Original subtitles

[creepy music]

[horror music]

TANANARIVE DUE: Real horror fans love foreign language horror.

Real horror fans love exploring the boundaries of the genre,

because just by the very definition,

you cannot be scared by watching the same thing

over and over and over again.

[exciting music]

KATE SIEGEL: I think there is something particularly beautiful

about Japanese horror.

It treats its audience with such respect in the sense

that they allow for slow character development,

and they allow for the slow, creeping horror

as opposed to the jump scare.

[shouts]

KATE SIEGEL: They allow for flawed characters.

They allow for their murderers to be people.

They allow for their murderers to have the most

insane, inventive minds.

They really tap into the individual's psyche.

DAVID DASTMALCHIAN: One of my favorites--

what are the most chilling Japanese horror movies?

[japanese speech]

[screaming]

[japanese speech]

ALEX WINTER: The great Japanese horror movies from the past

came out of Japanese ghost stories.

Ugetsu is probably my favorite film of all time.

That is a film that takes a couple of very famous

Japanese stories and combines them

and kind of reworks them into a story.

The samurai era and war and sort of a grand phantom princess

who lures our hero into a ghost world

that he does not realize he's in until it's too late.

[japanese speech]

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: The classic story of a farmer who has a side

business, making pottery.

[japanese speech]

And it's in some ways a cautionary tale about

unbridled ambition and desire.

[japanese speech]

And he loses sight of his family.

But then part of that isn't just consumeristic,

but it's sexual in nature.

One of the people that is interested in his wares

is this what seems like a noble woman, Lady Wakasa.

[japanese speech]

ALEX WINTER: When the princess first meets our hero,

we don't know she's dead for another hour, almost, right?

It's not even implying she's a ghost, because it's

supposed to be a big reveal.

And our hero looks up at this woman,

and she lifts the veil off her face.

And it's fucking terrifying, [laughs]

and it's not even supposed to be.

You're supposed to just fall in love with her,

and it's just the way she's lit, her performance, her makeup--

it's perfect.

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: In Japanese cinema,

you often have these ghosts that both are and are not there.

Sometimes they can walk through walls,

but sometimes they're very physical.

And in fact, so many of the Japanese ghost stories

involve people having sex with ghosts.

[japanese speech]

He just then gets enchanted by this woman

and then finds himself in this sexual relationship to the point

where he just like forgets completely

about his wife and his child.

Meanwhile, his wife is struggling

to keep everything together.

[screaming]

Ultimately, she's killed by marauding soldiers.

Eventually, he wakes up and returns home,

eager to reunite with his wife.

And there is this incredible scene where

he comes home to a fully darkened house,

and he walks around the house.

And the camera follows him.

And as he's walking around the house,

you can see the lights of the house slowly come on.

[intriguing music]

[japanese speech]

They're reunited for one night.

But he wakes up, and she's gone and realizes that he spent

this night with the ghost of his wife

who stayed around just long enough so they

could have this reunion.

ALEX WINTER: It's like what cinema can do at its best

when you just think that's just operating a whole other level

that no one else can do.

That's just superhuman artistic skill.

There's a lot of stuff you'll see in Japanese films

like The Ring and The Grudge that hearken

back to early Mizoguchi.

Charles Laughton with Night of the Hunter

just robs wholesale from this, and it's very effective.

The Sixth Sense, I think, takes a lot

from that-- this notion of, what is the divide between the living

and the dead?

[suspenseful tones]

DAVID DASTMALCHIAN: Japanese cinema has obviously

had a huge impact on Hollywood cinema,

but there's these really obscure two Americans

and strange horror films that are patient and unnerving

and unhinged in a way that you've never seen

before in a film like Onibaba.

[shouting]

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: I love Onibaba, one

of my all-time favorite films.

This is from 1964 by Kaneto Shindo.

Onibaba is one of those ones that,

again, uses the specter of ghosts or demons

to talk about sexuality.

DAVID DASTMALCHIAN: You've got these two women who are having

to try to survive in this really dark time in history

by picking off the armor, money, whatever

they can off of soldiers or victims of the war.

