After Deadstream and The Sleep Experiment, and Late Night with The Devil and History of the Occult, I realised that I vastly prefer found footage style horror where everything remains diegetic rather than following a typical narrative structure, even if it impairs understanding, so I went looking for more in that vein, and stumbled upon the works of Koji Shiraishi. It's been a good week.
I'd already watched one Shiraishi flick - Noroi: The Curse (2005), and while my memory told me that I would dread watching it again, the reviews I read didn't sound anything like what I remembered. This, it turns out, is because I was confusing it with Ju-on: The Curse - the first in the interminable Ju-on franchise, which has never clicked with me. I had never seen Noroi: The Curse, I'd just downloaded it at some point and then grimaced while remembering Ju-on every time I saw it in my library it seems.
Noroi is about a ghost hunter type guy who makes documentaries about supernatural phenomena who went mysteriously missing after a fire consumed his house (and wife) while he searched for a missing girl. Told as if it were pieced together from footage the ghost hunter captured, it is let down by some of its special effects (a running theme in Shiraishi films) but is mostly an entertaining ride thanks to the cast - the ghost hunter himself is great, and spends a lot of time in the film with a pretty actress and a psychic who appears to be autistic, and the three of them have good chemistry. At least until the end, when it all goes down in flames.
The next movie I watched was Cult (2013), primarily because it had 3 cute actresses in it. This was a much more entertaining movie than Noroi because it takes itself much less seriously. It's about 3 idols who are asked to help film an exorcism for marketability - a little girl and her mum are being tormented by a haunting. A priest is called in, but he isn't powerful enough to stop it, so he calls in a friend, who looks and behaves like he stepped out of a manga. (and maybe did? Or is that too ridiculous for this story about idols fighting off a cult worshipping ectoplasmic worms from another dimension?) From then things ramp up considerably - the eponymous cult enters the picture, people are possessed and curses are thrown about. And while some of the special effects are downright laughable (the gang of worms is almost Ed Woodian) some of them are very effective, like the shadow guys, and some of them fail, but show sparks of genius like the ceiling head's eye stalks. Unfortunately Shiraishi biffs it on closing I think - the ending is anticlimactic at best - it ends with Neo (the manga character) getting confronted by one of the idols, who is possessed and allegedly very powerful - he stares at her for 10 seconds and she crumbles to dust. Neo then says now the fun begins and the movie ends. It's obviously a subversion, and a clever one, but it's still pretty annoying.
After the worms I figured Shiraishi could only benefit from better special effects technology, so while I had planned to watch Occult (2009) next, I decided instead to watch A Record of Sweet Murder (2014) instead. Arosm is about a Korean journalist who interviews a serial killer who has allegedly killed 18 people so far, with the help of a Japanese cameraman. It is classic Japanese insanity, although by no means Shiraishi's most outrageous work in the exploitation world - Grotesque (2009) and Cho Akunin (2011) apparently go much further, but I haven't been able to source either with subtitles. But while arosm is definitely in the exploitation genre, it doesn't feel particularly exploitative to me (although tbh I've never really liked that term) - the murder and rape are necessary to the plot, and there is no revelling in it (well, not by our serial killer). All told it's an intense story about faith that blurs between thriller and cosmic horror very well, I thoroughly recommend it.
And so having had my faith restored in Shiraishi by arosm, I decided to go back to Occult (2009). And while the final scene of Occult proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Shiraishi's special effects game is weaker than a toddler with polio, it also 100% justified my faith in the man, Occult is a spectacular film. I don't want to spoil it - and I highly recommend going in blind - so a brief synopsis is this: Occult is about Koji Shiraishi, playing himself, as a documentarian investigating a seemingly random mass stabbing and the people affected by it, and learning there is a supernatural entity involved.
A lot of Shiraishi's work has elements of cosmic horror, but none more than Occult, it absolutely nails the genre. The leech god would fit perfectly in the Cthulhu mythos (or maybe the Kuturo mythos?) with its alien nature, overbearing mental manipulation and desire for blood. Best of all it nails that element found in the best cosmic horror stories that is hard to describe - the maintenance of hope until the very last second. I think it comes down to the protagonist - they are very often wretched, villainous or at the very least pathetic individuals, but the narrative has you hoping they will be ok anyway. At no point did I think the leech god was anything less than completely malevolent, I knew there was no way suicide bombing Shibuya station would work out well for anyone, and I generally thought Eno, the bomber, was a lazy dick, but somewhere deep inside me was the certainty things couldn't go as badly as I
I love how wrong I was too - ending the film with the slow, greying Shiraishi finishing his stint in prison was fantastic. I just wish they hadn't shown the leech god dimension, it almost ruined the film for me. It's just laughably bad, like something you'd expect from a 12 year old who just learned about green screens. And the most upsetting part is that I can see what he was going for, and it should have been great! It wasn't a twist, but it would have capped the film off perfectly. Instead we got jellyfish and effects straight out of Adam West's Batman.
