favourite camera angles, to pretend all this is terribly serious and scary.

Thankfully (not being American), Shiraishi goes with the second approach, presenting even the most absurd scene with so deep an earnestness it’s quite easy for the willing viewer (non-willing viewers having no business whatsoever in the monster mash movie watching business) to buy into the whole affair as threatening and scary. It does help that the camera work is generally calmly threatening, that Shiraishi knows other types of scares than jump scares and isn’t afraid to use them so that things get pleasantly tense after a while, that some of the more grotesque moments are as awesome as they are silly, and that the plot flows rather well. Why, even the hilariously bad plan for getting rid of the ghosts sounds like something appropriate to the film’s world, and while it is silly and dumb, it is absolutely the sort of silly and dumb that fits what else is going on in the movie.

So, while the endless franchisation (that’s a word, right?) of everything is of course deplorable, and so on and so forth, I had quite a bit of fun with Sadako vs. Kayko, which is much more than I expected from it.

Cult (2013)

Original title: Kurato

Idols Yu Abiru, Mayuko Iwasa and Mari Iriki (all three playing themselves as mostly sympathetic young women) are hired for a very special job - taking a plunge into the supernatural and entering a supposedly haunted house where a teenage girl and her mother are terrorized by something. Because this is going to be a responsible TV project, the lone director/camerawoman/who-knows-what-else also provides a friendly exorcist who will protect the idols and exorcise the house to the best of his abilities. Alas, things are much more dire than expected, and what looked like an easy job for the exorcist turns out to be rather more complex and problematic.

Fortunately, this isn't Paranormal Activity, and a failed exorcism doesn't result in the exorcist legging it out of the movie but calling his master for help. Yet even he might not be strong enough to get rid of the horrible force that now becomes rather possessive of everyone involved.

Director Koji Shiraishi has quite a bit of experience with POV horror movies; he even has quite a bit of experience with idol POV horror (yes, that's still a sub-genre of its own). Better and more importantly, Shiraishi also know how to take a been there done that set-up like that of Cult, and add copious amounts of the grotesque and the pretty fucking weird to it.

At first, Cult seems a very typical example of its genre, but things escalate quickly, so that about twenty minutes in, we already get a scene of a teenage girl eating her dog. Obviously, things only get more peculiar from there. In fact, right at the point where I thought I knew where this was going, the film made a sudden turn into the realm of the manga-esque when a very tsundere gentleman calling himself Neo (yes, after Matrix) appears to solve the situation after the two religious exorcists have been killed off. Suddenly, the film makes a detour into black humour, idol in-jokes, anime hair, weird posing, demon bombs, a teleporting idol ghost, various psychic powers and a cult trying to help a very Great Old One-like god cross over into our world, until the film just stops in an incredibly brazen non-ending. And all that on a shoe-string budget that can hardly afford more than two streets and two interior sets!

While it is obviously a bit of an insane mess, Shiraishi's film has the kind of energy that makes it impossible for me to not enjoy it, as well as the kind of all-pervading weirdness the director really seems to enjoy using whenever he can get away with it. After all, if you're hired to shoot a cheap horror film, and don't have the time or space to give it depth, you can still end up making something enjoyable to watch by the sheer power of strange flourishes you stole from various manga and anime shows and some of your own earlier films. This won't work for everyone, but Shiraishi had me convinced right quick.

I also admire the director for how little he seems to care that whoever is responsible for the effects has neither the time nor the ability to make them even the least bit convincing. Surely, having a dog's head walking around on a bunch of tentacles, tentacles possessing idols, and a giant face with tentacle-y eyes coming out of a ceiling are things worth so much as ideas that their technical execution isn't too important! I, at least, find it hard to criticize technical aspects of effects so clearly made to please me and all other right-thinking gentlepersons.

Compared with the often very interesting subtext or the actual creepiness of some of Shiraishi's better films, Cult's cartoon world isn't quite as interesting, but to me the spirit of just madly fucking around with strange stuff the film embodies so enthusiastically is something nearly as worthwhile.

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On WTF: Occult (2009)

It's one of my more lonely convictions that Koji Shiraishi is one of the great unsung heroes of post-Ring Japanese horror.

Sure, he's made some horrible crap too, but for every Shirome there's a film like Occult. That film once again sees the director returning to the fake documentary format (this time around with cameo appearances by the great Kiyoshi Kurosawa and mangaka Peko Watanabe), and is very much worth seeing.

I'll explain why in my column on WTF-Film.

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Three Films Make A Post: Hell Hath No Fury...Like

Fieras Sin Jaula aka 2 Masks For Alexa (1971): When millionaire Ronald Marvelling's (Curd Jürgens) marriage to the much younger Alexa (Rosalba Neri) doesn't work out too well, he does the obvious - turning the bedroom in his vacation house in the Normandy into a steel cage where he commits suicide and imprisons Alexa and her lover Pietro (Juan Luis Galiardo).

