i watched
noroi last night.
i was not expecting the combination of the usually formulaic japanese horror genre to mix so well with the equally formulaic western found-footage horror genre, but damn. what a perfect storm of creepy.
the director clearly takes a lot of influence from the pacing, formatting and cutting of texas chainsaw massacre. not the gore or anything, though. it's fairly low in the gore department. there's also the usual influences of japanese horror - there's some creepy ghost kid action, some croaking/groaning creepily. but this is kept to a kind of a minimum so that when it does happen it's not completely played out and dull.
it was interesting to me especially that the director departed from some really common pitfalls in both genres.
found footage always to me has a shortcoming in that you're stuck with a pack of young adults who you really don't care about. you don't want to get to know them, and the movie kind of forces you to, and it just makes you dislike them. in this, the real focus was on the "documentary maker" who was a middle-aged stocky man. there was no effort to stumble around his character, because it was presented as a real documentary would be in that the maker is kind of you know...only the eyepiece through which you see the subject of the documentary.
also the story was actually written out, so it wasn't just an unconnected series of creepy events (which is usually the case with found footage). it all came together in the end, there wasn't a giant gaping plothole that was left just for the sake of a cheap scare.
it also didn't really fall into the usual trope of GHOST DEAD. GHOST MAD. GHOST KILL EVERYONE! DOMINO EFFECT! of asian horror. and though there was some minor creepy kid action there was no like slow crawling croaking ghost with long hair nonsense that we've seen a thousand times. japanese horror especially has a hard time being original, because they just sort of copy the last successful thing that came along with a wee bit of a personal spin on it. i guess because this director looked outside his own country for a format to emulate, he avoided creating something that was just another samey jp supernatural horror story.
it also resolved things. like, it was still sort of THE END? but it actually explained what was going on and ended it in a way where you felt satisfied. no JOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH THUMPTHUMPTHUMPJOOOOOOOOOSH THE END GOODNIGHT
it is long though, but for that length what it accomplishes is worth it. it's almost 2 hours which is really unusual for horror. it makes good use of the time.
A+ actually creepy found footage horror totally going to check out the director's other work now