Tag: J-Horror
For the length of time that zombie movies have been a part of horror, it is only natural that the subgenre would eventually go stale, occasionally requiring a total re-evaluation of the creature design to breathe new life into the genre. As with classics such as White Zombie (1932) becoming obsolete after George A. Romero
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (1977) is memorable as a haunted house movie that defines itself through a whimsical absurdity forming a reality independent from any conventional filmmaking. It presents a cartoonish vision of our world, strange as the uncanny artificial foregrounds and otherworldly lighting; ultimately resembling a family-friendly film distorted into the surrealism of slapstick horrors.
Today I want to talk about a little film called Avatar. No, not the bloated CGI-laden thinly-veiled sci-fi retelling of Disney’s Pocahontas directed by James Cameron Avatar, I’m talking about the 2011 J-Horror movie directed by Atsushi Wada. Sure, it’s the only Japanese horror film with the title but unfortunately, the general headspace for most
Biotherapy is a Japanese 1986 sci-fi horror that’s aptly described as a slasher merged into a splatter creature feature. The short movie was released as a project from the limited career of director Akihiro Kashima and it dismays me how we never had the opportunity for more of such fun productions – the splatterpunk scene
The Kisaragi Station is a Japanese urban legend originating on the 2Ch message boards in 2004 and revolves around the private railway at Shizuoka. Shared as an anecdote in the thread ‘Post About Strange Occurrences Around You: Thread 26’, the tale recounted how the anonymous user – who was later identified as ‘Hasumi’ – awoke
Always on the prowl for new horror manga to check out, you sometimes have to browse off the beaten path. Randomly looking into titles lead me to Man Eater by Yosuke Takahasi, a mangaka I had never heard of previously. Having had moderate success in the past on going with gut instinct on a title,
Susumu Nokoshi once worked for a top foreign financial company. He is now a 34-year-old homeless man, usually found around a park in Shinjuku. He then meets medical school student Manabu Ito, who is looking for volunteers to undergo a surgical procedure known as trepanation. The surgery involves drilling a hole in the skull. Susumu
It is safe to say that the global coronavirus pandemic has drastically changed our world and the way we both operate and interact within it. Nowhere has this been more overwhelmingly true than in the film industry. What started with horror fans celebrating their favorite on-brand pandemic themed features has slowly devolved into a mired
One of the many perks of Blu-Ray re-releases is the granted ability to revisit a film that you otherwise might not have, or in some cases, the chance to check off a much-anticipated first-time-watch from your bucket list. When it comes to Meatball Machine, I fall into the former. In fact, if memory serves me
In 2017, a little movie from Japan called One Cut of the Dead arrived on the scene and took everyone by surprise. Being a micro-budget movie that was only made as a conclusion to an acting workshop, it received a mere week of theatrical run initially, but reviews were rave, and positive word-of-mouth spread quickly.