In short: Hitokowa (2012)

As anyone interested in Japanese horror made in the last twenty years or so will probably know, the country has a particular love for creating urban legends - and yes, there’s consequently also a heap of creepypasta, for early-style creepypasta really is the urban legend’s twin sibling. Cue an old-fartish whinge about too much of creepypasta today having turned into horror writing that’s not good enough for the actual horror market instead of being a thing all of its own here, if you wish.

Anyway, given this love, it’s no surprise that there are quite a few Japanese movie anthologies made for the local home video market either based directly on actual urban legends or aiming for their tone very directly. Much of this stuff unfortunately doesn’t make its way to the West, so watching a little anthology movie like Hitokowa, with its very short tales of horror shot on the cheap that might induce yawns in the Japanese audience it is actually made for, looks comparatively fresh to my eyes that have been less flooded with this stuff.

Apparently (this one’s a bit too minor to trust the IMDB and other sources completely) directed by Kazuto Kodama, the sixty minute film contains a surprising number of tales between five and fifteen minutes in length, generally with plots that really sound and feel a lot like actual urban legends, or are tone-perfect replicas of such (I loathe the term “fakelore”). So you get the tale of the schoolgirl who accidentally texts her romantic SMS to the wrong guy and pays for it (because in the land of urban legends, there’s always a serial killer on the other side of electronic communications), the young woman – most of the protagonists are young women – who googles her name and finds something really rather creepy, and so on and so forth, all presented with just enough worldbuilding and characterization not to be completely bland but absolutely focused on telling the creepy tale and get out.


Visually, the thing looks about as cheap as it probably is, but Kodama is a deft enough director to milk the simple stories and simple camera set-ups he can afford for as much as they are worth, never letting a tale overstay its welcome and certainly presenting each tales’ twist with a certain verve. An additional attraction for my tastes is the film’s location work, setting these short, bleak yet fun tales in the least glamorous places in Japan, poky apartments, and drab streets, which provides a degree of the strange veracity an urban legend needs much better than anything more glitzy would.