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Noroi the curse cast

Jin Muraki Masafumi Kobayashi

Tomono Kuga Junko Ishii

Marika Matsumoto Self

Satoru Jitsunashi Mitsuo Hori

Rio Kanno Kana Yano

Shûta Kambayashi Boy with Junko

Takashi Kakizawa Shin'ichi Ôsawa

Yoshiki Tano Teruyuki Yano

Yoko Chosokabe Kimiko Yano

Hisashi Miyajima Self

Mana Okada Midori Kimino

Miyoko Hanai Keiko Kobayashi

Eguchi Tomomi Self

Makoto Inamori Kôichi Hirotsu

Hiroshi Aramata Guest on TV Program

Dankan Guest on TV Program

Gôkyû Guests of TV Program

Ai Iijima Guest on TV Program

Kei Matsubara TV Program Host

Ryûnosuke Iriyama Psychic Boy

Takushi Tanaka Self - Ungirls

Yoshiaki Yamane Self - Ungirls

Maria Takagi Self

Ken'ichirô Matsui Self

Yôichi Okamura Event Emcee

Mikako Okui Self

Ryôko Okui Self

Kazuhide Shioya Self

Hajime Suzuki Self

Hitomi Takashima Takami Shimizu

Toshinori Tanimura Self

Toshimaru Yasuno Villager

Takaaki Yuhara Self

Crew 13

Art

Norifumi Ataka Production Design

Camera

Shozo Morishita Director of Photography

Costume & Make-Up

Yûichi Matsui Makeup Artist

Directing

Isamu Nagaseki Assistant Director

Koji Shiraishi Director

Editing

Nobuyuki Takahashi Editor

Production

Masashi Yamaguchi Casting

Shingo Miyauchi Line Producer

Takashige Ichise Executive Producer, Producer

Sound

Tsugenori Keida Music Producer

Visual Effects

Hajime Matsumoto Visual Effects

Writing

Koji Shiraishi Screenplay, Writer

Naoyuki Yokota Screenplay

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ノロイ Noroi: The Curse

4/10
Noroi: The Curse is a horror movie framed as a documentary about one man's paranormal investigation. This is an interesting idea in concept, but unfortunately the movie mostly failed at making the events depicted seem convincing. I know that these low-budget found footage films are meant to be a bit campy, but the stiff acting and awkward editing decisions riddling the film made getting invested in the documentary charade difficult. To top it off, the movie wasn't all that scary either, possibly as a result of its failure to be convincing. It did have a couple things going for it though. The movie was able to keep up a heavy, dreadful atmosphere throughout, and the special effects were, for the most part, really good, all things considered.
Noroi was definitely entertaining, just not for the reasons it was probably meant to be.

It's said the Gothic functioned as the afterimage of modernity, and that the finitude of late capitalism negates this purpose. The spectres of the past are already present and domesticated, the present as they say is saturated in a past that has as much hope of pulling us into it as it does propelling us someplace else. Noroi redefines a Gothic by complicating the surface/depth binary used by critics of postmodernism. That is, if there are only surfaces, and in these surfaces is the present-past, then these surfaces should be shown not to be insufficient (lacking depth) but disarmingly present. It should also mean taking recording technology very literally when it re-presents the living as latent digital patterns. In Noroi the haunting is of the surface where the surface indicates materiality, the Parmenidean hallucination of postmodernity a writhing and deathly terrifying re-present.

Whereas The Blair Witch Project indicates the failure of recording technology to capture the unknown, Noroi sets domesticity in its scope to reveal the horror of the hyper-known. And whereas Ringu concerns the virality of a blackmarket tape, the secrets of Noroi are, at least foundationally, already public. Noroi opens with the text This video documentary is deemed too disturbing for public viewing, but then Kobayashi is established as a well-known documentarian whose primary sources are all locally accessible historians and technicians. There is also a huge tonal whiplash between Kobayashi's somber sense of duty and the loud and upbeat character of his secondary source: television. The information that Kobayashi 'captures' is broadcasted ephemera, which means in the beginning he works more as a one-to-many digital archivist than an investigator. What this means is the unknown is not 'out there', but appearing 60 times a second within ordinary life, only to be forgotten when the next show comes on.

