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For many in the West, the term “J-horror” evokes photographs of long-haired little women emerging from deserted wells. Hideo Nakata’s vintage snapshot Ringu (1998) produced some of the most memorable horror films in japanese film history.
But as you’d expect from a country with one of the world’s oldest and most senior film industries, Japanese filmmakers have tapped into their own subconscious fears and the ancient genre known as “kaidan” (lit. strange stories) since then. Film cameras have arrived for the first time in this island nation, once remote. Japanese horror lifts the thin curtain between the living and the dead, evoking vengeful ghosts and high-tech demons in transgressive stories of madness, mutation, and death. Here they are, in alphabetical order, our options span decades of the best of Japan.
Audition is a hard sell, but not because it’s a bad movie. In fact, quite the opposite. The challenge with the discussion of Takashi Miike’s masterpiece of the Battle of the Sexes in 1999 is that the film’s main point of promotion is also to leave intact anything that is maximally productive. The comedy about a lonely widower who recruits his movie-producing friend to help him organize auditions for a new wife can also be one of the most disturbing and notorious mental horrors. Movies from the last 25 years: stay watching.
Available in: Tubi
An exciting combination of exploitation, gangster movie action and gothic horror, 1970s Blind Woman’s Curse is memorable for two reasons. The first is its mix of sword games of the time, a genre known in Japanese as chanbara, and paranormal details fostered through folklore. The moment is its star, Lady Snowblood herself, the icon of Japanese action of the 70s, Meiko Kaji. Kaji plays the fierce leader of a besieged yakuza clan, whose war against a rival gang takes on a terrifying new detail when she is cursed. a black cat licking blood from the wounds of its enemies.
Available: To rent or purchase on Apple TV
Are you taking away your job, your circle of relatives and your position in society?Will there be anything left? This terrifying void is the subject of director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, a film that offers Se7en a serious run for his money as the darkest series. killer mystery of the 90s.
The film centers on Detective Tanabe (Koji Yakusho), a committed murder investigator who leads a task force on a series of horrific unexplained murders. In each case, a user with no history of violence kills someone who enjoys it, without remembering why or how. they committed the crime. The following is one of the most disturbing cat-and-mouse mind games in film history.
Available at: Criterion Channel
Many films delve into the subconscious fears of homeowners (see: The Subgenre of Home Invasion). But Dark Water responds to a not unusual nightmare among tenants: having something with your apartment and no one around to fix it. Here, it’s a leak that drives a psychologically fragile divorcee crazy, as well as visions of a ghostly little woman who looks suspiciously like the woman’s six-year-old daughter. and a bloodless atmosphere, made even more frightening through the film’s likely prophetic connection to the Cecil Hotel/Elisa Lam affair more than a decade later.
Available in: Tubi, or to hire or buy on Amazon Prime Video
Not all Godzilla videos are horror. In fact, a large number of videos produced during Big G’s Showa era were explicitly aimed at children. But director Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original takes Japan’s collective trauma from the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and turns it into an unstoppable fire-spitting monster that crushes everything it touches and leaves those whose initial attack is in poor health due to a mysterious illness. central metaphor.
Available on: HBO Max
How the Hausu? Well, it starts with an organization of cartoonically nicknamed schoolgirls: the singer is named Melody, while the difficult one is called Kung Fu, who travels through the Japanese countryside to make a stop at a girl’s unmarried witch aunt. Only she’s not the laugh guy, Sabrina, a witch aunt, but the “bring family appliances to life to eat unsuspecting kids” type. Oh, and then a fluffy white cat starts vomiting blood geysers out of the wall.
Imagine all this, but under LSD, and start feeling the strangeness and magic of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 cult classic. For his part, Obayashi said he founded the film on one of his young daughter’s nightmares, which also largely explains the dizzying tone of this psychedelic ghost story.
Available at: Criterion Channel
Made in just nine days on a minimal budget, Ju-On: The Curse went from direct obscurity to video to a foreign franchise in the only terrible one. Based on the concept that a user who dies with excessive anger creates a curse that spreads like a virus, Takashi Shimizu’s success has an oppressive and morbid tone that overwhelms the audience with the terrifying inevitable ability of death. American remakes and upcoming sequels have several in terms of their ability to capture this macabre essence (Nicolas Pesce 2020 The Grudge is one of the evocative maxims). But Shimizu’s original is still taboo.
Available: To rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video
Based on the writings of folklorist Lafcadio Hearn, an American who moved to Japan and dedicated his life to documenting the country’s ghost stories, Kwaidan is a meticulously crafted horror anthology that elegantly tells 4 ancient horror stories in sumptuous colors. But don’t be fooled through the classic aesthetic of the film: the eternal women with long black hair and icy kisses that populate this winner of the Cannes Special Jury Prize, accompanied by vengeful ghosts and a blind monk covered from head to toe with protective sutras while entertaining the spirits of the dead, they are as scary as they are lovely to see.
