The 16 best Japanese horror movies
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For many in the West, the term "J-horror" evokes images of long-haired little girls climbing out of abandoned wells. And that's not incorrect — the J-horror craze of the late '90s and early '00s, spearheaded by Hideo Nakata's instant classic Ringu (1998), did produce some of the most memorable horror films in Japanese movie history.
But as one might expect from a country with one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world, Japanese filmmakers have been tapping into both their own subconscious fears and the ancient genre known as "kaidan" (lit. "weird stories") since movie cameras first arrived in this once-isolated island nation. Japanese horror lifts the thin curtain between the living and the dead, conjuring up vengeful ghosts and high-tech demons in transgressive tales of madness, mutation, and death. Here, in alphabetical order, are our decades-spanning picks of Japan's best.
<i>Audition</i> (1999)
Audition is a tough sell, but not because it's a bad movie. Quite the opposite, actually. The problem with discussing Takashi Miike's 1999 battle-of-the-sexes masterpiece is that the film's main selling point is also something that's best left unspoiled. Suffice it to say, if you're not sure how a more than slightly creepy romantic comedy about a lonely widower who enlists his film producer buddy to help him hold auditions for a new wife could also be one of the most celebrated and disturbing psychological horror films of the past 25 years — keep watching.
Available on: Tubi
<i>Blind Woman's Curse</i> (1970)
A titillating blend of exploitation, gangster-movie action, and Gothic horror, 1970's Blind Woman's Curse is memorable for two reasons. First is its unique combination of period swordplay — a genre known in Japanese as chanbara — and folklore-inspired paranormal elements. Second is its star, Lady Snowblood herself, '70s Japanese action icon Meiko Kaji. Kaji stars as the fiery head of an embattled yakuza clan, whose war against a rival gang takes on a terrifying new element when she's cursed by a black cat licking the blood from her enemies' wounds.
Available: To rent or buy on Apple TV+
<i>Cure</i> (1997)
Who are you, really? Take away your job and your family and your place in society — will there be anything left? That terrifying void is the subject of director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, a film that gives Se7en a serious run for its money as the darkest serial-killer thriller of the '90s.
The film centers on Detective Tanabe (Koji Yakusho), a dedicated homicide investigator leading a task force into a series of unexplained, grisly murders. In each case, a regular person with no history of violence kills someone close to them, with no memory of why or how they committed the crime. What follows is one of the most unsettling psychological cat-and-mouse games in film history.
Available on: Criterion Channel
<i>Dark Water</i> (2002)
Plenty of films delve into the subconscious fears of homeowners (see: the home-invasion subgenre). But Dark Water addresses a common nightmare among renters: Having something wrong with your apartment and no one around to fix it. Here, it's a leaky ceiling that drives a psychologically fragile divorceé to madness, along with visions of a ghostly little girl who looks suspiciously like the woman's six-year-old daughter. Hideo Nakata's followup to his international smash hit Ring is a slow-burn ghost story dripping with damp, chilly atmosphere, made even spookier by the film's seemingly prophetic connection to the Cecil Hotel/Elisa Lam case over a decade later.
Available on: Tubi, or to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video
<i>Godzilla</i> (1954)
Not all Godzilla movies are horror. In fact, a good number of the films produced during Big G's classic Showa era were made explicitly for children. But director Ishiro Honda's 1954 original takes Japan's collective trauma over the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and reshapes it into an unstoppable, fire-breathing monster that flattens everything it touches and leaves those who survive its initial attack sick with a mysterious illness. The original Godzilla is a powerful film about humanity's helplessness in the face of nuclear armageddon, with a central metaphor that's straightforward, but deceptively complex.
Available on: HBO Max
<i>Hausu (House)</i> (1977)
How to explain Hausu? Well, it begins with a group of cartoonishly nicknamed schoolgirls — the singer goes by Melody, while the tough one is called Kung Fu — who travel through the Japanese countryside to visit one girl's spinster witch aunt. Only she's not the fun, Sabrina kind of witch aunt, but the "bring household appliances to life to eat unsuspecting children" type. Oh, and then a fluffy white cat starts vomiting geysers of blood out of the wall.
Imagine all that, but on LSD, and you'll begin to get an idea of how strange and magical Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 cult classic really is. For his part, Obayashi said he based the film on one of his young daughter's nightmares, which also goes a long way towards explaining the giddy tone of this psychedelic ghost story.
Available on: Criterion Channel
<i>Ju-On: The Curse</i> (2000)
Made in just nine days on a miniscule budget, Ju-On: The Curse rose from direct-to-video obscurity into an international franchise on gruesomeness alone. Based on the idea that a person dying in extreme rage creates a curse that spreads like a virus, Takashi Shimizu's breakout hit has an oppressively morbid tone that overwhelms viewers with the terrifying inescapability of death. American remakes and subsequent sequels have varied in terms of how well they capture this macabre essence (Nicolas Pesce's 2020 The Grudge is actually one of the more evocative). But Shimizu's original still feels genuinely taboo.
Available: To rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video
<i>Kwaidan</i> (1965)
Based on the writings of folklorist Lafcadio Hearn —an American who moved to Japan and dedicated his life to documenting the country's ghost stories — Kwaidan is a meticulously crafted horror anthology that elegantly retells four classic tales of terror in sumptuous color. But don't let the film's traditional aesthetics fool you: The ageless women with long black hair and ice-cold kisses that populate this Cannes Special Jury Prize winner, accompanied by vengeful phantoms and a blind monk covered head to toe in protective sutras as he entertains the spirits of the dead, are as frightening as they are beautiful to behold.
