How can this possibly go wrong? ¥980 is about $10 right now. That is to say, it's not very much money. It's particularly cheap for a DVD containing "over 120 minutes of astonishing horror footage." And yet, that's exactly what 本当にあった 恐怖の心霊・都市伝説DVD BOX ("Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX") offers at that price. I was more than a little skeptical. I mean, the price point was the first warning sign. The second was that I found this cinematic tour de force in my local Family Mart, of all places, stuffed in-between the weekly women's magazines and ¥100 onigiri. Family Mart does not sell horror, you know. They're mostly focused on essentials like potato chips, coke drinks, extra batteries, and umbrellas. A giant box proclaiming to have "real footage so scary you can't shut your eyes" was a bit conspicuous. But, I mean, for ¥980, I figured what the hell. Worst (and most likely) case, it's terrible and I can laugh at it. And maybe, just maybe, there'll be a gem hiding in those 120 minutes. At 8 yen per minute, you can't really go wrong. Heck, if I bought this thing off Amazon I'd have to pay for shipping. So I bought it. This is not the first time I have done this. A couple of years ago I came home with a set of DVDs called Tales of Terror from Tokyo, which sounded terrible and, based on the packaging and box notes, looked like complete schlock. I was pleasantly surprised by Tales of Terror; it turned out that small, 5 minute episodes were a pretty good format and that a couple of the directors involved with the series had produced some pretty neat stuff. I like the idea that a director has a very short amount of time, and probably no budget whatsoever, to find a way to make things scary. Some of the best horror has its roots in simplification by necessity; The Blair-Witch Project is one famous example. The first hilarious thing about Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX is that it really is just a box. "DVD BOX" usually means "box set," here in Japan, but in this case, it's just a giant, empty box. Well, it's not entirely empty: there's some filler cardboard and a single disc. But that's all. No liner notes, no There it is in all of its glory. ¥980 well spent. nothing. At ¥980 these guys are probably making a killing. The first "story" is a collection of shinrei shashin pictures: photos of regular people in which ghosts are supposed to have been inadvertently captured. The first one is clearly a simple photoshop of the vampire's face from Nosferatu, and the rest are similarly lame. The sequence of photos ends with the sound of a woman screaming. Not a good start. Fortunately (and I say "fortunately" because anything is better than watching a video of still photos), the remainder of the DVD contains actual video. The rest of the DVD is a series of "stories" (their word, not mine) about a young woman who ventures into scary, and reportedly haunted, places with her video camera. She carefully climbs a long rock staircase to a supposedly haunted shrine, she ventures into old, abandoned houses looking for certain mirrors that are said to reflect ghosts, and generally freaks herself out. The presentation is more than a little Blair Witch inspired; she keeps a running monologue going and periodically turns the camera to face her (which I found particularly improbable, considering that she's supposed to be in a scary dark place and the camera is her only source of light). This really is horror on a shoe-string budget. The thing is, as simple as it is, it almost works. Japan is chock-full of fantastic places to make scary videos like this. It's got old, moss-covered, dilapidated shrines, there are war-era tunnels and bases to be found, not to mention your standard set of abandoned homes in the middle of nowhere. Even with no budget, the producers of these stories have absolutely fantastic sets to work on because Japan is full of scary-looking places. But of course it does not work. There are too many basic problems for the scenes to be involving; the reporter woman can't seem to keep the camera pointed in the way that she is moving so half the footage is a dark view of a floor someplace. And she keeps complaining about how dark it is without once activating the night vision mode on her camera (which the filmmakers make the mistake of introducing to us in the first scene). But the most amazing thing about this series is that nothing actually happens. The reporter ventures into a scary location, gets scared, and then leaves. No ghosts or otherwise scary things ever show up. And then, and then, as if the producers of this set were on some mission to make the most impotent horror film ever, the series gets even more boring! After the initial reporter has ventured I'm so scared, I'm filming myself! into scary-but-ultimately-harmless places several times, a new series starts in which a different girl does mostly the same, but in places that are even less scary (one of the sequences is, I shit you not, about a hill that, according to the DVD, some people think looks like a face). "Oh, I feel something. It's very sad here. I can feel something like an old man, and he's very lonely," the girl drones. Five minutes later the sequence is over and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. And then another starts and again, NOTHING HAPPENS. The last sequence they mix up a bit by having two girls (!!) and a couple of guys venture into some supposedly-cursed area (if people dying in a location is enough to curse it, every square foot of Japan must be cursed), and talk about it for a while, and guess what? NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS AND THEY LEAVE!! This is so far worse, so far, far worse, than I had imagined it could be. At least if they had a guy in a rubber mask I could believe that they were trying. But no, despite the fantastic locales (goddamn face-hill excepted), any potential these sequences might have had for horror is absolutely, completely squandered. They could have made them 10x better without actually spending any more money. Having a guy in a black outfit with a black face mask standing unobtrusively in the corner of one of the scenes, unnoticed by the reporter but obvious to the viewer, would have been enough to push this nonsense into the realm of "potentially watchable." The reporter people don't even get properly scared; they just sort of complain about the spot and leave. I mean, come on, I'm going way out on a limb for you guys here. I purchased a video for ¥980. Throw me a bone! Or at least a plastic skeleton! ANYTHING. I guess that if there is one interesting takeaway from this video, it's that the filmmakers are obviously working under the impression that their target audience already believes in ghosts, curses, evil spirits--the whole package. They believe their audience to be in such a vulnerable state already that they can get away with simply suggesting that maybe, possibly, according to somebody's brother's sister's mailman's uncle, there's a ghost around here somewhere. The whole set operates off this idea that the area is scary because it is potentially haunted; the stories don't give you any reason to believe in them--you have to be a believer already. And maybe that actually describes some people in Japan. In any event, 8 yen per minute was a rip-off for Absolutely Real Scary Ghosts and Urban Legends DVD BOX. But at least I got this blog post out of it.

This is a bit off-topic for this blog, but I wanted to make comment about the film adaptation of 20th Century Boys (２０世紀少年) a pretty killer manga by Naoki Urasawa. The manga is about Kenji, a regular joe convenience store owner who realizes that a story he wrote as a child about the destruction of Tokyo is being used as basis for an insane terrorist plot. The manga is very long and quite complicated; it jumps back and forth between present-day Japan, Japan in the near future, and Japan in the early 1960s. There are a great many characters and the connections between them are hard to keep track of. But the whole thing is fascinating, both because it's a high tension drama about a single man's attempt to stop a madman that everybody else seems to love, and because it shows how the central characters age and change over time. It is not, I would think, an easy work to convert into a film. However, having watched the first film a few weeks ago (which covers about the first 1/2 of the story; the second film is in theaters here now), I am greatly impressed by the extreme care with which the story has been adapted. There are a few minor changes, and more than a few unnecessary scenes have been trimmed, but fundamentally the (quite long) film hits every single major plot point from the first half of the manga series perfectly. The characters are all there, and the actors and actresses portraying them have been so perfectly selected that most characters are immediately recognizable. This is, hands down, the most faithful adaptation of any comic, video game, or book to film that I have ever seen (the first couple of Spider-Man films were pretty faithful too, but they have nothing on 20th Century Boys). It's as if the director sat down with the comic panels and used them directly as his story boards; with the exception of a number of omitted scenes, it's pretty much all there. The problem is, I get the feeling that the film will make absolutely no sense to viewers who are not already familiar with the manga. The transitions from scene to scene, from time slice to time slice, are too abrupt and arbitrary; in the original comic there were plenty of pages of exposition to ease the reader from one theme to the next, but the film has so many bases to cover in such a short amount of time that it is reduced to a collection of almost unconnected scenes (although each scene itself is quite good). Clearly the film suffers from its short time limit, even though it clocks in at two and a half hours. There's just too much story to tell, and while a series of three films might have made more sense length-wise, the plot is very easy to divide in half and very hard to divide into thirds. So I am left wondering if a work like this can be translated to film properly. Stephen King is famously hands-off when it comes to films based on his work because he believes film to be fundamentally different than writing, and he leaves it in the hands of his directors to render his works in screen format. But then again, almost all of the movies based on Kings works are terrible (though it's worth mentioning that the non-terrible ones are absolute gems). In the case of 20th Century Boys, the director has been absolutely meticulous in the translation of the manga to film, and yet the result feels disjointed and off-pace. When I went to see the Silent Hill film, the friends I was with were evenly split about the first fifteen minutes: those who have played the games loved the well-executed film recreation, and those who had not played the games found the intro long and boring. I've yet to see the Siren film that came out here in Japan, but I suspect that it will be pretty bad if it just tries to recreate the plot of the game; there's too many characters and too much cyclical interaction for the story to play out well linearly. Maybe the approach of the first Resident Evil film, which used the main characteristics of the series as its thematic basis but then presented an original story, is the better way to go (that film is unfortunately also pretty bad). This is, perhaps, an area where games are closer to literature than to film. A game has a very long time to present its story, and details can emerge at a rate much slower than in a film. Maybe the reason that game stories suck so much (David Cage likened them to porn film plots) is that film-length tales are being dragged out for 10 or 20 hours when they really only have enough content to sustain two hours. Hmm, a new theory to consider.