Available on: HBO Max
Many classic Japanese ghost stories have a pseudo-feminist element, and Kuroneko is a desirable example of this. The film is one of the earliest examples of the “rape revenge” subgenre about two women, a mother and a daughter, who become murderous ghosts after being assaulted and killed by a gang of anarchic samurai while men in the circle of relatives have gone to war. mixture of savage violence, domestic melodrama and haunting romance.
Available on: DVD and Blu-Ray (Criterion Collection)
Combining ancient evil with fashionable technology, Noroi: The Curse is one of the most productive found image horror films ever made in any country. about a paranormal investigator whose career comes to an abrupt end when he becomes entangled with an ancient demon named Kagutaba. What makes Noroi: The Curse so effective is the way Shiraishi uses the conventions of TELEVISION documentaries to create a sense of terror. as an evocative world-building and a murderous story (no pun intended).
Available on: Roku Channel
Like Audition, One Cut of the Dead is a movie where it’s best to know as little as possible. But what we can tell you is this: the film is the little horror metacommedia that could, from a theater school workshop (and a budget of $25,000), the seventh highest-grossing Japanese film of 2018 and a favorite at foreign festivals.
Writer-director Shinichiro Ueda relies on tropes of zombies and his own low-budget limits to achieve an inventive effect, making up for the lack of big names or beloved effects with impressively choreographed long shots, witty and self-reflective design, and, yes. , a lot of heart. It’s clear that the creators of One Cut of the Dead love horror and cinema. And his enthusiasm, like the zombie virus in the movie in a movie, is contagious.
Available in: Frisson
Another atmospheric harvest from director Kaneto Shindo, Onibaba is a film with the restless brain of a sleeper who struggles to get comfortable on a hot summer night. The total film takes place in a swamp where two women, a mother and a daughter-in-law. , they make their living by murdering samurai who roam their swampy territory and promoting the armor of warriors in exchange for money. And it’s also paranoid and puzzling what this description suggests, combined with a sweaty animal eroticism that only thickens the psychosexual stew. to a truly unsettling ending, when human depravity meets the ruthless sense of humor of fate.
Available on: HBO Max
“J-horror,” a foreign buzzword in the early 2000s, yet Japanese administrators have been making horror movies since there was a film industry in this island nation. Example: A Page Of Madness, a silent horror film released in 1926 and rediscovered in 1971. The story revolves around a sailor who works in an intellectual asylum to get closer to his wife there. But the most desirable thing about the film is its evocative and avant-garde expressionist style, created through an organization of artists and performers who rejected the trend towards realism in cinema.
Available: To rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video
Unlike Western animation, which tends to move towards more familiar stories, Japanese anime encompasses all genres and styles of storytelling. A wonderful example is Perfect Blue, a wonderful mental mystery about a pop star pursued by an obsessed fan who also happens to be animated.
Director Satoshi Kon uses the medium to his advantage, of course, the odds of changing the reality of animation to bring the audience into the paranoid and fractured mental space of his heroine. But the Film’s Hichcockian taste and themes of voyeurism, identity, and gender functionality go further. the means of its creation, creating a unique cinematic experience.
Available: To rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video
The film that unleashed the J horror craze of the ’90s and early 2000s, not to mention a series of sequels and remakes that continues to this day, Hideo Nakata’s ring proved to be a strangely enduring concept. That’s despite its technology-driven premise, which in the 1998 original comes to VHS tape and landlines (if you’ve noticed the new American version, you know the story). Simply put, there is a haunted recording circulating. receive a call informing you that you will die within seven days. The sublime simplicity of this hook is supported by a haunting inner mythology and haunting physical functionality through kabuki actress Rie Inoo, who plays a small but memorable role like the film’s spasmodic and spasmodic. living ghost, Sadako.
Available in: Tubi
A cheerfully twisted and voraciously excited edition of horror frame, Tetsuo: The Iron Man makes wild music from the drumbeating and incessant squeals of steel against steel that accompany life in the big city.
Screenwriter, director and producer Shinya Tsukamoto and a small organization of committed collaborators filmed this defining document of Japanese cyberpunk for 18 months in the small Tokyo apartment of co-star Kei Fujiwara, recording old portions of television to mimic the main character’s gruesome transformation from a candy. employed in a “metal fetishist” whose orgasmic mutation threatens to consume the entire world.
Available on: Roku Channel, Sling TV
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