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: So you get to see this idea of survival

in the midst of war, and this will resonate for decades

with Japanese audiences who are very intimately up

and close, saw the brutality of war

and what it can do to a population.

[suspenseful music]

DAVID DASTMALCHIAN: They are hungry, and they're poor.

And they are sexually unsatisfied.

And they are very close and bonded as the story begins.

It kind of reminds me of Gray Gardens in a weird way.

And this guy comes between them.

And the younger of the two women starts

a relationship with this man.

[japanese speech]

ERNEST DICKERSON: It's a very sexy film.

It's amazingly sensuous film with

beautiful black and white reeds, you know, the waving grass.

What an amazing image that is.

DAVID DASTMALCHIAN: The way that the camera kind of comes

through these landscapes and the points of view

of the different characters and the sense of paranoia

and the sense of covetousness that you get from both

the performances and the way that the world is

shot and exists in, creates the sense of dread

as the older woman is really losing her shit.

[panting]

[music intensifies]

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: She encounters a lost

samurai with this creepy demon mask,

and she's able to get that mask.

And she says, I'm going to use this to scare my daughter-in-law

to stop having sex with the man that I may or may

not want to have sex with.

[screams]

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: But then at that point,

the mother-in-law is like, this mask, I can't take it off.

[japanese speech]

It doesn't have to be supernatural, but it could be.

It's kind of like, do you believe

there's a force in this mask that is

possessing the mother-in-law?

DAVID DASTMALCHIAN: And then trying to remove that mask,

it takes like a mallet and a hammer.

It's like stuck to her face.

[screams]

[ominous music]

DAVID DASTMALCHIAN: It's all symbolic and a great metaphor

for what's been going on inside, and as these two

women are ripping themselves and one another apart.

Her disfigured face perhaps evokes the effect

of the atomic bomb on people during World

War II in terms of what it did to those who survived it.

Shindo was born in Hiroshima, one of the two cities

that had the atomic bomb dropped on it.

And he was also drafted into World War II,

so he firsthand saw the horrors of war.

DAVID DASTMALCHIAN: It's a great movie.

It's super weird.

The performances are so fantastic.

To see actors just be given free rein to just go

as far as they need to go to capture that sense of madness,

it's awesome.

[japanese speech]

[suspenseful music]

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: Masaki Kobayashi's, it's

spelled Kwaidan, but the pronunciation

is perhaps closer to Kaidan.

Kwaidan is another in the classic anthology form

that we see oftentimes in horror.

ERNEST DICKERSON: The four films--

The Black Hair, Woman in the Snow, Hoichi the Earless,

and In a Cup of Tea--

there is a beautiful surreality about all the films,

about each one of the episodes.

It's quite amazing.

Kobayashi actually commandeered a decommissioned airplane hangar

and built these country sides in the hangar.

I mean, it's all interior with these

beautifully-painted backdrops that he himself painted.

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: One of the stories

called woman of the Snow, the backdrops are either a snowy day

or different types of weather, but there's always

this eye or these multiple eyes, these humongous eyes just

in the background as if it's just part of the sky.

And it adds to that sense that the surroundings are alive,

that there's something at work beyond just what you think

is sort of provable by science.

[ominous music]

ALEX WINTER: You as an audience are aware of the fact

that this is not reality.

This is a staged production of these traditional folk tales,

and yet there is an emotional resonance

and a truth that comes through that is pretty profound.

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: One story that I

think is worth commenting on, though, is Hoichi the Earless.

NICHOLAS RUCKA: This man who's blind, he's a musician.

[japanese speech]

And he's basically tricked into performing

for the spirits of the dead, not realizing the risk that he's in.

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: He thinks he's going to this really fancy

place to sing for nobles, but actually he's

just going to this graveyard.

[music intensifies]

At one point when a religious authority realizes, oh, my god,

you're in the presence of ghosts--

[japanese speech]

And so what they have to do is write scripture on his body.

[chanting]

Because of this script, he basically is invisible,

supposedly, to the ghosts.

