Date: 2008-10-30 23:08 Subject: Japanese curses are no fun Security: Public Location: Not Jersey Mood: busy

I haven't really had time to do much for Halloween this year, but I did dig up a classic horror movie on youtube.

Noroi ("The Curse") is sort of the Japanese cousin of the Blair Witch Project. But rather than shaky-cam footage of darkness and bitchy campers, it is presented in "Incomplete Documentary" form, with archival films, home movies, interviews with crazy homeless people, and even clips from cheesy daytime TV shows... Mundane, amateurish, or even tedious in parts, it represents the unedited footage that an investigative reporter left behind before he mysteriously disappeared.

But viewed together, in sequence, a lot of small, very disturbing details start to come together. What initially come across as random clips of bad Japanese television become suggestions of very horrible, unseen, and strangely related events. As it was left incomplete by the (missing) author, there's no overarching narrative, so you're left with the comments he makes "live" during his interviews, and a lot of reading between the lines... Which makes it a little hard to follow at times, but much more disturbing when you start to make the connections.

It's fairly long, and cut up into little chunks on YouTube, but the first couple of parts will give you a good idea of whether it's your kinda party.

Part 1 ... Part 2 ... Part 3 ... Part 4

Part 5 ... Part 6 ... Part 7 ... Part 8

Part 9 ... Part 10 ... Part 11 ... Part 12

There are only a handful of special effects, and they're pretty subtle; Mostly it's about details and sounds, at least until things really start getting weird. And as a lot of the really terrible stuff happens off camera, it's not that disturbing... Unless you have a good imagination, and a talent for filling in blanks and question marks with horrible things, in which case it's pretty awful.

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