IJ-Horror Virus Revisits The Motion Picture That Still Stirs Up Nightmares

A widespread feeling of fear. The uncomfortable certainty that technology has bad intentions. That is a painful feeling something outside means that you are hurting. Japanese horror, or “J-horror,” reached its peak in the late 1990s-early 2000s with a tinge of millennial doom-but the collective mentality feels at home again in late 2024. Good timing then, that 2023 movie. The J-Horror virusdirected by Sarah Appleton and Jasper Sharp, now streaming on Shudder.

It’s a traditionally structured documentary, but with well-edited footage and insightful interviews—there are a few filmmakers sprinkled in, but mostly people (directors, screenwriters, actors) who have played a major role in making films that shape and define them. J-horror movement. That includes the initial low-budget motivation Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (1988) and True Scary Stories (1991), but also the genre’s greatest hits, incl Call it (1998) and Ju-On: Anger (2002). It was a tight-knit community of collaborators who influenced each other, both aesthetically and in terms of themes and characters, and the emergence of the genre coincided with new digital filmmaking techniques playing a larger role in how films were made.

Call it in particular it gets a special spotlight, with an examination of how the film’s success spawned a franchise in Japan and America. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, director of Treatment again The Pulseshare “found video” on it Call it-you know, the cursed video-still disturbed him in a different way; he also thinks that while he enjoyed Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake, he thought the cursed video part of it wasn’t weird.

One of the best talking doctor heads is Rie Inō, who played the ghostly Sadako in Hideo Nakata’s. Call it and her performance was so unforgettably surprising that she agreed to come back to follow up on her poem, even though she had just had a baby a few months earlier. (She also shares the amazing fact that Sadako’s trademark hair veil was her own—no wig or extensions required.)

But The J-Horror virus it’s more than just a clip show. It delves into the reasons why J-horror has made audiences so crazy, examining how elements that once seemed like tropes (including, of course, the ghost of a woman with long hair) are actually taken from Japanese folktales—”Kabuki tales. scary,” as one interviewee described it—that focused on women who, after sinning in their lives, sought revenge beyond the grave.

These ancient stories took on new life as modern urban legends, which do not blend into people’s everyday unremarkable lives, and increase universal feelings of loneliness and alienation. In other words, anyone can watch a video recording, anyone can stumble upon a cursed house, and anyone can accidentally contact a spirit while surfing the Internet. It is possible you!

It also discusses horror as it is specific to Japanese culture, and how the widespread popularity of J-horror films inspired foreign directors (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 uniquely scary, The Pulse director Kurosawa perhaps puts it best:

“It is difficult to understand what a horrific incident is. Things that cannot be understood by normal human thinking are presented in the film without explanation. This could be a variation of J-horror,” he told the doctor. “This was totally unintentional, but seeing as it’s best to leave it as it is, if you don’t understand.”

The J-Horror virus now streaming on Shudder.

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