Past Misdeeds: P.O.V. - A Cursed Film (2012)

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.


During the shoot of the low rent idol show of Mirai Shida (playing herself) with special guest Haruna Kawaguchi (playing herself too), something disturbing happens. The show's gimmick of the week is to have the two teenagers watch ghost videos, but the videos that appear on screen aren't the ones the director and the girls’ manager have vetted beforehand.

In fact, these videos contain much better footage than this sort of video usually does, and they all seem to be shot at Haruna's former junior high school, which must be the most haunted school in Japan. Oh, and the videos continue playing when the DVD they are on isn't actually in its laptop anymore. Haruna, who spent some time at her junior high hunting but never finding exactly the ghostly apparitions she now sees on screen, is convinced she is cursed, an idea that does not become weaker once the crew films the reflection of a female ghost in one of the studio windows.

Clearly, this situation affords a fine possibility for the show to hire the world's most matter of fact psychic (who, we will learn, is psychic, not a mind reader) to help Haruna and finally get some really exciting footage. Alas, the psychic is sure that Haruna's little ghost problem can only be solved inside of the junior high. Of course, once the film crew is inside the place, they'll get to see more of the ghosts than they probably asked for.

It looks like the found footage/POV horror sub-genre is suddenly somewhat hot again in Japan. This does not come as much of a surprise seeing as how ideally the genre is suited to low budgets, with footage that is generally supposed to look cheap, no need for complicated camera set-ups or sets, scripts that tend to the simple, and hordes of idols willing to act in everything being churned out by the Japanese entertainment machine. Somewhat surprisingly going by the standard of the POV genre in the USA and Europe, a lot of the newer Japanese POV films I have seen are actually decent or even better, with Koji Shiraishi's Occult and this one being particular stand-outs that manage to fulfil all genre expectations yet also give the clichés they are working with small, effective twists.

POV and Occult invite some comparisons in other aspects than their respective quality, too. Both films are directed by men who have done good, sometimes great, work in the second row of Japanese horror directors. POV's Norio Tsuruta does not have anything quite as brilliant as Shiraishi's Noroi or A Slit-Mouthed Woman in his filmography, but his films clearly show him to be someone who understands the horror genre and is intelligent enough to know that the point of making genre movies isn't just giving people what they want from them but also surprising the audience with slight twists on and tweaks to a given formula.

POV is a perfect example of the latter. In its basic set-up, the film seems as generic as possible, with the usual non-characters going about their horror movie days, and the expected ghosts (though a lot more of them than you usually see in a film like this) doing the expected ghostly things. And what 's more generic than a middle part that mostly consists of people shaking their cameras, screaming, and running through a dark building? The film's plot, however, is decidedly more clever than it at first appears, using the comfortably familiar spook show elements in service of something more sinister and more creepy, leading into a semi-apocalyptic post-ending titles climax that is surprising and highly effective in its nature.

POV is also one of the few films of its sub-sub-genre that seems interested in using the discomfort the basics of Japanese idol culture can produce in a viewer who isn't a total idiot, presenting the low rent entertainment biz in a subtly bad light, possibly even suggesting this sort of entertainment and its unspoken greed would be the perfect in-road for actual evil (or, ironically, that certain ghosts would see idol culture as a nice way to finally become famous). POV does not explore this aspect all that deeply (which is not coming as much of a surprise from a film that by necessity is itself a part of perhaps dubious, always looked down upon, circles of pop culture), but that does also mean it's not getting preachy - and therefore annoyingly hypocritical - about it. It's just an element that's there to add more cultural resonance to the film.

Of course, all of POV's interesting subtext would be quite wasted if it did not also succeed at the bread and butter parts of a horror movie, the shocks, the moments of discomfort, and the all-purpose creepiness. Many of the film's fright scenes are based on sometimes imaginative variations of pretty traditional Japanese ghosts and traditional POV horror shocks. About half of them tend to the more carnivalesque jump scare mode, as well as grating on audience nerves by having the characters screech and shake their cameras, but there are also some exceedingly creepy scenes based on clever sound design, shadows, and my eternal favourite (that also turns a ghost story into something Weirder for me), scenes of time and space losing their usual consistence to threaten the characters. That last element is especially finely realized in the film's first major climax, a scene I find too delightful/disturbing/effectively tense to spoil by describing it. Let's just say it involves a disappearance, a camera, and a ghost moving towards the characters making rather disturbing noises (as Japanese ghosts are wont to, of course), and that it actually got to me.

Tsuruta - who also wrote the script - shows itself as a director very capable of using the more subtle parts of horror craft even in a context like POV horror that often doesn't seem all that interested in them, with a real gift for pacing the suspense scenes beyond the usual running and screaming.


Thanks to him, POV is a surprisingly excellent piece of filmmaking.

Creepy (2016)

Original title: クリーピー 偽りの隣人

Warning: there will be copious spoilers!

