I’ve now seen all ten of the full-length Senritsu Kaiki Files movies. I thought 4 and 5 were the best in the series, but pretty much every episode had its moments. I also wish they had kept the humor at the level of the first few episodes and avoided caricature.
https://letterboxd.com/films/in/senritsu-kaiki-files/by/release-earliest/size/large/
Also, someone on Letterboxd fixed up the subtitles. I watched the second half of the series with these ones and they were an improvement.
Looks like they are all on Archive dot org, albeit in considerably worse quality.
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine
watched a recently translated one called Border Camera - the first in a series of four, seems like one big episodic thing with movie-length episodes. the plot involves a real cursed video, the paranormal investigative team which ended up making up fake “documentary” content to pad out their report on it, the real again haunted doings in the fake documentary parts, etc, but director kotaro terauchi is a veteran both of the fake documentary q series and also lots of dtv “paranormal surveillance camera” films. so it gets pretty specific and funny as an excuse to talk about what goes into making a found footage horror movie. there’s a good bit where he’s playing himself reviewing pieces of the unmade fake film and doggedly explaining just why none of it works. i’ve only watched the first one but am excited to see the rest.
as part of the meta thing it opens with a brief discussion of the paranormal surveillance camera series, and the way it apparently mutated over time from documenting standard hauntings to weird character studies (with a guy who catches ghosts in big plastic trashbags, with another guy who wraps himself in nylon bodystockings due to “spirit allergies”). some of these seem to be translated and when going through the list of episodes i was very intrigued by this one:
will report soon assuming i don’t give a strangled cry off-camera and disappear, never to be seen agai
i forgot to post about it here, but i recently watched okinawan horror stories 3, one of a series of five tv movie anthologies. not particualrly scary, but what’s interesting is that its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: it’s got a very low budget because it’s made for a local tv station, but it also has some really nice, atmospheric locations, presumably also because it’s made for a local tv station.
one of the stories was set in a neighbourhood temple at 2am, and really looks like it might have been filmed then. just really nice quiet night vibes.
another set in what i think is a community college on a day when it’s closed. not super interesting, except in the ways that these buildings are so similar-feeling on different continents.
finally, one set in a garage late at night. this might have just been a set, but if it was, then the set dressers did an amazing job filling the place with car parts and piles of junk.
screenshots from my favourite episode of the paranormal surveillance camera show so far
so far it’s a hoot, impossibly cheap and not scary in the slightest but very compelling in how weird and off the cuff it’s willing to get
Kinki (2025) - new shiraishi and it had a theatrical release?! i really liked this one! as much as i enjoy the dtv ones for their freedom and goofiness there’s also a thrill to seeing some of the same techniques used for something more focused.. definitely feels like the most “serious” of his stuff since noroi and slowly gets to some of the same feeling of sickly procedural dread. made me feel like the saddest lack in his cheaper stuff was not being able to afford child actors, since both here and in noroi that feels like a key part of what makes the urban-legend-horror feel oddly plausible.
this one is based on the book “about a place in the kinki region” which was translated recently and which i want to check out, it sounds very fragmentary in a fun way, and the movie is too - a mix of regular movie and found footage fragments from various sources. i wasn’t sold on the regular movie bit at first but i do think the constant transition back and forth between them ends up being pretty interesting. it feels like one of the formal questions in found footage stuff is how you balance out, like, the fear vs frustration of there being exactly one frame of dreadful happenings in a lot of undifferentiated wandering around. most of the dtv ones have some kind of “REPLAY…” while youtube ones like fake documentary q kind of rely on people in the comments being like “at 35:18, there’s a shadow…”. having characters whose job it is to comb through and investigate big heaps of footage feels like a natural way of dealing with it and thankfully some stuff still feels mysterious and uncommented-on.
the climax i think i would have dug more if it had been found footage throughout - one of the things i like about shiraishi’s movies is how well they understand that part of the appeal of the dryness of found footage is the sense of excitement when they suddenly get really cartoonishly off the rails. i think this is where the regular movie framing deflated it a bit, but i did like the ending
i really hope it gets a bluray release, i’m not optimistic about it coming to the cinema here (though we did get godzilla minus one, so there is a chance)
not a movie but have been on a siren kick again and found this immersive theater / haunted house thing that i’m very jealous of whoever got to go see: https://1999-kioku.jp/en/
B3rmuda is a creators’ unit
formed to generate a new wave in horror storytelling.
A novelist, a game designer, and a film director—
three individuals from different creative fields,
brought together by one shared experience: video games.
