 |
| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Arrow Video has been carefully tracking the rise of J-horror
or distinctly Japanese horror of the late 1990s all the way through the late
2000s, including but not limited to their 4K UHD of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu from
1998 to Takashi Miike’s Audition a year later and finally Kiyoshi
Kurosawa’s 2001 pre-social media shocker Pulse. Characterized by unfinished business ghost
stories, otherworldly women with superhuman abilities, fear of technological
advancements and an overarching sense of doom, gloom and decrepitude, J-horror
saw a rise in popularity in the East as well as the West with English language
remakes of Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge in the works. In the time-honored tradition of Arrow Video,
they have curated together seven horror features of varying image and content
quality including but not limited to the highly sought-after Noroi: The
Curse and in so doing paint another broad portrait of a subgenre arguably
at its creative heights.
Working with the best available elements with two films housed
per disc save for the last one Noroi, the boxed set is very much one to
accept will differ in picture and/or sound quality from film to film. With all the films including remastered
Japanese 5.1 surround sound save for the high-school set Persona in 2.0
stereo, each one ranges from 35mm to digital video, sometimes looking as crisp
as a film print to as pixelated as a 360p YouTube video. This of course is intentional on some of the
features and takes some getting used to, though all of the transfers supplied
by the studios are in the best possible quality available. Watching them I’m reminded of my favorite
Takashi Shimizu film Marebito, a quickie which was shot on digital video
starring Shinya Tsukamoto. The picture
quality and the sometimes-computer-generated imagery are dreadful but also
gives the prototypical J-horror film its distinctive mid-2000s patina.
Beginning with Shikoku in 1999 by The Enchantment director
Shunichi Nagasaki and co-starring Battle Royale and Kill Bill Vol. 1 actress
Chiaki Kuriyama, we join Hinako (Yui Natsukawa) as she moves from her parents’
home in Tokyo back to her stomping grounds of rural Shikoku. Upon arrival she finds out her lifelong
childhood friend Sayori (Chiaki Kuriyama) has died and her Shinto priestess mother
Teruko (Toshie Negishi) is mad with grief.
Moreover, she begins seeing apparitions of Sayori at night, leading
Hinako to seek advice on the paranormal from local experts meanwhile Teruko
begins hatching a morbid plan that will ensnare Hinako and Sayori into a
maelstrom replete with backwards walking.
Functioning as more of a somber ghostly mood piece than a
straightforward scare fest, exploring the emotional aspects of this unlikely
trio, the film becomes something of a character study. Lensed exquisitely by All About Lily
Chou-Chou cinematographer Noboru Shinoda and aided by a mournful score by Mobile
Suit Gundam F91 composer Satoshi Kadokura, Shikoku rolls out the red
carpet for what will be a long and checkered journey through the many annals of
J-horror.
Moving on to Toshiyuki Mizutani’s 2000 sci-fi/horror romance
Isola: Multiple Personality Girl, the J-Horror Rising series
takes a swift dive into realism by integrating the 1995 Kobe earthquake into
the storyline. When a young clairvoyant woman
named Yukari (Yoshino Kimura) uses her psychic abilities to try and help
survivors of the Great Hanshin earthquake, she crosses paths with a teenage
girl suffering from multiple personality disorder. One of the personalities locked within her is
a malevolent entity with supernatural powers threatening to break free and
wreak metaphysical havoc on any and all around her. Co-starring Ichi the Killer actor
Susumu Terajima and Makiko Watanabe, the film features a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it
cameo from none other than director Takashi Miike. Featuring an understated score by recurring
video-game composer Takeo Miratsu of The Legend of Dragoon and low-key
cinematography by Shûji Kuriyama, the film is something of a riff on Ken
Russell’s Altered States replete with an isolation tank though at times Isola
leans too heavily into teenage nudity once the tank comes into play.
Next is Matsuo Harada’s 2001 fantasy horror film Inugami which
moves us back into the rural village fare of Shikoku. Playing on Japanese mythology involving the yokai
spirit with a doglike appearance that can possess human beings if it wants to, Inugami
follows Tokyo based schoolteacher Akira (Atsuro Watabe) into a rural
village at a homegrown paper making house commandeered by reclusive Miki (Yûki
Amami). However he finds himself at odds
with her extended family members who have longstanding stakes in the region and
are rumored by the townsfolk to be descendants of the dreaded Inugami. Very quickly, the situation devolves into a The
Wailing-like scenario involving the once quaint small-town devolving into
chaos and superstition while closing in on Miki and her family with vengeful
intentions. Shot handsomely in soft-spoken
greenish-yellow hues by Battle Royale II cinematographer Jun’ichi
Fujisawa and given a somber ambient score by Takatsugu Muramatsu, it manages to
be a rural horror with conceptual aspects akin to, say, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s
timeless masterwork Woman in the Dunes while still ostensibly being a
J-horror programmer.
