The Psychosocial Dread at the Heart of Japanese Horror

There may not be as much brutal sexual combat or violation in any other director’s oeuvre, and Kuroneko is another portrait of the feudal wilderness from the perspective of tortured women. Here, in a scenario that makes something like I Spit on Your Grave (1978) look thematically half-hearted, a feudal-era mother/daughter-in-law pair of gang-raped corpses, incarnated as feline vampires, lure and obliterate an endless parade of swinging-dick samurai passersby, until a young warrior is commanded by the governor to eradicate whatever or whoever it is that is haunting Rashomon Gate and drinking gallons of man-blood. Much to his chagrin, he realizes the menacing presence is his own mother and wife. As with his suzuki fields, Shindo’s haunted bamboo grove is captured as if from a dream, all night shadows and luminescent mist, even when we’re in the ghosts’ illusory house, which sometimes, via an ingenious double exposure, appears to glide through the dark forest on its own. Rapturous genre textures, however, can hardly detour us away from the tragic political intent behind the final, limb-hacking, backflipping mother-son face-off, which pits self-righteous patriarchal might against eons of angry, abused women.

That was then. In the ’80s, modernity began to seem unnerving enough on its own. The anxious focus and expressive politics of Japanese horror changed with the toggle to what became world-famous as “J-horror” (after a good deal of horror-adjacent punkish experimentation, as with Nobuhiko Obayashi’s hilariously goofy House, from 1977, and Shinya Tsukamoto’s suppurating Tetsuo: The Iron Man, from 1989). The historical moment was ripe, and uncertainty took hold: 1989 was both the end of Emperor Hirohito’s seemingly infinite reign, and the popping of the country’s huge economic bubble, sending the Japan of the ’90s into a deflationary spiral. Abandoning the fabled past, filmmakers leaned into the anxieties of late-twentieth-century life–including, prominently and presciently, the ghostliness of digital technology.

World-dominant in the tech sector since the ’60s, the Japanese were the first to see this new-weird modernity coming at us, and in movies the game-changer was, of course, Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998), a simple but insidious pulp plunge based on a vapor-thin urban-legend premise—a haunted broadcast signal-on-video that, once seen, curses you to an abrupt death in seven days. It was that taboo video montage that bedeviled us: just exactly what you might imagine a dead person’s curdled rage might look like if snatched from the ether and materialized as a digital signal, an inexplicable series of images produced without a camera, fractured and residual and reeking of unnamable malevolence. And that’s even before it cuts to the well in the woods, from which something eventually crawls. The entire point of it, narratively, is that you’re not supposed to see it, and then Nakata makes us see it—doubling down in a stroke the psycho-emotional damage horror films are supposed to inflict at their riskiest. (And the question of how those images got on the magnetic tape in the first place remains beyond the beyond—though, naturally, the Japanese have a name for the parascience of imprinting thoughts on photographic material: nensha.) A sleepover-creep-out, fear-of-screens cousin to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, the movie, like the cursed video, is a Rorschach blot, but every reading boils down to the unknowable, even strangely paranormal void between our own sentience—how we perceive reality—and the way technology invades it while seeming to function outside of our understanding. Like a ghost.

Ring spawned sequels and tangents and remakes, but Nakata followed it with Dark Water (2002), which hits a different contemporary-heebie-jeebie target: amid an actual ghost story, we get the tumbling dominoes of climate change and, in particular, what it’s like to have your home and family destroyed by a haunting of relentless rain, leaks, floods, and mold. Conjoining a nightmarishly uncontrolled custody battle with every homeowner’s fear of having your domestic world upended by water—the nagging, metastasizing ceiling stains are like ghosts unto themselves, residue of past breaches, threatening and impossible to eradicate—the film leans into the unsettling inundations as an effectual metaphor for the unquiet afterlife. Only a nudge gets you thinking about our accelerating climate disruptures as the revenge of the troposphere against its polluters.

The J-horror moment saw a similarity between the untrackable infectiousness of supernatural hauntings and the uncanny tech condition of virality, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa grabbed it with sweaty hands, first with Cure (1997). An enigmatic spate of unconnected murders and their entirely unmotivated and baffled culprits vex a police detective (Koji Yakusho), whose schizophrenic wife is just one emblem of the insanity of modern life he can’t understand. Eventually the killings are vaguely linked to a single, maddeningly forgetful nowhere man (Masato Hagiwara), who may or may not be some kind of mesmerist psychopath. But the connections of and, therefore, responsibility for the murders remain permanently out of sight, suggestions linked and spiraling by way of unknowable channels.

Never one to squash a vexing enigma by explaining it, Kurosawa later made what might be the dawning internet era’s definitive missile of neo-Kafkaesque anxiety: 2001’s Pulse, which updates Ring’s VHS-era screen-dread by probing the notion that the Web itself is a kind of unpluggable access point—physical as well as virtual—to the realm of the dead. Or to something darker: in Kurosawa’s profoundly upsetting depiction, the new jacked-in computers are haunted windows on pure suicidal horror of various sorts, and they control themselves. Perhaps something of a Luddite concept, it’s also one we’ve all felt in our chairs, the infinitely regressed sense of a virtual shadowland to which our screens are tethered—a realm that has more freight and more control over our decisions than it should. Like Ring, Pulse suggests a chilling metaphysics: both films hinge on an unknown sphere of electromagnetic malevolence acting on its own agenda. After all, the virtual world is an astral plane, almost literally, and for Kurosawa (who also adapted his script into a novel) it’s a hellish other-scape leaking into our world. In the end, virtuality has swallowed us. What could be more modern? Both Kafka and Beckett, had they seen life online, might’ve grasped this dehumanizing accretion of techno lostness.