But the key is for this to work in this particular story,

it needed to have been on every single inch of his body.

But there's one oversight that you can probably guess,

based on the name of the story, Hoichi the Earless.

They forgot to write it on his ears.

[japanese speech]

And so then the ghost of the samurai says,

well, you know what?

I need to prove that I at least looked for him.

[japanese speech]

So I'm just going to take these ears.

Of course.

I mean, what else would you do?

[horror tones]

These are stories that are meant to chill and maybe teach

you a lesson or maybe just make you think

that the world, the universe, is maybe a little bit

more mysterious and profound.

There's something beyond this sort of temporal existence

that we all operate in.

There's this unspoken plane of existence

that's there that sometimes crosses over with our own.

And sometimes it's in positive ways,

and sometimes it's in pretty horrific ways.

[suspenseful music]

[creepy music]

[ominous music]

[chanting]

[japanese speech]

[laughs]

[japanese speech]

[screaming]

[thunder crashing]

MICHAEL GINGOLD: There is kind of a dichotomy

in Japanese horror.

There's been a lot of great Japanese horror films that

are very moody and subtle, and then

on the other side of the coin, you have movies that are

absolutely out of their minds.

[strange sounds]

Hausu is a great example.

That movie is one of the most wonderfully berserk films

that I've ever seen.

PROFESSOR AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT: It's a really strange film

and raises an interesting question

about the relationship between horror

and experimental filmmaking.

[japanese speech]

House is meant to be sort of Japan's response to Jaws,

of all things, which I think is like very unexpected,

cause it doesn't resemble Jaws in any way except that it does.

[laughs]

[suspenseful music]

[screaming]

The story was kind of shaped, at least in part, by the director,

Nobuhiko Obayashi's whose then teenage daughter whose

perspective really informed the characters and just

the general femininity of this film.

So it's this group of teen girls.

Gorgeous is the leader, then there's Fantasy, Mac, Kung Fu.

There's Sweet.

Their names all kind of like refer to certain types

of personality traits.

And they are just so much fun to watch together,

but it's also very much so about like the nature

of disappointment from a feminine perspective.

So Gorgeous is kind of the center of the film.

Her father really spoils her.

She's kind of the apple of his eye,

except he introduces a stepmother.

And gorgeous is not OK with this.

What gorgeous decides to do is, you know what?

I'm going to spend time with my aunt-- so she brings six

of her friends along with her--

and we're going to go to my aunt's house

and have a wonderful time.

They're supposed to be joined by their school

counselor, Mister Togo, but he doesn't

make it to the train in time.

[japanese speech]

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: What she does not realize is that her aunt has

been dead for years--

[crash]

that, in fact, there's some weird force

where she, her house, this white cat

are one as a spiritual force.

And basically what ends up happening in this film is that

gorgeous and her six friends in classic slasher form

are knocked off one by one.

[japanese speech]

But what then technically happens

is that they're eaten by the house.

[screams]

LEA ANDERSON: So mattresses and clocks

and all of this weird stuff that you wouldn't think

to be consumptive becomes a consumptive entity,

and that's where it's like sort of paralleling Jaws.

Perhaps the most iconic image of this film

is of the character Melody who is very musical.

She plays piano.

She plays guitar.

Melody in this film is eaten by a piano.

[horror music]

[screaming]

How do we make a piano eating a girl convincing?

[japanese speech]

Well, I think he decided, we're not going to make it convincing.

We're just going to make it outrageous.

And then it then becomes unsettling

at a different register.

NICHOLAS RUCKA: Very interesting stop motion,

weird double exposures, inventive use of green screen,

animation.

It was just like sort of whatever

kept the frame interesting and just kept you engaged.

[japanese speech]

I'm not sure Obayashi necessarily knew what was scary,

but he certainly knew what was freaky.

If you want to assign like a sort of final girl figure

somewhere, Fantasy sort of takes that role.

Because she's so prone to daydreaming,

she also sees the unreality of things a little bit more

clearly than the others do.

But the one thing she never lets go of

is the fantasy that Mister Togo is going

to arrive and save them all--

[victorious music]

My lovely princess, Fantasy.

