Tokyo Videos of Horror 3-5 (2012-2013)

Original title: Yami Douga 3-5

The third entry in Kazuto Kodama’s series of cheap POV horror movies full of digitally blurred faces, Mickey Moused-voices and slow motion repeats of pertinent sequences doesn’t try to change up anything in the formula. It does, however, feature some very fun little stories – and a couple of adorable vignettes, of course. I’m particularly fond of the first of the longer tales, that features yet another team of hapless fictitious paranormal documentary makers learning why you shouldn’t play Kokkuri-san (basically the Japanese sibling of Ouija) in the creepiest damn room of a creepy building.

Starting with the fourth movie and continuing in the fifth, Kodama starts to try variations on the formula that bring hints of more traditional narrative back into the segments. Suddenly, some of the tales have more than one scene; plots become more complicated; and the film’s paranormal investigators start to become involved ever so slightly in attempts at actually investigating phenomena. Never in a way that would make it necessary to give them actual character traits, mind you, nor in a way that would find them encountering anything of the strange stuff they present on the videos themselves.

Structurally, film number four puts its longest story – a woman’s attempt at rescuing her sister from the medium who seems to have taken over her life that ends rather catastrophically and with what might be time travel as if this were a Koji Shiraishi joint – in two parts separated by vignettes and another longer tale and ends it on a note that leaves the door wide open for a potential sequel in a later episode.

The films also begin to develop a taste for the exotic lure of the West, so film number three’s last segment features a haunted rosary, while number four includes a story about the creation of a Hand of Glory by a cultist, and film number five does connect its most grotesque and inexplicable tale with a Russian sect often mentioned by “the great writer Dostoyevsky”. I find particular joy in films not from the West treating Western culture and occult traditions in this weird and often slightly off manner. Not just as a fair payback for cultural borrowings and bad readings of foreign cultures from our side, but because it makes well-worn tropes and accoutrements suddenly look new and exciting again.

At the same time, some of the vignettes become increasingly surrealist. Obvious high point is a short shot of a tuna market with two giant, blinking eyes overlaid onto the bellies of two of the dead fishes, which the – perpetually wonky – subtitles comment on thusly: “The eyes that blink at the stomach of tuna fish. To whom do these eyeballs belong?”. Which may or may not be the greatest poem ever written about the freaky eyes on a tuna’s belly, or a prompt for a Werner Herzog documentary.

While none of this is deep or concerned with much of thematic resonance, many of the segments work wonderfully as urban legends and folk tales come to simple and direct life. Kodama clearly aims for this effect consciously: there’s really no other reason to include a scene of doomed characters telling each other true ghost stories and even mentioning 2chan (an important source for Japanese creepypasta) than to point this out.

Because that is the sort of thing I’m bound to admire, I just love that the series has no compunctions against not explaining anything in most of its tales, keeping the Strange and the Weird – or what you can see of it between all those pixelated faces and signs that can make some shots look like an AI’s attempt at doing impressionism – just that.

In short: Tokyo Videos of Horror 2 (2012)

Original title: 闇動画2 Yami Douga 2

Don’t worry, imaginary readers, I won’t give its own post to every single one of the ten or so entries into this Japanese POV horror series by Kazuto Kodama, but after the first one, it seems somewhat interesting to at least use a few words on (or if) changes develop.

Well, for one, none of the segments here go the “gore with little budget for gore” route of the first film’s final tale. Even the middle story about a stalker contains a supernatural element, and the film stays completely in the realm of the urban legend, creepypasta and simplified J-horror. The three main tales – about a nightly visit to a school that goes a bit wrong, a woman chased by a rather peculiar stalker with a thing for creepy paper dolls, and a visit to a haunted suicide bridge that ends badly – are all broken up with short vignettes which don’t feature the interview bits of the longer stories now, because clearly, spooky cheap CGI ghosts and ghoulies are everywhere in Japan, at least wherever low res cameras point.

The longer tales here feel slightly more substantial than in the first film, their set-ups and construction a little bit more complex. This does stand them in good stead, and though all of them are still much too simple to go into plot details productively here (you might as well just spend the hour watching all three), this does improve their creep factor nicely.

The series’ generally repetitive structure could become a problem if one mainlines the films as if they were a streaming TV show, but for me, the rhythm of video, interview, video, interview, slow motion and zoom, creates a mood of cosy creepiness I find rather delightful and effective enough to keep me coming back for more.