Last year my network of horror-aficionado friends started talking about a hard-to-find Spanish film called REC. The few reviews available were stellar, and I was intrigued with the idea of a Blair Witch-style film about zombies (as I mentioned in my Cloverfield review, the handicam approach to horror seems to be pretty viable). But, as far as I know, REC isn't available in the US. It was remade this year (one year after the original release; predictably, the remake staring English-speakers is inferior to the original), so maybe now it will come out on DVD, but at the moment it's a hard film to find in the States. But not so in Japan! This weekend I sat down with a friend and watched the film, and while it didn't totally blow me away, I found it to be an extremely capable zombie flick. There's an immediacy about the movie, partially because it's all handheld photography but also because events occur in succession faster than the characters are able to respond. A TV crew doing a show about how firefighters spend their evenings find themselves trapped in a small apartment building when the government blocks all of the exits and declares a quarantine. The crew, along with a couple of firefighters and the residents of the building, have no idea why they've been sealed off or when they'll be able to leave. And the old woman upstairs seems to be having some problems; she keeps screaming at the top of her lungs. Based on this fairly simple premise, REC takes off like a bolt and doesn't really ever slow down. It's one revelation after another, and though a few moments are pretty predictable for the most part the characters and the audience figure things out at the same pace. The end is a mixed bag; on the one hand it is one of the most tension-filled scenes in the film, but on the other it veers dangerously close to the trap of trying to explain everything. This is how horror films should be made. Not that they all have to be shaky handicam productions, just that the formula is simple and the execution excellent. All extraneous bits (monsters, gore, sex scenes) have been removed in service to the central focus of the film: scaring the viewers. Though REC isn't a perfect horror film, and though it's not the type of movie that leaves you pondering the plot after the credits roll, I was pretty happy with it. Skip the remake (and even the trailer for the remake--they reveal some key scenes) and find yourself a copy of the DVD.

Brandon over at insert credit posted about a horror short that he worked on which is part of a contest from a site called ChillerTV. There are a ton of entries (though so far, the one Brandon linked to is the best that I've seen), and at five minutes, it's fun to see filmmakers try to invent a scary situation under time pressure. It's actually kind of the same type of experiments that I liked in the Tales of Terror from Tokyo series. Some of the shorts are better than others, but with this number of entries there are sure to be some really nice films. Check it out!

Update: The more of these I watch the more convinced I am that Brandon's film is several orders of magnitude better than the competition. Some of these shorts are really, really bad; I suppose that's to be expected with an internet contest, but after seeing the Insert Credit film I had high hopes for the rest. Alas, it seems that Brandon's film is the outlier. It's still interesting to see how people with no restrictions (and, to be fair, no budget) attempt to just duplicate their favorite scenes from established horror films rather than trying something new. Perhaps the plethora of crappy Hollywood horror films is the product of a "horror is easy" mindset that afflicts indy film makers as well.

Here's a couple of videos I've come across lately:

• Some super alpha handicam vid of Sadness actually running. I think that this footage is legit; that black box on top of the guy's TV is a Wii dev kit (I used to have the same kind on my desk), and the footage looks like prototype-level quality (minor, obvious things, like interpolation of the rotation angle of the characters, is missing, which means that this is really, really early in the game's development). What we don't know is when this was shot--if it's recent, I think this game has at least another year of development ahead. If it's fairly old, then the game might actually be in active development now. Either way, Sadness just got one (very tiny) step closer to not being vaporware.
• Here's some early footage of a recently-announced Wii horror game called Cursed Mountain. I'm not one to hang a lot of value on trailers, but this looks pretty neat! Thanks to forums member suedepup for the link.
• Finally, another gem from suedepup is this absolutely fantastic claymation zombie short. In six minutes the author has captured the essence of the Romero zombie formula, and he or she has done it with humor and style too.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing the film section of my local Japanese bookstore when I came across a box set of four discs called Tales of Terror From Tokyo and All Over Japan. Now, to tell you the truth, the set looked like utter schlock. In addition to the awkward title and terrible cover art, the distribution company responsible for the series is a group called "Tokyo Shock." There's no useful information on the back of the box and the whole thing was selling for $30 for all four discs (most of the other films at this store go for $30 each). It looked like a very blatant attempt to ride the post Ring wave of interest in Japanese horror films; I could tell right there in the bookstore that this Tokyo Shock group got the rights to whatever they could in Japan and released it here in hopes of making a quick buck. I bought it. I mean, four discs for $30 is a steal, and I figured that even if it was utter crap I could peruse it for funny screen captures for blog posts. And the back of the box said something about "over 60 episodes," so I figured they can't all be bad, right? Plus I recognized some of the director's names that were listed on the back of the box, and some of them have been responsible for films that weren't half bad. So I said to myself, "what the heck." That was about four weeks ago, and I'm just getting around to watching the damn thing now. I've only watched the first disc so far, but I am happy to report that I am so far pleasantly surprised by the set. As I imagined, Tokyo Shock has snagged whatever horror-related material they could and reissued it here in the states. It turns out, however, that the material they were able to grab isn't all that bad. The series is from a TV show called Kaidan Shin Mimibukuro (怪談新耳袋), which started running in Japan in 2003 (meaning that the show itself was probably an attempt to ride the Ring boom to profitability). What's really cool about the show is that each episode is really, really short: five minutes at the most. This means that the directors have a very little amount of time to set up a scene, introduce characters, and then get to the scary bits. The results are definitely mixed, and the acting is pretty mediocre across the board, but I found many of the episodes to be quite good. The episodes that keep things simple are the most effective; those that try to be a regular film in a five-minute timeframe are less stellar. And some of the stories are just sort of nonsensical rather than scary. Each episode is a self-contained story. The format resembles an earlier Japanese TV show, Yonimo Kimyouna Monogatari (世にも奇妙な物語), which was sort of a modern-day version of The Twilight Zone when it aired throughout the 1990s. The biggest difference is the Shin Mimibukuro's five-minute format, which is what I think saves the series from being bad. The stories themselves are often just scenes: an elevator is headed down but it's already on the ground floor; somebody is at the door and they sure don't sound like your Aunt; something is wrong with your sister's new apartment; your childhood diary warns you of a cheating lover. But that's what makes the series fun--the episodes that are well executed just examine one particular scene and then end; they don't have time to get bogged down and start sucking. Anyway, I was surprised to find the first volume of this series as interesting as it was. Hopefully the rest of the set will be good as well. If you like this sort of thing and see this set for cheap, I think it's a worthy purchase.