These broadcast signals are cropped to emphasise the materiality of the transmission, because if signals/surfaces are all we have, then that is where the Gothic is. Noroi is obsessed with documents before it's interested in action, with printed folders, old books, scrolls, reels, doodles, and home cooking videos holding as much weight as the ritual objects documented. In one particularly unsettling scene, footage is re-shot from the viewfinder of a DV camera to draw attention to the laminar representational surfaces in the film. The diegetic (from the live camera) sound is swallowed up by the second-level (from the DV footage) sound and image, so the safe perspective of the documentary layer is broken never to be fixed. The footage we see (which is now all levels of footage) is invaded with faces, and damaged through image artefacts and time dilation. The sound becomes overwhelming, slowed to an agonising crawl as the faces materialise in the corrupted image code. Given that we are aware Kobayashi is missing in the film's future, we might assume this unseen footage was shuffled into the edit after the fact. But then this encroachment from the future is recognised in Noroi's diegetic timeline as encroachment. Which is to say Kobayashi in this moment knows he is already dead.

This is the liveliest thing in the film because it reveals a rapturous violence inflicted on the material form rather than the film's inability to capture the material. The other is a scene of 16mm footage of a now drowned village performing a ritual for a now drowned deity. There is no violence against the film or anybody present, but it does capture a sense of coming-alive in the film's materiality that is as agitated as the DV re-recording. A woman dressed as the deity performs as her, we are told, to keep the spirit at bay. This scene dramatises simulation as a way of enacting and so stopping some event — making material the unknown, and then performing it in the safety of mimesis. Where this goes wrong is in its underestimation of the postmodern Gothic. If there can be no distinction between the simulation and the Real, then to simulate is to become, in this case possessed. The material form of the footage is possessed, as well as the figures it represents. In the cursed found-footage format to play the simulated recording is also to summon it, because there is no difference between the frame and its contents. Hitting play is summoning the dead as they are caught in celluloid and digital patterns; there is no witnessing, only experiencing. The ghost hunter predicament is whether technologies give greater access to unseen realities, or whether these means of access are themselves rituals to materialise the unseen. The characters making up Kagutaba are 'disaster', 'tool', and 'spirit' — the tools themselves conjure the spirit of disaster, are its medium. Noroi's spectrograms too flatten seen/unseen, material/incorporeal distinctions as every sound is indexically rendered in waves. Nothing is left to a hiccup in the individual's psychology, or to a noumenal exchange between the individual and the spirit. Everything is not beyond, but right here. The Kagutaba mask (the film) is also Kagutaba (the form).

The range of hideous cameras on display here is often breathtaking, and the range of different forms of 'acting' eventually comes to constitute something like ordinary life (where acting is not uniform). Noroi's foundations in channel surfing are at first strange and then bracing, and Kobayashi's later procedural is more rife with frustration than with a satisfying descent into mystery. People he needs won't talk to him or have moved, and when he finds the right house they've moved back to where he started. When new information is uncovered it does not advance Noroi so much as belabour its foregone conclusion. It becomes less satisfying as it goes, domesticating scenes of climactic horror such that they become the accepted norm. Dread scales inversely to interest when interest is committed to satisfying conclusions and indicating a way out. When ectoplasmic worms are said to devour the young and to bind strangers to inexplicable suicide pacts, this seems less a metaphysical speculation than a statement of fact: the bodies do turn up, they do adhere to the will of these invisible threads, and so most likely we just haven't developed the right tools to capture their signal yet. Not that this would change anything. A bored child, soon to be dead, offers I guess it's too late for all of us. It's already here.

