This zine ruled, and it also got me to finally check out senritsu kaiki kowasugi. I’m in the middle of the first one. I know these start quiet and get wild later on, but I’m already loving this. Thanks for the recommendation!
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Just finished the first episode of Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi. That was excellent. Just the kind of hazy, low-key horror I needed tonight. I couldn’t remember when it came out, so for the first half of it I was assuming early 2000’s. It really has that vibe! Then a character’s laptop and an early smartphone clued me in. I love seeing all these different styles of degraded, low-quality DV footage from so many different obsolete cameras. The evocative grain and limited color palettes of cheap, utilitarian cameras from before today’s world where even doorbell cameras are 1080p.
The group discovering a rat king of dirty cursed braids and the filmmaker, without hesitation, grabbing a plastic bag and picking it up like a dog turd so he can take it home… Beautiful way to end it. And then that great final stinger!
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I was looking up the actors from that episode – most haven’t been in much else, but one was recently in this:
IMDB has it tagged as horror. Maybe a good candidate for this thread.
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My partner is out of town for a few weeks so I’m using my bachelor time to watch a bunch of Koji Shiraishi movies. I loved Noroi back in the day, so I’m very pleased that @thecatamites’ zine reminded me that I’ve been meaning to watch more of his work.
I just watched Occult and WOW! That was incredible. I liked the wild epistolary format-hopping of Noroi, but I think the simpler structure of this movie really shines. I love the way the film gradually morphs between documentary styles… The trashy true-crime investigation turns into a classic doc-about-a-wild-dude-the-filmmaker-met, which then naturally escalates into one of those filmmaker-is-complicit-in-crimes docs you almost never see outside of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On. Unlike most similarly oriented mockumentaries like Man Bites Dog (which I do like), this felt surprisingly lived in until the delightfully bonkers 23-years-later epilogue that ends things on such a perfect note. It’s so fucking funny that the one world-building detail of this future Tokyo is that barbecue restaurants now all serve rooibos tea instead of oolong.
I really did not expect that extended cameo from Kiyoshi Kurosawa playing himself! He did a pretty good job!
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there’s a japanese youtube channel called Fake Documentary Q who do good (and subtitled!) foundfootagey shortform horror bits, and their most recent video inclues a perfect pastiche of mid 2000s DTV urban legend horror, right down to the overlit sets, oddly formulaic shots and 30 year olds playing middle schoolers
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nice nice nice
also that reminds me that i should link the youtube channel toy video, that has a bunch of old japanese dtv movies, among other things
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This comparison applies even more to Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi. I’m watching the 6th one and there’s a moment where I’m convinced there’s a scene directly inspired by that doc. This series is so good.
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OMG, Kudo and Ichikawa have got to be the most compelling protagonists I’ve seen in an epistolary horror movie. In File 6, Kudo’s hero turn, rejection of his destiny, and declaration that he’s going to return to the haunted village and punch his way through the demons there had me hooting and hollering! The abusive asshole who’s reckless with the safety of everyone around him… at least isn’t going to try to end the world. What a character to have to root for.
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Holy shit, that ending to File 6… I’d heard this series got weirder and more intense as it went but damn. This is pretty striking, original stuff.
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i finally got around to watching the first senritsu kaiki file, and i think it might honestly be one of the best horror movies i’ve ever seen
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I watched fake documentary Q a dozen days ago and it was really fascinating. That made me notice this thread in turn which just led me to watch the first 7 senritsu kaiki files, and wow! This is real good stuff.
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St John’s Wort (2001) - turns out this is a movie version of Otogiriso, the original chunsoft sound novel. i guess in the same way the comicbook movies of the early 00s would try to put panels and things in there, this one plays on the source material by being as multimedia-y as possible, incl parts where the cast are wandering around what look like prerendered ps1 graphics, multiple disorienting limited-pallet filters put over everything, sudden freeze and zoom ins whenever someone finds a key or important item, resident evil style static ceiling shots of characters wandering around investigating, and - my favourite - breaking into visual novel text bubbles for some conversations. which is all a lot more interesting than the comic thing… for the first half of the movie i felt like the mass of filters and shakycam was fun but made it impossible to feel any interest in what was actually happening, but i think as the movie goes on the combination of filter effects and relentless artificial grunginess of the mansion actually does give it quite an atmospheric effect. in honour of the source material, it has multiple endings and they eventually solve the mystery of the mansion by making a map.
also, most of the characters are game designers, so their office includes both a tomo cat and crash bandicoot plush
ju-on: the curse (2000) - the convoluted seeming nature of the various ju-on series have put me off dipping into anything past the first theatrical one in the past. but i heard people say this earlier DTV movie was their favourite so i wanted to check it out. i was curious to see whether it could still work in the confines of japanese dtv, which often seems like such a specific and ritual look (down to lighting and specific shots) that it can be hard for things to break out of that confine. but here i think it works bc of them, bc even that familiar world starts to seem alien when the great sound design suddenly cuts out the chipper library music at the start and becomes unsettlingly quiet and sparse, when the movement of the camera and the characters becomes so frozen and slow it’s like watching a tableaux… goofy as it sounds i think you could tell the ju-on guy used to be in kiyoshi kurosawas film class.
out of curiosity i watched an ep of the latest ju-on thing afterwards, which purports to be the story of the REAL ju-on case that inspired the films etc. it seems fine but the thing i couldnt get over is the meaningless netflix glossiness, every set and shot being busy with detail and beautifully lit in kind of an indiscriminate way that made the carefully atmospheric version of the haunted house feel so much less memorable than like that initial blank prefab feeling house.
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I also liked Noroi and Occult way back when and have been meaning to try those Senritsu Kaiki File movies. I watched the first one last night and it was pretty entertaining.