Sato, screenwriter of SIREN, met director Nishiyama,
who had long hoped to adapt SIREN into a live-action film.
Author Sesuji, known for About a Place in the Kinki Region,
was also a fan of the game.
Through their mutual connection to SIREN,
the three quickly found common ground.
In spring 2024, they came together to form the unit.
‘1999 — Memories of a Day That Never Existed’
marks B3rmuda’s first creative project.
the dream of siren goes on forever… apparently About A Place In The Kinki Region comes out in feb 2026 in english translation as well
other stuff: watched Missing Child Videotape (2024), more in the kiyoshi kurosawa vein than the found footage one - it felt like a lot of the story beats were more familiar than you’d get in his films but i enjoyed how slow and tense it was, feels like it gets a lot out of the very unexplained nature of the main manifestation.
house of sayuri (2024) - a koji shiraishi theatrical release i was unaware of! maybe bc most of the focus around his work is on found footage which this is not - i get it, both sadako vs kayako and teke teke were fun but didn’t have quite the juice or mood of his found footage films. but this one was interesting to me in how it took the crazy tone whiplash of some of those ones and tried applying it to a more conventionally shot film.
i have a friend who doesn’t like watching contemporary mainstream japanese movies bc they can feel kind of processed - like the emotional cues, lighting, acting, shots etc can feel a bit cloying and predictable, as if the main intent is to reassure. i have no idea how fair a summary that is but this did make me think of it a bit - the fun is that it’s three or four drastically different movies crammed into one and that it will suddenly change what it seems like it’ll be about at odd moments, but at least the first two submovies feel very of a type and not necessarily like they’d be that interesting on their own. it does end up getting a bit more close to the bone as it goes on (and thankfully complicates what seems like it’ll just be a fat-nerds-are-evil kinda monster framing at first) and there’s some CSA stuff which i figured i’d mention in advance. it feels like a bit of an experiment with conventional filmmaking before the blended approach of kinki but i did enjoy it.
about a house in the kinki region, by sesuji - this came out in english recently so i was curious enough to grab it. as you might expect from the film it’s a collection of ambiguously linked found-document pieces with a framing narrative that slowly comes more to the fore. having it all be text is interesting bc it sorta feels like the thread of influence goes from creepypasta → obscure found footage videos like fake documentary q → back to text again. it feels like a positive thing in that the stories feel like they can kind of presume enough of an establishing context to be a little more terse and nondescriptive than written horror often is. there’s some playfulness with format as you’d expect- one i liked was when we get a short horror anecdote followed by the manuscript copy, which has a few more meaningless-to-the-author-but-consequential details around the edges. and there’s a kind of flexing of the extra granularity of text - the transcription of a 2ch thread of someone visiting a haunted spot has some play with the various personalities of anonymous numerical usernames in a way i think it’d be hard to do on film.
a thing i noticed in the film a bit but which is much more plain in the book is the extent to which the story is “about” a syncretism of various stock horror stories - both the idea that the various places already identified as famous ghost hotspots might be related, and in the narrative about various layers of occult stuff bleeding into each other and changing over time, but also as kind of a best-of of narrative horror types. like, i was taken a bit aback in the film when the cult is introduced - wasn’t there already enough going on? - but here it feels like more of an acknowledgement of the various residual horror framings already floating around the reader’s head, and an effort to do something with all of them. something i thought was fun is that not all of the haunted locations turn out to be relevant - if i’m not wrong the tunnel mentioned a few times at the start is a false lead, with the only connection being the possibility of meeting someone already possessed by the mountain god wandering around in there
i found some parts of it effectively creepy! and enjoyed it overall enough to be leafing through it again looking for connections i didn’t spot the first time. if anyone’s read it, something i’m kinda thinking about is the way both the author and the editor have their own previous histories with the region - the author as being undercover with the cult, the editor as having been there camping as a kid (dont think the timeline matches with the camping story reported later, though). the editor is a guy and we’re told the mountain spirits use men visiting the area to try to look for new “brides”. the author as having had a child should be exempt from the possibility of becoming a “bride” but seems to have her own thing going on in propogating the image of the red woman. the idea that both parties just end up working together through unconsciously trying to inflict their curse on one another is funny to me, but idk if there’s anything else going on that builds on that dynamic.
overall enjoyed. found it in the “light novel” section of the bookstore bc i guess it’s a manga publisher, which maybe accounts for the nice touch of having a sealed set of cursed images tucked away at the back
