In short: Sealed Video 27-30 (2017)

I’m not going too deeply into details about every single of these Japanese POV anthology movies from the producers of the “Honto ni Atta. Noroi no Video.” series. That latter series seems to be one – if not the – pioneer in this peculiarly Japanese found footage sub-genre of about hour-long anthologies of supposedly true videos.

All of them are clearly done dirt cheap and feature stories that are predominantly inspired by/taken from urban legends, Japanese folklore and 2Chan. Aesthetically, Sealed Video, like most of the other series of these types I’ve managed to see some episodes of, loves the blurred faces and street signs, the point of views assembled from security cameras, supposed home video, and so on, and so forth, which – at least to my eyes – often actually does work to provide even the silliest tale with a certain frisson of reality gone wrong.

Sealed Video’s director Ryujin Onizuka is as efficient and competent as most of the filmmakers working this particular field seem to be, milking dubious ideas, mediocre acting and often bad special effects to tell tales that are seldom not at least a little interesting. In fact, nearly every hour-long anthology of the series I’ve seen has at least one actually pretty good tale in it, one where aesthetics, ideas, and directorial effort create a simple creepy tale.

Compared with the other series of the style I know, Sealed Video features a bit more involvement by the fictional production crew in the stories. They don’t generally become proper occult detectives (alas!), but there are tales where they do attempt to break instead of just show a curse. The series never goes as far as to provide them with much characterisation, but a somewhat more proactive team does make for a nice difference compared to other series.

From time to time, a tale recommends itself by being properly bonkers as well. One, for example, explains the tengu the witnesses encounter in a mountain forest as the descendants of persecuted Western Christians, who apparently have learned how to fly and drink blood while doing the backwoods lifestyle for a few centuries. Which, we are told, is much more horrifying and threatening than actual yokai would be.

How could one resist a proposition as this?