the most interesting thing about noroi is not that it is found footage, but just how heavily it wraps itself in its found footage trappings. canonically, this is a meticulously edited product labored over by a collective of people at least one degree removed from the events of the film; and these people know exactly what kind of film they're making. noroi has the presentation of a cheap, gaudy 2-hour tv special running on some desperate-for-ratings paranormal investigations channel at 3pm, sandwiched between the kind of trashy filler programming the U.S.'s history channel has become infamous for. the first hour, after hooking us with the deadly serious aftermath of the events we are about to witness, plays out rather sloppily in a way that feels endemic to the format; organic, almost. whoever put this together struck gold; not only are they sitting on a ton of creepy-ass footage of spooky shenanigans, nearly all of those involved are missing or dead. they don't restrain themselves to this principal footage, splicing in variety shows and stories from the local news to add context and drama, along with generous doses of "creepy", utterly generic, musical stings and editing flourishes. these self-reflexive tendencies peak at about an hour into the film, in a gloriously meta scene which captures kobayashi, our unwittingly tragic paranormal investigator, watching a vhs transfer of a 16mm reel from 1978 of the last performance of a highly idiosyncratic ritual meant to ward off the demon causing all the horrible mischief the film revolves around. that's four degrees of separation from the piece of media presented to us as 'noroi', all of differing technological specifications and eras, and all in service of presenting us with what is itself an anachronistic and mournfully final customary practice from a village on the verge of destruction. the amount of telescopic collapse here is something i've never seen before in this genre, and done in such a casual manner as to not overstate its presence, but merely invite the viewer farther down this hellish rabbit hole.

following this scene, however, the film steadily devolves into a kind of onanistic braindead representation of exactly what it seems so uniquely equipped to lampoon. at which point you'll remember this is a 2000s j-horror film which asks us to take digitally inserted ghost-girls very seriously, and not some postmodern riff on the found footage genre and exploitative ghost show hosts. my loss, i guess.

This really happened.

I don't want to say too much on this movie, because it's simply the best found footage horror film in existence right now. The brilliance of Noroi is in its excellent pacing, imaginative deviations from typical found footage films (the TV show bits are so well-shot), and serious acting chops from just about everyone involved.

Though it doesn't take center stage, there's a folk horror element to Noroi that is firmly rooted by excellent use of location and set design. The dark corners of rural Japan that the movie explores feel lived in, festering and dirty. The editing and cinematography never deviate from that spontaneous documentary feel and the lead character, Kobayashi, is extraordinarily convincing as a journalist trying to uncover the truth no matter what. Maybe there's a bit of cheapness to some of the (very infrequent) special effects, but it never once shakes you from its grimy aura.

To this day, I'm still unsure spoiler: click to read how much of the Kagutaba myth, ritual footage, and superstition comes from real history , but that only makes it more freaky to me.

A movie I've wanted to see for a while. I've seen a fair few different films by this director, so it's only a matter of time before I see the one he's most known for. So, let's see if this movie lived up to it's underground hype.

In the movie, we follow a journalist going through a documentary like process of trying to solve a mystery of a missing girl. Although, the footage is actually showing the last months of the man before he mysteriously disappeared. The movie goes through various different phases of showing different characters whom get elaborated on further through the movie, as well as more and more content being revealed about a the curse whether it be through other characters dying, or giving some information towards it.

This movie was quite strange. Definitely hard to follow at times, but that's nothing to do with the plot persé. More of a case of the story just being quite bland, nothing much really happens in the movie and although it definitely does run on atmosphere, it's a movie that is very light in the scares department. But the movie is very interesting, it definitely kept my attention, despite it's general lack of content. It has some very interesting filming techniques as well, and does feel like a genuine found-footage style documentary.

Noroi: The Curse was a good movie, a strangely made hard to follow mess at points, but it was still a good movie. If you're a fan of POV horror, found footage or just Asian horror in general (despite this being very different) then you should give this movie a go, I'm not going to guarantee you'll like it, but you might.

Noroi is admittedly underwhelming, but it does succeed in the normal found footage ways that the vast majority of similar works fail to address.

I am happy, no, ecstatic to say that there is little drama among the characters, or at least it is implied that they have the good sense to turn off and/or edit out when this drama takes place. After seeing so many other found footage horror flicks fall from great heights after they decide that the optimal course of action is to turn down the fear factor and turn up the melodrama (Cloverfield anyone?) it is a breath of fresh air to see filmmakers concerned with making realistic horror using this format.

Without all the poorly acted drama that infests other found footage films, Noroi is jammed with all the creepy symbols, scares, plot twists, and strange characters that can fit in its nearly 2-hour run-time. As a mockumentary, it often preemptively reveals scares and plot twists, but it is acceptable as a component of this style of filmmaking.

