J-horror
or modern Japanese horror including but not limited to Ringu, Ju On: The Grudge,
Kairo (Pulse) and Audition is something of an ongoing
genre which kicked into high-gear in the late-1990s/early 2000s. A genre unto itself with seemingly no end to
the tie-ins and self-replicating duplicates, reception of said genre remains
mixed at best with some praising the slow-burn buildups to uncanny scares while
others pick at the clichés of long-haired ghost girls or spooky white-faced
demons. Around this time another equally
debated subgenre of horror began to reappear in the form of the found-footage
film with the success of films like The
Blair Witch Project and Paranormal
Activity.
Though
J-horror and the found-footage film bear their own variety of tropes singling
them out as either inspired or run-of-the-mill, around 2005 a Japanese writer-director
by the name of Kôji Shiraishi decided to bring the disparate subgenres together
to create a new kind of J-horror offering.
The resulting film became known as Noroi
or Noroi the Curse in some
territories and predates such black magic shamanist horror gems as South
Korea’s The Wailing. As complex as a convoluted film noir, Noroi plays out much like Barry
Levinson’s The Bay as a series of
clips, news broadcasts, videos and even 16mm film footage at one point, all of
which is designed to give credence to the notion of a curse as a palpably real
world thing.
An
unnamed narrator informs us documentary filmmaker Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin
Muraki) disappeared without a trace shortly after completing his latest film The Curse but not before a fire engulfs
his home claiming his wife’s life. The
narrator warns us the contents of the The
Curse are dangerous before said film begins and precluded by a series of
various clips Kobayashi’s documentary unspools.
What follows introduces us to a child psychic on a reality TV show who
has gone missing, possibly with a freakish young woman who might be demonically
possessed before involving another psychic who may hold the key to what’s
shaping up to be a most deadly and unstoppable curse including but not limited
to dead pigeons, eerie curly loops tied together like ponytails and mysterious
face masks that will make the likes of Gerald Scarfe shudder.
Considered
by many to be among the scariest found footage J-horror hybrids ever made, Noroi is a slow, deceptive burn of a
spooker with images and sounds that sear themselves into the psyche which don’t
necessarily frighten at first but burrow to haunt your sleep later. Prominently featuring what is easily the
scariest medium depicted on film since The
Changeling, the tin-foil covered vagrant looking psychic Mitsuo Hori
(Satoru Jitsunashi) with walls decorated in foil and unearthly drawings
twitches and convulses as he receives new premonitory visions punctuated by
shrill screams about “ectoplasmic worms”.
Even when the film veers dangerously close to debatably silly territory,
the psychic comes back into the foray to scare the ever living shit out of us.
Though
labyrinthine in form with confusing logistics that are easy to lose our grip on,
Noroi the Curse is the kind of found
footage horror film that evokes the feeling of being in the middle of an
implacable spider’s web slowly closing in around us before we realize it is
already too late. Because we’re told
outright the filmmaker capturing all of this has vanished, part of the horror
comes from finding out just what took over a small Japanese village and the
inhabitants foraging for survival. Much
like the aforementioned The Wailing,
the small town takes on the characteristics of an unholy altar beyond
redemption as more and more pigeons fly themselves to their deaths and people
randomly become possessed mid-sentence.
For
years the film was almost impossible to see outside of Japan without straight
up bootlegging the picture. Despite
being one of the most talked about found-footage horror films of all time,
getting to actually see it was next to not at all. Frequently uploaded to YouTube before copyright
strikes promptly booted the film off of the platform, the 2005 found-footage
J-horror cult classic remained in distribution limbo in the United States until
the streaming service Shudder finally picked the film up in March 2020. Though Kôji Shiraishi later became known for
his violence filled Grotesque before
himself partaking in the ultimate in J-horror silliness with Sadako vs. Kayako, Noroi the Curse nonetheless remains an inspired offering which may
or may not make your hair stand on end while watching but will inevitably come
to haunt your dreams.
--Andrew Kotwicki