You can learn something about the American economy by watching horror movies. It's true: when times are good and Hollywood is less risk-averse, we are treated to subtle, interesting, and original horror movies. When the economy is shitty (I hate the word "downturn," it's so saccharin), Hollywood responds by reverting to tried-and-true vehicles for turning a profit from teenage audiences (read: whatever worked before; usually sex and gore). During these times the penny-pinchers are looking for "sure bets," films that they can count on to make a profit, even if that profit isn't ultra blockbuster. I think that there is probably enough historical evidence to make a Horror Film Quality economic index at this point. Where such an index to exist, it would be (correctly) indicating that the American economy is in the toilet right now. Take the up-and-coming release of The Eye, a remake of a Hong Kong film from 2003, this time starring white people speaking English. The thing is, the original film wasn't all that great (at least, I didn't think so), and by all accounts the remake is even worse. The concept for the film is interesting enough (a woman undergoes eye surgery to restore her vision and subsequently can see ghosts), but the reason that Hollywood decided to remake it not because it is a good film but rather because it is safe. All the risk was taken back in 2003 when the film was originally made, so all Hollywood has to do is reshoot it with some white actors, throw in some superfluous CG, and call it a day. The whole endeavor is really cheap, so profit is almost guaranteed. How does this process anger me? Let me count the ways. First of all, I'm constantly incensed by Hollywood's need to "sanitize" foreign films for American audiences by inserting white actors and changing the script into English. God forbid we have a movie with an asian (or Indian, or Middle Eastern, etc) protagonist, who could even (blasphemy of blasphemies) speak a different language. Heaven help us if the details of the plot are not explained to us in such excruciating detail that we actually have to think about the film on our own. And it's a well known fact that no movie with subtitles could possibly be enjoyed by American audiences (oh how quickly we forget). Secondly, for all of its cash Hollywood is almost totally unable to innovate in this genre because films are treated as a business rather than an art. There's nothing wrong with business--you need money to fund art, after all--but good art requires risk, and business is the process of removing risk in order to maintain profitability over the long term. So instead Hollywood remakes like The Eye, The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water (not to mention non-horror films like Shall we Dance) are made on the backs of the people who took the risk and made something interesting for a change. These are usually minor film makers with almost no budget, working without the aid of high-end special effects teams or multi-million dollar marketing campaigns. Once they've proven that a new idea might actually be something that viewers want to see, Hollywood can just pluck up the rights, discharge a remake, and take all the credit (and profit) for somebody else's hard work. That doesn't help the genre progress, it doesn't expand the size of the audience, and it certainly doesn't encourage the propagation of original films. It's a one-sided business weighted entirely in Hollywood's favor. Finally, films like The Eye are hardly worth remaking! If they enjoyed the original, why not just re-release it here with English subtitles and a small marketing blitz? That'd be far cheaper than reshooting the whole thing, and they have a chance of creating an instant cult classic. Besides, the critics prefer the original versions of these films almost every single time--it's not like improvements are being made by Hollywood. The original Eye isn't such a great film, but it's better than the American rendition. Hollywood remakes are like Bizarro versions of real films: flakey and nonsensical. The industry and its audience would be far better off if the original films were just released verbatim in this country. Maybe when the economy corrects itself there will be a return to interesting American films (or even better, a surge of foreign imports), but for the moment the pickings are pretty slim.

I went to see Cloverfield with a friend the other night. The trailer doesn't show you very much, and I'm not about to spoil the movie for you here, but if you are already planning on seeing this movie and would appreciate the full effect, stop reading now. Oh, wait, before you go: I was advised to sit at the way back of the theater for this one, and that advice was sound enough for me to relate it now to you with some conviction.

Still with me? Ok, so from the trailer it should be pretty clear that Cloverfield is about something attacking New York City the same way Godzilla has ravaged Tokyo so many times in the last fifty years. In case you couldn't tell, the whole film is shot as if being held by a consumer-grade handicam, Blair Witch style. The result of the constantly moving scene is at first disorienting and difficult to watch, but eventually, as with Blair Witch, I got used to it and forgot that it was even there.

In return for sustaining the frenetic camera, the hand-held look lends a huge amount of credibility to the events occurring within the film. Though the actions of the main characters are somewhat unbelievable, the cinematography does an excellent job of making the events unfolding throughout the film plausible. The CG work is also excellently done; the absolutely destroyed New York City that the protagonists find themselves in cannot possibly exist, and yet as they move from block to block the visuals are stark and convincing. The camera work, combined with the convincing visuals is more than enough to make this film fun. And thankfully, when the big bad threat to the city is shown, the filmmakers don't overdo it.

What I thought was most interesting about Cloverfield is that it is so clearly a modern Giant Monster movie, and yet at the same time it is also clearly a reaction to the events of September 11th. Just as the Godzilla films reflected cultural fear about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Cloverfield's depiction of Manhattan's demise is quite obviously based on the terrorist attacks seven years ago. This makes Cloverfield more thoroughly a member of the Japanese Giant Monster genre than any other Western film that I know of.

I'm not generally a huge fan of Giant Monster movies, but I had a lot of fun with Cloverfield and I was impressed with the film's ability to display such a convincing environment. The filmmakers clearly know their roots, but have done a good job of innovating within the genre.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. As a filmmaker, he's able to manufacture creepiness with lighting, shot composition, and sets alone. The actors (and ghosts) that populate his scenes are sometimes just icing on the horror cake: Kurosawa knows how to design his films to maximize scares better than any other director in recent memory. Loft is no exception. The film mostly takes place in a couple of desolate buildings and every shot has Kurosawa's prints all over it. The lighting and scene progression were particularly impressive. The plot and characters are almost secondary; the scenery and timing do almost all of the heavy lifting for scares. Kurosawa has the ability to take us through a what's-behind-that-door scene, the kind we've seen in a thousand other films, and still make it dramatic and suspenseful. Loft's plot is a little difficult to describe. The protagonist is a writer struggling to get through a novel in time for a deadline. Having moved out to the country to concentrate, she runs into a university professor who seems to have kidnapped a 1,000 year old mummy. When the protagonist agrees to hold on to the mummy for a bit, things start to get very strange. Eventually, she and the professor must solve a series of seemingly-unrelated problems if either of them ever hope to be comfortable in the dark again. Unlike some of Kurosawa's other films, Loft is actually fairly straight-forward. I was not left scratching my head at the end of it, which is more than I can say for Pulse or Retribution. It's not simple, but on the other hand he spends a lot more time explaining things in this film than in some of his others. I think the goal in this film is simpler: he's got a particular theme in mind but there's no grand message that he's trying to convey. In that sense, and in the way that Kurosawa actually tells his story, I think Loft is most similar to his earlier film Seance. One reviewer I read called the film "uneven," which I think is an insightful description. There are a couple of extremely jarring scenes, scenes that do not fit with the rest of the film to such a degree that you have to wonder if maybe it's a dream sequence or something. There's extremely little dialog, so when the characters start to express any sort of emotion other than fear, it seems a little thin. But those sections of the film are thankfully few and far between, and the rest of the time is spent slowly (the pace is quite glacial) exploring ways to freak the characters (and us) out. In fact, this film seemed quite Western compared to the rest of Kurosawa's catalog (excepting Seance, which is based on an English short story and feels very Western). Of course, the particulars of each individual scare are very Japanese per Kurosawa norm, but the way that information is revealed and the clarity of that information seems more in line with a Western thriller than Japanese horror. Like I said, this film is the easiest of Kurosawa's recent work to comprehend. For me, the amazing cinematography and genuinely scary sequences were more than enough to make up for some of the films flaws. Loft isn't a phenomenal film, but it's extremely well made, it's pretty scary, and if you like Kurosawa's handiwork as much as I do, there's a lot here to enjoy.

The height of cool. The setup: I have a newborn who sleeps every evening by 9 PM. I enjoy horror games and films, but my wife isn't such a fan. I have one of those TVs where the volume goes from "inaudibly quiet" to "loud enough to wake the house up" in a single click. I'd like to stay up late and indulge in my games and movies after my family has gone to sleep, but so far I've had to either turn the sound off entirely or sit about two feet away from the TV. I need a pair of headphones. But not regular headphones; my TV is large enough that I need to sit several feet back to enjoy it. No, I need wireless headphones. I bought a pair of wireless headphones a couple of years ago in Japan, and while they were super-cheap and rarely worked correctly, they sold me on the idea that slightly better technology could make wireless horror viewing a reality. So I started to shop around. It turns out that there are four types of wireless headphones available: radio frequency headphones (the worst; you get interference from the local hip hop station), 900mhz frequency headphones (probably fine if you don't have a lot of 900mhz interference; I do), infrared headphones (sound is good but they require line-of-sight to a base station), and Bluetooth headphones (sound is good but they are super expensive). The price range for these things goes from about $15 for the radio headphones to $200+ for Bluetooth, which also requires you to buy a Bluetooth transmitter if you want to use your 'phones with the TV. None of these things sound like very good options to me. I don't want to spend $200 for some headphones that I'm only going to use once a week, but on the other hand I can't abide by lousy sound quality. The cheapest Bluetooth setup is slightly more affordable but doesn't come with big ear pads, which I also desire. So I decided to go with the IR headphones. Line-of-sight isn't a problem for me, as I'm just going to wear them in front of the TV. They are pretty cheap and the reviews on Amazon suggest that the sound quality is pretty good. I went with a pair of Sony headphones that retail at a very-affordable $50. The way these things work is that the base is connected to the TV, and it beams the audio via infrared to receivers on the headphones themselves. I have to push my hair back when I wear them to make sure that it doesn't obscure the receivers, but otherwise they feel pretty good on my head. They rest on the base station when not in use and automatically recharge, which is nice. And actually, the sound quality isn't half-bad. That is, unfortunately, until I turn on the TV. A key miscalculation on my part is that I have a plasma TV, which emits infrared light. I knew this to be the case before I bought the headphones, but I didn't make the connection between an IR-producing TV and IR-receiving headphones. The result is a significant amount of background static, which annoyingly changes depending on what's currently displayed on the screen (scenes with lots of white are louder). It's acceptable, I guess, but the sound quality is degraded so much that I might have just been better off with a 900mhz model. It sounds better for games than for films, probably because the games I play are generally darker. But my plan to enjoy horror wirelessly was fatally flawed by my brand of television. As an aside, last night I used my new headphones to sit through Exte, a Japanese horror flick about, well, hair extensions. Mostly this movie operates on the idea that other people's hair is pretty icky to touch when it's not attached to their head; we get hair coming out of people's mouthes, out of their eyes, and even out of cuts in their skin. But the premise is terrible and the film can't decide if it wants to be funny-and-campy or serious-and-scary. In the end it's a pretty complete failure in every department. Also, it sounded bad through my stupid headphones.

