Experiencing ‘Noroi: The Curse’ In 35mm At Fantasia
Befitting its status as a cult object, Noroi: The Curse was difficult to see until recently. Unavailable in North America—at least, through legal means—until its debut on Shudder in 2017, Koji Shiraishi’s unsettling 2005 supernatural horror film nevertheless built a word-of-mouth following based on one simple fact: It’s really fucking scary. Last year, I hosted a screening in Chicago of an imported print for an audience that had largely never seen the film. The mood started off light, but over the course of 115 minutes, giggly excitement gradually transformed into real, frozen terror. One person even screamed. It was awesome.
Watching Noroi in 35mm with Koji Shiraishi Himself
So, forgive me if I brag a little and say that I’ve seen Noroi on 35mm twice now—once last year, and again at the Fantasia Film Festival. This time, director Koji Shiraishi was in attendance, for a Q&A in which he described the film’s long afterlife as “more of a blessing than a burden.” Through a translator, an audience member asked Shiraishi if there was anything he’d change about the film if he had the chance. He said that the film’s bleak and brutal ending was suggested by his producers. His idea was to end the film with the climactic sequence where documentarian Kobayashi chases paranoid psychic Hori through the woods; there, Hori would discover a portal through which he would find and save Kana, the missing girl who drives the story.
No offense to the creator of one of my favorite horror films—I’m one of those who also considers Noroi one of, if not the best, found-footage films ever—but that ending isn’t nearly as compelling. Its feeling of oppressive, inescapable evil is key to what makes Noroi so terrifying, and a happy ending would undermine that sensation. Ironically, however, that bizarre tonal shift would bring Noroi closer to the rest of Shiraishi’s wild, go-for-broke filmography.
Portals and alternate dimensions play a major role in 2023’s Senritsu Kaiki World Kowasugi!, a meta follow-up to Shiraishi’s X-Files-esque Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! film series. And last year’s House of Sayuri—which also screened at Fantasia—is structured around a wild tonal shift, abruptly pivoting from a grim and morbid haunted-house movie to a goofy exorcism comedy midway through.
A New Short From The Mind of Koji Shiraishi
Although it’s a flawed film, I love the foul-mouthed hippie grandma in House of Sayuri, who spends much of the movie deep in some sort of cognitive decline. She’s nonverbal and appears to be lost in her own world until she suddenly snaps out of it, prompting the film’s dramatic change in tone. A similar rug-pull happens in Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension, the 29-minute short film that brought Koji Shiraishi to Fantasia in the first place.
Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension was one of five projects accepted for the shorts-to-features program at Fantasia’s Frontières market, an annual event that runs parallel to the film festival in July. According to festival programmer Tania Morrissette, this year’s selections were dominated by projects from East Asia, with a film from Taiwan and a Japanese/ South Korean/Singaporean co-production featured alongside Shiraishi’s film, which was produced by a Japanese company, Ihr HERz Inc. (The other two projects were from the USA and Canada.)
Fantasia and J-horror
Fantasia has played a big role in popularizing Japanese horror in North America. In 1999, the festival hosted the North American premiere of Ringu, effectively launching the J-Horror craze abroad and prompting Dreamworks to pick up the remake rights based on the crowd’s reaction.
Shiraishi and his producer submitted Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension to Frontières, presumably hoping for a similar reaction. They came to Montreal to pitch a feature-length version of the film to investors and production companies from around the world.
The festival screening of Noroi: The Curse was added later, the sort of opportunity that seems obvious when you have a legend like Koji Shiraishi already on his way. “I’m always so grateful that we get to showcase incredible artists and support filmmakers with their projects, but to have this opportunity with a legend of Japanese cinema that I’ve long admired has been simply unreal,” Morissette says.
What Lies In Koji Shiraishi’s Future?
Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension is primed for a feature-length expansion. The film opens with a startling, inexplicable scare scene, as a woman lying in bed in a traditional tatami room is attacked by a gigantic nail that comes flying out of a mysterious, fleshy void in the next room and buries itself in her left eye. That scene takes place under the cover of night, but the next chapter of Red Spider Lilies unfolds in daylight, employing the type of supernatural deadpan comedy that also defines the second chapter of House of Sayuri.
The exorcists that the poor woman’s sisters have called to evict the spirits turn out to be con artists, completely helpless in the face of actual evil. This ties in to the sisters’ motivation for contacting these particular men—a twist that I loved, but won’t spoil here. Let’s just say that it sets up Red Spider Lilies for a whole series of films, all centered on a group of witchy anti-heroes. There’s potential to develop these characters, as well as the creepy history of the house itself, tying together past and present in an infinite cycle of supernatural revenge. All it needs is the right investor to ensure that Koji Shiraishi’s cult status continues to grow.
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