[japanese speech]

which he doesn't.

[japanese speech]

So there's this critique of the mythologies,

of patriarchy, and the stories girls and women are socialized

into, and what we can expect from when we take

these mythologies as truth and facts,

which is really just disappointment.

[crash]

[laughing]

[laughing]

One of the first, very visceral, extreme horror films

is obviously Tetsuo which kind of came out of nowhere

and really startled people.

Shinya Tsukamoto kind of kicked down some doors there

in presenting a new, very in-your-face, extreme, visceral

approach to the horror and with some really

creative special effects.

Tetsuo, of course, when it came out, I mean,

we were all shocked.

Shinya Tsukamoto-san is still the one and only.

There's no other filmmaker in the world like him,

and he came out from a Japanese, kind

of underground, indie filmmaking world.

And I was blown away by chaotic editing and visual style

and the bombastic music.

[vibrant music]

ALEX WINTER: Tetsuo was all done in camera.

It's kind of beyond a horror movie.

It's almost its own thing.

It's like a conceptual piece of art, basically.

You kind of can't pick your favorite moment

because it's really-- the whole thing is like one shot

right from beginning to end.

[screaming]

And it's just like you're on the train, you're off the train,

and the whole thing is a blur.

When I first saw this movie, it felt like nothing I

had ever seen before.

This guy has been shoving metal into his own leg,

and he is accidentally killed by a Japanese businessman.

And then this businessman becomes

infected with this disease.

[squirt]

[groaning]

NICHOLAS RUCKA: He is literally just sprouting metal--

[shouting]

and turning into this metal beast.

And then he comes across his doppelganger

is the rust version of him.

And it's basically their love story.

I mean, it's a pretty heady stew.

RYUHEI KITAMURA: The world that Tsukamoto creates for Tetsuo--

The Iron Man is really one of detritus.

This is scrap metal.

This is not the world of that kind of shining neon technopolis

that Japan itself celebrated and promoted

as this kind of advanced, late modernist culture.

NICHOLAS RUCKA: These young men who were making these films,

their parents were the sort of miracle generation,

postwar, who got Japan back up on its feet.

And the casualty from that was that the parents weren't around.

The dads were not around.

They were married to the companies, to the businesses,

and the kids were left to basically run around

in this industrialized society.

Well, all I'm seeing outside are factories belching out fire.

So if that's what you're seeing, that

becomes food for the machine.

And you're going to reflect that one way or another,

and it's going to end up being inevitably probably a pretty

dark view of the future or even a perversion, in the case

of Tetsuo, of the present.

[japanese speech]

[gunshot]

[japanese speech]

[flapping]

REBEKAH MCKENDRY: 1999, Audition comes out

from director Takashi Miike.

At this time, we had not seen a lot of Japanese films coming

over to the States, not anything like the wave we were about

to see in the early 2000s.

[intriguing music]

[japanese speech]

Nothing could have prepared me for that movie.

NICHOLAS RUCKA: The movie sets you up thinking

that he's not a bad guy.

You watch the guy's wife die from cancer.

In Japan, they would say gambaru.

He's just doing his best to kind of get on with life.

[japanese speech]

[pleasant music]

And because his friend has a suggestion of using an audition

as a way to find a girlfriend and not

actually cast for something--

[japanese speech]

he crossed the unforgivable bridge.

In this respect, I would say Audition

actually is maybe something a little bit more

in common with Kwaidan.

He had transgressed in a way he had no idea,

not even for bad intentions.

He was not a bad guy.

The problem was the woman he fell

for, he fell for without really knowing anything about her.

It was looks and manners--

purely superficial.

[intriguing music]

KATE SIEGEL: That man really thought

he knew where that was going. He did not.

None of us did.

I will always love that long shot with the sack

in the background--

[music intensifies]

and then just--

[phone ringing]

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant movie.

[japanese speech]

MICHAEL GINGOLD: But there's a lot of really interesting stuff

going on in that film just beyond the surface level

horror about relationships and about the way

people relate to each other.

