Dark Water is a 2002 J-horror directed by Hideo Nakata and starring Hitomi Kuroki, Rio Kanno. It involves a woman, Yoshimi Matsubara, who, in the midst of an unpleasant divorce, moves to an eerie, run-down apartment building with her young daughter, Ikuko. The ceiling of their apartment has a dark and active leak. Yoshimi discovers that the upstairs apartment, which appears to be the source of the leak, was formerly the home of a young girl named Mitsuko Kawai, who was of similar age to her daughter. The child had attended the same kindergarten Ikuko now attends. Mitsuko was abandoned by her mother and vanished more than a year ago. She also had owned a red bag which was the same bag that Ikuko found on the apartment roof when first viewing the apartment. Read more…
Retribution is a 2006 J-horror movie directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and starring Kôji Yakusho and Manami Konishi. Yoshioka, an experienced police detective, investigates the murder of an unknown woman in a red dress. She was drowned on the Tokyo waterfront, in a pool of muddy water, but an autopsy reveals that her belly is full of seawater. Read more…
Kwaidan is a 1964 Japanese portmanteau film directed by Masaki Kobayashi; the title means ‘ghost story’. It is based on stories from Lafcadio Hearn’s collections of Japanese folk tales. The film consists of four separate and unrelated stories. Kwaidan is the archaic transliteration of Kaidan, meaning “ghost story”. Read more…
Categories: classics, j-horror, movies Tags: ghosts, horror, keiko kishi, lafcadio hearn, masaki kobayashi, michiyo aratama, misako watanabe, rentaro mikuni, tatsuya nakadai
Pulse (Kairo) is a 2001 Japanese horror film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The film was based on his novel of the same name, and was released in the US in 2005 as Pulse. The movie is the subject of a 2006 English language remake Pulse. Read more…
Ju-on (The Grudge) is a 2003 Japanese “J-Horror” film, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu. The film is the third entry in the Ju-on series and is the first film theatrically released. The film was released in Japan on January 25, 2003 and has spawned several sequels and an American remake titled The Grudge which was released in 2004. Read more…