Tokyo Videos of Horror (2012)

Original title: 闇動画 Yami Douga

POV horror is apparently not just the great Koji Shiraishi’s obsession, but at least until the end of the 2010’s, there was a proper little cottage industry in Japan churning out cheap POV horror series for the DVD/streaming (or however you consume this stuff in Japan) market. Yami Douga – like the 25(!) other films in the series - was directed – possibly written, depending on the sources – by Kazuto (or Kazu, again depending on the source) Kodama.

Structurally, the films in the series consist of a number of found footage segments where the meat of the small supernatural horror tales is intercut with interview footage of generally one of the surviving characters, or simply a character who acquired the footage we’re seeing. Ghosts and ultra cheap CGI ghoulies appear in the background and are pointed out, rewound to and checked out in slow motion.

Contentwise, the tiny tales stand with both feet in the realm of Japanese creepypasta and J-horror traditions. There’s the tale about the couple shooting fireworks at the beach who are led to the corpse of a dead kid by its ghost; the tale of a man lured into cursing himself through a ritual on a grave out in the boons and who is then accosted what may be rokurokubi, and so on and so forth. The whole affair has its creepy moments, where the low res footage – often made even lower res by exhaustive use of pixeling out of faces, signs and so on –, the simplicity of the tales, how much they are of a specific time and place, and the general awesomeness of Japanese ghost (and yokai, and so on) lore combine rather wonderfully. At least wonderfully enough to charm someone like me who really likes this sort of thing. From time to time, there’s also a grand carnivalesque hokiness on display, when the film counts down from ten so one can run away screaming/close one’s eyes/fast forward away to the next segment before it shows something mind-blowing and haunting (or so it says). William Castle would be so proud, particularly when said mind-blowing thing is a cheap and cheery CGI effect of dubious provenance.

The final tale is quite different in tone, however, and seems to aim more for a bit of Guinea Pig nastiness, though Yami Douga doesn’t even have enough of a budget to pull the gore off properly. Here, a pregnant woman is mildly – for this particular genre – abused by yakuza, drugged, and then made to commit suicide on camera. Eventually, the camera lingers on a tasteless but unconvincing foetus until the instant grudge karma gets the yakuza off-camera, while we continue looking at the rubber thing for half a minute or so, with yakuza screaming in the background and some grudge-y CGI vapours rocking around the foetus. All of which rubs badly against the good-natured creepiness of the other segments but does suggest that Kodama likes a bit of variety, which can only be a good thing in a series this long and simply structured. I also can’t help but admire the chutzpah needed to go for the final shot of the story.

In short: Hitokowa (2012)

As anyone interested in Japanese horror made in the last twenty years or so will probably know, the country has a particular love for creating urban legends - and yes, there’s consequently also a heap of creepypasta, for early-style creepypasta really is the urban legend’s twin sibling. Cue an old-fartish whinge about too much of creepypasta today having turned into horror writing that’s not good enough for the actual horror market instead of being a thing all of its own here, if you wish.

Anyway, given this love, it’s no surprise that there are quite a few Japanese movie anthologies made for the local home video market either based directly on actual urban legends or aiming for their tone very directly. Much of this stuff unfortunately doesn’t make its way to the West, so watching a little anthology movie like Hitokowa, with its very short tales of horror shot on the cheap that might induce yawns in the Japanese audience it is actually made for, looks comparatively fresh to my eyes that have been less flooded with this stuff.

Apparently (this one’s a bit too minor to trust the IMDB and other sources completely) directed by Kazuto Kodama, the sixty minute film contains a surprising number of tales between five and fifteen minutes in length, generally with plots that really sound and feel a lot like actual urban legends, or are tone-perfect replicas of such (I loathe the term “fakelore”). So you get the tale of the schoolgirl who accidentally texts her romantic SMS to the wrong guy and pays for it (because in the land of urban legends, there’s always a serial killer on the other side of electronic communications), the young woman – most of the protagonists are young women – who googles her name and finds something really rather creepy, and so on and so forth, all presented with just enough worldbuilding and characterization not to be completely bland but absolutely focused on telling the creepy tale and get out.


Visually, the thing looks about as cheap as it probably is, but Kodama is a deft enough director to milk the simple stories and simple camera set-ups he can afford for as much as they are worth, never letting a tale overstay its welcome and certainly presenting each tales’ twist with a certain verve. An additional attraction for my tastes is the film’s location work, setting these short, bleak yet fun tales in the least glamorous places in Japan, poky apartments, and drab streets, which provides a degree of the strange veracity an urban legend needs much better than anything more glitzy would.