The only "misstep" I can point out is the poor translations that come with every subtitled version of this film. It distracts from the idea that this is a documentary we are suppose to be watching. If that mood is not established, the realism of the film falls apart. And at various point it does, as the conversations feel forced. That fact alone unfortunately ruins a large portion of the scenes for me.

Noroi is definitely worth watching for anyone who is a horror or found footage fan, but be warned that its long run time and frequent poor translations are distracting from the overall mood of the story.

Eh, pretty underwhelming. I enjoy a slow burner as much as the next guy, and I can see the point of not going overboard on explicit scares, but this did not so much build tension as anticipation of something actually creepy happening which it ultimately failed to realize even when shit went down. The first hour and a half consists of a guy conducting boring research and Paranormal Activity-esque strange yet unremarkable occurrences ("this woman only has one baby but on this recording we can hear FIVE BABIES"; "all the pigeons gathered at this guy's window, then he VANISHED"; "I woke up and found KNOTS on the table"), the last half hour does have some scary scenes (especially the ending and the woods segments) and a nice atmosphere but had me looking at the watch and wondering when it would really kick in only realizing it would not.

A decent J-horror offering that lost itself in the last 20 minutes or so. There were some very creepy moments in the first half but the more overt scares later on were not as effective. The plot, though, was interesting, and a few compelling scenes made it worthwhile (the old footage of the demon ritual). I also liked the variety show material used for exposition, and for the first forty minutes or so I thought this might be some kind of dark satire on sensationalism. It wasn't, but whatever.

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Noroi the curse cast

Streaming Availability: Shudder

Noroi: The Curse is a found-footage horror movie, the first major film from prolific genre director Kōji Shiraishi. The whole movie is shot on VHS home video cameras, which were already way out of date by 2005. More advanced digital video cameras were common and cheap, DVD was already the preferred home video format, and the HD revolution was underway. I do not think Noroi was ever officially released on VHS cassette. The strange antiquarianism is important to this movie’s affect, however. Archaic media formats are core to found-footage and the related phenomenon of creepypasta. The more anachronistic the medium, the more complex the meta-layer of the story grows, and the more disturbing it becomes. Even this film, which claims to have been shot in late 2003 and early 2004, needs that cloud of artifacting and lo-fi degradation to be “believable”.

Noroi (which means "curse" in Japanese, so the English title means "Curse: The Curse") has a meta-layer of being the final film from paranormal "researcher", Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki). Kobayashi is a minor documentarian, studying occult activities in Japan. We never learn about his previous works, but we do not get a sense of much fame or success, and one suspects this guy is not terribly concerned if his stories are actually bullshit. The film-within-a-film, also called "Noroi", is shown to us by a spooky disembodied narrator, explaining that the film was completed, but a few days later, Kobayashi's home burnt down in mysterious circumstances. The director has disappeared, no body found. The distance between reality and fiction are further confused when a Japanese actress, Marika Matsumoto (the voice of Rikku from Final Fantasy X), appears in the documentary playing herself.

Thanks to this concept, we get clear answers as to why all this footage has been tightly edited and who did it. That’s an annoying problem that movies like Paranormal Activity cannot answer. Speaking of that franchise, its central gimmick of staring at a possessed woman all night in case she does something creepy is just one scene in Noroi. Marika has found herself mysteriously tying intricate loops and knots without memory of doing so. Kobayashi helpfully films her sleeping, and indeed, she’s got something controlling her at night. Many found-footage movies are slow, methodical build-ups to the big punchlines, relying on atmosphere, not big set-pieces. Noroi actually has both. We get a demon in camera by a half hour in. Since Kobayashi and his crew are watching their own footage, they play it back to point it out to us. They edit in freeze-frames just in case you missed it. So you end up with a movie that has all the most interesting features of Lake Mungo, The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activity all in two hours of dense plotting and big scares. It will not leave you feeling short-changed if atmosphere alone is not your path to entertainment.

