A tiny made-for-DVD (apparently) “true paranormal” show believes they have hit the big time with an audience video that shows a supposed encounter with the Kuchisake Onna, the Slit-Mouthed Woman, herself. Or at least, a woman of considerable height who likes to dress the part and can run astonishingly fast. Pasted scraps of paper and other clues lead the intrepid reporters – irascible and sometimes violent director Kudo (Shigeo Ohsako), his assistant Ichikawa (Chika Kuboyama) and their typically unseen cameraman Tashiro (director Koji Shiraishi) – on the trail of a mystery that involves curses, a magic school of dubious morals and village tragedy.
Mostly ignored by western distributors, the great Koji Shiraishi has spent several years in the 2010s on a series of connected made for home video/streaming/whatever POV horror movies about the misadventures of the trio of paranormal documentary filmmakers we first encounter here. By now, we’re up to nine films, with all but the last two of them fansubbed by some unsung heroes of the cause.
This early in the series, there’s just a hint of a larger meta plot in Kudo’s backstory as well as the way the occurrences here don’t quite resolve; not yet having seen any of the later films, I have no idea how or if any of this is going to be important later on, which makes me quite happy, actually.
As you may know, Shiraishi has turned into something of a specialist in the POV horror form, and has probably used the mode in more films than anyone else making horror movies right now. Not surprisingly, he is rather good at this sort of thing, using the stylistic elements of POV horror to disguise miniscule budgets, dodgy effects, and the sort of flaws that come with a tight shooting schedule, rather adeptly. Shiraishi also understands the use of POV horror as an actual aesthetic, the joy of hiding things in blurry backgrounds, or revealing them with slow motion and post-production zooms. In Shiraishi’s world, cheap digital media take on the same haunted quality as the VHS tape does for other filmmakers, and he’s using this to create a feeling of liminality.
Unlike other filmmakers of the style, Shiraishi clearly doesn’t believe in the necessity of keeping dull scenes during which little happens on for too long, so things zip along at a nice pace, the characters following the trails of their investigation from hint to hint, while things become increasingly creepy. It’s a budget-conscious kind of creepiness, of course, but one that’s wonderfully effective for a viewer willing to go with the film’s conceits and its aesthetic.
Even though the film does indeed feature a slit-mouthed woman, the backstory and the way she acts do not try to repeat Shiraishi’s first movie concerning the legend. They do seem to belong into the same kind of occult world the director’s POV masterpieces Noroi and Occult take place in, where urban myth, folklore, and those aspects of Japanese religions closest to what we in the West would call occultism blend into something that always feels close to the nihilism of certain types of cosmic horror to me. If the Senritsu Kaiki File films will completely go there in the end, I don’t know yet, but particularly the last act does suggest they may very well end up in that direction.
Putting on my Weird Fiction fan hat, I found myself particularly enjoying how much the film uses its cheap shot filmmakers as a group of occult detectives, though the sort neither with electrical pentacle nor much practical magical knowledge, who try to unravel an enticing mystery that seems to suggest strange vistas, and even seem to plan on some ill-advised ghost(?) busting.
All of this, particularly presented in Shiraishi’s carefully made to not look carefully made style, and showing much of the director’s interests, is very much catnip to me.
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