[japanese speech]

[suspenseful music]

KATE SIEGEL: Like most horror movies,

it takes a grain of truth, and it

kind of distorts it into something

grotesque and unrecognizable.

NICHOLAS RUCKA: It's a high water mark for horror, I think,

just bar none.

I don't even think you should call it J-horror.

I just think it's a fantastic piece of horror storytelling.

[ominous music]

[laughs]

PROFESSOR AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT: I'm perpetually

surprised by what Miike does.

Of course, he's famous for Audition and that genre

of sort of extreme violence.

[japanese speech]

But he has an incredible versatility and

a tremendous sense of humor.

He's done period pieces.

[thoughtful music]

He's done nostalgia films.

He does comedies.

[singing]

He does musicals.

RYUHEI KITAMURA: I was just watching the TV,

and Miike-san came up and talking about his work.

And he said, more the script is bad, motivates me.

[laughs] I was like, oh, my god, Miike-san You are--

[laughs]

That is the power he has.

He doesn't-- in a good way, he doesn't really care.

He can just make it happen.

Whatever he does, he put his stamp on it.

And I really admire that.

[fighting sounds]

[japanese speech]

[creepy music]

[japanese speech]

[screaming]

[japanese speech]

[gunshot]

[japanese speech]

[gunshot]

[train horn]

[japanese speech]

Around like '99.

2000, 2001.

those days, Japanese industry had very--

this crazy passion.

[shouting]

[gunshots]

Producers were giving young, passionate

director a little bit of money and just do whatever you want.

Go as crazy as you can.

That's why we were still able to explore our pure passion

and creativity.

Horror films in the 1980s and after were often nicknamed V

cinema, and V stood for video.

So they never got a theatrical release.

They went straight to video rental houses.

You have these very low-budget but very innovative

horror films.

[scratching sounds]

RYUHEI KITAMURA: A lot of hardcore horror fans

prefer the original, straight-to-video Ju-On

than The Grudge.

The Grudge--

[croaking sounds]

One of the things that I love about The Grudge

and about Japanese horror is it's coming from not only

different mythologies, but also use of space

is very different in Japan.

[suspenseful music]

And the way people's houses are laid up

and the size of the rooms, so in The Grudge,

this creature is appearing from camera angles that

are constantly surprising us, because we're just

not expecting to see him there.

We're not oriented.

We're not oriented in the mythology.

We're not oriented in the space.

[screaming]

It keeps us off-balance visually through the whole film.

JEFFREY REDDICK: And it was totally nonlinearly,

so I had to kind of keep track of what was going on.

But I didn't mind it, because I was kind of

so tired of films being told in just an A to B to C kind of way.

[suspenseful music]

We've heard the concept that if somebody dies horribly,

their spirit will linger, like horrific acts in the past

will haunt the present.

But it was so interesting to see how this house was infested

but how it also affected generations

of people and then kind of uncovering

the mystery at the same time.

[mysterious music]

Culturally speaking, there's a huge difference between the way

the Japanese and Americans treat ghosts.

Americans are very distanced from death.

Death is something we gloss over a lot,

and so ghosts aren't something that are

part of a normal conversation.

If I tell you I think the ghost of my father is in my house,

you're going to think I'm a little weird.

I think in the Japanese culture, there's

more of a sense of ancestry and spirits and ghosts

being something that you can encounter at any time.

One of the great things about Ju-On is the motif

of the haunted house, that once you get inside that house,

you are victimized.

But the assumption is that if you leave,

or if you can get out, then you're safe.

The Grudge, you, get followed home.

This idea that even when you leave the haunted space,

you're stuck with it.

[knocking]

[gasps]

[croaking sounds]

[screams]

KATE SIEGEL: It's touching into that Japanese horror

understanding that violence and fear can

happen anywhere, in the most basic

of things, like real estate--

[suspenseful music]

and treating it with the respect

without kind of winking at it at the same time.

[creaking sounds]

[japanese speech]

Battle Royale is about Japan is

under an authoritarian government,

and they pick a class of kids every year.

And they basically fight to the death on this island

until there's a sole survivor.

