I have been pretty vocal about my love for the works of the contemporary king of POV horror Koji Shiraishi, as well as my general love for the horror anthologies of purportedly real footage that got churned out for the local Japanese home video market for a time. So much so, finding a new fansubbed movie of the sort provides me with a genuine moment of happiness.
Ura Horror, an anthology of shorts that tend to be around the five minutes mark, brings these good things together, with Shiraishi co-directing together with Yohei Fukuda (who also spent some time in the realm of cursed footage and tapes banned from broadcast on his own). Quality and depth of the pieces wavers between what amounts to short jokes and their set-ups, to tales that suggest a larger world of the supernatural lurking right at the upper right corner of a fuzzy video.
For the Shiraishi maniac, some moments here feel like suggestions and sketches of what is to come later: yes, digital worms are indeed in here, and AV actress turned general purpose idol and Noroi stalwart Maria Takagi is featured (and getting cursed) as well in a segment that also features the great Takashi Shimizu playing himself. Shiraishi’s love for the low-rent parts and aspects of Japanese popular culture is already in full effect.
This is, of course, all pretty lightweight in the sense that none of the tales here is an actual story with a traditional beginning, middle, and end, or features an explanation for the weirdness we have just witnessed, and no deep characterisation is going to be forthcoming. One could, of course, argue this to be exactly the point: these are films about the lack of explanation, about weirdness only briefly encountered, caught on camera, and then locked away by the survivors.
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