A pervasive feeling of dread. An uneasy certainty that technology has malevolent intentions. The nagging sensation that something out there means you harm. Japanese horror, or “J-horror,” hit its peak in the late 1990s-early 2000s by tapping into millennial doom—but the mood it conjures also feels right at home in late 2024. It’s perfect timing, then, that 2023 documentary The J-Horror Virus, directed by Sarah Appleton and Jasper Sharp, is now streaming on Shudder.
It’s a traditionally structured doc, but it boasts well-curated footage and insightful interviews—there are a few film scholars sprinkled in, but it’s mostly folks (directors, screenwriters, actors) who played an active part in making the films that shaped and defined the J-horror movement. That includes low-budget early inspirations Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (1988) and Scary True Stories (1991), but also the genre’s biggest hits, including Ring (1998) and Ju-On: The Grudge (2002). It was a close-knit community of collaborators who were influenced by each other, both aesthetically and in regards to themes and characters, and the emergence of the genre coincided with new digital filmmaking techniques that played a big part in how the films were constructed.
Ring in particular gets a special spotlight, with an exploration of how the film’s success spawned a franchise in Japan as well as America. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, director of Cure and Pulse, shares that the “found footage” in Ring—you know, the cursed video—is still uniquely disturbing to him; he also opines that while he enjoyed the 2002 Gore Verbinski remake, he thought its cursed-video component wasn’t freaky enough.
One of the doc’s most delightful talking heads is Rie Inō, who played the ghostly Sadako in Hideo Nakata’s Ring and whose performance was so unforgettably eerie she agreed to return for its sequel, even though she’d just had a baby a few months prior. (She also shares the amazing fact that Sadako’s trademark veil of hair was all her own—no wig or extensions needed.)
But The J-Horror Virus is more than just a clip show. It digs into the reasons why J-horror struck such a chord with audiences, examining how the elements that came to be seen as tropes (including, yes, the long-haired female ghost) were actually drawn from traditional Japanese folklore—”Kabuki tales of terror,” as one interviewee describes them—that focused on women who, after being wronged in their lives, sought revenge from beyond the grave.
These ancient stories took on new life as modern urban legends, unspooling in the otherwise unremarkable lives of everyday people, and amplifying universal feelings of loneliness and isolation. In other words, anyone can watch a haunted video tape, anyone can stumble into a cursed house, and anyone can accidentally contact a spirit while scrolling through the internet. It could happen to you!
There’s also discussion of fear as it specifically pertains to Japanese culture, and how the widespread popularity of J-horror films encouraged directors from other countries (South Korea, Thailand, America; It Follows gets a shout-out in this context) to create their own films inspired by the J-horror style. But as for what intangible quality makes J-horror films so uniquely scary, Pulse director Kurosawa maybe puts it best:
“It is difficult to understand what a horrific event is. Things that cannot be understood by normal human reasoning are expressed on film without explanation. This may be the uniqueness of J-horror,” he says in the doc. “This was not at all intentional, but more a realization that it’s fine to leave it as it is, if you don’t understand it.”
The J-Horror Virus is now streaming on Shudder.
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