31 Days, 31 Horror Movies: Noroi (The Curse)

Noroi (The Curse)

Last night I realized I hadn't watched any J-horror so far this year. Casting about on Shudder revealed that they had Sadako vs Kayako - but I just couldn't bring myself to watch it. I know - I'm contemplating a Bill Rebane double feature, but this is where I draw the line? What can I say - I've only got low expectations for Giant Spider Invasion, but I really enjoyed Ringu, Ju-On and their US remakes. I sense only disappointment coming from watching a film where those two characters clash. (And I say this as someone who actually enjoyed Freddy vs Jason.)

I did see that they had a film called Noroi: The Curse by the same director. Not necessarily a high recommendation, I know, but it looked like an early (2005) Japanese found footage horror film (not something I've seen a lot of). I looked up the director, and realized I'd seen at least one of his films, Shirome, another found footage flick. I didn't remember much about it (other than the butterfly imagery and a lot of screaming girls), but it was enough to make me take the plunge. "Five minutes," I thought. "if it doesn't catch me in five minutes I'll bail and find something else."

Something with more gravestones in it.

Well, it caught me.

The Medium
Noroi is a Shudder exclusive, which I think means it's the only service with the streaming rights (in the US anyway). The quality was as good as you can expect for a film that appears to have been shot in standard definition on various media (including VHS tape). (That's consistent with the context of the film, and not a budget consideration.)

The Movie
Noroi is a bit of a film-within-a-film in that the framing sequence - a matter of a few minutes introduction and ending - is presenting the final work of a 'well known' journalist and paranormal expert, Masafumi Kobayashi. The majority of the film is the actual documentary - finished before Kobayashi disappeared in the wake of a fire at his home that resulted in the death of his wife.

"That totally has nothing to do with the documentary though, right?"

This is a great choice and allows for pacing, music, repetitive visuals, slow motion and generally all of the filmmaking tricks one uses when creating a documentary to try and tell a story. There's no need to have long sequences of running through the woods with vague shouting (although, to be fair, there is a bit of that) or people saying things people would never actually say in order to get information across. We get newspaper clippings, segments from (actual) Japanese TV shows, interviews and footage from various sources edited together to create tension and mood, while still maintaining that 'realistic' feeling. And of course you've got a cameraman and a documentary filmmaker - the perfect excuse to keep the cameras rolling when most people would have dropped the damn thing and beat feet.

Like I totally would have if this showed up.

Kobayashi's documentary is called The Curse (natch) and details his final investigation, starting with a woman's call about a strange neighbor and developing through to a final exploration of the events in and around a 'drowned' village (flooded by a damn). Along the way we'll see psychic kids, tinfoil hat (and clothes) wearing conspiracy theorists, strange knots, possessed TV stars, suicidal pigeons, ancient shrines and much more besides. It sounds like a lot - and it is - but here the films length actually works for it, allowing all these disparate threads to slowly weave together, forming a tapestry of unsettling events and people.

"And worms! Ectoplasmic worms!"

There are a few missteps in execution and not every actor is as good as the leads, but to be honest I'm only thinking about those things in retrospect. They didn't bother me while I was watching - I was pretty engrossed. There's also one dodgy piece of CGI, but it was horrifying enough in context that I didn't notice until the film re-used it later. The scares are more in a growing sense of unease and the creepiness of realizing what's going on. There are some jump scares, but they're few and used to good effect. I found the ending pretty clear (and horrifying), but some might find it either too ambiguous or too flat.

Sleep with this ambiguity in your head tonight, though.

The Bottom Line
Noroi is a really effective horror movie - in mood and execution it kinda reminded me of Junji Ito's work, though not as gory or bizarre as they tend to end up. There's a great mood and the sense of being unsettled by what you're seeing. It's in the unsaid things that slowly add up and the implications you're led to. One of the better found footage movies I've seen and highly recommended.

Still not up for watching Sadako vs Kayako, though.

31 Days, 31 Horror Movies: Pulse (Kairo)

"Help me"

There was a time there where every Japanese horror movie seemed to get an American remake. Ringu, Ju-On, Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara - all made into relatively big-budget movies with big name American stars. I've seen a bunch of them, but not all (I haven't seen Chakushin Ari, for instance). Pulse was one that slipped through the cracks.

I generally prefer to watch the remakes first, if I can. I find that I almost always prefer the original, and if it's the last version I see I don't end up disappointed. This isn't always the case - The Ring is pretty damn good all on its own, for instance, but it's happened often enough that if I watch the original of a film first I'll end up avoiding the remake. (Which is why I still haven't seen Let Me In, though I've heard it's a fairly decent remake of Let the Right One In.) I ended up deciding on the original this time around specifically because I was in the mood for some J-horror and this was on the recommended list. So I may never get around to the remake as a result.

