Noroi: The Curse (2005)

directed by Kôji Shiraishi

Japan

114 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is going to be less of a review and more of a small treatise on why this is one of my favorite movies ever. I've seen it many times, but it had been much too long since my last viewing, so I decided to kick off the spooky month with it. Even though I know everything that's going to happen, there's still something so potently creepy about Noroi that keeps me coming back. Nothing ever gets explained or becomes clearer to me than it was the first or second time I watched it, but there's a magnetism to the film that makes me not care.

Shot in a faux-documentary format, Noroi opens with a short introduction by the cameraman, who ostensibly picked up his friend's film project after his disappearance. As I touched upon in my review of 1998's Ringu, much if not all of the overall tone of Noroi has to do with the presence of analogue media. In the U.S., at least from my own memories, VHS was pretty moribund by 2005, but it's held out far longer in Japan, and there's not a single disc to be found in Noroi. Everything is circulated on VHS tapes, sometimes containing footage that was transferred to them from some even older format like film. The physical object is integral to creating the effect of a cursed film, and although interesting things have been done with the idea of a curse attached to the more intangible domain of the internet, to me nothing will ever be scarier than the perennial haunted VHS tape.

It's not the tapes themselves that are haunted in Noroi, but much of what we see relies on literal "found footage" - recorded TV broadcasts that show authentic paranormal activity, that were incorporated into the finished product presumably by the cameraman to provide a clearer picture. Something about these television segments hit me harder this time around than the previous times, I think just because I was paying more attention to them - the variety TV shows and awkward, half-finished interviews are not the filler between more important moments, they're some of the most important moments in establishing the dread-filled atmosphere of the movie. There is something so powerfully unnerving about the thought of chancing upon genuine paranormal footage on late night TV, being one of only a handful of people who are both awake and watching whatever no-budget variety show is on in the ungodly hours of the morning, and being rewarded for that with actual recordings of unexplainable events. Ghosts caught on film by ghost hunters can be compelling, but what's much scarier is what happens in Noroi: a stumbling-upon, a rabbit hole, an uncovering of connected events that lead to a terrifying and unknowable whole.

One of the more interesting things I was picking up on during this most recent watch was the character of Hori, the psychic, and how his role complicates the plot. I'll get to that in a minute, but first I feel the need to provide some context. This is definitely a movie that has become much more famous than the person who made it; although Kôji Shiraishi is one of my personal favorite directors, Noroi is by far his best-known work and many people who are familiar with it are not familiar with his other films at all. So Hori's rants about "ectoplasmic worms" might read as nothing but the obsession of a severely mentally ill person to anybody who's unfamiliar with the rest of Shiraishi's output, but the concept of these worms, and of intangible creatures that exist all around us but are not visible to the average person, is something that comes up very frequently in his films. Because I had this in mind while I was watching Noroi, I was automatically giving a weight to what Hori was saying that other viewers might not. His talk about the worms has nothing - and I cannot believe this is the first time I'm actually realizing this - to do with the overarching concept of Noroi as a film, the Kagutaba ritual and the sacrificed embryos. But I believed that what he was talking about was a real part of the plot because I knew that Shiraishi was no stranger to involving it in the plots of his other work.

And I still choose to believe that, to be honest, because another thing that happened since the last time I saw this is that I watched From Beyond. I instantly made the connection between the creatures only visible to a jacked-up pineal gland that Lovecraft introduces in that story, and Stuart Gordon elaborates upon in that film, and the ectoplasmic worms that only Hori can see. Even though it is difficult to draw a connection between the worms and Kagutaba, I think the Kagutaba ritual is in some way an interpretation of or an explanation for the presence of other-dimensional creatures that the people of the flooded village became involved with.

Even though I'm a fan of everything this director has done, there's no question that Noroi stands alone. There's a reason why it's become so famous, divorced from his other output, though it's all pretty good to great. This is one of those movies that is its own entity. It's unembellished, the interviewees are soft-spoken and awkward, and no one is particularly "likeable" in the typical sense. The characters only exist as pawns in the cyclical, consuming course of events just under the surface of reality. But although it may seem shabby and unrehearsed, a ton of work had to have been put in to make the film look that way. Certain sets, like the interior of Hori's apartment and the possessed woman's hideout, were so crammed full of clutter that you almost miss the fact that somebody's job was to set all of that up from scratch. There's also a fire stunt at the end that is genuinely insane and upsetting to watch, but again, your brain reads it as so authentic that it takes a minute to remember somebody had to do that and get paid for it. I said I'd explain why I love this movie so much, but I really can't, when you get down to it - it's just one of those things with an atmosphere all of its own, that never gets old no matter how many times I watch it.

(Fitting that my first post of October should also be my 666th post - to me, at least; I've got some drafts you wouldn't know about that bring the post count up a bit. To you, though, number 666 will be coming soon.)