Juan Logar's film may sound like a thriller or a giallo, but the whole middle part of its narrative is a long, long flashback that strictly belongs in the realm of the melodrama. Some of that is quite effective, presented with just the right sense of unreality, but there's an unpleasant tendency for moralizing finger-wagging that's never effective in an exploitation movie (see also: hypocrisy). The movie's final act then turns into a full-grown low budget delirium of sledgehammer visual metaphors, off-screen monologues, and arty ambitions that probably doesn't work like Logar wanted it to, but sure keeps things interesting enough.

And "interesting" is the word here: you'd be hard-pressed to call Fieras a good or a artistically successful movie, but interesting, it sure is.

The House In Marsh Road aka Invisible Creature (1960): It's the old chestnut about a husband trying to murder his wife for money (though the stakes here are comparatively low, financially speaking) and another woman (though the passion driving him looks not very passionate to me). To change things up a little, the heroine (Patricia Dainton) is protected by the family poltergeist.

Still, poltergeist or not, this is an exceedingly routine movie, directed by routine director Montgomery Tully, featuring routine actors, routine music and a routine script. There are certainly worse ways to spend seventy minutes, but excitement lives elsewhere.

Shirome (2010): One of the core questions of modern horror film is of course how to use the by now hoary old form of the fake documentary and still innovate. Koji Shiraishi (usually one of my favourites among the second tier of contemporary Japanese horror directors) isn't afraid of being a real innovator, and so gives us a fake documentary about the adventures of a teen idol girl group (played by a real-life teen idol girl group) in a haunted house, boldly uniting POV horror and idolsploitation. In some of his other films, Shiraishi had quite a bit of luck with using actresses and elements of idol culture (see Noroi), but those idols weren't a gaggle (or corps? a troupe? a squeal?) of teenage girls.

Not surprisingly, the movie at hand is pretty horrible, for the simple reason that, whenever it threatens to become even slightly creepy (Shiraishi, as you might know, can do "creepy" well), half a dozen teenage girls start to cry, squeak, shout, gibber, moan and play patty cake in the most headache-inducing manner and quite, quite independent of the creepiness or not-creepiness of what's happening around them, until nobody in their right minds wouldn't want these horrible, horrible girls to shut up forever (and probably die in a fire, silently).

On the positive side, at least the film's not in 3D.

 

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Dead Girl Walking (2004)

Japanese schoolgirl Yuri (Ayaka Maeda) one day finds her heart stopping and the world around her turning from colour to black and white. The doctor her family calls pronounces her dead, yet she's still thinking, talking and walking around like everybody else.

At first, her family just finds her state rather inconvenient, but as soon as Yuri starts to rot and stink (as dead people do), they decide to stop the nuisance by burning her. That's what you do with dead people after all. The scene turns accidentally bloody.

Yuri flees from home to walk around forlornly, from time to time shedding body parts and thinking if formaldehyde wouldn't be of use in her state.

While she wanders around, she meets and is rejected by her former classmates, has to flee a rude gardener and is shortly displayed in a surreal circus.

Dead Girl Walking is a short film based on a manga by the obsessive horror mangaka and director Hideshi Hino, who also delivers a very hokey introduction. It's part of a series of such films, all of them shot on digital video for very little money. As always, I'm not entirely sure if these films were done for the video market or TV; it doesn't matter much anyway.

This episode was directed by my secret Japanese horror director crush Koji Shiraishi (who directed the good Ju-Rei, the excellent Noroi & A Slit-Mouthed Woman aka Carved, the less excellent Grotesque and a bunch of other films I really want to see on subtitled DVDs right now) and is as good as this crushee had hoped for.

It might feel more like a metaphorical little art film using horror tropes than a pure horror film, but since its basic metaphor describes the horrors of growing up, it still ends up being quite horrifying if one is responsive to these special horrors.

The film is all about the fear of rejection (by family, friends, random strangers), the feeling of being a freak and the loss of the will to live that made being a teenager so much fun for many of us. Shiraishi is using the living dead angle to show the terror of the situation more clearly. Interestingly, he also chose to break the nightmarishness of his material up through the use of black humor (mostly based on the loss of body parts), showing acceptance of the silliness that lies buried under his film's view of teenage life and the general drama of its premise.

This laughter is not necessarily a liberating one - it is much too knowing for that. Still, it is laughter, and without it the film's final, weird moment of hope would just seem campy. With the laughter in mind, I'm just about willing to accept it.

Stylistically, the film mixes obvious influences of early David Lynch (the terrifying, nightmarish black and white absurdity of Eraserhead), Carnival of Souls and expressionist silent movies, just with even less money to spend. The silent movie influence is especially strong thanks to the soundtrack's synthesizer version of "typical" silent movie music (I'll spare you a digression on why "typical" silent movie music isn't in fact typical for silent movies but for modern interpretation of them) and the title cards that show us Yuri's thoughts, not to speak of some very fine uses of shadow and weirdly angled sets.