There is a lot going on in Noroi. Kobayashi starts off just by checking out reports of a creepy neighbor, Junko Iishi (Tomono Kuga) and her quiet little boy (Shûta Kambayashi). But later he's folding in the disappearance of a psychic little girl, Kana (Rio Kanno), who draws horrifying asymmetrical faces. There's Marika's possession. Then there's Hori (Satoru Jitsunashi), a paranoid, dirty man with huge cavities in his teeth, wearing a tin-foil hat, and raving about "ectoplasmic worms". You'd expect a character like this to be played more exploitative than he is; a lot of more movies would make Hori into a comic relief - Noroi does not. He’s over-the-top but he’s more an omen of the impending horror that’s coming for the entire cast. Turns out Junko is part of a black magic cult from a recently-sunken village named Shimokage. Worse, she has been stealing aborted fetuses for a horrible reason.

Then there's the issue that everybody keeps disappearing. Junko and her boy keep popping in and out of places in Tokyo. The first group of people who reported Junko to our director disappear a few days later. Kana disappears. A neighbor actress of Marika's disappears. Some guy who played with pigeons in a weird way disappears. The relocated Shimokage villagers keep their homes full of dogs that are constantly barking. All the dogs disappear. And we need to remember that even Kobayashi himself is doomed to an unknown fate. That dramatic irony gives the movie a lot of tension. However, before the end, most of these people will come back, never in great shape. (Warning to animal lovers: you will not enjoy Noroi.)

There's a lot of detail to the spookiness in Noroi. The demon uses pigeons as his calling card. We get a thick mythology involving multiple symbols and faces. The whole issue of abortion is tied into some running problem with mental health and a cold-unfeeling sense of the world. There's so very much wrong happening in plain view, yet it is left unsolved, indeed mostly unquestioned. Nobody seems to be interested in actually solving any of this mystery except Kobayashi, who is probably a con-artist when his movies do not actually involve demons. (Though, that is my interpretation, very few characters get much development beyond being victims of the terror.)

My other disappointment is that the demonology of this movie is mostly invented. The central demon is named "Kagutaba", a local folk spirit of the Shimokage area. We never get much clarity on what Kagutaba is or what it wants, but it is heavily associated with the Shinto traditions. In old 16 MM films - again the spookypasta theme of old technology - we see a priest and a masked woman dressed as that asymmetrical face that Kana drew perform a ritual to cleanse the area. It involves bowing and clapping and cutting a string, only for it fail and the masked woman to scream uncontrollably. Kagutaba's face looks a lot like the demon masks used in Japanese theater, only much more awful. Later one of the biggest scares of the movie is set under a torii, the iconic gates that mark the entrance to a Shinto shrine. We see Kana covered in little crawling fetuses, themselves looking like mischievous Yōkai spirits. I'd rather have an authentic Yōkai, but Noroi is still a great horror movie.

And it is nice to take a break from talking about Satan every day. I love the Devil as much as the next guy but not everything is about you, Lucifer. The Japanese conception of demons is wildly different. Many of them are more like mischievous fairies or adorable little freaks. Shinto is a really interesting religion, since it is without a central dogma or orthodoxy. It can co-exist with Buddhism in Japan without a worry. So demons are usually not global threats that could destroy the moral order of the universe, they're often just fun little ghouls. Kagutaba seems to be also inspired by Christian demon films, thus the evil conspiracy to create him. Junko's little boy might be as close to an Anti-Christ as you can fit into Shintoism.

Noroi did have some back luck upon initial release. You'd imagine a movie like this would have been a huge international hit, coming out right between the found-footage horror craze and the big run of East Asian horror. However, that meant it landed in exactly the worst spot. By 2005 the J-horror movement in America was dying down. Incredible movies such as Kairo were turned into dogshit like 2006's Pulse and we were sick of it. (I think Takashi Miike made One Missed Call in 2003 cynically to get an American remake.) That leaves Noroi just too late to follow The Ring, but too early to get on the bandwagon of [REC]. There was no way it wasn't going to find an audience, however. The V/H/S franchise would spool up a new-interest in magnetic media by 2012. So Noroi was finally given a release here in the West by Shudder in 2020. Fifteen years too late, but not nothing.

Next Time! You know my sister is named "Emily" and her middle name is "Rose"? I guess I cannot avoid this one, The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

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