Back around Halloween I mentioned that a CG Resident Evil movie had been announced by Capcom. Well today the first screens from the film are available over at Destructoid. The aesthetic reminds me of Resident Evil 2, which is good because Leon S Kennedy and Claire Redfield are the main characters.

Update: Kotaku has a whole trailer for you to peruse in all of its computer (de)generated glory.

The other evening I watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest, a film called Retribution (sakebi, or "Scream," in Japanese). You may remember that I am a pretty big Kurosawa fan; his film Cure is one of my favorite horror films of all time. The others of his that I've seen, Doppelganger, Pulse, Charisma, and Seance, are also excellent, though they are not as absolutely inspired as Cure. Kurosawa is good at using long, wide shots that go on for seemingly forever to convey the emotions of the protagonist (which, in his films, is usually isolation and despair). Kurosawa is a horror film director who actively avoids simple plots and cliche devices in his films; there is a subtly and sense of careful measurement in everything that he makes. Retribution is no exception. The film revolves around a police detective working on a murder case and slowly realizing that the perpetrator is probably himself. It is a fatalistic film, very similar in tone to Kurosawa's earlier Pulse, with a few little details from Cure thrown in as well. Kurosawa has something to say about Japanese society, something about the bleak isolation that Japan's constant development and focus on the future creates. When the protagonist detective (played by Koji Yakusho, just like in every other Kurosawa movie) begins to see the victim of the crime he may have committed in his apartment, the effect is less ghostly than it is desperate. The visions that haunt him seem like pretty standard horror stuff early on, but by the end of the film the dead girl is something other than a run-of-the-mill vengeful spirit. The feeling of desolation and poverty within the world's second richest nation is reinforced by the locales and sets that Kurosawa employes. Everything throughout the film is decrepit, dirty, and old, even locations that we might normally associate with modern society, like the police station. Recurring earthquakes and endless shots on reclaimed land also remind the viewer that the foundations upon which modern Japanese society is built are not necessarily stable. Retribution has its flaws (well described in this extremely detailed, very well thought-out review of the film), and I enjoyed it slightly less than Kurosawa's previous works, but that said I still thought it was pretty great. This kind of film cannot be made in America (not by a major production company, anyway), and I am thankful that we have guys like Kurosawa around to make it.

I'm sure she's just planning to trim those bangs back. This evening I watched Kuchisake Onna, a film made this year about the slit-mouthed antagonist of a Japanese urban legend I've discussed before. Actually, the film is built around the very general idea of a scary woman with a slashed mouth and surgical mask who hunts children--the other details of the legend are completely ignored. But that's ok, because the filmmakers actually did a pretty good job on Kuchisake Onna's design: when she shows up, you know exactly what to expect from her. The story, such as it is, involves a series of children vanishing from the streets in broad daylight. Rumor has it that they are victims of Kuchisake Onna, who has been released from imprisonment by a recent earthquake. Turns out the rumors are right: Kuchisake Onna is on the loose and has a bone to pick with just about everybody under the age of 11 (and any adults who happen to get in her way). The protagonist, a teacher at a local school who's students are among the victims, must track Kuchisake Onna down and stop her from taking any more children. She's aided by another teacher, who helpfully can hear a strange voice whenever Kuchisake Onna is about to strike. Together they must solve the mystery--blah blah, you know the rest. As a movie, Kuchisake Onna is unfortunately pretty bad. It's not cringe-worthy bad, but there's very little to redeem it; the acting is pretty terrible, the script is atrocious, and the plot is both full of holes and entirely predictable. But it's not a total train wreck: some of the photography is pretty good (though there are a few really noticeably bad cuts) and I liked the way the director used color filters to code different locations in the movie. The pacing is pretty weird: the movie just starts, with no introduction, and within the first few minutes we've already seen Kuchisake Onna take her first victim; there's no build-up and consequently very little arc to the overall story. The ending, unfortunately, is pretty lame, as is the application of some not-so-tricky wordplay late in the film to connect the story with the legend upon which Minetaro Mochizuki's Zashiki Onna it is based. One thing I did like about the film is the way the antagonist, Kuchisake Onna herself, is portrayed. She shows up whenever she pleases, even in the middle of the day on a sunny street. There's no need to wait for darkness or to explore the haunted mansion with flashlights at night (though that happens too--sigh), Kuchisake Onna is bad-ass enough to appear right in the middle of the day to grab children. I also like the way the Kuchisake Onna looks: she is tall, has long hair, a surgical mask, and carries around some incredibly large shears. Actually, now that I think about it, I think her design was taken pretty much directly from the antagonist of Minetaro Mochizuki's excellent horror comic Zashiki Onna. I've thought many times about translating Zashiki Onna ("Tatami Room Woman") into English, as it's such an awesome and well-written horror comic. At any rate, the design of Kuchisake Onna matches Mochizuki's antagonist almost perfectly. That's cool though--the design works, and it's one of the best things about the movie. The other, somewhat interesting (for aficionados, anyway) thing about the film is that it follows the modern Japanese horror film tradition of being about broken families. In this film, the subject is child abuse. As David Kalat points out in his fascinating book, non-nuclear family relationships are one of the core themes of modern (post-Ring) Japanese horror films. The thing is, nothing else about Kuchisake Onna really aligns to "J-Horror" (a term I abhor) conventions; it's much more like a formulaic Hollywood slasher flick, with a heavy emphasis on body count and gore and no attempt at the subtlety favored by the recent classics of the genre. I wonder if the broken home theme was chosen because it fit the story (which it actually does) or simply to be like other modern Japanese horror films. In any case, Kuchisake Onna is a pretty mediocre horror film that I think you are probably better off avoiding.

