The film opens up gruesomely with a metal fetishist, surrounded by pipes and smoke, violently cutting open his leg and inserting a steel rod inside of him.
There is very little dialogue, which adds to the film's allure. This 1989 cyberpunk horror film was directed by Shinya Tsukamoto and has become a low-budget horror cult classic. Tetsuo: The Iron Man is one of those J-Horror films that sticks with you after watching it for the very first time. There’s something very terrifying about being cursed by the simple act of watching something, especially when you know how little time you have to break that curse. Ringu was a fascinating film because it used the creepy little girl trope in a way that made it unique. Like the remake, the film opens up with two teen girls talking about a cursed videotape after one of them reveals that they've seen it, and the opening goes about as badly as you'd expect. It follows the story of television reporter and single mother Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) who becomes entangled in a seemingly inescapable curse that will be your demise about seven days after watching the curse's origin- a VHS tape. The remake deviated a little but from the original, but not much. Most people knowthe long-haired, creepy curse-caster Sadako by her westernized name, Samara, from the 2002 English-language remake of the film. Ringu is a 1998 psychological horror film directed by Hideo Nakata. Read on to learn about the 17 Best Japanese Horror Movies of All Time. Nothing compares to an honest to goodness J-Horror movie.īeware of some spoilers that lie ahead, there’s a few of them! The 2000s saw the advent of the Western J-Horror remakes, like The Ring and The Grudge, but few were worthy of comparison to the original Japanese films.
From classic black and white ghostly tales to modern takes on digital and cultural curses, Japanese horror filmmakers add an imaginative and creative flair to their films that can be hard to find in Western horror filmmaking. Whether you’re looking for something that will give you literal nightmares or just an absurd blood-spraying campy good time, there’s an entry on this list for just about every horror fan. even a really terrible one? The Japanese horror genre (known by the abbreviated term “J-Horror”) has given us films, television shows, comics, and other media that are some of the spookiest, campiest, and most mind-melting within the realm of horror.