J-Horror: An Alternative Guide

Created by Igor_Brynner.

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There's a lot more to Japanese horror than the vengeful, lank-haired spook-girls of Ring, Ju-on and their legion of imitators. Sure, the West may have only recently woken up to its charms, but J-horror has been around for a mighty long time. The first Japanese novel, The Tale of Genji – now nearly a millennium old – is positively packed with ghosts and gruesome revenge. Noh and Kabuki are some of the most haunted theatrical traditions on Earth, and Edo period playwrights were constantly fighting to outdo one another in the gore, murder and supernatural vengeance stakes.

Pretty much as soon as the first motion picture camera came off the boat here, someone picked it up and started making horror movies. Jizo the Spook [Bake Jizo] and Resurrection of a Corpse [Shinin no Sosei], both filmed in 1898, predate Nosferatu (1922) by decades. Since then, Japanese horror has come to us in a number of guises: sometimes grotesque, sometimes scary, sometimes erotic, funny or even beautiful. Let's take a look at a few examples...