Following his smash success with "Ring" (1998) and "Ring 2" (1999) — films that launched the worldwide J-horror boom — Hideo Nakata went to Hollywood, where he was hyped as the next Asian directing phenomenon — a Japanese version of John Woo and Ang Lee. But instead of churning out blockbusters, Nakata has spent the past five years making the Hollywood version of "The Ring 2," a cake that failed to rise at the U.S. box office, and developing other projects, including "The Ring 3."

For his first Japanese film since 2002, Nakata has made "Kaidan," a period shocker based on the work of Encho Sanyutei, a 19th-century writer and rakugo (comic monologue) performer. In other words, Nakata is returning to his native roots, which makes creative sense since some of the scariest elements in his J-horror hits were deeply Japanese, beginning with vengeful female ghosts, elements that Hollywood remakes often diluted or abandoned. Nakata must have had many a frustrating script meeting.

But J-horror also departs from Japanese ghost-story traditions with its use of contemporary technology, mundane modern settings and everyday phenomenon to generate scares. In the "Ring" films, the carrier of the deadly curse is a videotape. In Nakata's 2002 "Hongurai no Mizu no Soko kara (Dark Water)," the house of horrors is the sort of moldy, run-down apartment building found throughout Tokyo; the harbinger of evil is water dripping from a ceiling.