Teketeke (2009)

aka Teke Teke

Original title: テケテケ

A rather nasty spirit (who is indeed the star of various real world urban legends in the country with the best urban legends) known by the onomatopoetic moniker of Teketeke after the skittering noises it makes when it comes after you, haunts an overpass in the city of Nagoya. The thing takes the form of the upper half of a woman’s body moving around on her hands with high speed, and has the habit of slicing anyone in half horizontally who looks at her after hearing the noises she makes, mirroring whatever happened to herself before she became a supernatural creature. Apparently, even when you manage to escape, Teketeke will come and finish the job exactly (jurei are nothing if not punctually) three days later.

After a bit of a row about a boy, high school student Kana’s (Yuko Oshima) best friend Ayaka (Mai Nishida) takes the unaccustomed way across the overpass and is promptly killed by Teketeke. The manner of Ayaka’s death, the way it fits the urban legend of Teketeke, and a quite a bit of guilt do leave Kana with more than a few questions and doubts about what happened to her friend. When she visits the overpass where Ayaka died to lay flowers on the little shrine put up in her memory there, she encounters Teketeke herself. Unlike Ayaka, Kana manages to escape the thing; but now that she’s seen Teketeke, she can’t disbelief the rest of the urban legend, so she has only three days left to find some way, any way, to get rid of it. Fortunately, she doesn’t only have the local library to help her out, but also an older cousin named Rie (Mami Yamasaki) who is a grad student in cultural anthropology, and will turn out to have a vested interest in this particular urban legend herself.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, in my eyes Koji Shiraishi is one of the best Japanese horror directors of the post-Ringu generation. Like all of these guys (and at least one gal), Shiraishi has to fight against ever tinier budgets and a market that prefers its horror with idols instead of actual actresses in the lead. Shiraishi usually manages to squeeze good to astonishing things out of these production vagaries, getting decent and often much better performances out of the idol of the week, usually suggesting that many of them are only a bit of luck, a system change in the Japanese entertainment industry, and some acting lessons away from better ways to show their talents than bikini shots, variety shows and J-Pop.

Of course, this still  leaves a film like Teketeke with a budget that can only afford a couple of appearances of its titular creature and needs to fill the rest of its short 70 minute runtime with anything a filmmaker can come up with. It has to be said that the creature design when we get to see it is actually pretty creepy, and thanks to some excellent directorial framing choices, its absurd way of running around doesn’t feel as ridiculous as it might be but rather strange and otherworldly. Generally, the scenes where Teketeke scuttles and skitters and around work very well, Shiraishi using all the tricks in the low budget handbook to produce menace and excitement, never showing too much of the creature for too long.

This still leaves about fifty minutes of movie. About half of it Shiraishi fills with little character moments that don’t exactly pull these women away from being the obvious clichés you expect them to be but make them sympathetic and likeable and provide them at least with a bit of an inner and outer life beyond being horror movie characters, and give Oshima and Yamasaki some room to demonstrate decent basic acting chops. The other half is spent, like in any proper ghost story, following our heroines doing research about the whys and wherefores of Teketeke, trying to find a way to understand the thing and hopefully come up with a way to dispel it. I’m getting quite a bit out of scenes of characters hitting the books and interviewing people about the background of ghosts, so this sort of thing is nearly always enjoyable to me, as indeed is the case here as well.


All of this adds up to a somewhat lightweight horror movie without too much emotional heft. However the combination of a simple yet not brain-dead and effective script, the lovely urban legend it uses, Shiraishi’s directing chops as well as the chutzpa of a guy who can base a suspense sequence on a spelling mistake do make it a fun time. Sure, Shiraishi has made far more impressive movies than Teketeke, but given the constraints he’s working with, I’d still call this an artistic success.