The films

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Jigoku

A student's guilt drags everyone he knows into a Buddhist hell, and the last third is that hell in detail.

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Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

A plane crash, an alien blob, and the single most striking red sky in Japanese genre film. Tarantino borrowed it.

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Marebito

Takashi Shimizu, between Grudge films, shot this in eight days about a cameraman who brings something home from the underworld.

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Noroi: The Curse

A documentary film-maker investigates a demon called Kagutaba and does not come back.

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Matango

Toho's mushroom people, made by the Godzilla team, and it is far bleaker than its reputation.

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Trouble Every Day

Claire Denis made a vampire film with no vampires, and it was booed at Cannes.

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Uzumaki

A town becomes obsessed with spirals. Junji Ito adapted before his manga had finished.

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House

Toho asked their ad director what would scare children. He asked his eleven-year-old daughter and filmed her answers.

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Kuroneko

Two women murdered by samurai return as cats bound by a promise to drink the blood of every samurai they meet.

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One Cut of the Dead

Sit through the rough first 37 minutes. That instruction is the whole review and it is worth obeying.

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Society

A Beverly Hills teenager suspects his family are not human. The last twenty minutes prove it, wetly.

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Cure

A detective investigating identical murders committed by unconnected people who cannot say why.

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Kairo

The best J-horror film and the least seen. About loneliness and the internet, and genuinely despairing.

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Ju-On: The Grudge

No plot to speak of, structured as loops. Either its weakness or the reason it works.

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Suicide Club

Fifty-four schoolgirls hold hands and step in front of a train in the first three minutes.

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Tetsuo: The Iron Man

67 minutes of black and white industrial noise made over eighteen months by a crew that mostly quit.

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Dark Water

Nakata again, and the saddest of the cycle. A custody battle with a damp patch on the ceiling.

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Ichi the Killer

Miike at his most gleefully unpleasant, and the sickbag handed out at Toronto was a marketing stunt that worked.

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Confessions

A teacher calmly tells her class she knows two of them killed her daughter, and that she has already taken revenge.

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Onibaba

Two women murder soldiers in a sea of susuki grass in fourteenth-century Japan. The grass is the antagonist.

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Kwaidan

Four ghost stories on hand-painted sound stages, three hours long, and among the most beautiful films ever made.

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Godzilla Minus One

Seventy years on, the series returns to what it was for: the war, the guilt, and the cost.

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Audition

Spends an hour as a gentle romantic comedy. That is not an accident.

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Perfect Blue

Satoshi Kon's animated thriller about a pop idol losing herself, and Aronofsky bought the remake rights just to reuse a shot.

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Nope

Peele's best-looking film. About spectacle, and about what happens to the people who handle the animals.

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Ringu

A cursed videotape and seven days. Reset the entire international horror market.

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Battle Royale

A class of Japanese schoolchildren are dropped on an island and made to kill each other. Kinji Fukasaku's last major film.

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Godzilla

A serious film about the atomic bomb with a man in a suit in it, and the American recut removed most of what mattered.

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Get Out

Won the screenplay Oscar, which horror never does. The sunken place is the best new image in the genre this century.

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Oldboy

A man is imprisoned in a room for fifteen years with no explanation, released, and given five days to find out why.