Original title: Yami Douga 3-5
The third entry in Kazuto Kodama’s series of cheap POV horror movies full of digitally blurred faces, Mickey Moused-voices and slow motion repeats of pertinent sequences doesn’t try to change up anything in the formula. It does, however, feature some very fun little stories – and a couple of adorable vignettes, of course. I’m particularly fond of the first of the longer tales, that features yet another team of hapless fictitious paranormal documentary makers learning why you shouldn’t play Kokkuri-san (basically the Japanese sibling of Ouija) in the creepiest damn room of a creepy building.
Starting with the fourth movie and continuing in the fifth, Kodama starts to try variations on the formula that bring hints of more traditional narrative back into the segments. Suddenly, some of the tales have more than one scene; plots become more complicated; and the film’s paranormal investigators start to become involved ever so slightly in attempts at actually investigating phenomena. Never in a way that would make it necessary to give them actual character traits, mind you, nor in a way that would find them encountering anything of the strange stuff they present on the videos themselves.
Structurally, film number four puts its longest story – a woman’s attempt at rescuing her sister from the medium who seems to have taken over her life that ends rather catastrophically and with what might be time travel as if this were a Koji Shiraishi joint – in two parts separated by vignettes and another longer tale and ends it on a note that leaves the door wide open for a potential sequel in a later episode.
The films also begin to develop a taste for the exotic lure of the West, so film number three’s last segment features a haunted rosary, while number four includes a story about the creation of a Hand of Glory by a cultist, and film number five does connect its most grotesque and inexplicable tale with a Russian sect often mentioned by “the great writer Dostoyevsky”. I find particular joy in films not from the West treating Western culture and occult traditions in this weird and often slightly off manner. Not just as a fair payback for cultural borrowings and bad readings of foreign cultures from our side, but because it makes well-worn tropes and accoutrements suddenly look new and exciting again.
At the same time, some of the vignettes become increasingly surrealist. Obvious high point is a short shot of a tuna market with two giant, blinking eyes overlaid onto the bellies of two of the dead fishes, which the – perpetually wonky – subtitles comment on thusly: “The eyes that blink at the stomach of tuna fish. To whom do these eyeballs belong?”. Which may or may not be the greatest poem ever written about the freaky eyes on a tuna’s belly, or a prompt for a Werner Herzog documentary.
While none of this is deep or concerned with much of thematic resonance, many of the segments work wonderfully as urban legends and folk tales come to simple and direct life. Kodama clearly aims for this effect consciously: there’s really no other reason to include a scene of doomed characters telling each other true ghost stories and even mentioning 2chan (an important source for Japanese creepypasta) than to point this out.
Because that is the sort of thing I’m bound to admire, I just love that the series has no compunctions against not explaining anything in most of its tales, keeping the Strange and the Weird – or what you can see of it between all those pixelated faces and signs that can make some shots look like an AI’s attempt at doing impressionism – just that.
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