here’s a thread about no-budget straight-to-video absolute garbage japanese horror. i fuckin love it.
obviously, everyone loves quality japanese horror: ring, noroi, pulse, etc.
but i also love these movies that look and feel cheap and usually don’t even get to actual movie length. hide and go kill, the tokyo shock video series, the hideshi hino’s theater of horror series, the movies based on the twilight syndrome games, etc.
common themes include: urban legends/rumours actually being true, clowns of some kind, toys coming to life, rituals, a mish mash of european occult and onmyouji iconography, very small casts, small cramped-looking sets.
does anyone else like this kind of thing? does anyone know how much has official english disc releases?
i, uh, made the packaging layout/art and on-screen menus for the 2005? 2006? usa dvd release of a film entitled Ghost Train, but in retrospect i am not proud of my results and also i never watched the movie
It’s less shit and more just uneven and mid, but I had a good time with Marebito. It’s classic artish early 2000’s J-Horror – Extremely alienated young man stalks and falls in love with a weird feral girl and lets her live in his apartment. Then she leads him to an enormous lovecraftian underground labyrinth city where nothing interesting happens. Good times, bad movie.
burying the lede that the guy is played by Shinya Tsukamoto. The movie isn’t great but I love what it represented of the 00s mid-low-budget indie scene, that seemingly anyone could pick up a camera and make a feature, and everyone collaborated with everyone else (except sion sono, for obvious in hindsight reasons)
to quote midnight eye on this movie,
Shot on digicam, it was released in Japan in the autumn of 2004 as part of a series of modestly-budgeted digital features resulting from a collaboration between the Film School of Tokyo and the Eurospace cinema in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. This special “Bancho” series resulted in a total of 11 films that fell under three categories - Horror Bancho, Eros Bancho, and Wara Bancho (comedy) - directed by a mixture of film students and established professionals.
inexplicably thinking of Versus, which is a Zombie-flick and def not a horror movie, but I have such fond feelings when thinking back how awesome it was to watch that from an absolutely not official DVD-R.
also helped it reach stardom.
Ryuhei Kitamura would later direct Godzilla: Final Wars, which I adored for its style-over-substance sci-fi action extravaganza.
In hindsight, these two movies feel like someone did alter the normal course of history, because he liked this dude’s output and wanted to send off Big G in the best Showa-Manner there is.
senritsu kaiki kowasugi is great, he really took the crazy ending to Occult and went running with it. one of the episodes even turns into a sequel?? if you can watch the one where they try to beat up a kappa and not find be moved then idk what to say
anyway the far shittier looking dtv japanese found footage thing i’m most excited to be translated is Jason Village, the one about a secret japanese village which is full of jasons from friday the 13th. the most imagined by a 6yo horror concept possible.
i’ve never played shin megami tensei but it turns out to have had a liveaction tv show in the 90s that looks kind of fun…??