It's totally not because I'll have become a stain on the wall. Totally not.

Medium

On Shudder via Amazon streaming. Decent quality.

Movie

Pulse has two separate threads of story that eventually entangle. The first thread follows a group of workers at a rooftop plant shop while the second focuses on two college students.

FYI, THIS is what passes for a sunny day in the movie.

The primary character in the first thread is Michi, with her friends Junko and Yabe. They're expecting a piece of software from another employee, Taguchi, who they haven't heard from in a few days. Michi goes to visit him and while she looks through his stacks of disks he casually goes around the corner and hangs himself. Later, looking at the disk he made for them, the friends find an image of Taguchi standing next to his stack of monitors, one of which contains the same image, causing an infinite series of the same image. In another monitor they can see what looks like a ghostly face.

How can they see anything at this resolution? It's like, 1024 by 768, am I right?

There's a sense of dread that suffuses the action almost from the opening scene. When Taguchi trails off in mid-conversation and shuffles around the corner I said aloud, "well, that's not good." I could have said it almost constantly, however. There's just a constant feeling like things are going horribly wrong just out of your range of vision. The color palette is also very washed out and greenish in tone, leaving even the brief moments of normality feeling off somehow.

The second thread focuses on Ryosuke, an economics student. He signs up for internet access using one of those disks that used to come in, like, every magazine ever. (AOL, Yahoo etc.) Whatever service he used, he should totally uninstall, however, because it immediately connects him to some weird shit. People alone in dark rooms, mostly. Ryosuke turns the computer off, but later that night while he's asleep it turns on again, showing a man in a chair with a plastic bag over his head - before the man can pull the bag off Ryosuke flips out, turning off the computer and unplugging pretty much all the cables. The next day he goes to the computer lab for help, being a novice in all things internet. Another student, or post-grad, Harue, tries to talk him through capturing the address of the site.

"You're not a computer person, are you?"
"What gave it away? Was it the shirt?"
"... yes, it was the shirt."

That whole sequence with Ryosuke starting up his computer and using the disk was a MAJOR 'whoa, I'm old' moment. The sound of the dialup modem, the whole 'computer service on a disk' and the Windows 95 interface on every computer - I felt like I was having flashbacks. It really made me appreciate my cable internet, if nothing else!

In both story threads things start to get weird. Yabe gets a call from the dead Taguchi, whose voice pleads 'help me.' He goes to Taguchi's apartment where he sees a black stain on the wall where Taguchi committed suicide - he also finds a crumpled piece of paper with the words 'the forbidden room' on it. This appears to refer to a room in the basement of the building with a door that is sealed with red tape. When Yabe goes into the room he is confronted and cornered by what appears to be a ghost. This seems to unnerve him completely, and soon he too has vanished into a stain in the wall.

So does Junko. "Come on, be a stain, everyone's doing it!"

Ryosuke manages to take a screencap of the video with the man in the plastic bag. On the wall behind him the words 'help me' are scribbled many times. A character suggests that maybe the place where we go when we die, the place the ghosts come from, only has a finite amount of space. That hell is full, in other words, and now the dead walk the earth.

Nothing quite explains why or how the ghosts are killing people - if the afterlife is full, why bring more people over? Wouldn't ghosts want to help make people immortal - as Harue says? I mean, where are the newly dead going to go?

Don't say library, don't say library... ah, dammit.

Whatever the reason, more and more people disappear as the ghosts multiply. There's an underlying thread about loneliness and isolation in modern life that seems to exacerbate a natural nihilism. The ghosts, it seems to say, indicate that whatever existential angst we feel in life is reflected in the afterlife. "It's lonely being dead." The problem for most of the characters is, it's lonely being alive as well. Confronting the ghosts seems to bring that desire to just stop existing to the front and people either jump from buildings, or, in some cases, simply turn into ash and blow away.

It IS an easier cleanup, though. Too soon?

Our two main characters, Michi and Ryosuke, eventually meet up and try to escape from an increasingly empty and apocalyptic looking city. The question is, is there anywhere to go - and will there be anyone left to greet them if there is?

Let's... go someplace else.

The Bottom Line

I like Pulse quite a bit, although the plot doesn't always (or often) really make sense to me. The ghosts seem to be using the medium of the internet to interact with people, but then they're also in rooms that get sealed with red tape. Some people look at ghosts and are fine, but others just lose the will to live. Really, it's a moody meditation on loneliness and isolation and the worry that we're all just trapped inside our own skulls. Sitting alone in the darkness of my basement, watching this movie over the internet, it felt a little more potent than it might have otherwise.

