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
mount nabi (2014) - ok this one was pretty bad BUT in some unusual ways that still made it likeable to me. for one thing it’s a strong departure from the “never show anything” school of found footage horror - you can tell they were pretty pleased with their gore effects and there’s a lot of dismembered torsos dangling from trees. which comes as a bit of a surprise bc at first it seems like it’s gonna be more on the twisty and metatextual end of things - there’s a murky relationship between the director and two lead actresses, discussions about how to make a “ghost” interrupt the movie the rest of the cast think they’re making, etc. all this turns out to be moot though bc they see a ufo on day one of shooting and then an alien appears and starts dismembering people, and from that point on it’s sorta just predator… meets, uh, inseminoid, bc the alien is also sexually attacking the women to impregnate with his prominent chitin penis. which turns them evil. it’s handled with the taste and sensitivity this description implies, which is not great. but in all honesty i have never seen a movie with such a clear and well framed shot of a tokusatsu bug monster guy mid penetration, so i guess i was a little impressed from that perspective. when’s the last time a movie’s shown you something that you’d never thought you’d see.
aside from this, the character stuff is unfortunately pretty broad and shouty, which is a problem when found footage relies on conveying distinct types of guy. there’s one memorably gross part at the end where the lady gives birth to a wiggly alien baby thing. i also liked the scene before that where she’s turned evil and the camera flashes down to reveal she’s holding the same huge basketball-size rock the makeup lady was previously trying to bop people with when SHE turned evil. and how whenever the alien grabs people to kill offscreen it plays like, what feels like several dozen freesound videogame attack noises all at once to represent just how badly it’s fucking them up. sounds like a turok map in here.
special shout out to the director character’s gf and initial main actress, who drives up at the start of the film to announce she’s not climbing the mountain and then we just see her standing around the parking lot next to her prius as everyone else walks off. is she still there?
Mmm I may have asked this before but does anyone happen to remember there being a movie, japanese, horror, that takes place on an island with a big radio tower on it. Near the end of the movie there is a sequence where the main girl is chased up the radio tower by everyone in town having become a zombie. A guy she knows grabs her leg as a zombie and says her name, and then she wakes up and the whole thing was a dream.
It is probably from the 2000s, 2000-2010.
i’ve never actually watched it, but could it be the Forbidden Siren movie from 2006? it sounds like a synopsis i read of it once
THAT’S IT thank you, that’s been driving me nuts for years and years.
x-cross (2007): at last my long struggle is over… at last i’ve found an english subbed copy of x-cross. it’s been a long ordeal involving multiple torrents, sub files, a purchased dvd that turned out to be in dutch, and a youtube rip that i thankfully avoided watching at the last minute after noticing the upload cut the entire last 10 minutes of the movie. it may sound weird to put all this effort into watching a movie that i’ve never heard anyone either talk about or think very highly of. but there are two reasons i wanted to put in the work:
having watched it at last i can say… understandably so!! there are two protagonists with overlapping arcs that are split up in a way that very emphatically does feel like a callback to the famous zapper system. they deal with basically two completely seperate sets of opponents, one of which being an unstoppable stalker enemy carrying an enormous pair of scissors, the other being a hidden village cult whose adherents lurch, mumble and attack you with sickles in approved shibito manner. there’s a goofy and playful emphasis on scenario switching, fast forwards and sudden jumps between the overlapping stories. and at least one of the heroines wears a knee boots and short shorts combination throughout.
i actually enjoyed it quite a bit, in part bc it mixes these elements with a pretty un videogamey tendency towards emotional melodrama and plot twistiness, and in part because it feels just as stupidly extra as a videogame movie should be. the parts where the evil scissor girl appears dressed in full goth couture and starts attacking in particular feel like a really fun step up. also just like the ao oni sequel it gets quite gay, it’s funny to think of this as part of the cultural idea of “a videogame story” is in ways videogames themselves seem quite oblivious about.
this one was made by the son of the director of battle royale, who also wrote the screenplay to that movie and directed battle royale 2. x-cross is apparently based on a novel which is something that feels pretty hard for me to believe, since about half the movie feels like an excuse to show a lady in gothic lolita wear threatening people with scissors and the other half feels like a similarly vested interest but for feet and leg peril. so idk it’s fun to imagine all this stuff’s in the book. i liked it.
txq fiction season 5 (2026) - man i just think the fake documentary q guys have been crushing it. it’s been exciting to watch that stuff and dig deeper into older kotaro terauchi things like paranormal surveillance camera and border camera, and then to see txq fiction which is a much drier, less occult but even more tricksy and ambitious version of a similar set of ideas. i like those kanepixels vids and am cautiously excited for the backrooms movie but to me txq fiction existing as a tv series is an even more exciting form of found footage crossover.
