Occult (2009), Found Footage, Birds

A mockumentary framing offers a nice spin to the found footage genre. While most found footage films are shot and arranged in an amateur fashion to preserve their realism and home video sense, mockumentary is its counterpart. Here, the believability of the horror comes from one’s flair in crafting conceivable documentation of something purely fictional.

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“Strings of gold sway gently in the wind, They play a sweet and gentle melody, At night I walk in the pale moonlight, Together with a dream, A secret dream..” Having spent most of my adolescence hunting down Japanese films at my local video stores and rummaging through endless online forums to discover new titles,

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Sensor Junji Ito manga Cover Photo

Junji Itō is easily the most prolific horror mangaka in English translation. Viz Media has made a concerted effort to bring as much of his work to the west as possible, with Kodansha and Vertical Comics licensing the few titles Viz missed. There is certainly a valid argument to be made that the popularity of

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I distinctly remember when it was announced that Takashi Shimizu, one of the most consistent contributors to Japanese horror over the last two decades, was going to direct a film based on the infamous Aokigahara forest. It came as a surprise to those of us who were still waiting on a similar project to come

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Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell Cover Photo

Being one of the most attributed inspirations in filmmaking, filmmakers around the world have cited The Evil Dead series as a motivation to create cinema for themselves. The mastery of the low-budget filmmaking process, which led to various highly esteemed horror films, still hold its own to this day in the horror genre – ingenuity

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Japanese Monster Slashers

It’s Halloween and I therefore decided to do a recap of horror-related tropes or subgenres in Japanese entertainment! An obvious choice, taking up a fair amount of the genre landscape, are slashers – something much less associated to Japanese cinema. Now, clearly, Japan has no shortage of iconic slasher movies: …However, as my core interest

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Spirit Hunter Shinrei Horror J-Horror

Today I’d like to talk to you about the visual novel series, Spirit Hunter, known in Japan as Shinrei Horror (心霊ホラー), a series that seems to have passed many by, but is definitely worth your consideration. The first game, Death Mark, was initially released in 2017 and an English translation was released a year later.

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Being a subjective genre, horror, much like its fans, is incredibly varied compared to other genres in film. From solid scares, slow-burning tension or just a general spooky atmosphere, there are a lot of things that can be grouped together under the horror umbrella. But, for those that require something a little more unyielding in

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Over the years of watching cinema, we have all experienced something so shocking, so horrifying that it has stuck with us long after the fact, permanently burnt into our memories. Whether it was a scary movie seen at far too young of an age or something so visually intense that was mentally overwhelming, we have

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