A couple of years ago I had a frightening experience. I was getting out of the shower one evening when from behind me I heard the sound of metal scraping against metal. The house was empty and I was standing there in the bathroom, naked and dripping wet, and in that instant I knew that I was about to die. Immediately I had a mental picture of my killer: a tall, stocky man with a black mustache and some sort of knife or hook in his right hand. From the location of the sound, I knew that he must be standing inside the shower that I had stepped out of moments before. For about a tenth of a second I was scared out of my wits. The next moment I heard the shampoo holder crash to the floor and realized that the sound I had heard was the holder sliding off the top of the metal shower head. I felt pretty dumb at the time, especially considering how blatantly impossible the entire scenario was, but looking back I find that moment of fear fascinating. In the time it took for my toiletries to fall six feet to the floor of the tub, my brain conjured up a detailed mental image of something scary to explain the metal scraping noise. It's like my imagination had this scary idea prepped and ready to go, and when the right variables came together (a disturbing sound combined with the vulnerable feeling of being home alone and buck naked), it sprang to life. Last week I saw a preview for 1408, a new horror movie based on Stephen King's short story of the same name. I was at the theater to see Grindhouse, which was quite enjoyable (especially Tarantino's film, Death Proof). The preview for 1408 made the film look pretty mediocre, but I found myself even more disappointed than usual by the ad. Most horror story film adaptations follow the same formula: superfluous plot and characters + contrived rationalization of mystery + special fx + special fx + special fx = profit, and it seems that 1408 is no exception. What disappointed me about the trailer for 1408 is that the filmmakers seem to have dramatically misunderstood what makes King's short story so compelling. 1408 is a short story about a writer staying in a haunted room and getting far more than he bargained for. The thing is, most of the story doesn't take place in the room; less than half of the pages are spent actually describing the room and the writer's experience there. The rest is dialog between the hotel's manager and the protagonist, annotated with the protagonist's own thoughts and memories. And even inside the room, not much really happens to the writer: the horror he experiences is comprised mostly of a nameless, implicit threat that manifests in a few key events. Despite the brevity of this part of the story, the effect on the reader (at least, on me) is intense. The reason the story is so effective is that King has masterfully created a structure for horror and then left most of the detail work up to our imagination. He's provided a locale (the haunted room), a reason to be scared (various deaths and other strange occurrences that the hotel manager spends most of the story describing), and a few key events to start the reader's mind down a path. But from there on out King becomes more of a bystander than a storyteller. The weird history of the room and the series of increasingly disturbing things that actually occur once the writer enters it are more than sufficient kindling for the reader's imagination to catch fire. And as the story ends, King shows his real skill by just letting that fire burn: he provides no rationalization or justification for the events that take place in the story, and thereby requires his readers to decide upon some personal explanation. This personalization makes the story extremely effective; as my brain demonstrated to me on my way out of the shower, we are much better at scaring ourselves than anybody else. The trailer for the film version Hooray for Hollywood of 1408 seems to suggest that most of the film will be spent in the room itself, depicting various scary things. If the filmmakers are real screwups, they'll also try to tell the audience why all these events occur and what they should mean. Doing this completely destroys the horror that the original short story is able to induce, and reduces the film to a mere catalog of CG effects. Some might argue that film as a medium requires more explicit visual narration, but I would argue that plenty of films are able operate on the same mechanic as King's story by suggesting a lot but showing very little. Another King story-turned-movie, The Shining, is an excellent example. The Shining continues to be an extremely effective horror film because it gives the audience just enough information to let their mind wander into whichever territory they find the most disturbing. The gamut of effects-based nightmare events that seem to comprise 1408 is a cop-out on the part of the filmmakers: it removes the need for the audience to think and consequently lessens the impact of the horror it is attempting to deliver. I should mention as a caveat that 1408 has not yet been released and I'm judging it based entirely on a single preview, which isn't really very fair. But though I may be picking on a trailer for an unreleased film, I think that the contrast between the content of King's short story and the events depicted in the film preview are a good basis for my point. In my notes from GDC 2005, I described Akira Yamaoka's approach to horror, which involves "stacking" of fragmented and convoluted information to "create space for the imagination." I think this approach is very similar to the mechanic employed by King in 1408, and helps explain why Yamaoka's Silent Hill series is so consistently effective.

I followed a link from Slashdot Games to this interesting post about the difference between horror games and horror movies over at the hilariously titled GamersWithJobs.com. The author admits to being absolutely terrified by horror games despite having no trouble with horror movies. The point he makes, which is a big part of the reason I am running this site, is that the level of emotional involvement that a video game can produce can be much higher than passive media like film. Playing the roll of the main character means that we are unable to use common cliches as a defense against fear. I think that this type of involvement is possible for other types of games as well, but the horror game genre seem to be where the best of the best currently reside.

This room isn't pitch black, but it's dark enough for us to be worried. Though I didn't think it was a great film, one of the things I dug about Juon 2 was the way the director used lighting to suggest some sort of abstract malice. Unlike many traditional horror movies, Juon 2 doesn't rely on pitch-black locales to build tension; instead, it suggests that the characters in the film could be attacked anywhere where there is the slightest degree of shadow. It also seems to be necessary that the victims be alone, but the director makes it clear that well-lit rooms are no defense against the film's traveling curse. I think that director Takashi Shimizu's goal here is to keep the audience on the edge of their seat by suggesting that nowhere is safe. The antagonist of the film isn't contained by a dilapidated mansion or haunted graveyard; she can strike anywhere, even during the day or in a brightly lit room. The protagonists have nowhere to hide, and unlike many lesser horror films, the audience has no chance to relax. Once the director has communicated this idea to the audience (as he did so effectively with a particular apartment scene in the first Juon), we begin to scrutinize every shot for possible danger. The power of a small shadow or slightly dark corner is dramatically increased, as we know that it might be the source of immediate danger. Even a little bit of shadow in the corner can be suggestive. This puts Shimizu in an incredibly powerful position over the audience; if he wants to create tension, all he needs to do is put his characters in a room by themselves and include the mere suggestion of darkness. Juon 2 shows that this method can produce high-tension scenes without relying on music, tricky camera work, or any sort of special effects. Any further suggestion of malice (such as the tendency in Juon for common appliances to reveal impending danger) only increases the suggestion of danger produced by his approach to lighting. The result, I think, is a rather relentless pressure on the viewer that increases as the film slowly unveils the horror at hand. Unfortunately, Shimizu damages his own tension with a terrible script and a few completely out-of-place scenes. But there are a few moments in the film where his ability to use light suggestively makes an otherwise predictable scene pretty scary stuff. I think that there are several video games that are already taking advantage of this sort of approach. The Silent Hill series, especially Silent Hill 2, have used suggestive lighting to dramatically increase the level of tension inflicted on the player. Unlike Resident Evil, which gives the player Silent Hill switches between ambient light and the flashlight to produce different moods. easy-to-identify safe rooms, the Silent Hill series has often employed varying levels of ambient light to suggest the relative danger of its various otherworldly locales. These games also switch between areas with some ambient light and areas that are are only visible through the tight beam of the flashlight. Here the message is the same but the effect is a little more direct: nowhere is safe because danger lurks everywhere. The radio in Silent Hill serves the same purpose as the rogue appliances in Juon: to incrementally increase the tension already created by the rest of the scene. Though horror movies have traditionally relied on scenes that are pitch-black to sell the idea that danger may be lurking in the darkness, movies like Juon 2 show that the same effect can be achieved without turning out all the lights. Once the audience has been lead to believe that any shadow may harbor danger, everyday locations can easily host tension-filled scenes. Though it seems like the same sorts of techniques are applicable to video games as well, very few developers actually take advantage of this sort of iterative creation of tension. Sorry if this is all sort of a stream-of-consciousness. In the future I have some other random thoughts about techniques that games developers could learn from modern horror film, but this post is already long enough.

In preparation for the American version of The Grudge 2, I decided to watch the original sequel to Juon, which was itself a remake of a TV movie. In total, I think there are at least six versions of these movies, all directed by the same director and all pretty much the same. To its credit, the latest American remake looks pretty different than the Japanese version, so maybe that iteration will change things up a bit. Juon 2, however, is pretty much a perfect-to-form sequel to Juon. The director, Takashi Shimizu, has making this movie down to a science; it almost seems as if each scene can be described by an equation with slightly different variables. All the neat things from the first film return in the sequel: backwards, Memento-style storytelling, a curse that jumps from one person to the next like a virus, modern-day appliances behaving maliciously, and a female antagonist with long, face-obscuring hair. The first Juon also experimented a with a sort of time warp effect for one of its characters, which felt out of place because it did not match the rest of the film. Juon 2, on the other hand, takes that idea and makes it central to the presentation, with pretty great results. Shimizu has also progressed as a cinematographer: the shots, sets, and lighting are pretty high quality, and seem to be a distinct improvement over the original film. That said, Juon 2 also has some fatal flaws. First of all, the story is sort of pointless. The main resolution of the first film explained to us why Kayako, the antagonist, likes to kill people in interesting ways. Having answered that question, the second film doesn't really have anywhere else to go. We have a cast of characters that are assaulted by Kayako one after the other, but there's no overall tension or drama to the story itself: it's just a collection of scary scenes. I guess there is an attempt to tie the story together with a single, reoccurring character, but this just leads to a really dumb ending. While Shimizu is an expert at creating a five-minute scene that is full of tension, he seems to lose focus when considering the film as a while. I thought another of his films, Marebito, had the same problem. As in the first film, Shimizu also shoots himself in the foot a couple of times with some really, really poorly done special effects. While not as egregious as the original Juon, Juon 2 has a scene or two where I was just unable to suspend my disbelief any longer. These scenes are minor and they don't ruin the film, but they do sort of pull you out of the scary mood. So, in summary, Juon 2 is almost exactly the same as Juon, only with less overall plot focus. If you liked the first movie, you'll probably enjoy the second. If you hated the first movie, there's nothing here that you'll find any better. If you are looking for Japanese ghosts killing girls, you can do far worse than this film, but if you care about plot or script, you may be disappointed. While Juon 2 perfectly replicates the good parts of its predecessor, it also suffers from a lot of the same flaws.

