Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Preface: True Story of the Ghost of Yotsuya (2014)

directed by Kōji Shiraishi

Japan

71 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of Yotsuya Kaidan and I love to see how it's handled through all the different adaptations of it that there are. I have not seen very many modern adaptations, however (Over Your Dead Body excepted, which is one of my favorite horror movies) and especially not one done in a found-footage style by possibly Japan's finest found-footage director.

I've reviewed at least one of these Senritsu Kaiki File movies before, so I'll run through the basics of the series pretty quickly: the setup is that there's a team who investigates videos of apparently paranormal phenomena that are sent in to them by viewers, but where this series differs from other ghost-investigation found-footage (besides Shiraishi putting his usual spin on it, which I'll get to later) is that the leader of the team is genuinely unhinged, and his crew seems to stick with him largely out of fear. This is... not quite played for laughs, but there's definitely some kind of absurdist humor going on here.

The paranormal video that the team is sent in this film comes from another film crew who were in the middle of making a Yotsuya Kaidan adaptation, but believed they'd provoked Oiwa's spirit because they didn't perform the proper purification ritual that's necessary to do before putting on a Yotsuya Kaidan production. (Note: I don't know if this is actually a thing.) The video is kinda bogus: all it is is what might be a floating head behind an actress wearing gyaru makeup. The team investigates the actress who was in the video and gets chased away with a knife when they find her, and then they look into another crew member from the art department, whose house also seems to be haunted. It becomes clear that none of the locations they visit is the problem, though - the problem is that Oiwa's spirit has attached itself to Ichikawa, co-host of the show.

I gotta say this really feels like The Ichikawa Movie™. Ichikawa undergoes a grueling exorcism to attempt to remove Oiwa's spirit from her, during which time she becomes possessed by it. Chika Kuboyama's performance in this scene gave me the impression that this was something she'd been holding back this entire time and only now was she given the chance to actually do some acting. It's kind of amazing.

I wouldn't recommend this for someone purely interested in the Yotsuya Kaidan connection, because it doesn't really focus that heavily on the play or its backstory, but what it does instead makes it even more interesting. The film posits that Oiwa is a fictional character who has been brought into a physical existence by the collective imagination: one of the film's more genuinely creepy moments is a surprisingly low-key interview with a scholar who elaborates on how a ghost story that is believed by enough people can gain the power to manifest itself in reality. But the film then takes a left turn and says that Oiwa is just a puppet, that there's something older and more terrible using her as a kind of conduit to enter our world. As always, the metafictional element of this series allows for some really fascinating explorations of the nature of ghost stories and how they influence reality, but you do have to put up with Shiraishi's quirks in order to enjoy it.

I have no trouble with said quirks, because I've already been a huge fan of Shiraishi's for a long time, but... the best way I can put it is like this: imagine you have a friend who is really, really good at telling scary stories. He has a huge repertoire and he's excellent at creating atmosphere, and all your friends get really into it whenever you're sat around a campfire or whatever listening to him tell a story. No two of them are the same - he has a great talent for inventing new stories. But every story ends with your friend talking about how there's a parallel dimension that's filled with worms. The things he has to say about the worm dimension are as creepy and engaging as the preceding story itself, but the worm dimension is always there. Some of your friends don't mind, because they find the worm dimension to be an interesting topic, and your friend is so good at telling his stories about it that it's hard to find fault. But some of your other friends just go "ugh, he's going off about the worm dimension again."

That's Kōji Shiraishi. You have to put up with the worms to watch his movies. They are always there. Always.