Flickers in the dead of night

Kaidan Shinmimibukuro

Rating: * * * 1/2 (out of 5)
Director: See review
Running time: 92 minutes
Language: Japanese
Currently showing

The older I get, the harder I am to scare -- with horror movies at least. After a certain age, real life, including medical bills, school fees and Fox News, becomes scary enough -- and the celluloid variety of shock becomes more tiresome.

I've had enough chain saws, claw hands and hockey masks to last a lifetime. But several Japanese directors, such Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata and Hiroshi Shimizu, have given me a new kind of creeps that have nothing to do with implacable madmen chasing shrieking teenage girls, and everything to do with unquiet dreams, fugitive fears the logical mind can't comprehend and stories that have the ring of inner truth or actual experience, however incredible.

I'm not the only one -- the films of these horrormeisters, under the label J-Horror, have spread far and wide outside Japan, more by word of mouth than any clever PR campaign. If the new anthology "Kaidan Shinmimibukuro" is any indication, there is a new generation of directors already coming up, each trying to outshock the other: The J-Horror farm team.