31 Days, 31 Horror Movies: The Ring

The Ring
I saw The Ring when it first came out and I remember enjoying it greatly. It was probably the first awareness I had of Japanese horror films and obviously opened the way to a number of US remakes of successful J-horror films (The Grudge, Dark Water, etc.) I actually went out of my way to track down the original film - Ringu - and they've gotten somewhat tangled in my memory. I expected certain things to happen when I re-watched it this time, only to realize that the event or character I was looking for was in the original film.

In the years since I've also read the book the original film was based on (and the first sequel, Spiral). It's significantly different and is more of a science-horror story than a supernatural one. Characters and events from THAT have also seeped into my collective recollection - particularly revelations about the nature of Sadako (Samara in The Ring).

So I was a little confused watching things this time around!

This image from the movie isn't directly related to anything - I just liked the picture.

The Medium
I keep meaning to pick this up, whether on DVD or blu-ray, but just never got around to it. I watched it streaming on Amazon and the quality was average.

The Movie
Two teen girls, Katie and Becca (Amber Tamblyn and Rachael Bella) are having a sleepover where Becca opines that TV is stupid. She then recounts an urban legend about a videotape that if you watch it, seven days later you die. Katie is disturbed, as she has watched the tape. Seven days ago.

"Well, we're bing-watching Ugly Betty, so suck it up."

I always like this bit because they use the standard 'teen in a house with something bad' tropes against you. Amber Tamblyn's character opens the fridge and you just KNOW there's going to be something standing there when she closes it. But there isn't. The person on the phone is her mom, not a killer. The TV stays off when she unplugs it. (A lot of these have been subverted in films since, but I vaguely remember it being of note at the time.)

Katie does die, of course, and whatever her friend sees drives her into a mental health facility. At the funeral for Katie a family friend, Rachel, is asked by Katie's mother to find out anything she can about what happened to her daughter. Rachel is a reporter and she quickly finds out that every kid who went with Katie on a weekend trip has died - and that they all watched the tape.

And they all suck at taking selfies. Hold that phone steady, people.

Katie tracks down the location where the kids stayed and watched the tape because, well, there's no story if she doesn't. (I admit, I'd be curious too.) The tape is a mix of mundane and disturbing images with no coherent story - a woman brushes her hair in a mirror, a fingernail is pulled off by a nail, a ladder falls, stormy waves crash on a headland. Nonsense images. When the tape finishes the phone rings and Rachel answers. A girl's voice says "seven days."

"Seven days until we start charging late fees." Heh. Remember late fees?

Well, that's nicely creepy! In fact, the whole movie is suffused with a sense of dread. (I don't get to use the word 'suffuse' all that often - and it seems to like being paired with 'dread.') The cinematography is very de-saturated, as if all the color has been leached out of the world. It's almost always raining, about to rain, or has just rained. The music, acting and pace are all subdued - the movie spools out in slow motion, like a train wreck you can see happening but can do nothing to stop.

Much of the rest of the movie involves Rachel's efforts to find out where the video tape came from and how to stop the oncoming train of death it represents. This quest takes on some additional urgency when her young son, Aidan, watches the videotape as well. She enlists her ex-husband Noah in her search - after he watches a copy of the tape. They scour images from the tape for clues, leading eventually to an island, an asylum, and a strange little girl who may or may not have been murdered by her parents.

What are YOU looking at?

Though there are twists and turns and creepy moments aplenty, the best part of the movie comes after the supposed ending. I hope I'm not spoiling anything to say that the standard "she just needed to be put to rest" ending is a fake-out. That's not what this ghost, if ghost it is, wants.

Honestly, the ending makes a lot more sense in the books - the tape actually has instructions, though the 'how to avoid being killed' bit at the end is taped over, causing much of the action of the book. It's still damn creepy in the film, however, and Samara coming out of the TV is probably one of the iconic horror moments of the early 2000's.

Luckily I wore my brown pants.

The Bottom Line
In general The Ring is still an eerie and effective horror film. My only issue (beyond my own confusion amongst the sources) is that the director (Gore Verbinski) affects such an emotional distance in how he frames and edits things that I ended up a little disconnected. I wasn't quite as affected as I could have been, if I'd been more emotionally invested in Rachel, Noah and Aidan. I understand why - the emotional estrangement of the characters is an import part of the story - but I think it reduces the horror a bit.

I haven't seen the sequel, actually - is it just a retread of the same stuff? (And shouldn't it have been called Rings, instead of The Ring Two?)