__ __ _ _____ _ _ _
| \/ | ___| |_ __ _| ___(_) | |_ ___ _ __
| |\/| |/ _ \ __/ _` | |_ | | | __/ _ \ '__|
| | | | __/ || (_| | _| | | | || __/ |
|_| |_|\___|\__\__,_|_| |_|_|\__\___|_|
community weblog
"pulse shaped me into the person i am today"
r/J_Horror (10/24/2026) answers, "What was the first J-horror movie that got you hooked onto this genre?" Responses free online in the US include Ringu (Fanfare; Kanopy), Pulse (Fanfare; meet the director), Battle Royale (Fanfare; Kanopy), and Reincarnation. "Japanese horror is J-Horror." "The primary audience for J-horror is... young women." Older examples include A Page of Madness (script), The Ghost of Yotsuya (in novel form previously), The Bride from Hades (Hoopla), and House (Fanfare; Kanopy). But examples since Ringu include One Missed Call (Kanopy), Dark Tales of Japan, Noroi: The Curse (Fanfare; Hoopla), Cult (meet the director of both Noroi and Cult), Creepy (Fanfare; Kanopy; Hoopla), Vampire Clay, and Occult Bolshevism (Hoopla).
posted by Wobbuffet on Oct 25, 2026 at 10:58 AM
---------------------------
Occult Bolshevism has me at the title alone.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:31 AM
---------------------------
What about the Attack of the Mushroom People? (Archive.org, 1963) Maybe not horrible enough.
posted by Rash at 11:34 AM
---------------------------
If you're not watching House in the month of October, what are you even doing? Just make sure it's the Nobuhiko Obayashi flick, not the one with George Wendt.
posted by Four String Riot at 11:39 AM
---------------------------
The Haunting (1963)
posted by jim in austin at 11:40 AM
---------------------------
What about the Attack of the Mushroom People? ... Maybe not horrible enough
Oh, no, it's terrific! Being really candid about why it's not here, the free sources for it, e.g. at Plex, are just worth passing over for the better version on Criterion. Otherwise known as Matango (1963), it's a great movie from the director of Godzilla, The H-Man which is also good, and The Human Vapor which I loved and linked last week because it has a new adaptation on Netflix. Weird fiction fans may also want to see Matango for the reason that it's an adaptation of a short story by William Hope Hodgson.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:45 AM
---------------------------
For me it may have been Onibaba (1964), which is gorgeous, intense, filled with dread, and has one of the greatest masks ever in cinema.
More recent J-horror? I think it was the first Ringu.
posted by doctornemo at 11:54 AM
---------------------------
I'm surprised Ju-On hasn't been mentioned. Some of the all-time great horror images and suspense build-ups.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:15 PM
---------------------------
Battle Royale the novel was better than the movie, somewhat in the vein of Bachman/King's The Long Walk. The alternate history of a post-WWII Japan in which the military government survived was interesting.
A series I enjoyed was Alice in Borderland. An empty Tokyo is in some ways more alarming than a spooky forest. Like, without the people, what is this place?
posted by SPrintF at 1:16 PM
---------------------------
Ringu though having 6 sisters Ju-On then remake. Grudge 2 was interesting. Eldest sister took me to 'House' Hausu hooked, after that some samurai movie then Rocky Horror at the State in one day.Painted my face like a character outta Let this be your last battlefield.
I realize my live of horror movies originates with elder sisters second hand tales and my habit of sneaking into theaters.
They loved me, told me that the leaded gasoline exhaust was BAD to inhale.
posted by clavdivs at 2:41 PM
---------------------------
Kwaidan and Onibaba.
posted by fiercekitten at 2:45 PM
---------------------------
2002 to around 2010 was the golden age of bootleg DVDs. Much Asian cinema was made available for a reasonable price at the time.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 3:05 PM
---------------------------
I saw Cure a few years ago and it struck me as so surreal and stuck with me that every time I tried to watch Pulse for free, the ads on the services kept me from getting through it. I'll have to hit up our one remaining rental store and seeing if they have it ...
posted by cobaltnine at 3:10 PM
---------------------------
for me, it was Audition
posted by kokaku at 3:19 PM
---------------------------
2002's Ju-On: The Grudge had a lot to say about the cycle of domestic violence. I particularly liked its metaphorical treatment of victims versus perpetrators; everyone remembers the uncanny visions of the woman and child who were murdered, but their killer is the spirit who reappears unchanged and unchallenged and ensures that the violence continues. I never saw the American remake.
Twenty years ago I worked on a DVD box set of J-Horror video originals as well as the DVD release of Takashi Miike's "banned" Masters of Horror episode Imprint. The video originals all seemed derivative of Ringu, The Grudge, and other films mentioned above, with fourth-wall breaks/jump scares or "we're characters in a visual novel/video game" or casual misogyny or transgender panic all rearing their ugly heads at times. I cannot recall any of the names of those titles, and it's a good thing, too: damnatio memoriae and whatnot.