Some viewers may find the bluntness of Shiraishi's use of all these elements and the obviousness of his symbols somewhat off-putting, but I don't have this kind of qualms. A symbol that is so cryptic that nobody not reading the artist's mind can understand it does of course have its own charms and uses; Shiraishi seems more interested in communicating what he means than in making communication impossible (very un-Lynch of him, I know), or in making the difficulty of communication the theme of his film.

My tastes run - as they so often do - in both directions at once, so I'm satisfied, as long as a film does what it is trying to do well. Dead Girl Walking does do it well.

 

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A Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007)

A charming little urban legend is told in Japan: There is a creature called a "Slit-mouthed woman" who wanders Japanese towns to ask the important question "Am I pretty?". She's tall, has long black hair, wears a long coat and a white surgical mask behind which she hides her carved-up mouth. Oh, and she kidnaps children, mutilates them with a big pair of scissors and finally kills them.

When an earthquake hits a Japanese town, the legend comes to life and starts taking children. She takes her second victim, abused little Mika (Rie Kuwana), nearly directly out of the hands of the girl's teacher Kyoko Yamashita (Eriko Sato). Kyoko herself has a past as an abusive parent, and her own daughter lives with her divorced husband.

The police remains skeptical when the young woman describes the kidnapper as the slit-mouthed legend - the only thing her honesty gets her is a temporary suspension as a teacher.

Her colleague Noboru Matsuzaki (Haruhiko Kato) seems to know more about the legend than he is letting on. He shows Kyoko a photo of his mother, who looks exactly like the kidnapper minus the face mutilation, and tells her that he hears a voice in his head whenever a kid is being targeted by the creature. He thinks he could be able to follow the voice to protect the next victim.

When the teachers arrive where the voice in Noboru's head leads them, they are just able to rescue another of their pupils from the Slit-mouthed Woman, killing her during the course of a nasty fight. They are shocked when the freshly killed evil-doer turns into a rather different dead person, the mother of two other children.

The part of the urban legend that talks about the immortality of the Slit-mouthed woman is not very precise - her body can be killed all right, but her evil spirit will just possess another woman.

Noboru and Kyoko are the only people in town unhinged enough to actually believe this kind of story, so it lies in their hands to hunt the creature down and rescue her victims.

Now it is certain: Koji Shiraishi is my new unsung hero of Japanese horror. A Slit-Mouthed Woman doesn't deliver the creeps as intensely as Ju-Rei does, and isn't as strange and meta-oriented as Noroi, instead it relies heavily on the construction of its own disturbing mythology out of bits and pieces of authentic urban legend, folklore and the directions these lead in and a very unflinching look at child abuse in the family. The fact that the film only talks about abuse by mothers is problematic, but the movie's husbands (with Kyoko's ex-husband as the big exception) are conspicuous in their near-total absence. I am tempted to say the fathers would have to spend time with their children first to be able to abuse them, and if they would, there would probably be less slit-mouthed women. But I might be reading a little much into it.

The scenes of violence against children are what will make or break the film for most viewers. Shiraishi resists the temptation to sensationalize them too much, but he doesn't shy away from the amount of brutality necessary to make his point.

As should be very obvious now, A Slit-Mouthed Woman, has a fairly different feeling from many other Japanese horror movies. Where those films are very much about the influx of the irrational into an overtly rational world and are drawing their power from strengthening our doubts of an orderly world by undermining it, Shiraishi's film shows us an open wound in the veneer of our civilization and starts to open it further.

 

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In short: Ju-Rei: The Uncanny (2004)

Ju-Rei is a strange little film. It is a Japanese Direct-to-Video production with many of the problems that typically plagues these movies, like mostly bad acting and a non-budget. Additionally it is highly derivative of Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On and uses all clichés connected with the terrible word "J-Horror" (to digress a little: I daily pray for the person who coined that abomination to be visited by a little blue boy).

But its director Koji Shiraishi (who would go on to direct the higher budgeted and very good Noroi) does a few quite inspired things:

• He uses the problematic device of telling the episodic story backwards, starting with "Chapter 10" and counting down to the prologue, surprisingly well, leaving the viewer with the knowledge that all will end as badly as it began
• Most of the chapters contain at least one moment of brilliant framing - Shiraishi really knows how to use static shots to creep the viewer out
• The film makes good use of the claustrophobic feel much of modern Japan seems to have. As a Westerner, one tends to forgot that Japan isn't just high-tech and modernism, but also people living in small, anonymous spaces
• Ghosts who are society's unpaid dues, work as a kind of infection that eats a society from inside out

 

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