[japanese speech]

This is kind of the film that says, well, you know,

what if your teachers really were trying to kill you?

[japanese speech]

[suspenseful tones]

There is this national competition

going on assembled by Takeshi Kitano

who's like one of the biggest [laughs] names in Japan.

He's a very familiar actor and director,

but he set up like the teen version of The Most

Dangerous Game, where the kids are

outfitted with these collars.

[japanese speech]

[gunshots]

They're all given different weapons.

They're let loose on this island.

[japanese speech]

And last man standing is the winner.

It sounds like Hunger Games, yeah,

it pretty much is, although this is considerably bloodier.

[music intensifies]

[gunshots]

[laughs] And I think the social satire is a lot more

scathing in this one.

[screaming]

Despite 40 kids or whatever killing each other in the most

brutal of ways, it really is kind of just standard, as we

know it, high school teenage drama with the gossip

and the drama and the relationships.

[japanese speech]

It's like it has all those tropes,

but they fucking kill each other instead of just not talking.

[gunshots]

It is really anarchic filmmaking that has

this remarkable energy to it.

[screams]

Kinji Fukasaku was 75 or something,

and he's able to direct this film.

Battle Royale is, in many respects,

almost like an epilogue, an aging filmmaker thinking

back about, this is what happens when the fascists are in power.

They don't value the price of youth.

They're willing to let you die over something as simple

as, just looks like fun and games.

[ominous music]

[screams]

In Japan, this was seen as something that was

sort of like manga territory.

It was very fantastical in a way that it was very symbolic,

whereas you show it in Americans in the early 2000s,

you saw it, and it was a little too close to home at the time.

Since then, it's become like one of the biggest

cult hits in Japanese history.

It's considered an absolute classic by now.

[japanese speech]

[chatter]

[horror tones]

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: Ringu or The Ring

is probably the film that people associate with Japanese horror.

Ringu is this story about this cursed videotape.

[japanese speech]

If you watch it, seven days later, you will die.

I think part of what made this resonate with audiences, first

of all, this fear of technology.

Japan has often been at the forefront of consumer

electronics, and so to have these J-horror films that

tap into that fear, I think, is something that is enduring,

the fact that this is something that's in your home,

if it's a cell phone in your pocket.

And some way it's going to be a harbinger of your death?

That's something that I think that people can relate to.

Ring, to me, really personifies a style of kind

of '90s Japanese horror that is really

stylized but also mundane.

There's an aesthetic to that film

that feels very grounded in reality

but also highly composed and creepy.

And I think no one has done that except that era

of Japanese horror.

[gasps]

My husband, Steven Barnes, is also a huge horror fan.

And years ago, he was doing some research

and heard about this film.

It had not reached the United States yet.

So he ordered it, and we ended up with a videotape.

We watched this entire movie in Japanese,

not understanding a single word of it.

And it still scared the crap out of us.

It's just like that old film school lesson, they say.

You should be able to turn the volume down

and still follow the story.

We were following the story.

When I saw Ringu I was terrified

for such a long time of every girl with long black hair

forever.

[laughs]

[japanese speech]

Ringu is definitely one of the most iconic villains out there.

It just has this texture of somebody

that is just slimy and real and almost like

decomposing right in front of you.

There's absolutely continuity, I think, with the ghosts

that you see in something like Ugetsu, like Kwaidan.

We see that absolutely come through with a character

like Sadako.

Sadako also very much part of this idea

of being a vengeful spirit, and this

is somebody who's had a profound trauma.

She did seem to have sort of psychic abilities

that led her to be othered--

[japanese speech]

and then ultimately to be murdered by her father.

MICHAEL GINGOLD: It's really gripping and chilling

all the way through, and it gets to the point

where it seems like the plot has been resolved.

And then you get to that TV scene.

[suspenseful music]

[music intensifies]

You could just feel-- everyone just be--

[gasps]

Essentially it was inspired by Videodrome.

Instead of like going into the TV set, it's coming out.

It's a very simple gag, but one of the things that's

so interesting about it is that after Sadako comes out,

and she comes out, and their hair is down,

they cut to the close-up of the eye.