I went to see The Descent last week despite knowing absolutely nothing about the film. I'd never seen a trailer or even a poster, but strong critical response convinced me to go.

The Descent is about a group of thrill-seeking women who decide to go spelunking in a remote cave. They get pretty deep into the cave before they realize how dangerous their situation is. The tension is high and unrelenting, and then the monsters come out.

What's nice about this film is that it doesn't waste any time whatsoever on superfluous scenes. The script is concise and direct: only the necessary scenes are included. This is a "pop out of the dark" movie, and after a while there is a definite rhythm to each scare event, but the film never becomes trite and it never really loses its ability to startle you. The characters are developed just enough to make the interactions between them important, and the monsters are not dwelt upon for longer than necessary.

It's been a long time since I've seen a pop-out movie that is this effective. Though there are a huge number of films in this genre, very few are successful (Alien is probably the best of the bunch). The Descent is tight, simple, and expertly constructed, and I found it much more effective than I was expecting.

I watched a couple of horror movies lately, but I haven't had a lot of time to write proper reviews for them. I've got quite a few films I want to see in my queue, but thanks to work I've not really had enough time to watch many of them. For the few I've seen in the last couple of months, here's a few mini-mini-reviews. Marebito (A Stranger from Afar) is a 2004 film by Takashi Shimizu (director of Ju-On) starring none other than whacko director and actor Shinya Tsukamoto (director of Tetsuo The Iron Man, among others). It's an intensely strange film about a man who is either losing his mind or has become one of the few who realize that there are many horrible things dwelling below the surface of Tokyo. Depending on what you believe, he either brings a strange naked girl back from the depths below the city or he's a lunatic who is is treating his own daughter like an animal. Either way, the film is interesting but sort of nonsensical. It leaves plenty of little clues around for you to think about, but it never really reaches a meaningful conclusion. I'd say watch it if you are a fan of movies that might have some hidden inner meaning or might just be really poorly told. Picnic at Hanging Rock is another cryptic film. Directed by Peter Weir in 1975, this film is about the disappearance of several girls and one of their teachers at a vaguely threatening volcanic rock in Australia. The girls are part of a much larger group, and they seem to vanish without a trace among the boulders and rubble. The circumstance of their disappearance is made even more confusing by a few eye witness reports. But even though the film is centered around the site of the rock, the bulk of the content concerns how the remaining classmates and teachers react to the disappearance. It's complicated and doesn't really ever reveal its hand, but I enjoyed it quite a bit for the shear creepiness factor that the film is able to impart to a bunch of rocks. Equinox (or The Equinox, depending on which version you see) is a 1970 horror classic. By today's standards it is simplistic and campy to the extreme, but it's an important film in the modern history of American horror cinema. It was created entirely by high school students, including a young Dennis Muren, who went on to be the special effects wizard behind Star Wars, The Abyss, and pretty much every other great effects movie. Though it is sort of hilarious to watch now, you can see elements of the film that clearly influenced later movies like Evil Dead. Imprint is a film created by Takashi Miike (director of approximately 3 - 5 films a year, including Ichi the Killer and Audition) as part of Showtime's Masters of Horror series. As the story goes, Miike was asked by Showtime to make a movie and to go all out, since Showtime can run its own films without any censorship. Miike was probably the wrong person for them to go to, because Imprint plays out like a gauntlet of gore, with each scene doing its very best to one-up the previous in depravity and suffering. It was far too much for the Showtime execs, and was never shown in America. I don't know why they were surprised, however, as it's pretty true-to-form for Miike. The problem with it is, despite all the gore and bloodshed, the movie still isn't very good. There you have it. What have you guys been watching?

Last night I watched Wolf Creek. I didn't know anything about this film going in, but I'd heard a few people recommend it so I gave it a shot.

The film centers around three young vacationers who are traveling through the Australian outback on their way to Sydney. On the way they stop at Wolfe Creek crater for a hike. When they return they find that their car has died, and they're stranded alone in the outback. Their circumstance gets progressively worse, but in the end being lost in the middle of nowhere seems like heaven compared to the situation that they end up in.

Though it's not a ground breaking movie, I enjoyed Wolf Creek. It's a teen slasher flick with all of the cruft and nonsense that plagues the genre removed. The violence is calculated and intense, but most of it is implicit; with a few exceptions, the movie does not rely on gore for its scares. The movie also avoids most teen slasher cliches, and it manages to keep you wondering about which of the protagonists will actually survive their ordeal. And though the characters make bad decisions throughout the film, most of their actions are believable. Finally, there are some extremely beautiful shots of the Australian wilderness.

So all in all, I'd say that Wolf Creek is not bad. I like that it avoids most of the problems we associate with this brand of horror movie, and I didn't have any problems with the acting or pacing. The movie isn't brilliant or anything, but as a teen slasher movie it's pretty good.

I went and saw Silent Hill today. I'll try to write a spoiler-free review that describes how I feel about it.

As you might expect, the Silent Hill movie has a lot of elements of the Silent Hill games. In fact, it is not difficult to classify the movie as a collection of such elements. Here's a few that I thought they did really well:

• Locale. Silent Hill looks exactly like it should. The otherworld looks the way it should. The sets and locations are extremely close to the game, and I liked them a lot. The first 45 minutes or so in particular will really please people who have played the original Silent Hill.
• Pyramid Head. He's awesome, and they don't overdo him.
• The soundtrack. They mostly used music from Silent Hill 3, but the industrial booming works just as well in the movie as it does in the games.
• The fog and darkness. With the exception of a couple of extraordinarily bad shots, the fog and darkness are spot on. They really help to convey the "Silent Hill Feeling."
• The body bag monsters. You don't see much of them, but they look perfect.
• The sirens. Again, perfect.
• The nurses. A little different than the variations of nurses in Silent Hill (probably closest to 3's), but they were still very cool.

There were also some elements that I think they could have done a lot better.

• The radio. They used the siren well but totally missed out on the importance of the radio.
• Dahlia Gillespie. They split her character into two, and I don't think it was really a good move.
• The pacing. This is a difficult problem for any movie based on a game, but Silent Hill breaks down around the middle. It's too long and it meanders in the middle.
• The story. It's very similar to Silent Hill 1, but it's far more explicit and far less interesting. The elements are there but the presentation is not as good. I especially didn't like the last half.

The reviewers aren't big fans of this movie, but I understand why: the film is built to please people who've played the games, and I think it would seem even less interesting and have even more pacing problems if you do not recognize some of the content. So, if you didn't play the Silent Hill games, you probably won't like this movie very much.

However, if you are like me and have played these games to death, there's a lot to enjoy. As I mentioned before, the first 45 minutes or so are expertly lifted from the games, right down to some of the cinematography used in the games. The otherworld looks excellent and conforms to the regular Silent Hill otherworld rules, and the characters in the game are suitably close to their game counterparts. If you like the game I think you'll get a lot more out of the film.

Silent Hill was surprisingly the most gory movie I've seen in quite a while. Most of the gore is well done and it's only used in a few key scenes, but it was a bit of a departure from the games' usually understated and implicit violence. The main failure of the movie, in my mind, is the trap that so many horror movies fall into: explaining everything to the viewer. There are a couple of scenes where the movie just stops so they can go back and explain everything in excruciating detail. The Silent Hill games are very careful to never give too much away; they drop many hints, but putting the story together has always been a job for the player. The movie, however, fell apart for me towards the end because they insist on making everything as brutally clear as possible. There are also some major changes to the story that I thought were bad, and the ending was sort of annoying. Still, the movie was by far the best video game translation I've seen, but on the other hand, there's not a lot of competition in that category.

In short: Silent Hill is enjoyable if you've played the games, but probably not if you haven't. As a film translation of various game elements, it works pretty well. As a horror movie, it's not all that great.