In a Web search the other day I came across this summary that seems like it will be helpful if I decide I want to dig deeper.
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Since Kowasugi ep 7 I have also watched Noroi and Occult and Ura Horror and Cult (all great! Special shout out for the moment in Cult where I went “I know that guy from Kamen Rider” and then it turned out the people in the movie did too) and then before watching World I felt I needed to watch Occult Woods, except those weren’t nearly as easy to find. So that spreadsheet was a boon, thank you very much. And I’ve gotta say after all the other stuff Occult Woods is certainly a mood!
But then! Only the links for the first two episodes of that are still good, so I am in despair (especially since Neo hasn’t made his comeback yet).
That’s being said, Kowasugi-wise, I feel Chou and World are flanderizing the material a bit? Still, World especially was still great, and what an ending.
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yeah i feel like the two after final chapter are treading water a bit and maybe get a bit too comfy with the exaggerated kudo violence and jokey tone… i think world works a lot better, maybe in part because it deliberately tries to undo that aspect?
occult forest is really good, maybe one of my favourites by the end - it ends up getting to this really strange, unsettling mood in the last few eps that are more striking by comparison to the goofy beginning.
i forget if it’s in the tracker but it turns out there’s another senritsu kaiki ep that’s like a spinoff of the sadako vs kayako movie, probably done with 0.005% of the budget and probably 2x as good a time. it starts off a bit more broad - i think it was done for like japanese tv so the first part is sort of an interview with the crew in character goofing around, and much discussion abt whether cameraman toshiro resembles the director of sadako vs kayako or not. and then it turns into kind of a shortform ep about wandering a haunted school while trying to find both the titular ghosts. it gets pretty fun and chaotic, it’s funny to me how even the most limited version of the series can somehow still get some juice out of that feeling when things kick off and suddenly everyone’s yelling and trying to get out of the building.
otherwise in sadako news, i watched Sadako DX. i haven’t really watched any of the ring sequels, does anyone know if the 3d ones have any good “stuff popping out of the screen” action?
Sadako DX as like the ninth or ninehundredth of these is intrinsically goofier, to the point where it sorta wraps around to feeling more like an abstract procedural, like a more comedic version of the techno-thriller stuff in the ring books. there’s some extremely broad, mugging comedy that wasn’t my speed and the plot would probably make more sense if any of the tweets, dms etc had been translated by whoever did the subs but the ending it gets to is fun. the smallpox metaphor in the first ring turns into a riff on uneasy covid normalisation: it turns out neo-sadako will only get you if you go 24 hours without watching the ring video, so the credits sequence is everyone glumly huddling round for their daily scheduled dose of temporary curse relief while the ghosts creep closer, hoping their vcr’s still working and that they remembered to rewind the tape
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I watched SKFK File 02: Shivering Ghost last night. I think I kind of expected each movie to stand alone, but then suddenly there’s the “Kudo Method” scene.
I guess I also didn’t expect these to be deadpan comedies in a way that Noroi and Occult weren’t (at least that I remember). I think that approach here works here in part because it heads off any questioning of whether events or character actions really make sense.
Glad I didn’t look at the Letterboxd page before watching, as the picture there spoils a big scene.
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I like how in File 03 Kudo hands that guy the previous two DVDs to convince him to work with them.
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new fake documentary q came out the other day 
i also watched a few eps of TXQ Fiction, which is i guess the documentary q guys collaborating with someone else on a network tv show. three self contained arcs of four eps each. only the middle one, “apology to the iimura family”, seems to have been translated so far, and annoyingly for the one arc that has been translated the subtitler decided not to do the japanese words on paper at the end that form the reveal of the whole thing, lol. but i got the gist and liked it, it’s much slower paced and more methodical and straitlaced for the most part, but that sometimes gives it a good crawling feeling and lets it be a little more of a character piece.
i also recently watched another shiraishi, “a record of sweet murder” - a serial killer believes killing two more people will cause his childhood friend plus everyone he killed to come back to life and enlists another friend (plus tashiro from senritsu kaiki) to document this. it’s set in seoul and the two main leads are korean, there’s kind of a funny disconnect between them playing it relatively straight and every japanese character being a cartoon weirdo. at first it was a little slow to me but by the time the next two victims finally show up and turn out to be freak maniacs themselves it escalates and starts feeling really crazed in a fun way.. i don’t know if this is bc its a nikkatsu production thing like Aishiteru! was but there’s also an extremely sleazy and abrupt left turn into pornography at one part which adds to the sense of mania. i liked it
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Magical Girl Yamada - the third TXQ Fiction series, i liked it more than the 2nd just because the central mystery is more, uh, mysterious, and the various variety show and found video segments had more juice. consensus seems to be that this is the worst of the three, i think because it has no occult content whatsoever - it’s more of a character driven mystery where everthing has a specific explanation, underplayed by happening offscreen at the very end. which was interesting but maybe a bit coy and unsatisfying as payoff for all that buildup, i tend to prefer these things when they have some kind of gears changing moment when they go all out.
Celluloid Nightmares - ok but it’s obviously all shot on video..?! anyway this one is from 1999 and so has lots of good 90s library music, workstations and at one point some great shots of the inside of an adult vhs store. it’s kind of ambiguously porny - the plot is about a fictional missing AV actress and the possibility she ended up in a snuff film, there are extended clips of her work but since faces and genitals are blurred and since her speciality is very bloody menstrual fetish stuff it’s uh hard to say the degree to which any of it’s meant to titillate. i actually enjoyed this one a lot, the investigation part is moody and tense and the ending is a fun twist, but i sorta got the lite experience in that i skipped through some of the extremely effectively gross and horrifying bits on the assumption they were “just porn”.. which in retrospect was not true but that probably let me enjoy the movie a lot more
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