A Selection of J-Horror Classics

Japanese cinema has so successfully contributed its own specific and original style of horror film that it has earned its very own subgenre commonly known as J-horror. Japan has a rich history of traditional ghost stories and scary folk legends that frightened listeners for centuries. The dropping of the atomic bomb by the United States in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II would drive modern directors back to these horrific tales to revisit them in order to consciously and subconsciously communicate the political, emotional, and psychological pain and fear left by this disastrously historic event. Filmmakers' first explorations in the genre would be in the 1950s and 1960s with monster movies like Godzilla, whose giant lizard symbolically represents the terror of nuclear war and its consequences, and with recreations of the aforementioned fables in films about ghosts and demons who were wronged in the past and seek revenge. These first films produced will serve as blueprints to be followed and reimagined time and time again. For instance, a special obsession is made of vengeful female ghosts with pale white faces and long black hair, characters who have become ingrained into Japanese popular culture from the first films on this list, Kwaidan and Kuroneko, to the last, Ringu. A similar diabolical, yet sympathetic, woman is present in Hausu. Yet the film, made in the late 70s, takes on a pulpy vibe, far less serious than its predecessors, instead taking the genre to another far-fetched dimension. The most unique film on the list, like Hausu, is a cult classic whose provoking, look-away images and bizarre uber violence dares to take the genre somewhere that would have been impossible decades before. It is a shocking film that tests viewers' patience and stomach, but is also an interesting take on apocalypse movies and has something to say about humans' dependence and obsession with machines. Finally, Ringu brings things full circle, tying in the ghosts of the Japanese past with the modern technology and television of the future. As the decades pass the genre has found ways to remodel itself over and over, constantly pushing the envelope by depicting a very unique vision of what worries, torments, and haunts us, something that must speak especially true for Japanese audiences, but that has also enchanted filmgoers all over the world. 

Kwaidan - Masaki Kobayashi 1964

Kwaidan, an ancient Japanese word for Ghost Story, is an enthralling, gorgeous 3 hour epic composed of four traditional horror stories. The scale of the film is enormous yet not for one second does Kobayashi seem anything but up to the task of crafting and molding this leviathan like monster of a project. His technical skill and masterful perfectionism are clearly present in every expertly planned and executed shot. Watching the film one can imagine his story boards like a comic book, neatly laying out exactly how the film is going to look long before the camera ever got rolling. Making the film in a studio, Kobayashi insures that he has total control over every aspect of the film from the ghostly makeup effects, the beautiful period costumes, the expansive, huge sets, the intricately studied choreography of props, actors, and extras, to the very elements of nature such as snow, rain, wind, fog, and even the sky. Perhaps the most striking aesthetic quality of the film is Kobayashi’s flamboyant and expressionist use of color. His deep blood reds and cold blues are overpowering. He uses color and the artifice of the backdrops and sets to give each story a slight aura of reality, but really places them in a fantasy world where everything is bigger, more spectacular, and far more colorful. He creates an aesthetic that feels in and of itself legendary. The four stories are ‘The Black Hair,’ about a man who abandons his wife for a richer woman and immediately regrets his decision, ‘The Woman of the Snow,’ about a snow white ghost who spares the life of a young man trapped in a blizzard on the condition he keeps a promise, ‘Hoichi the Earless,’ about a young blind musician who is contacted by spirits who died in battle to recite the chant of their fateful last hours, and ‘In a Cup of Tea,’ about a Samurai who sees the reflection of a ghost in his bowl and drinks it only to be haunted by the man’s spirit. Each section offers a variety of spellbinding images including shots of indescribably perturbing long black hair, a man who ages and turns greyer with each subsequent cut, a snow covered landscape with demonic, marble like eyes in the horizon, a ruby red sunset behind the silhouette of a tall straight forest of trees, a brutal battle of smoke, water, blood, and arrows, the insidious reappearance of souls sitting like statues where their tombs once were, a man with a holy text written on his body from head to toe as if they were scars or tattoos, and a desperate old man whose reflection appears in a cauldron of hot water grasping at the surface as if to escape. The stories are told with a slow, almost silent precision. Different from the other films in the list, Kwaidan is first and foremost an art film first and a horror film second.

