J-Horror

J-horror is a marketing label for a run of Japanese films, roughly 1998 to 2005, that rebuilt the ghost story around a specific set of images and then conquered the international market.

What it inherits

The onryō, the vengeful spirit, is centuries old in Japanese theatre. It is usually female, usually wronged by a man, and its rage is not proportionate and cannot be reasoned with. Kwaidan (1964) and Onibaba (1964) are the classical cinema versions and are both superb.

Ringu

Nakata's Ringu (1998) is the hinge. A cursed videotape kills its viewer in seven days. It was an enormous hit across Asia, and the American remake in 2002 made 249 million dollars, which caused Hollywood to option essentially every Japanese horror film in existence.

Its innovations: the ghost moves wrongly, in jerks, using footage shot backwards. The threat spreads like media rather than like a haunting. And the resolution requires you to pass the curse on, which removes the moral exit.

The others

Ju-On (2002) has no plot to speak of and is structured as a set of loops, which is either its weakness or the reason it works depending on who you ask. Kurosawa's Kairo (2001) is the best of them and the least seen: it is about loneliness and the internet, it is genuinely despairing, and its ghosts are slow rather than sudden.

Miike's Audition (1999) does not belong to the cycle stylistically but arrived at the same moment and is the film most people remember. Its first hour is a gentle romantic comedy. That is deliberate.

Why it ended

Diminishing returns and thirty American remakes. By 2010 the long-haired ghost was a parody.