Crazy Scary (2023) Film Review – Honoring Kaidan Through the Lens of DIY

Posted on by Oki Covarrubias

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It is no mystery to seasoned J-horror fans that many of the most prolific directors of the genre started their careers making low-budget short films for television or straight-to-video productions, otherwise known as V-cinema. Takashi Shimizu of Ju-On fame, for example, dipped his toes in the waters of V-cinema with 4444444444, In a Corner, and Ju-On: The Curse 1 & 2, before diving headfirst into feature-length theatrical releases, earning him much-deserved success.

Following in those footsteps, filmmaker Seiya Tomari, who has been uploading short horror films on his YouTube channel J Horror Story since 2020, was able to release a compilation of his work as a film titled Crazy Scary, three years after the inception of his online account. Crazy Scary is a one-hour anthology horror flick with a total of nine short stories. In the office, in the bathroom, in bed—the characters all encounter supernatural deformities. But it’s not them that are truly terrifying, it’s the humans.

Like any anthology film, Crazy Scary’s shorts range from mediocre to exceptional. The first two segments, ‘Office’ and ‘White Footprints’, are especially brief, clocking in at around 5 minutes each, leaving little room for build-up or dread. These two initial shorts may not instantly engage one’s attention, as they didn’t for me, but they certainly set the tone for the rest of the film, featuring the white-painted specters that one would expect from V-Cinema horror. It wasn’t until the third short titled ‘White Woman in the Toilet’ that I really started to enjoy the ride.

‘White Woman in the Toilet’ features director Tomari-san himself, playing a man who locks himself in his restroom to avoid a ghastly figure that suddenly strikes terror into him upon arriving home. This is the first short to place greater emphasis on its characters, giving them just enough personality to make the horror feel more grounded—even if the story itself stays pretty bare-bones due to its runtime. 

The shorts that follow are more or less the same in terms of entertainment value, with some standouts being ‘Starving Samurai’, which follows two choleric samurai in a forest as they battle it out for survival at all costs, and ‘Part-Time Job Washing Corpses’, the final segment in the film that follows a young man who gets hired to look after and tend to the corpse of a young woman in a bathtub. This last short definitely leaves a lasting impression as it is perhaps the most eccentric of the bunch. 

The practical effects are undeniably low-budget, but there’s a scrappy charm to them—the kind of handmade grotesqueness that feels both endearing and unsettling in a most delightful way. They’re like a haunted arts and crafts project gone horribly right. I don’t imagine that anyone going into this film knowing that it’s an indie production is expecting polished effects or complex storytelling, but what it lacks in polish, it makes up for in pure chaotic charm.

Crazy Scary is a solid addition to the innumerable list of low-budget anthology horror films in the V-cinema catalog. Not every segment lands, but across nine bite-sized ghostly tales, each with its own strange twist, the film succeeds in honoring Japan’s long tradition of kaidan, filtered through the lens of modern DIY horror. It’s endearing, as expected, the way 4444444444 and In a Corner are, and it has enough spectral surprises to warrant a watch.

I’m definitely curious to see what Seiya Tomari produces in the near future—Crazy Scary is currently on its fourth installment, and I have yet to see any of the sequels to confirm whether or not he took a different route with the format. He has a few other indie films under his belt, but I would love to see what he could do with a bigger budget and a longer runtime. Sometimes horror can be overproduced to the point that it loses its charm (I’m looking at you, Ju-On!), but if other directors like Shimizu can successfully graduate from V-cinema, so can Tomari-san!

 

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