Kuroneko - Kaneto Shindo 1968

Kanteto Shindo’s Onibaba is widely considered one of the greatest horror films of all time, and, though less well known, Kuroneko, his later ghost story is worthy of the same praise. It is just as visually inventive and captivating as its predecessor, as Shindo finds brilliantly clever ways of bringing his ghosts to life through camera tricks, editing, smoke, and lighting. The film begins in a dialogue-free scene as a group of samurai arrive at a house in the middle of a bamboo grove. In a long shot we see them enter the frame, exhausted, as they crawl towards a fountain, and drink like animals. Then, like mindless beasts, they enter the house and find two women, a young one and an older one. They silently stare at each other before one of the samurai bursts and the rest follow suit, eating everything in sight, breaking things, and, eventually, unavoidably, grabbing the women. They leave the house, and the women, utterly destroyed, letting a small fire expand and burn down the house with the bodies of their two victims inside. When the fire finishes consuming the house a black cat, a Kurenko, licks the wounds of the women. This dark, violent, and masterfully directed sequence sets up a story of vengeance, where the two women, a mother and daughter in law become cat people who return from the dead to drink the blood of every samurai they cross paths with. The plot twist comes when their son and husband, Hachi, returns from war a successful samurai, and the cursed women have no choice but to kill him as well or forsake their souls. Hachi’s return home is a violent, entertaining, and sexy journey as he battles with a famous samurai in a swampy reed (bringing back memories of Onibaba). He is young and dirty, yet irresistibly beautiful and almost completely naked. He manages to kill the samurai by luck and returns in heart pumping fashion as fast as he can by horseback. When he arrives home he tells the leader of the samurai, with youthful, innocent intensity, as naked as he was before, about his adventures. Curiously, Shindo makes Hachi as much, or even more of a sexual object as our young female spirit protagonist. We get a female perspective of the young man in quick shots of his dissected body including his nipple and loin cloth covered bulge. Before Hachi’s return, in a series of mystically haunting scenes, his ghost wife, now dressed elegantly in a white flowing dress and elaborately beautiful makeup, goes to the city walls to lure samurai into her now haunted abode in the grove. There, her mother in law awaits them with plenty of sake before inviting the man to ‘make himself at home.’ The sake numbs any sense of danger these soldiers may have even as they seem to glance the twitch of the mother’s long hair shake like a cat’s tail, or the sudden flash of a hair covered limb. The house is magically captured as a place that, like a ghost ship, floats through the grove as the long sticks of bamboo pass through the top and sides of the frame. It is as if the house were moving silently through space, so silently that the doomed visitor takes no notice. An eerie cloud of smoke that sneaks through the ground of the home and forest, and Shindo’s incredible use of lighting to capture the women’s movement creates an underworld-like fantasy atmosphere. In one particularly well executed scene, the young woman is mourning the return of her husband and the impossibility to be with him. She alone is lit as she cries crouched on the floor of a dark room. Her mother in law approaches her, also lit up with this ghostly white light. The scene is shot in one take, with the young woman periodically changing places, inconsolable, and her mother in law following her compassionately. A light shines upon them, or rather, seemingly, from within them every time they stop to sob. The glow of an otherworldly light follows them in their misery, in a simple yet mystical way, communicating their disconnection with the physical world much more effectively than digital effects could.Though the film has some fun, scary moments, the reason it makes such an impact on the viewer and stays with them is the sense of tragedy felt by the two young lovers put in an impossible situation. The scenes that depict the short time they are able to live the life of newlyweds are done in such a tender, loving, sensual, and erotic way, that our hearts break for them. They are not just a samurai and a ghost from a horror film. They are pain personified by a man and a woman whose happiness has been robbed by violence and war. 

Hausu - Nobuhiko Obayashi 1977

Obayashi’s 1977 Hausu is the ultimate haunted house movie. This retro, psychedelic, experimental horror comedy is a ridiculous blast from start to finish. Everything is out of this world, starting with the characters who Obayashi does not even bother to give names to, instead calling them by the very stereotypes they represent like Gorgeous, Fantasy, Kung Fu, Prof, Music, Sweet, and Mac (the fat one). The plot kicks off when Gorgeous’ father, a music composer who Leone supposedly thinks is even better than Marricone, brings home another woman, one who is impossibly beautiful and perfect, so much so that a mysterious air current that only seems to reach her is constantly, romantically, blowing her scarf and hair around. Gorgeous rejects her mother’s replacement and decides to take her friends to her mother’s home town where her aunt still lives. As Gorgeous explains in a flashback with comedic commentary by her clueless teenage friends, her aunt was left alone after she promised to wait for the love of her life as he was sent off to war and never returned. However, little did she know that her aunt died long ago of loneliness, and, as in Kuroneko, lives on thanks to a supernatural (this time white) cat, cursed to drink the blood of young girls to remain young and beautiful should her long lost love return. The film that follows is like a fun house of absurd terror where we will witness a floating decapitated head biting somone’s butt, killer mattresses and a killer piano, a room turned into a swimming pool of bright red blood, and our supposed savior turned insane by a cartoonish fruit vendor and now only capable of saying the word banana. Obayashi masterfully blends this crazy humor with colorful, super artificial backdrops and sets, pop art effects, and a disturbingly sweet and maddeningly repetitive soundtrack that has continued ringing in my head days later. Films with this B-movie style that are purposely cliched and intentionally of bad taste can be exacerbating, and even just boring, instead of reaching their goal of being so bad they are good. Yet Hausu is the perfect cult movie in every way. There is not a dull moment in the entire film. Laughs and scares are in abundance, and its take on the overtly familiar tropes of an old witch who lives in a haunted house and the one dimensional teenagers in danger is caricatured in such a bizarrely, almost epically, emphatic, poppy, and satisfyingly entertaining way that it feels completely fresh. Obayashi takes something that has been done and over done to the point of exhaustion and turns the dial up to breaking point to breathe new, vibrant, irresistibly preposterous life into the genre.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man - Shinya Tsukamoto 1989

