Both folklore and the all-powerful Japanese cinema have always been good with ghosts and curses. But what happened around The Ring in 1998 was a true paranormal phenomenon. The turn of the millennium was approaching, and with globalization, the Internet and digitalization, the East became very, very fashionable among a cinephile eager for new stimuli. In the midst of all this, a mysterious movie appeared on a videotape that caused death to those who watched it. Hideo Nakata was then unknown, but he left very disturbing images that can be seen as a metaphor for the turn of the millennium, the leap from tradition to postmodernity, transferring ghosts from the countryside to the city and relating them to electronic devices of everyday life, like the image on the television and that damn video tape that, in the days of the glorious DVD (which brought us the original version home), was already an antique.
Twenty-five years later, Nakata has returned to the festival where The Ring was the best film – in Sitges ’99 – to be honored with a Temps Machine award, and present a new work, Prohibited Game, which, although it will not have the impact of that , plays with some tropes of the genre known as J-Horror, or Japanese horror, such as a ghostly woman who calls the protagonist from an unknown number (those that are better not to answer), warning her: “Don’t come near my husband.” . She is jealous to death, and beyond. For the rest, although it tries to adapt to the MeToo era through a bully boss, and it is not lacking in ideas, the result is rather crude. Although it is still disturbing, it is very far from the hypnotic Dark Water, the film with which Nakata surpassed himself (on his day, excitedly, I compared it to Antonioni’s The Red Desert). This time the evil manifested itself through black leaks that, as the protagonist, a single mother, ended up discovering, came from a tank in which a girl had drowned. J-Horror ghosts were usually children or women with wet hair, blank eyes, marbled skin, and a general appearance that was as unhealthy as it was absolutely terrifying.
In a very short time, The Ring had a prequel, sequels and remakes, including the inevitable American version, starring Naomi Watts and directed by Gore Verbinski in 2002. Nakata himself was in charge of carrying out the sequel in Hollywood, with disappointing results. Dark Water also had a remake made in the USA, this time by Brazilian Walter Salles and with Jennifer Connelly, one of the most authentic scream queens of the West – her first leading role was in Phenomena (Dario Argento, 1985) –.
The J-Horror fever seemed to have no end: in 2003, a title like Missed Call still sounded groundbreaking, so much so that it had two clearly inferior sequels. The first call had been from the prolific but irregular Takashi Miike, a filmmaker renowned for the magnificent Audition. The more intellectual Kiyoshi Kurosawa, director of many masterpieces such as Cure, an enigmatic thriller about amnesiac murderers, made the difference with the extraordinary Pulse, where the ghosts came from the Internet.
J-Horror even had time to reflect on itself with the meta-cinematic Strange Beings, where the man with the camera, on the hunt for an urban legend in the Tokyo subway, was none other than Shinya Tsukamoto, the director of the revolutionary Tetsuo (1989). But, as Ángel Sala, director of the Sitges Film Festival, recalls, “the bubble deflated because the same schemes were repeated too much, even reaching the point of self-parody. There was a very Japanese internal exploitation, with a crossover like Sadako vs. Kayako, in which the ghosts of The Curse and those of The Ring faced each other, and there was also a saga titled Sadako 3D, which has its fans, but it was not good.” Overexploitation killed J-Horror.
“Japanese horror cinema is not at its best,” admits Sala. Although we are talking about pure terror, not about fantastic cinema, gore, thrillers or other strange phenomena such as the successful meta-zombie comedy One Cut Of the Dead (Shin’ichirô Ueda, 2017), which underwent a French remake by the ineffable Michel Hazanavicius. There are directors like Sion Sono, highly revered among fans since Suicide Club (2001) – a cult film that began with the unforgettable image of a hundred schoolgirls throwing themselves onto the subway track – who from time to time present titles like the monumental Love Exposure (2008), but they escape any classification.
“The last great J-Horror film itself could have been Noroi, which already had very poor distribution in the West, although it has become a cult phenomenon in recent years. It was a found-footage about a curse.” The subgenre based on supposedly found footage also led to dozens of very low-budget Japanese films, although in those cases horror stayed at home, it no longer conquered the world.