When it comes to early noughties J-horror that broke into the international mainstream, there are a few movies that jump out at once: Ringu, Ju-On: The Grudge, Dark Water, take your pick. But one that I think deserved greater attention than it received is Noroi: The Curse, and, twenty years after it first came out, I feel like it’s finally starting to get the respect it deserves.
Because Noroi, released in 2005 and directed by Koji Shiraishi, is a very different kind of horror movie compared to the other Japanese tales of dread that made a splash overseas around this time. Noroi is a weird overlap of found footage and mockumentary following the vanishing of a respected paranormal investigator Kobayashi (Jin Muraki) after he spent months following an apparently-interconnected series of supernatural events, including the vanishing of a psychic child and the haunting of an actor.
On the surface, this might look like a pretty standard ghost story – missing children, mysterious figures appearing on VHS footage, the works. But the way that Noroi frames this story is what makes it so interesting to me – because this is a procedural film first and foremost, with Kobayashi serving as the central detective investigating this case. The juxtaposition of the more straightforward framing device and the increasingly-hideous nightmares that exist in the centre of this curse makes the eerie, unsettling moments land all the harder.
And it offers a chance for the movie to build a really dense and interesting mythology that requires some genuine unpacking by the time the credits roll – in fact, it’s hard to think of many other movies that are so unapologetically dense in their storytelling and characters, but handing us Kobayashi as a POV character allows for this world-building to feel like a natural part of the story. Watching the pieces fall into place as he slowly puts them together is a supremely satisfying experience, and serves the two-hour runtime (pretty generous for a found footage movie) well.
In the last couple of years, I’ve noticed Noroi attracting a little more buzz than it has in years past; and that’s partly because it’s excellent, no doubt about that. But I think it also serves as a very loose outline for the analogue horror genre, that has exploded so much in popularity in the 2020s – the use of different media, overlapping story beats, and the dense, rich backstory an obvious comparison to some of the best examples of analogue spookery. It might not fit into the genre directly itself, but it feels like its spiritual predecessor.
Have you seen Noroi: The Curse? I would love to hear where it lands on your list of J-horror movies, and any other recommendations you have in the genre below.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Rotten Tomatos)
No But Listen 