This evening I watched Don't Look Now, a horror flick starring a young Donald Sutherland circa 1973. The story centers around an American couple living in Venice who have recently lost their daughter. It's hard to describe exactly the events that unfold in this film, but the tension level is pretty high throughout the whole thing and the ending is seriously insane. What I really liked about the movie, however, is that it is able to build suspense without showing you anything at all. The director, Nicolas Roeg, plants an idea in your mind and lets your imagination run rampant, but he's careful to give absolutely nothing away until the very end of the film. If you were to look at this film out of context, it would seem like nothing is really happening. But coupled with Roeg's excellent cinematography of highly creepy Venice alleyways and a pretty excellent orchestral score, Don't Look Now kept me on the edge of my seat. This is high-calibre horror: the film is so well structured that nothing but the mere suggestion of deceit is necessary to build suspense. I throughly enjoyed it.

Producer #1: Ok, we need a movie to fill our release schedule out in March 2004.
Producer #2: Hmm, we should target teens... how about a horror movie!?
Producer #1: Sounds good. We should be able to throw one of those together in six months. But we need a hook... how about a demonic web site that kills you if you go to it?! That's edgy, and kids like edgy. Plus they use the web!
Producer #2: Hmm, yeah, but we're already remaking Pulse during that time, and it's got web sites in it. And we sort of lost money with Feardotcom.
Producer #1: Oh, yeah, I don't know what happened there. What else to kids like these days?
Producer #2: VIDEO GAMES!! All the kids play 'em. They are addicted, it's the new heroin for kids.
Producer #1: Video games? You mean like Space Invaders?
Producer #2: Yeah, but now they are more advanced and very violent. Some even have nudity!!
Producer #1: Ok, that sounds perfect. It'll be a double whammy: a horror film with teens about teens playing video games, which teens love. They won't be able to resist! We'll make money hand over fist!
Producer #2: Ok, so just so we're clear, they play a video game and then get killed, right?
Producer #1: Right. Get a writer on that. Also, we need at least one shower scene.
Producer #2: I'm on it.

If you don't know what I am talking about, try watching the Stay Alive trailer, or, if you can stomach it, check out the first scene. I guess I am glad that games are becoming more visible to general society, but it's fairly painful to watch Hollywood make such blatant asses of themselves while trying to make movies for gamers.

Wow, an update after several weeks of radio silence. Sorry everybody, work has been increasingly demanding lately. Also, I've been playing through Michigan, which has not proven very post-worthy.

Anyway, I thought I'd tell you guys about some horror movies I watched recently.

• Pulse (Kairo) finally came out in the US. I guess they are remaking this movie, but I have no idea why--its themes of isolation and loneliness are so amazingly Japanese that I can't see the movie translating to white, American, English-speaking actors well at all. Anyway, like everything from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Charisma, Doppelganger), I can easily and without hesitation recommend this film. Be warned that the movie is sort of social commentary wrapped in a horror context, and the narrative is convoluted to say the least.
• Session 9 is an American horror film that somebody recommended to me because of its Silent Hill-like atmosphere. I checked it out and was pleasantly surprised to find it a mature, subtle, psychological horror movie in the vein of The Shining. It's not nearly as competent as Kubrick's seminal film, but it hits a lot of the right notes and is very careful not to spoil the horror with too much information. The ending sort of misses a beat here or there, but generally I think it's one of the best American-made horror movies that has come out in a long time.
• Testuo II: Body Hammer and A Snake of June are both weirdo films by weirdo director Shinya Tsukamoto. Tsukamoto's claim to fame is the original Tetsuo the Iron Man (and also he was the ultra-buff old guy in Ichi the Killer), but unfortunately Tetsuo 2 isn't as good. Actually, it's incredibly similar to the first movie, but the story is a little more clear and it's in color. I rather enjoyed Snake of June, though it isn't really horror: it's about a stalker forcing a woman to act upon some of her fantasies that are too racy for her husband, and the film only contains one giant animatronic penis scene, which is a record low for Tsukamoto.

Anyway, that's what I've had the chance to see lately. What have you guys been watching?

1up.com has a pretty interesting (and fairly lengthy) interview with Christophe Gans and Akira Yamaoka about the upcoming Silent Hill movie. There aren't any real spoilers, they mostly discuss how the game has made the transition to film. Gans is apparently a pretty hardcore gamer. The movie comes out in the US on April 21st.

A while back I watched The Eye, a Chinese movie directed by brothers Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang, about a woman who has surgery to restore her eyesight and also ends up with the ability to see ghosts. Despite its promising first half, The Eye pretty much fell apart at the end, which was really too bad. But since the first part was pretty good, I was willing to give the Pang brothers a second chance.

After watching The Eye 10 (it's actually only the third in the series), I have to say that the Pang brothers are now completely out of chances. They've blown it more completely than I could have imagined. The Eye 10 isn't just a bad movie, it's an absolutely atrocious movie. It's so bad that I don't even want to talk about it (not that the story makes any goddamn sense, mind you). It's probably in the top five worst films I have ever seen, edging out the likes of Boa vs Python and I Come in Peace. Ok, so Alone in the Dark (which I saw last year) and Ju-Rei (which I also reviewed) were probably worse, but it's pretty close. I'd say this movie gives St. John's Wart a run for it's money on the "what were they thinking?" index.

Don't see The Eye. But if you do, DO NOT see The Eye 10. Never again, Pang brothers!

My recent article on Japanese horror attempted to explain horror in Japan by examining some details of the Japanese culture. Nicholas Rucka takes a different approach in his fascinating article The Death of J-Horror?: he describes in some detail the history of Japanese horror cinema and why the current boom isn't likely to survive indefinitely. Rucka has quite a few obscure films under his belt; I was particularly interested in some of the connections he draws (Woman in the Dunes to Tetsuo The Iron Man? interesting). He also clearly shares my disdain for the term "J-Horror." Check his article out.

This morning I decided to browse some of the entries for the Silent Hill Poster Contest, but I found that a gallery isn't provided on Sony's site. So I wrote a very simple script to display the entries. There appear to be around 2000 entries at the moment, though I think it's safe to assume that more will come online.

Note that this script won't aid you in voting for an actual entry. That can only be done by receiving a special link from the person who created the entry (many have been posted on forums around the net). But this script is pretty good for browsing. I wrote about this contest a few weeks ago.

I've finally posted a new feature, Chris' Guide to Understanding Japanese Horror. This article is a detailed look at Japanese horror within the context of Japanese culture. I attempt to explain how horror from Japan works on a very general level, and how the mechanics of Japanese and American horror differ. Here's an excerpt: The underlying concept behind Japanese yuurei is onnen (), the idea that some emotions are so strong that their power can extend from beyond the grave. Almost all classic and contemporary ghost stories from Japan operate on onnen: in addition to the obvious case of Okiku, witness Sadako's character in The Ring, the antagonist in Juon, or even the explanations given for Hanako's origin in the Hanako-in-the-Toilet story. Onnen is the central concept behind yuurei, and as we will see, it differentiates Japanese horror from works in the West pretty dramatically. I spent quite a while on this one, so please check it out.

1up.com has a story about a contest to design the upcoming Silent Hill movie by Christopher Gains. From their article:

The full contest details are available at www.welcometosilenthill.com, but here's what you need to know: design a poster in JPG or GIF format no larger than 300K using assets provided on the website itself (art from the games are off limits) and submit it by January 3. Staring the next day, the website will start tallying votes for best poster design.

Sounds like a lot of fun! Time to bust out Photoshop!

Happy Halloween Everybody! Why not celebrate by curling up with the original Night of the Living Dead, available for free download/stream in all its glory. Or, if that's not your cup of tea, how about translations of classic Japanese horror stories (my favorites include Yuki-Onna and Mimi-Nashi Hoichi) by Lafcadio Hearn? I totally ripped off this picture of Zombie Maiko from this guy.

Since my thoughts on movies are so amazingly popular, I thought I'd post a few more.

• The Brood is a pretty great horror film by David Cronenberg. It's pretty hard to go wrong with demon children, and Cronenberg does an excellent job with suggestion and understatement. The demon kids all wear similar winter coats, you never really get to see them up close, and the movie wastes very little time trying to explain everything away. The climax of the film is pretty shocking too. Also, the movie is old enough (1979) that everybody's clothing has gone back to being cool again after losing its vogue for twenty years.
• ... and on the other side of the quality coin, we have Versus, a horrifically long movie about, well, people fighting in the woods. There are zombies or some shit too, I don't know. The whole movie is nonsensical, the acting is horrible, and it is about an hour longer than it needs to be. You know how some manga and anime series have this problem where they spend like 50 books/episodes on a single, never ending fight? This is the cinemagraphic embodiment of that failure. Seriously, the film was so bad that by the end we were watching the DVD time display and hoping that the 118 minutes listed on the back of the box included the credits, or if we were really lucky, the trailers. Avoid at all costs.

