The single most common message I get is some version of: I want to get into Japanese horror, where do I start. And the single most common assumption underneath it is that the answer will be a jumpscare delivery system with a long-haired ghost in it. That is one decade of one country's output, exported extremely successfully, and it has flattened everything either side of it. Here is what I actually recommend, in order, with reasons.
Start with Kwaidan, 1964
Four ghost stories, adapted from the collections of Lafcadio Hearn, shot on enormous hand-painted studio sets with skies that no real sky has ever looked like. It is long, it is stately, and it is one of the most beautiful things ever committed to film.
It matters as a starting point because it establishes the grammar. The dread is architectural — it comes from space, silence, and duration, from a scene being held forty seconds longer than is comfortable. Nothing jumps. Nothing needs to. By the time you get to the story about the man with the text painted on his skin you will understand what this tradition thinks horror is for.
If two and a half hours is genuinely too much, watch the second story on its own. But watch it properly, on something bigger than a phone, in the dark, without a second screen. It will not survive being half-watched and neither will your first impression of it.
Then Onibaba, and then Ugetsu
Onibaba, also 1964, is two women murdering soldiers in a field of susuki grass during a civil war and selling the armour. There is a mask in it. It is not a supernatural film for most of its running time, and it is more frightening than almost anything that is, because the horror is poverty and the mask is a consequence rather than a cause.
Ugetsu, from 1953, is a ghost story about ambition — a potter who leaves his family to profit from a war and finds exactly what he thought he wanted. It has one sequence involving a boat in fog that I would put against anything in the genre. It is also, quietly, a devastating film about how men treat their wives, which is a theme running under an enormous amount of this material.
Between them these two will break the assumption that Japanese horror means ghosts with hair. Both are about what people do when there is not enough of anything to go around.
Then the modern ones, in the right order
Now Kairo, from 2001, about the internet and loneliness and what happens when the afterlife runs out of room. It is the most upsetting film I own and almost nothing happens in it. There is a shot of a figure walking across a room, in full view, unhurried, that I have never fully recovered from.
Then Dark Water, from 2002 — a mother, a daughter, a leaking ceiling in a damp apartment block. It is a horror film about the cost of housing and the exhaustion of a custody dispute, and the ending is genuinely one of the saddest in the genre rather than one of the scariest.
Then, if you want the found-footage entry, Noroi. It is long, it is patient, it pretends to be a documentary properly rather than as a gimmick, and it rewards paying close attention to background detail in a way very few films of that shape do.
And then, fine, Ringu
It is a good film. It is efficient, it is well made, the central image earned every bit of its fame, and I am not being contrary about it. My only argument is that it should not be first.
Watch it after the other five and you will see it correctly: not as the origin of anything, but as a very sharp modern application of a tradition that had already been doing this for decades, with a new delivery mechanism bolted on. The videotape is the innovation. The dread underneath it is the same dread as Kwaidan.
Watch it first and everything before it feels slow, everything after it feels derivative, and you end up believing the export version of a national cinema. Which is how we got to a place where people tell me, with total confidence, that this stuff is all jumpscares.
Kwaidan, Onibaba, Ugetsu, Kairo, Dark Water, Noroi, then Ringu. That is about eleven hours and it will comprehensively rewire what you think the genre is. Do it in the dark, do it without your phone, and do not let anyone tell you the slow ones are the boring ones. The slow ones are where it lives.
Come and talk to me about the boat in the fog ✦
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