did i ever write about the border camera series on here? it’s a really fun scrappy project across four movie-length episodes, each of which follows the effort to pick up the trail of an abandoned fictional found footage work from years before. we see the remaining footage, talk to the crew members, get a fun pro’s eye on exactly how the work of producing a convincing-feeling fake documentary is accomplished. get pulled into a morass of inter cast squabbles, a bizarrely shady and manipulative cameraman in a PARIS TEXAS shirt, the producer who thinks none of the investigation is going anywhere and keeps trying to cancel thins. the director (terauchi himself) who relaunches the investigation after he goes on a livestream bitching about the producer. a lot of it is in the form of like, samples of longrunning occult livestream channels that may or may not really exist. i enjoyed it a lot but part of the pleasure was just seeing people who knew the found footage format inside out taking increasingly ambitious and odd narrative swings with things.
txq fiction is kind of in a similar vein. to me the best and scariest season is still the first one, “looking for kikue ishinaga”. the next two were fun but a little dry - playing on the idea of like a seemingly occult thing that turns out to be a depressingly grounded one, in ways i felt the fourth season with the ufo did more successfully. i think this season was maybe the best one after the first? taking similar ideas again but an even twistier premise - real life celeb ryunosuke kamiki playing himself, meeting up with the real txq fiction producers and wanting to get involved, talking about ideas that’d work with his status as a known figure. showing his own effort at fake haunted house footage and discussing ways they could maybe enlarge it by pulling in real life aspects - real names, locations, a particular child actor, etc. part of it is behind the scenes of the fake documentary they’re going to shoot and part of it just is that documentary, so there’s a bit of unpacking in terms of which “layer” each character and revelation belongs to. the eventual revelations are fun but what makes it for me is a final sequence again in a haunted house, where the combination of just how well they know to do this kind of thing with the narrative uncertainty of all the twistiness gives it such a strong and distinct effect… “they dont miss”!!!
book korner:
strange pictures by uketsu - i debated posting this here. the back of the book says it’s “mystery-horror”… i think it’s far more on the procedural end of things, BUT, even when it ends up explaining everything in (comparatively) down to earth ways i do think a big part of the effect as a whole is the creepiness of the titular strange pictures and the idea of some hidden meaning expressed within. it kinda feels like a cross between a creepypasta and an ace attorney game.
it’s something of an anthology, split into a few different parts that each center on a different “strange picture”, specifically a drawing of some kind. and then with gradual revelations of the links between chapters. the chapters vary in effectiveness a good bit - for me the best one was probably one of the earliest, with the two guys stumbling on a mysterious blog - but there is something fun about the unfolding of the mysteries. where they unfold to is, well.. to me maybe a bit too much in that unhappy cross section where something is “psychological” in a way that both feels a bit pat and literal as a way to tie up various loose ends, while also feeling completely unreal as human story and motivation. there are also a strange houses, strange buildings and strange maps by the same author, idk it was fun to blaze thru as a lazy weekend morning read. maybe i’ll read the others if i ever run out of maigret.
paranormal master tape (season one) - watched this after it was recently translated. does it make sense to call kotaro terauchi underrated? he feels pretty central to found footage in japan but i get the sense that he’s not the “name” on the most wellknown stuff he’s involved with (fake documentary q, txq fiction, etc), while work he’s more straightforwardly front and center on tends to be lost in the sprawl of endless dtv shows with names like Forbidden Exercise Tape 67. but Paranormal Surveillance Camera is easily one of the funniest and most inventive versions of that format i’ve found (featuring greats like haunted middle aged man, american who becomes japanese due to a curse, wish-granting chicken, gay ghost beach fandom) and the Border Camera series was a great, twisty play on the contruction work that goes into this whole genre of fake ghost documentary. and they’re oddly connected, figures from paranormal camera (incl terauchi himself) return in the border camera series, and a beloved problematic uncle from border camera makes a surprise appearance in this show.
the plot involves an attempt to locate a mythical very first dtv ghost documentary video, said to be produced in the 80s after a brief occult boom the previous decade. the hunt involves asking various real contemporary found footage directors, who then get pulled further into the search. there’s some shop talk, a detour into the hiring process around the inevitable assistant character, a visit to an FF collector (piles of dvds, including a big plastic crate of terauchi’s own nestling among the heaps). the little fragment of Primal Tape they’re able to dig out is stagy, creepy - full of the signifiers that the genre would go on to drop, overdramatic monologues musing about psychic phenomena and rinkydink keyboard music settings for endless footage of people walking slowly in the dark. there’s a good building atmosphere as the investigation gets into defunct production companies, missing people, magazine trade corners, strange figures at the edges of the investigation footage itself (particularly of a strange guy holding a camera - i kept thinking that this might have been an invitation for the viewer to add whatever accidental blooper crew member shots they found in the course of their own dtv journeys into the lore). it all works in the end, but part of the pleasure is the sense of all these people dreaming up imaginary myth histories for their tiny, two-inches-of-ivory commercial form. beneath all the meta stuff is sort of a lingering faith in the promise of garish video covers, creepy yamaha loops and slow-motion replays, that THIS time, you might really never find a way back.