Available on: HBO Max
<i>Kuroneko</i> (1968)
Many traditional Japanese ghost stories have a pseudo-feminist element to them, and Kuroneko is a fascinating example. The film is an early example of the "rape-revenge"subgenre about two women, a mother and a daughter, who transform into murderous ghosts after being assauted and murdered by a band of lawless samurai while the men of the family are away at war. The line between the human world and the spirit one is very thin in Kaneto Shindo's atmospheric ghost story, which stands out thanks to its eerie blend of savage violence, domestic melodrama, and haunting romance.
Available on: DVD and Blu-Ray (Criterion Collection)
<i>Noroi: The Curse</i> (2005)
Combining centuries-old evil with modern technology, Noroi: The Curse is one of the best found-footage horror movies ever made in any country. Koji Shiraishi's breakout 2005 hit is structured as a TV documentary deemed "too scary" for broadcast, about a paranormal investigator whose career comes to a fiery halt when he tangles with an ancient demon named Kagutaba. What makes Noroi: The Curse so effective is the way Shiraishi uses the conventions of TV documentaries to build a sense of creeping dread, as well as the evocative world-building and a killer screenplay (no pun intended).
Available on: Roku Channel
<i>One Cut of the Dead</i> (2017)
Like Audition, One Cut of the Dead is a movie where it's best if you go in knowing as little about it as possible. But what we can tell you is this: the movie is the little meta horror-comedy that could, rising from a drama-school workshop (and a $25,000 budget) to become Japan's seventh-highest grossing film of 2018 and an international festival favorite.
Writer-director Shinichiro Ueda builds on both zombie tropes and his own low-budget limitations to ingenious effect, making up for the lack of big names or expensive effects with impressively choreographed long takes, a witty, self-reflexive structure — and, yes, lots of heart. It's clear that the makers of One Cut of the Dead really love horror and movie-making. And their enthusiasm, much like the zombie virus in the film-within-a-film, is infectious.
Available on: Shudder
<i>Onibaba</i> (1964)
Another atmospheric classic from director Kaneto Shindo, Onibaba is a film with the restless mind of a sleeper struggling to get comfortable on a blazing-hot summer night. The entire film takes place in a marsh where two women, a mother and a daughter-in-law, make their living by murdering samurai who wander into their swampy territory and selling the warriors' armor for cash. And it's as paranoid and disconcerting as that description suggests, combined with a sweaty, animalistic eroticism that only thickens the psychosexual stew. It all leads up to a genuinely haunting finale, as human depravity meets fate's cruel sense of humor.
Available on: HBO Max
<i>A Page of Madness</i> (1926)
"J-horror" became an international buzzword in the early '00s, but Japanese directors have been making horror movies for as long as there's been a film industry in this island nation. Case in point: A Page Of Madness, a silent horror film released in 1926 and rediscovered in 1971. The story revolves around a sailor who takes a job at a mental asylum in order to be close to his wife, who's imprisoned there. But what's most mesmerizing about the film is its evocative, avant-garde expressionist style, created by a group of artists and performers who rejected the trend toward realism in cinema.
Available: To rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video
<i>Perfect Blue</i> (1997)
Unlike Western animation, which tends to lean toward more family-friendly storylines, Japanese anime truly encompasses all genres and styles of storytelling. A prime example is Perfect Blue, an excellent psychological thriller about a pop star being stalked by an obsessed fan that also happens to be animated.
Director Satoshi Kon uses the medium to his advantage, to be sure, utilizing the reality-bending possibilities of animation to take viewers inside his heroine's paranoid, fractured headspace. But the film's Hichcockian style and themes of voyeurism, identity, and gender performance transcend the means of their creation, making for a singular film-going experience.
Available: To rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video
<i>Ring (Ringu)</i> (1998)
The film that launched the J-horror craze of the late '90s and early '00s — not to mention a string of sequels and remakes that continues to this day — Hideo Nakata's Ring has proven to be a surprisingly durable concept. That's despite its technology-driven premise, which in the 1998 original involves a VHS tape and landlines (if you've seen the US remake, you know the story). Put simply, there's a haunted recording circulating out there. And if you watch it, you'll get a call informing you that you will die within seven days. The elegant simplicity of that hook is supported by a disturbing internal mythology and an unnerving physical performance from kabuki actress Rie Inoo, who plays a small but memorable role as the film's spasmodic, well-dwelling ghost Sadako.
Available on: Tubi
<i>Tetsuo: The Iron Man</i> (1989)
A gleefully twisted, voraciously horny take on body horror, Tetsuo: The Iron Man makes crazed music out of the jackhammering drumbeat and incessant screeching of metal on metal that soundtrack daily life in the big city.
Writer-director-producer Shinya Tsukamoto and a small band of dedicated collaborators filmed this defining document of Japanese cyberpunk over 18 months in co-star Kei Fujiwara's tiny Tokyo apartment, taping old TV parts to themselves to mimic the title character's grotesque transformation from a meek office worker into a "metal fetishist" whose orgasmic mutation threatens to consume the entire world.
Available on: Roku Channel, Sling TV
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