Some time ago, Koichi Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) was one of the few Japanese police investigators well versed in American profiling techniques. After an incident that resulted in the death of several people and grievous injury to himself, Koichi retired from the force, and now works as a university lecturer on criminal psychology. His wife Yasuko (Yuko Takeuchi) and he have just moved into a new house in easier reach for his new job. And, one suspects, also to draw a hard line between the past and the present. The marriage certainly isn’t in the best state, either, both partners performing the roles of a loving couple more than actually living them.

Soon, though, Koichi finds himself falling back into old habits he promised Yasuko to change, poking around a cold case involving the disappearance of three members of a single family who left behind their daughter Saki (Haruna Kawaguchi). Saki’s vague statements concerning the case never made much sense to anyone involved in the investigation, and when a former colleague and friend of Koichi hears of his interest in the case, he asks him to interview the now nearly grown up girl. What he hears from her suggests a very particular and strange kind of serial killer.

At the same time, Yasuko has repeated and increasingly disturbing encounters with one of their neighbours, Mr. Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa). Something is very off about that man as well as his family, and he seems to develop some kind of hold over her.

Of all the directors who came to a degree of international fame during the great J-horror boom, Creepy’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been the one whose films have been the most consistent in quality; by now, I don’t believe Kurosawa is actually able to make a bad or even just a mediocre movie. Among the themes creeping up again and again in the director’s films, alienation is one of the strongest and clearly of great importance to him. In the case of Creepy, Kurosawa concerns himself with the quiet alienation between members of a family, with people who are nominally close going through the motions of personal relations, never even getting up the energy to shout much about their problems – that would, after all, be emotional, and the characters in the film are mostly involved in shutting out their emotions for another until only the outer veneer of them exists.

It’s this gap between what they actually feel and try not to feel, and what they express the film’s serial killer thrives on, dominating family members and playing them against one another by providing them with the opportunity to violently express all the things they leave unsaid as well as with drugs that makes it so much easier for them to keep the emotions they are afraid of at bay. There’s even more to the character, in the way he uses whom he leaves alive of the families he preys on to construct a fake family of his own; in a fitting bit of irony he certainly doesn’t appreciate, a family that is quite a bit more built on lies then the ones he destroys ever were.

A look at Creepy’s basic plot construction might raise a few eyebrows, for Kurosawa asks you to accept that the serial killer Koichi begins to hunt just happens to be his neighbour now and that said serial killer is – apparently without violence - able to turn a reasonable woman like Yasuko into his drug-addled accomplice over the course of a few days. However, I don’t think Kurosawa is actually interested in making the kind of straightforward thriller where this thing would be a problem, for both these narrative problems (if you want to call them such) – as well as some rather more minor ones later on – fit very well into the film’s meaning: Nishino just happens to be the Takakura’s neighbour because, the film suggests, every family is like them, so he might as well be theirs, and Yasuko falls as quickly as she does because she needs exactly the kind of destruction and/or structure (both things seem closely related in the film; see also Nishino’s house that is at once a building site and a well constructed death trap) the killer provides.

While Creepy is sometimes unwilling to play to the standard rules of the thriller, it still uses many a trope and many a visual concept from the genre. Kurosawa is colliding these with the earnest Japanese domestic drama most beloved by western critics when it comes to the country’s movie output (and one he has worked in as well) explores what happens during and after the collision, quite literally finding the horror beneath the calm bourgeois surface in the wreckage. And Creepy is truly a horror film, too, full of moments of expectant dread when another character steps into Nishino’s house, a place nobody leaves unchanged (and few alive); culminating in various acts of violence that are as haunting as they are not just because of Kurosawa’s unflinching depiction of them, but because of the natures of the perpetrators, and what this means.

The acting is spectacular throughout, with Teruyuki Kagawa’s indeed very creepy performance certainly a stand-out, but also nuanced work by Takeuchi (who easily convinces the viewer of things that should be difficult to swallow) and Nishijima.


It’s all held together by moments of incredible filmmaking. Just watch the way the scene becomes darker and darker, and the rooms closer and closer in Koichi’s interview with Saki Honda, and that’s just one perfectly staged and imagined scene among dozens. Kurosawa is equally adept at the moments of horror and dread as he is at the domestic drama (with echoes of very classic Japanese cinema in the last one, not surprisingly), but more importantly, he easily keeps a film under control that would in lesser hands burst under the pressure of too much meaning, too many genres colliding, and too many improbabilities, and so proves that all these elements do indeed belong together in Creepy.

On WTF: P.O.V. - A Cursed Film (2012)

Either there is a minor renaissance of decent POV horror movies happening in Japan these last few years, or I've just been very lucky with examples of the genre.
Be that as it may, today's example is Norio Tsuruta's POV, a film that turns out to be much better, and clearly more intelligent, than it sounds. My column on WTF-Film goes into more detail.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,horror,reviews,norio tsuruta,haruna kawaguchi,mirai shida,other places