The most intense and totally different film on this list is by far the cyberpunk cult horror film, The Iron Man, by Shinya Tsukamoto. With echoes of Cronenburg’s The Fly and Videodrome, and David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Tsakamoto’s film is about a young metal fetiscist who seems to have the power to infect people and turn them into freakish metal zombies. The film is utterly distressing for its entire runtime which leads us to be thankful that it only lasts a little over an hour. Prepping audiences for what is to come, Tsakamoto begins the film with what could be its most revolting image as a young man, played by the director himself, cuts his leg open with a knife and proceeds to insert a metal screw and wrap it up, only to reopen the wound and see maggots gnawing on his open bloody flesh. I myself almost decided to turn off the film after this sequence, feeling I was too revolted to continue. Thankfully I did, and while the film is an incredibly physically unpleasant experience, once you give yourself into it and accept the gory, horrible images, you realise that this dystopian gore fest is extremely inventive and even invigorating. The film is shot in a grainy, low budget, black and white aesthetic very similar to that of Eraserhead, which adds to its off putting quality. The blood is so black that it is hard to determine if it is really blood, or oil that is spurting out of our protagonist's skin. Tsukamoto’s use of close up, quick editing, and unsettling sound design add together to make the experience as uncomfortable as possible. The film is almost dialogue-less, instead relying on grunts, moans, and screams to communicate the nonstop pain experienced throughout. The rest of the soundtrack is composed of hairraising effects like the sound of a fork against a womans’ teeth, an enormous drill, irritating maniacal laughter, the occasional explosion, and punk rock music. The effects are wonderfully done using stop motion to capture the characters' transformations into cyborg like creatures. Like Cronenburg’s Crash, or this year's Palme d’Or winning Titane, the film also investigates a machine like sexual fetish with scenes that include a man being penetrated by his girlfriend’s tube-like penis, and the same man chasing his girlfriend with a horribly enormous drill penis. There is a very sexually adverturous and sometimes homoerotic nature to the film that feels distasteful and revolutionary even today. While it is definitely a film I never want to watch again, this visually daring and thematically radical take on a different type of zombie apocalypse is an unforgettable, disturbingly ingenious piece of work. 

Ringu - Hideo Nakata 1998

Ringu is the film that started off what would become an extremely financially and critically successful invigoration of the horror genre in Japan that would go on to make waves not only in Japan, but all over the world. Ringu’s influence goes far beyond its sequels and Hollywood remakes and is present in an innumerable amount of films that came after it. Perhaps that is why, watching the film for the first time more than 20 years after its release, it feels almost unoriginal. Because it has been copied and parodied so many times, all of the scenes and ideas that were so fresh and sharp when it came out have been dulled by the fact that I have already seen uthese now legendary images that are an immortal part of pop culture umpteen times. The scratchy video tape, the well, the fingernail-less pale girl dressed in white with long dark hair hanging over her face crawling like an injured insect on the ground, and the ghost coming headfirst through the television have been replicated and reproduced time and time again. Like Jack Nicholson breaking down the door in The Shining, or Janet Leigh taking a show in Psycho, it is impossible to live on planet earth and not have been exposed to these scenes. Yet, in this critics opinion, what sets apart The Shining and Psycho from Ringu is the fact that the film around these iconic moments is just as, if not more interesting. The plot, though likely unnecessary to explain, is about a cursed video tape, the creator of which kills its viewers exactly one week after watching it. Our protagonist, Reiku, is a ditzy, beautiful reporter who incredibly leaves her 6 year old boy alone at home with the excuse that he is used to it. Her ex husband, the grumpy,  expressionless Ryuji is a university professor who is completely absent from his ex wife and son’s lives, yet for some reasons decides to help her decipher the meaning of this murderous videotape. Not only is it completely unbelievable to me that Reiku is a reporter and Ryuji a professor, not to mention that their 6 year old son is autonomously taking care of himself at home while they decode the mystery of the killer VHS, but half way through the film Ryuji seems to acquire some previously unexplained paranormal psychic abilities to read people's minds. The characters and the way they behave are utterly unbelievable in a way that makes no sense in a film that does not have the exaggerated, experimental style of Hausu. However, that is not to say that it does not have its share of brilliant moments starting with a classic opening scene complete with teenage girl talk, the rumor of a curse, and a chilling phone call and television that turns on by itself, and the critique the film gives against television that kills you and the danger of passing on any type of random recording is particularly interesting, perhaps even more so today in the age of social media. The final scare of the ghost girl coming out of the television is truly brilliant and terrifying, and must have been even more so in its day. Unfortunately, the scares are now too well known to be scary, and the set up and characters are too ludicrous to be taken seriously. It seems that to truly be able to appreciate Ringu, you have to have lived in a well for the past 23 years, because upon release, its original, groundbreaking scenes must have been able to make up for its hammy storytelling before they became tainted by their popularity.