My computer has either been taken by the dreaded Astwihad or it has suffered a hard disk failure. At any rate, I'm behind on a backlog of news and database updates. Everything should be in the right by next week. Here's some quick news: Siren is becoming a movie! Here's some info and pictures of the cast in Japanese and English updates from GameSpot. It stars Yui Ichikawa, who was the protagonist in Juon. Alone in the Dark 5 has been confirmed for Xbox360. Here are some screenshots. Thanks to forum zombies spookycreepy and Grace Saunders.

Today I had a few hours to kill, so I watched Uzumaki. Uzumaki is yet another post-Ring Japanese horror flick that probably would not have warranted American release if fanboys like myself were not creating demand for Japanese horror. Adapted from a manga series by the same name, Uzumaki (which means "spiral" or "vortex") is about a town that is becoming increasingly influenced by, well, vortexes. Now, if you are wondering how a shape can exert influence over a town, welcome to the club. Sadly, the movie fails to answer this question; instead of dealing with difficult topics like personal relationships and back-story, the film stumbles through a mediocre introduction and then proceeds with mediocre gore. No explanation of the premise is ever attempted, and even if you accept the events that are occurring in the film, the events themselves are still nonsensical.

Technically, Uzumaki is a mixed bag. The acting is terrible, with a protagonist that seems like she's trying too hard and a boyfriend stuck in empathy-less monotone for the entire film. Surprisingly, some of the editing is pretty well done: the director has tried to wrap the movie with little disconcerting references to spirals (including a few post-processing effects that are interesting), and some of the shots are very well composed. That said, there are also some awful scenes, including one that reminds me of a scene from Vertigo that may have worked in 1958 but looks very lame now. The sound design isn't bad, but after a while everything seems to make the same sticky crackling noise.

The manga that spawned Uzumaki is probably a lot better than the movie. I suspect that the movie is a collection of scenes or short story snippets taken from the manga, which might explain why the movie makes no sense and the story seems to go nowhere. Overall, it's an interesting rental if you are the type of person who likes looking for technical details (see how many spirals you can find in the regular scenes), but otherwise skip it.

I watched Ju-Rei last night (Japanese title is actually kuro jurei (), lit. "black vengeful ghost"), which is a Japanese horror film by Koji Shiraishi. This movie is only interesting because it is like a catalog of Japanese horror movie elements, mostly ripped from much better films like Ring and Juon. The movie unfolds in ten chapters, and each chapter is like a study of a visual effect or horror mechanic used in some other popular Japanese horror film. It's like an amalgam, but it's mostly nonsensical and underwhelming. Features blatantly ripped off from other movies include (minor spoilers, beware):

• Out-of-order story telling (Juon)
• Ghosts as people with white faces, black eye shadow, and blackened mouths (Juon)
• A cyclical curse that moves like a virus from one person to the next (Ring)
• A Predator-like back-of-the-throat frog vocalization made by the bad things (Juon)
• High-school girls home alone, investigating odd sounds in their house. (Ring)
• Old women who can see the bad things even though the young people can't. (Juon)
• The blurry TV grain effect when baddies show up (Ring)
• Female ghost things crawling on their hands towards their victims (Ring and Juon)
• Reflections in mirrors that reveal people who, when you turn around, are not there (Ring, Juon)
• Hands coming out of nowhere to grab a frightened girl (Juon)

The film's one "innovation" is the interesting use of blur over the ghosts to make them look... well, ghostly. But the effect is fairly trite and it gets old very quickly. In all, I'd say the film is interesting if you enjoy catching "homages" to other Japanese horror movies, but on its own it's pretty weak.

I used to watch a lot of horror movies, but I don't have much time for them any more. Just recently I saw a few (a failed attempt to erase Alone in the Dark from my brain), so here's a few impressions.

• The Shining (1980) - This movie is famous for a reason. It's got all sorts of stuff going on, yet it manages to be subtle and subdued. The presentation, particularly the music and cinematography, is fantastic. And the story is wonderfully suggestive without being explicit. Highly recommended.
• House of 1000 Corpses ( 2003) - You know how sometimes a movie can have a terrible title but then turn out to be pretty good underneath? This is not one of those movies. Directed by Rob Zombie, House of 1000 Corpses is sort of an amalgam of every slasher flick made in the last 25 years. Unfortunately, it's not constructed in a way that might be interesting. I'd guess that there really are 1000 corpses in this film, and man, do they get boring after the third or fourth. You'd think after watching so many horror movies Rob would have realized that gore and nudity are never good replacements for plot. Moral of the story: if the director is famously related to horror but has never directed before (I'm looking at YOU, 976-EVIL), the movie will not be good. Stick to the music, Rob. The one redeeming quality of this movie is the Captain Spaulding character, who is both well-delivered and hilarious.
• The Ring Two (2005) - So like most everybody else I throughly enjoyed the original Japanese Ring movie. The sequels weren't that hot, but the first movie was inspired. I was unimpressed by the American remake because it added all kinds of superfluous details and yet still failed to meet the subtle horror of the original. So I went to see The Ring Two with cautious optimism, especially after I learned that the director of the original Ring was responsible for the American sequel. I really should have known better. The Ring Two isn't terrible, it's just not very good. It's actually fairly similar in quality to the Japanese Ring 2 (which has a pretty different story), but its somewhat less interesting because it goes in too many directions at once. The worst sin of the film is that it discards the "killer tape" mechanic, which is what made the series interesting to begin with. There are some nice moments (a particular climb up a well was pretty great), but overall there's nothing here you haven't seen before.

In summary: see The Shining, avoid House of 1000 Corpses like the plague, and wait for Ring Two to be a $3 DVD rental.

... don't go see Alone in the Dark. After getting 1% on RottenTomatoes.com and a 9/100 on Metacritic, I knew I had to see this film. $6.50 (matinee showing, thank god) and 90 minutes later, I can say with certainty that Alone in the Dark is one of the worst films I have ever seen.

It's not the worst of all time, though. That honor goes to Manos: Hands of Fate, which is truly, truly awful. But Alone in the Dark might be second. I've seen a lot of movies, including just about every terrible horror flick produced in the '80s and '90s. This is worse than all of them. Remember Tails from the Hood? Or I Come In Peace, starring Dolph Lundgren? Alone in the Dark is worse than those. Thought that video games-into-movies could never stoop below Street Fighter or Super Mario Bros.? You thought wrong.

So yeah, it's terrible. And the worst part is that it is so bad that it's not even so-bad-it's-funny-bad. It's surpassed the funny-bad point and ventured completely into the realm of un-fucking-believably bad. I expected to laugh through the movie, but mostly my mouth was agape. This is a new low for Christian Slater. Come on man, you were in Pump Up the Volume and True Romance! Even your work on Broken Arrow is cinema gold compared to this drivel. How could you accept that script?? And why oh why did you make a movie where Tara Reid is cast as an archeologist?!

In summary, don't go to see Alone in the Dark. The game upon which the concept is loosely based (and the degree of looseness here is extreme) is far better than the movie itself, and it wasn't that great to begin with. Spend your $9.00 on a used PS1 or Dreamcast copy--it'll last longer and you'll get far more enjoyment out of it.

I am not sure what it is about the Survival Horror genre that attracts film makers. Most horror games are heavily influenced by cinema anyway, which might make people who produce films comfortable.

Regardless, I think it is important to remember that there has never, ever been a good movie made based on a video game license. Resident Evil was bad, Street Fighter was terrible, and Super Mario Bros. was god-awful. I suppose the Mortal Kombat was the most successful: it spawned a series of terrible sequels.

Well my friends, more video game movies are on the way, and they all seem horror oriented.

• Alone In The Dark trailer.
• House of the Dead trailer/site. I shouldn't judge this movie until I see it, but I gotta say.... it looks super lame.
• Silent Hill announcement via IGN.
• Fatal Frame announcement via IGN.
• Onimusha announcement via IGN.
• Devil May Cry announcement via IGN.
• Eternal Darkness announcement via IGN.

I guess we'll have to wait and see what the film makers behind these productions do, but my hopes are pretty amazingly low. I guess I can see some potential for Silent Hill or Fatal Frame turning out well, as those games rely heavily on mood. The fact that the trailer for House of the Dead starts with "teenagers, at a rave, on an island full of zombies!!" pretty much ruins any hopes I might have had for that flick.