Imprint is a period piece with an unreliable POV character who meets an unreliable-to-a-point narrator and is worth watching. Showtime, the Dexter network and commissioner of the Masters of Horror series, found it too gruesome and disturbing and never aired it, which is as specific as I will get with regards to the type of gore and horror in that piece.
posted by infinitewindow at 3:40 PM
---------------------------
I thought for a moment the anthology I worked on might have been Dark Tales of Japan, but none of the short plot summaries on Wikipedia rang any bells. Genius Entertainment was a client of ours at the time of its US release, but I don't think we did that particular title for them.
posted by infinitewindow at 3:45 PM
---------------------------
Turns out my colleagues and I did work on Dark Tales of Japan, as well as Kadokawa Mystery and Horror Tales vols. 1-3, Mail, Legends, and Underworld.
posted by infinitewindow at 5:32 PM
---------------------------
Turns out my colleagues and I did work on Dark Tales of Japan, as well as ... Mail
Oh, I liked Mail and FWIW it's free online in the US too! I never read the manga it's based on, but it wasn't surprising to find the stories were adaptations from a manga. Although it has the look of, like, a soap opera or a 1970s episode of Dr Who, I appreciated its occasional 'cozy' vibes. I also enjoyed more recent J-Horror along the same lines in the Stigmatized Properties series (the first on YouTube, the second on Prime). Like, the blend of horror, very low-key pacing, and very simple sentimentality in all three titles was nice.
Re: Dark Tales of Japan, I suspect you're right that list of themes you mentioned comes from one of the other anthologies you worked on too? IIRC one character in it was a jerk towards women, setting up the moral economy of the conclusion, but I remember the anthology being relatively approachable--more in the ballpark of Kowatan, which is sometimes scary but probably for teenagers, and not comparable to more extreme anthologies like the Hitokowa series or Yami Douga or whatever. The titles linked here were selected to be more or less accessible to any horror fans, though it's very possible I've forgotten something about them.
posted by Wobbuffet at 6:11 PM
---------------------------
Would you like to take a survey? Do you like beans? Do you like George Wendt? Would you watch George Wendt in a bean-eating movie?
posted by PresidentOfDinosaurs at 8:23 PM
---------------------------
"How 1990s Japan Redefined Horror FOREVER" [32:42] — ANIKI, 25 October 2026
posted by ob1quixote at 10:27 AM
---------------------------
I saw The Ring in a theater when I was in college, early 2000s, peak torrenting and file sharing age. Not wanting to take any chances I went home, torrented a copy of the film, renamed it something strongly suggesting it was porn, and seeded. It was downloaded many times, so I assume that's why I'm still alive.
I'm very sorry to anyone who was at Virginia Tech in the early 2000s who thought they were downloading something fun and ended up with a horror movie.
posted by jermsplan at 4:28 PM
---------------------------
In 2002 my Literature professor was teaching Japanese Postmodernism. Literature, but he was really into film as well, so in addition to 12 novels we also had twice weekly film screenings, usually Monday and Wednesday nights (optional). He would also sometime show trailers or individual scenes during class when they thematically related. He showed several scenes and the trailer from Pulse over the course of the class, such that we were all rabidly demanding to see it, and he arranged a special Friday night screening of it (in the 500 person Engineering lecture hall). It was by far the best attended screening of all the years he had been doing it. Dozens of college kids giving up prime Friday night partying hours to come watch a bootleg DVD copy projected onto a big screen.
When the movie ended, it was dead silent. We all walked out and I've never been part of such a dead crowd of college students. License to Live is the Kurosawa movie that reshaped my understanding of life, but Pulse was incredibly important to a 19 year old me. My professor was incredibly gracious and gave me a VHS copy of both films that I still treasure to this day.
posted by phibetakafka at 8:23 PM
---------------------------
Shortly after I got a car, I followed some show posters to a series of underground movie screenings that had been set up in what looked like an old light industrial space that hadn't been used in years, tucked into a rough part of town.
They tied up a white bedsheet and used it to project bootlegs of Tetsuo the Iron Man and Visitor Q. The sound was run through PAs in an echo-y concrete hall and the bedsheet screen billowed from the box fan that someone had set up to help deal with the heat. Somebody was selling beer out of a cooler. There were a handful of folding chairs. Most people sat on the floor or stood.
My love for bizarre film grew three sizes that summer.
posted by neuracnu at 10:44 PM
---------------------------
Visitor Q, first time, is surely a country that shall remain forever unrevisited
posted by runsrealgood at 11:49 PM
---------------------------