Horror from Japan

Why it matters

Japanese horror draws on centuries of ghost stories, theater and folklore, where wronged spirits return to confront the living. Modern films connect that tradition to everyday technology.

In the late 1990s the style, often called J-horror, reached international audiences and prompted a wave of remakes.

Japanese horror grows out of a long tradition of ghost stories, known as kaidan, which circulated in the Edo and Meiji periods and spread with the help of printing. Kabuki and Noh theater staged tales of revenge and haunting, and these plays became a rich source for early Japanese cinema. The images of that tradition, including the wronged woman who returns as a spirit, were fixed by prints and performances long before film existed. The legend of Okiku, a servant thrown into a well, echoes in the novel Ring.

The central figure of that tradition is the vengeful spirit, called the onryō, the soul of a person who died wronged and cannot rest. It is the subject of its own profile, The Onryō, which traces how the figure moved from stage to screen. What is distinctive in the Japanese approach is less the existence of ghosts than how the stories frame them. The ghost is not simply an enemy to be defeated. The haunting is a consequence, the return of something unresolved, and that gives these stories an emotional weight that comes through even when they are frightening.

After the Second World War, Japanese cinema reflected the trauma of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in monsters, mutants and vengeful figures, beginning with Godzilla in 1954. The next major landmarks arrived in 1964. Kwaidan, directed by Masaki Kobayashi, adapted four stories by Lafcadio Hearn, two of them from the 1904 book that gave the film its title. Distributed by Toho after Shochiku withdrew, it was one of the most expensive Japanese films of its time and Kobayashi's first in color, with sets built for stylized, artificial effects. The original cut ran 183 minutes, a version of 161 minutes played at Cannes, where it won the Special Jury Prize in 1965, and the US release was shortened to 125 minutes. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The same year, Onibaba drew on older tales and on Noh theater, showing that horror in Japan did not rely on a single style. In the 1980s the emphasis shifted toward gore and slasher imitations, and then, at the end of the decade, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Sweet Home (1989) helped set the template for the modern haunted-house film. In 1991 and 1992 Norio Tsuruta's Scary True Stories helped establish the label J-horror, and the stage was set for the breakthrough that followed.

That breakthrough had two forerunners. Kurosawa's Cure, which premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival on November 6, 1997 and opened in Japanese cinemas on December 27, 1997, is a psychological thriller in which a detective investigates a series of murders whose perpetrators confess under strange circumstances. It was originally called Evangelist and was renamed during production, partly because of the Tokyo subway sarin attack. It received a US theatrical release in 2001, and has been widely praised. The director Bong Joon-ho included it in a Sight and Sound poll list in 2012.

Then came Ringu. Directed by Hideo Nakata from a script by Hiroshi Takahashi and based on Koji Suzuki's 1991 novel, it stars Nanako Matsushima, Miki Nakatani and Hiroyuki Sanada. A journalist investigates a rumor of a videotape that kills those who watch it a week later. It was a hit in Japan and abroad. It was notable for relying on suggestion, atmosphere and a slow build of dread instead of graphic violence, and it connected the old ghost tradition to modern technology, which critics read as a conflict between tradition and the new. It also touched on themes of motherhood.

The film's success set off a chain of events. Hollywood remade it as The Ring (2002), and the Japanese wave continued with Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), the first of that series to receive a theatrical release after earlier installments, and Dark Water (2002). The US remade Ju-On as The Grudge (2004), Dark Water in 2005 and One Missed Call in 2008. Most of these remakes received negative reviews, with The Ring generally regarded as the exception. Nakata himself directed The Ring Two, and Shimizu directed The Grudge and The Grudge 2 (2006). The influence on American horror was substantial, in part by pushing it away from the slasher formula toward quieter dread.

Ju-On tells of a curse attached to a house in Nerima, Tokyo, and its structure, in which the curse consumes anyone who enters, made it a model for later haunted-house stories. Critics were divided at first, with some comparing it unfavorably to Ring, but its reputation has grown, and many now rank it among the best Japanese horror films. See the 1990s guide for how this wave sits beside the American self-aware slasher and the found footage boom.

Because the Japanese ghost film often relies on what is withheld, it is a good case for the principle explored in How Horror Films Use Sound to Create Fear: sound and silence can do as much as imagery. Watching Ringu with attention to what you hear, to what is not shown and to how long the camera stays on an empty space shows how the style works.

What can viewers take from this tradition? First, that a monster can be a moral event, a result of something that was done. Second, that technology is not neutral, since in these films it is a medium through which old grief returns. Third, that restraint can be more effective than excess. These ideas are visible across the decades, from the stage plays of the Edo period to a cursed tape in the 1990s.

To go further, read the entry for Ringu, the profile of the onryō and the supernatural horror page. The Movie Explorer can filter to Japan and combine that with a decade. Where this page mentions films without entries in the library, they are named for context, and the details given were checked against published references.

Films from or co-produced in Japan