That same year came Ten Shimoyama’s Silent Hill by
way of Hackers genre-hybrid St. John’s Wort: a movie that feels
like a garish carnival funhouse juxtaposed with a dark decaying haunted mansion
aesthete. Centering on Nami (Ju-On:
The Grudge actress Megumi Okina), an art-designer for a horror-themed
videogame entitled St. John’s Wort, she and her colleagues venture into
her estranged artist father’s mansion to film interiors for research on the
game’s look. However, as she enters the
mansion she begins reliving a myriad of childhood traumas while unearthing
hidden rooms full of dark secrets including but not limited to one room chock
full of porcelain dolls and/or toys.
From here, the tension and psychodrama continues to mount, taking on the
structure of what would or wouldn’t become the Grave Encounters movies
by mixing social media with the supernatural.
Of the movies in the set thus far, this was the hardest on the eyes and
ears with intentionally blown-out neon-saturated almost black-lit digital
cinematography by Kazuhiko Ogura, herky-jerky editing by Seigo Hirasawa and a
very video-gamey score by Asako Yoshida.
Conceptually the premise is interesting and does manage to conjure up
some fear factors, but the tension is deflated whenever the film pulls back
into the videogame designers’ headquarters.
Next on the list (albeit out of order chronologically in the
set) is Noroi: The Curse director Kōji Shiraishi’s downright mean psychodrama
child-killing shocker Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman from 2007. Though it would arrive two years after the
still-superior medium-bending Noroi, in contrast this film adds spikes
to that film’s pair of brass knuckles.
In Carved, loosely based on the Japanese urban legend
Kuchisake-onna involving a vengeful female spirit covering her face partially
with a mask and/or scissors, the yokai horror film follows divorced mother and
schoolteacher Kyoko (Eriko Sato) who takes it upon herself to try and solve a
series of child kidnappings with the help of her co-worker Noboru (Haruhiko
Kato). Following an earthquake, their
town is besieged by their children disappearing only to conclude the
Kuchisake-onna can transfer from body to body, possessing whomever it wants as
it goes on a child murdering rampage. With
the same fearlessness towards killing minors as The Untold Story including
children either being stabbed or having their faces cut with scissors, Carved
is J-horror equivalent of receiving a dog bite wound. Featuring crisp camerawork by Shozo Morishita
and a joint score by Gen Wano and Chika Fujino, it emerges as the first film in
the set to not play nice in the sandbox.
For a little while, things get hard on the eyes and ears
again with Takashi Komatsu’s digital ghosting video high-school set 2000
fantasy thriller Persona. Not to
be confused with Ingmar Bergman’s indefatigable 1966 masterwork, Persona happens
upon a standard Japanese high-school setting with its usual stock trade bullies
running throughout it when Danda comes into class donning a porcelain mask to
fend off the bullying. Sparking a trend
where half the school forms into a separate faction of mask-wearers, the kids
descend into youth gang violence beating up anyone not also wearing a
mask. All of it seems to stem from mask
maker Akira (Battle Royale star Tatsuya Fujiwara) whom classmate Yuki
(Maya Kurosu) warms up to in an effort to find out who killed her friend and
why. Co-starring Audition actor
Ren Osugi, Chiaki Kuriyama and Kill Bill Vol. 1 actor Akaji Maro, of the
films featured here despite the low-quality image and rough soundtrack Persona
seems to have the most star power in it.
Hiroshi Takahashi’s camerawork is fine but the transfer and master
supplied to Arrow has a lot of ghosting issues.
And the soundtrack, what little there is of it, isn’t much to write home
about. More of a youth-violence thriller
than J-horror, making the film’s inclusion in the set all the more perplexing.
Lastly but not least (and really the reason to consider
buying this whole set lest it gets a standalone release) is Kōji Shiraishi’s
found footage horror masterpiece Noroi: The Curse from 2005. While previously a Shudder Streaming original
reviewed by me back in 2020 (you can read it here), Arrow have finally brought
this long sought after found footage nightmare to blu-ray disc in the UK and
US. The premise is exceedingly simple: 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.
Rounding out the boxed set for all seven films are plentiful
extras including but not limited to several newly conducted audio commentaries
by Tom Mes, Jasper Sharp and Amber T, newly commissioned double-sided artwork
and a collector’s bootleg featuring numerous essays. Where it really stands out are the extras
included on the most important film in the box Noroi: The Curse which
has everything from new video interviews and essays to a whopping near
two-hours of deleted scenes. Given the
lore and intrigue still surrounding Noroi, the attention lavished upon
it over the others is striking and a most satisfying end to a very 2000s-era Japanese
horror film box. While my feelings on
most of the films in it vary in quality like the films themselves, Noroi is
a significant enough release in its own right to consider plunking over the
hefty cash for this. As always, Arrow
Video have gone above and beyond the call of duty in producing a set as
extravagant as this and that alone is something to be admired whether you dig
the films in this box universally or not.
--Andrew Kotwicki
