Streaming Availability: Shudder
Noroi: The Curse is a found-footage horror movie, the first major film from prolific genre director Kōji Shiraishi. The whole movie is shot on VHS home video cameras, which were already way out of date by 2005. More advanced digital video cameras were common and cheap, DVD was already the preferred home video format, and the HD revolution was underway. I do not think Noroi was ever officially released on VHS cassette. The strange antiquarianism is important to this movie’s affect, however. Archaic media formats are core to found-footage and the related phenomenon of creepypasta. The more anachronistic the medium, the more complex the meta-layer of the story grows, and the more disturbing it becomes. Even this film, which claims to have been shot in late 2003 and early 2004, needs that cloud of artifacting and lo-fi degradation to be “believable”.
Noroi (which means "curse" in Japanese, so the English title means "Curse: The Curse") has a meta-layer of being the final film from paranormal "researcher", Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki). Kobayashi is a minor documentarian, studying occult activities in Japan. We never learn about his previous works, but we do not get a sense of much fame or success, and one suspects this guy is not terribly concerned if his stories are actually bullshit. The film-within-a-film, also called "Noroi", is shown to us by a spooky disembodied narrator, explaining that the film was completed, but a few days later, Kobayashi's home burnt down in mysterious circumstances. The director has disappeared, no body found. The distance between reality and fiction are further confused when a Japanese actress, Marika Matsumoto (the voice of Rikku from Final Fantasy X), appears in the documentary playing herself.
Thanks to this concept, we get clear answers as to why all this footage has been tightly edited and who did it. That’s an annoying problem that movies like Paranormal Activity cannot answer. Speaking of that franchise, its central gimmick of staring at a possessed woman all night in case she does something creepy is just one scene in Noroi. Marika has found herself mysteriously tying intricate loops and knots without memory of doing so. Kobayashi helpfully films her sleeping, and indeed, she’s got something controlling her at night. Many found-footage movies are slow, methodical build-ups to the big punchlines, relying on atmosphere, not big set-pieces. Noroi actually has both. We get a demon in camera by a half hour in. Since Kobayashi and his crew are watching their own footage, they play it back to point it out to us. They edit in freeze-frames just in case you missed it. So you end up with a movie that has all the most interesting features of Lake Mungo, The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activity all in two hours of dense plotting and big scares. It will not leave you feeling short-changed if atmosphere alone is not your path to entertainment.
There is a lot going on in Noroi. Kobayashi starts off just by checking out reports of a creepy neighbor, Junko Iishi (Tomono Kuga) and her quiet little boy (Shûta Kambayashi). But later he's folding in the disappearance of a psychic little girl, Kana (Rio Kanno), who draws horrifying asymmetrical faces. There's Marika's possession. Then there's Hori (Satoru Jitsunashi), a paranoid, dirty man with huge cavities in his teeth, wearing a tin-foil hat, and raving about "ectoplasmic worms". You'd expect a character like this to be played more exploitative than he is; a lot of more movies would make Hori into a comic relief - Noroi does not. He’s over-the-top but he’s more an omen of the impending horror that’s coming for the entire cast. Turns out Junko is part of a black magic cult from a recently-sunken village named Shimokage. Worse, she has been stealing aborted fetuses for a horrible reason.
Then there's the issue that everybody keeps disappearing. Junko and her boy keep popping in and out of places in Tokyo. The first group of people who reported Junko to our director disappear a few days later. Kana disappears. A neighbor actress of Marika's disappears. Some guy who played with pigeons in a weird way disappears. The relocated Shimokage villagers keep their homes full of dogs that are constantly barking. All the dogs disappear. And we need to remember that even Kobayashi himself is doomed to an unknown fate. That dramatic irony gives the movie a lot of tension. However, before the end, most of these people will come back, never in great shape. (Warning to animal lovers: you will not enjoy Noroi.)
There's a lot of detail to the spookiness in Noroi. The demon uses pigeons as his calling card. We get a thick mythology involving multiple symbols and faces. The whole issue of abortion is tied into some running problem with mental health and a cold-unfeeling sense of the world. There's so very much wrong happening in plain view, yet it is left unsolved, indeed mostly unquestioned. Nobody seems to be interested in actually solving any of this mystery except Kobayashi, who is probably a con-artist when his movies do not actually involve demons. (Though, that is my interpretation, very few characters get much development beyond being victims of the terror.)
My other disappointment is that the demonology of this movie is mostly invented. The central demon is named "Kagutaba", a local folk spirit of the Shimokage area. We never get much clarity on what Kagutaba is or what it wants, but it is heavily associated with the Shinto traditions. In old 16 MM films - again the spookypasta theme of old technology - we see a priest and a masked woman dressed as that asymmetrical face that Kana drew perform a ritual to cleanse the area. It involves bowing and clapping and cutting a string, only for it fail and the masked woman to scream uncontrollably. Kagutaba's face looks a lot like the demon masks used in Japanese theater, only much more awful. Later one of the biggest scares of the movie is set under a torii, the iconic gates that mark the entrance to a Shinto shrine. We see Kana covered in little crawling fetuses, themselves looking like mischievous Yōkai spirits. I'd rather have an authentic Yōkai, but Noroi is still a great horror movie.
And it is nice to take a break from talking about Satan every day. I love the Devil as much as the next guy but not everything is about you, Lucifer. The Japanese conception of demons is wildly different. Many of them are more like mischievous fairies or adorable little freaks. Shinto is a really interesting religion, since it is without a central dogma or orthodoxy. It can co-exist with Buddhism in Japan without a worry. So demons are usually not global threats that could destroy the moral order of the universe, they're often just fun little ghouls. Kagutaba seems to be also inspired by Christian demon films, thus the evil conspiracy to create him. Junko's little boy might be as close to an Anti-Christ as you can fit into Shintoism.
Noroi did have some back luck upon initial release. You'd imagine a movie like this would have been a huge international hit, coming out right between the found-footage horror craze and the big run of East Asian horror. However, that meant it landed in exactly the worst spot. By 2005 the J-horror movement in America was dying down. Incredible movies such as Kairo were turned into dogshit like 2006's Pulse and we were sick of it. (I think Takashi Miike made One Missed Call in 2003 cynically to get an American remake.) That leaves Noroi just too late to follow The Ring, but too early to get on the bandwagon of [REC]. There was no way it wasn't going to find an audience, however. The V/H/S franchise would spool up a new-interest in magnetic media by 2012. So Noroi was finally given a release here in the West by Shudder in 2020. Fifteen years too late, but not nothing.
Next Time! You know my sister is named "Emily" and her middle name is "Rose"? I guess I cannot avoid this one, The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
Leave your sister out of this! Love, Mom
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