The films

WATCHcult

Jigoku

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

WATCHcult

Noroi: The Curse

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

WATCHcult

House

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

WATCHknown

Kuroneko

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

WATCHknown

Shutter

A photographer starts finding a figure in his negatives. The reveal about the neck pain is the best in Asian horror.

WATCHknown

Cure

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

WATCHknown

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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Dark Water

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

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Onibaba

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

WATCHknown

A Tale of Two Sisters

The highest-grossing Korean horror film ever, and it is really a family drama with a haunting in it.

WATCHknown

Kwaidan

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

WATCHcanon

Audition

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

WATCHcanon

Ringu

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