Noroi: The Curse
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“No matter how terrifying, I want the truth”
Overview
Kôji Shiraishi’s Noroi: The Curse is a chillingly atmospheric cult classic of found footage horror. About a year or so before he disappeared, paranormal researcher Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki) was making a documentary called ‘The Curse’, investigating a range of seemingly disparate phenomena that seem to focus around a strange woman and an archaic piece of folklore. Together with his cameraman Miyajima, Kobayashi teamed up with Marika Matsumoto (as a version of herself), an actress who caught herself performing rituals in her sleep, and a tin foil clad psychic named Hori (Satoru Jitsunashi) to get to the bottom of this mystery.
Why You Should See This Film
Uttered in the same breath as The Blair Witch Project and Lake Mungo, Noroi: The Curse remains one of the greatest mockumentary / found footage films, and honestly, one of the scariest J-horrors of its era too. Confronting the terrors of urban alienation with folk horror like many of its contemporaries, Noroi uniquely utilises Japanese television formats, documentary stylings, low resolutions and digital artefacts to create a thick atmosphere of dread and heart-stopping moments of ‘did you see that thing in the corner of the screen?’.
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