The Yurei
At the tender age of four, Kanako Inuki was handed a shiny new five-yen coin. Promising the same allowance each month, her mother took her to a bookstore and let her choose a manga magazine. Inuki considered a series by Masako Watanabe, but the pull of Kazuo Umezz proved impossible to resist. Despite scaring easily,
If someone from ten years ago told me that I would one day be able to find Junji Ito merchandise at even some of the biggest chain stores, I might not have believed them. Even now, I’m astounded each time I enter my car and see the Tomie air freshener that my niece got me.
LSD Dream Emulator is a PlayStation video game released in 1998 by Asmik Ace Entertainment, based on an MS-DOS program created in 1992 by Osamu Sato. Basically, the game consists of exploring a surrealistic dream world, where the player explores various dreamscapes and interacts with various objects. Despite its PS1 limitations and overall obscurity, a
Maniac Driver is a 2020 Japanese horror thriller, written and directed by Kurando Mitsutake. Mitsutake has worked in many areas of film production but is most notable as the director of Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf (2009) and Gun Woman (2014). Following a personal tragedy, a taxi driver randomly stalks and kills his female passengers
Korean genre cinema has never shied away from violence; from the unrelenting stream of beatings in I Saw The Devil to the eye-wateringly graphic tooth extraction in Oldboy, blood and brutality have long been a staple of some of the country’s best cinematic achievements. Enter Project Wolf Hunting (2022), a movie so drenched in viscera
Despite being one of Japan’s biggest film studios throughout the late 40s and 50s during the golden age of Japanese cinema, Daiei was struggling by the mid-60s and had to slash budgets for their productions. This eventually led to a merger with Nikkatsu in 1970, followed by bankruptcy in 1971. Somewhat overlooked is Daiei’s
Eichi Sato, known better in the following years for his work on the live-action adaptations of Lychee Hikari Club (2016) and Miso Misou (2018), found his way to shock us from the very beginning with his debut movie. Let’s Make the Teacher Have a Miscarriage Club (2011) is a film with many flaws, but its
After File 01 went off with a bang, Koji Shiraishi’s Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 02: Shivering Ghost (2012) tries something different and turns out unexpectedly good. The first episode of the mockumentary series didn’t disappoint in serving Koji’s found footage brands and Japanese myth goodness, showing how his knack for storytelling and genre
There is something about bad media that can be extremely attractive in some cases. Why The Room is still revered while The Exorcist II is panned? This fine line between so-good-it-is-bad and please-kill-it-with-fire-bad is still baffling. Maybe because we have always tried to make sense of this oddity, we end up being drawn to absolute
Audition (1999) is the scariest movie of all time. I say that without hesitation or hyperbole. No other director is as effective with their imagery as Takashi Miike is here, and no other film elicits fright as consistently on a tenth viewing as the first. The film is a delightful descent into madness executed nigh