Fun fact-- that's not the actress's eye.

That's the assistant director's eye.

So they used this guy's eye for the close-up.

Now, why would you do that?

Because it's horror.

It's meant to make you feel unsettled.

It's supposed to be uncanny, and I think it succeeds in that.

[shouts]

[thunder crashing]

[creepy music]

[suspenseful music]

[japanese speech]

[screams]

[japanese speech]

[child crying]

[screaming]

[japanese speech]

[shouts]

[thunder crashing]

[jaunty music]

[police siren]

Cure, I would say, without equivocation

is one of the masterpieces of Japanese cinema,

regardless of genre.

All of the elements of horror in Japan, from ghost stories

to the supernatural to the monsters, all of this

reaches a certain apex in this film.

NICHOLAS RUCKA: The detective has a wife who's

dealing with some sort of mental illness,

and there's these murders that are happening where

the people that are committing them

go from being normal to sort of enter

into these mesmeric states, and they do these horrible crimes.

[japanese speech]

And the linchpin seems to be this young man who is handsome,

but he's also of very few words.

He speaks in kind of riddles.

[japanese speech]

He's like the anti-Joker to Koji Yakusho's Batman.

There's so much beautiful setup in that movie.

It's almost like the Japanese version of Seven--

this serial killer movie in a way

that just twists it all on its head, and it just grabs you.

And there's so much long buildup between moments of violence

which are fairly matter of fact in that movie.

[suspenseful music]

[gunshot]

This is a film that's basically a world that's sort

of slowly going out of control.

It's going crazy.

I think it is sort of a response to a society

that it's like, everyone's acting really busy.

This is all really important, what we're doing.

But, wait, what are we doing?

What is this all for?

[japanese speech]

PROFESSOR AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT: Kurosawa makes films that reveal

the extraordinary in the ordinary,

and I think that's his unique talent.

So even a film like Cure, which is so atmospheric and so

stylized, is filled with so many domestic scenes,

so many ordinary interactions between people,

between detectives and professors and doctors in a way

that might indicate melodrama rather than horror.

And yet somehow the strangeness seeps into those moments.

[music intensifies]

I know a lot of people don't like cure,

and they don't like the fact that it makes you feel

kind of crummy, kind of grimy.

It's like there's no answers.

But as a horror movie, boy--

RYUHEI KITAMURA: Kiyoshi Kurosawa,

he has very specific directing style,

visual style, even the way he uses the sound and music.

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: It's working at a level

where sometimes you don't know exactly what it is you're

supposed to be scared of.

[intriguing music]

PROFESSOR AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT: Pulse, I think,

is a really tremendous film in its ability to create

a terrifying narrative.

[suspenseful music]

RYUHEI KITAMURA: I think that movie don't

fit into this Hollywood movie making-- act one, act two, act

three character arc-- so while you're watching it,

you don't really understand the story or the theme

or the character arc.

But something grabbed me, this atmosphere.

EARNEST DICKERSON: It's kind of like a new modern ghost story,

and they're really, really, really creepy.

There's this one image of this woman ghost that's approaching,

and just how she moves--

PROFESSOR AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT: It's a ghost story

about the world of ghosts being overpopulated as if there was

a kind of finite number of ghosts

that the afterlife could support.

[japanese speech]

And the ghost starts seeping back

into the world of the living through online connections.

So on first glance, it appears to be a film about the horrors

of a new technology.

[phone ringing]

[shouting]

But that film is really about loneliness.

It's about isolation.

It's about the horror of being alone--

[japanese speech]

which is, I think, something that

is particularly pertinent to Japanese life

and Japanese postwar life.

[japanese speech]

When the movie gets to like 70 minutes, 80 minutes,

it's almost like the end of the world, you know--

very apocalyptic feeling.

It made me feel like I was watching something more than

just a ghost movie, and I think that's probably

one of the things that makes J-horror stands out is

you can't really get it-- why.

It's not like you kill somebody, you get cursed.

It's not that simple, right?

