directed by Koji Shiraishi
Japan
72 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I'm not sure if I've ever reviewed anything by Koji Shiraishi before, but he has the distinction of having made possibly my favorite horror movie of all time, Noroi: The Curse. I know I throw around the term "favorite movie" often, but Noroi is head and shoulders above everything else and is one of the finest works of horror I've ever seen. It is also, by far, Shiraishi's best-known film; he is quite prolific but with little following outside of Japan. The majority of his horror films are found-footage and all involve a very specific theme, which I will go into further later. I'm also going to spoil basically the whole plot of this thing with reckless abandon, because I feel a burning need to talk about it, so if you're interested in watching this, don't read past this paragraph and just go do it. I consider Koji Shiraishi an essential director for any found-footage horror fan because of the way he messes with a subgenre that tends to get a little same-y after a while.
(I should note that this is the second in a series, and I haven't yet seen any of the others, but based on how good this one was, I'm going to take care of that immediately. The preceding film is mentioned at some points during this one, but the mentions of it do enough explaining that you don't feel like you're missing something.)
So on the surface this is a very straightforward found-footage movie. It purports to follow a film crew who investigate video files of strange, paranormal activity that are sent to them, traveling to the location shown on the videos and trying to see if they can capture or replicate the phenomena. They don't seem to have any context on the video they're sent in Shivering Ghost, but backstory on the people involved in the video will unfold throughout the film. The film depicts another amateur ghost-hunting crew going into a fairly disgusting abandoned building in search of an apparition. They start hearing weird noises, like the sound of a bell with no apparent source, as they home in on the location of the ghost. This is all filmed in a fantastically creepy way: Your mileage may vary with regards to how much you can stomach found-footage movies where somebody is whining and crying out of fear the whole time, but personally, if the rest of the film is handled well, I think having a character react with abject terror onscreen does a lot to boost my own feeling of anxiety towards the film. Shiraishi is really nothing less than a found-footage master; he knows exactly when to pause and zoom on a "ghost" so that, although it may be just a couple of blurry pixels, you feel like you're seeing something horrifying.
The ghost footage ends with the crew running out of the building in fear after having seen the apparition, and Shivering Ghost itself picks up when the documentary crew tracks down most of the people from the original footage and decides to accompany them back into the building to investigate further. All but one of the original crew go along for the ride: One of them, a woman named Yuko, is apparently missing. This will become important later. The second exploration of the building doesn't reveal any more ghosts, but there's still bizarre things going on, like most of the crew members from the original video suddenly seizing at the same time, and a spot in the ghost room that swallows up flashlight beams. Neither of these things are ever explained or brought up further.
This is pretty much where the ghost story ends. The genius of this film is that it only looks like a ghost story on the surface, and beneath, it's hiding something much, much less comprehensible. The direction the documentary crew goes in next is to try to find out what happened to Yuko, spurred on by one of the original crew members admitting that, after the footage, Yuko started acting "strange". (Another reason why you may find it hard to suspend your disbelief for this movie is how often people hold important information back for seemingly no in-universe reason; in actuality, it's clearly so that Shivering Ghost can have some kind of a plot, because if all the information was on the table from the start, there would be no movie.) During filming, the crew gets a voicemail from Yuko that's just gutteral screaming, so they go to her apartment, where she isn't there, but more bizarre events follow, as well as the manifestation of another apparition. We learn that Yuko has been in simultaneous relationships with several men and women, and those of them that the crew interviews talk about her as if she is herself some kind of strange entity; hinting - even coming out and saying - that she isn't human, and occasionally spawning an aura of darkness at, uh, inopportune times.
Trying to explain all of the individual events that happen in this movie is useless, because it goes off in so many different directions after the initial ghost video ends that you can barely keep track of them. But at the heart of it is an idea that Shiraishi revisits over and over in his films. Nearly everything of his I've seen has, at some point or another, circled back around to this concept that there are invisible, extradimensional, wormlike beings inhabiting or possibly invading the Earth, visible only to certain people, who are usually dismissed as insane. To my knowledge Occult is the film of his that deals with this most directly. Noroi, perhaps contributing to its being more accessible than the rest of his ouevre, deals with it only minimally, if at all, although the ghost fetuses do bear a resemblance to how Shiraishi usually depicts the creatures when they're made visible.
Since this is a series, I really can't say if any of the others pick up the thread or expand on what happens in Shivering Ghost, but the exact reason why I love this movie so much is because it is just utterly inexplicable. Something weird will happen and everyone will move on. Nobody seems to be much affected by having had actual seizures at the same time for no apparent reason. The thing with the flashlight beam disappearing once it crosses an invisible line in the ghost building is really, really creepy, and it's never explored. After a while it comes out that the actual building itself was designed to have something to do with these invisible beings, and that Yuko and the building's architect had some kind of teacher-student relationship, which hints at a far, far deeper history than just a simple ghost video. This whole thing, without the context of any other films around it, is so totally weird and out there, when at first all it looks like is a movie about an old haunted building. This is what you get from Shiraishi every single time: Something that continually stumps you, leading you to dead ends and roundabouts, constantly reinventing the story and dragging it by force into weirder and weirder places until you're not sure what a haunting or a possession really is anymore.
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