There's always multiple layers to it,

and you don't really understand why--

why suddenly this is the end of the world.

[screams]

[vibrant music]

NICHOLAS RUCKA: Kiyoshi Kurosawa said in an interview

that when it comes to horror, there's only

three endings you can have.

One-- insanity.

[shouts]

NICHOLAS RUCKA: Two-- you become the murderer.

[gunshots]

Or three-- the world ends.

[roaring flames]

And if you watch his movies, that's basically it.

[explosion]

[screams]

[japanese speech]

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: Noroi-- The Curse, I think,

is one of the greatest found footage films ever made.

It's basically a film that is about

this documentarian journalist filmmaker who explores

supernatural phenomena.

But the beginning of the film conveys to us

that this filmmaker has disappeared

after making the film that you're

about to watch called Noroi.

[japanese speech]

And so sort of this idea of the film you're watching

is about the making of the film that you're watching,

that sort of meta level.

I think adds to that creepiness.

The director, Koji Shiraishi, works a lot within found

footage, and it really seems like a genre

he's consistently interested in exploring

and using the aesthetic of.

But this is the most densely layered version of it.

[japanese speech]

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: It's just a complete mimicry

of all these different media forms, including

Japanese variety, television that

lends credence and sort of authenticity

to this ghost story.

[japanese speech]

One of the reasons I think that filmmaker loves working

within sort of found footage or faux documentary

is there something that applies to the video in The Ring.

You'll never see clearly with some

of that old video, whether it's VHS or whether it's DV.

There's always going to be grain,

or there's something that, at least in our eyes,

feels obscured--

[shrieking]

and thus feels creepier, thus feels

like there's hidden layers, thus feels like more

potential for the supernatural.

And I think that's really cool.

[creepy sounds]

[japanese speech]

TODD KUSHIGEMACHI: It's kind of a detective story

as you kind of follow the different lines,

but it's basically about this ritual

to pacify this ancient demon that stopped abruptly.

Part of it had to do with one of the young women that

was involved in this procedure seems

to have gotten possessed over the course of this rituals.

[screams]

And I think it's really important that the documentarian

is somebody who takes this stuff at face value

because oftentimes in horror films,

our point of identification is the person

who doesn't believe this stuff.

This is a film where the people that you are identifying with

are the people who do believe this stuff

and are experts on this stuff.

One of the most sympathetic characters that we really

align with is one character who literally

has the iconic tinfoil hat.

His house is decked out.

Covered in aluminum.

He has a hat that's covered in aluminum.

His clothes is covered in aluminum.

But he's the one who sees all.

He's the one who actually understands.

[japanese speech]

There are so many different threads that collide.

And by the end, It all comes together.

But it's also just out of reach, which I think is also

part of the interesting thing.

It's all there, but it's all not there.

[intriguing music]

[japanese speech]

[suspenseful music]

PROFESSOR AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT: The Japanese cinema in its best

instances is often in the hands of people

who are exploring that medium to see

what is possible with this set of tools.

[shouts]

PROFESSOR AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT: And you

see the range of filmmakers that would fall under that category,

whether we are talking about the great masters

of Japanese classical cinema to contemporary filmmakers--

[growling]

to experimental filmmakers to arthouse independent

and so forth.

And horror, I think certainly contemporary but really

historically, is one of the genres in which

that experimentation and that discovery, that exploration

happens time and again.

[music intensifies]

[splat]

[creepy music]

[japanese speech]

[shouting]

[japanese speech]

[screams]

[suspenseful music]

[shouts]

[japanese speech]

[groaning]

[gasps]

[croaking]

[shouting]

[japanese speech]

[intriguing music]

[japanese speech]

[jaunty music]

[japanese speech]

[gunshot]

[japanese speech]

Scientists talk about laughter having come originally

from a fear response

as a way of mitigating fear or shock,

a negative as opposed to a joyful thing.

A really good horror filmmaker

knows that they kind of have you riding the line of a laugh.

We're gonna have some laughs. [Smooches, laughs]

I'll stop doing it when you stop laughing.

[closing music]

[cats meowing]