After releasing various pink and straight-to-video yakuza films, Kiyoshi Kurosawa made his breakthrough (both in the East and West) with his 1997 psychological thriller Cure. Often seen as being one of the first films to kickstart the J-Horror phenomenon that became incredibly popular in the 2000s (with other films such as Ringu and Audition), leading to many films — including Kiyoshi’s very own Pulse — to be remade by American studios. Despite Cure not being Kurosawa’s debut film, this is the one that laid the groundwork for many themes and story elements which would further develop throughout his oeuvre.
Takabe (played by Koji Yakusho) is an overworked detective working on a long-running case involving a string of brutal murders, with only one thing linking them, there is an X carved into the flesh of the victim. Within the first 10 minutes of the film Kiyoshi establishes the traditional tropes of a serial killer crime film; something that was increasingly popular in the 90s thanks to the grungy and downbeat aesthetics of David Fincher’s Seven. However, he slowly strips away the genre tropes and narrative until we are just left with a hollow shell and the barren essentials of the genre. Different to most Western films that focus on a central killer, Cure has each murder committed by an otherwise normal and friendly person who has suddenly descended into madness and engaged in a brief moment of violence; none of these people have any real reason for doing these acts and cannot remember any circumstances that would have led them to the murder.
Over the course of the film, we learn that these people are being hypnotised into perpetrating these brutal killings. We are introduced to this hypnotist, a mysterious ex-psychology student named Mamiya — played masterfully by Masato Hagiwara, who cannot remember anything about his past. Seemingly without any reason he wanders around Tokyo meeting people and through suggestion, manages to convince them into doing his bidding and then disappearing again. Despite remembering nothing and having no obvious motive he remains an exceptionally creepy person who speaks almost entirely in questions, asking everyone “Who are you?” until they are driven into rage or confusion. A psychoanalyst tells Takabe that suggestion alone cannot drive someone to murder, they must already have some underlying urge to do so.
Each individual — who on the surface seems like an upstanding citizen — harbours something deep within them, that when drawn out can be used to tempt people into carrying out horrible acts against people they might love deeply. This evil is grown through a number of wide-ranging reasons: misogyny inflicted against a female nurse which causes her to lash out against an unsuspecting male; a police officer simply becoming agitated on a daily basis by the incompetence of his colleague; or, in the case of Takabe, the daily frustrations of juggling work and looking after his sick wife. Due to social codes and laws these feelings are repressed and ignored for decades until something ruptures the system and allows them to explode out of society. Cure is Kiyoshi’s most Freudian film and also probably his most clinical as his films would go on to have a more of a tangible sense of sorrow and loneliness in them, however, the relationship between Takabe and his wife definitely provide inklings of melancholy.
Four years after becoming a recognised horror auteur, Kurosawa cemented his legacy as a master of J-Horror with his techno-horror Pulse. Whilst it remains just as terrifying — perhaps even more so — as Cure, it is far less clinical and much more grounded in raw emotion than any of his previous works. Throughout the film it follows two separate characters who investigate a number of strange happenings involving ghosts, the internet and suicide. Firstly there is Michi, a worker at a plant shop who visits a colleague, named Yabe, whose increasing social reclusiveness is starting to worry her. She visits to find him in a strange way in which he replies to her questions with vague answers, suddenly she finds him just after he has hung himself. This event causes a chain reaction ultimately leading her to meet the second main character; Ryosuke, an economics student whose recently installed dial up internet connection is proving to be strange as he is constantly redirected to an eerie website where he can view people alone in dark rooms.
Each narrative plot focuses on the themes of alienation and isolation in an increasingly disconnected world. Through the story with Michi we look at how society is totally oblivious to how many individuals suffer from depression, isolation and mental health issues. When Yabe kills himself, his fellow colleagues cannot understand how it happened because he never seemed depressed or unwell. This ignorance, something which has become a societal norm, causes the dead to remain on as spectres to remind people of their indirect neglect towards the people they are supposed to care about. Technology such as PCs, TVs, phones, and any device designed to connect people is used by these spectres to remain in the realm of the living and communicate to them. This is an important part of Ryosuke’s story, he has the ability to see into the rooms of ghosts through their webcams. The use of grainy DV footage makes these sequences incredibly creepy, almost as if you are watching a dark web snuff film. The way that the website that houses this footage appears randomly on Ryosuke’s PC taps into the fear of the internet and the dangers of the absolute unknown parts of the web.
Without a doubt, even 21 years later, this remains one of the most genuinely scary films ever made. During the entire run time there is a sense of unease and discomfort that never really goes away, this is exacerbated by the editing which employs jump cuts that can happen halfway through a spooky sequence or land the viewer halfway into one. Most notoriously is a hallway sequence in which Yabe is confronted with the ghost of a lost soul, like in Cure, Kiyoshi keeps total control of the scenario and never turns into a jump scare or spectacle. The ghost slowly moves along this decaying hallway without saying anything menacing or wielding any sort of weapon; it is with this minimalism where Kiyoshi flourishes as a director, he is able to create so much fear and tension with such limited substance. It is surprising how incredibly spooky a scene can be when it is shot without music and lingers for far longer than you expect, as you are left constantly waiting for something terrible to happen.
Pulse doesn’t try to accuse the internet with the responsibility of being solely to blame for the rapidly loneliness in the postmodern world. More so that the dread of being constantly alone and stuck in the slums of depression existed before the internet; however, new technologies that were thought to potentially increase social contact and alleviate these wounds actually might have just made things worse. Like in Ringu, which turned the television set into a conduit for an evil apparition, Pulse does the same for the internet. Kurosawa sees the internet as another step in the constantly eroding social connectivity which seems to be getting worse every decade — an effect of late stage capitalism and rapid technological advances.
Another important film to look at is 2006’s Retribution, in which Kurosawa combines plot elements and themes of both Cure and Pulse but uses them in slightly different alterations; recurring elements often appear in his films but always feel fresh. Kōji Yakusho once again plays the lead role — a detective named Yoshioka. He begins the film investigating a single murder, a woman in a red dress has been drowned in salt water and left dead on the Tokyo Waterfront. A site that is currently being redeveloped into a landfill site. This escalates into a string of other murders with the same modus operandi, which is that they are all drowned in salt water. Each killer has murdered someone close to them for only a small, seemingly unimportant issue — something that feels very reminiscent of Cure.
Slowly the clues start unfolding and point at Yoshioka himself to be the murderer, although only of the initial killing. He starts seeing an apparition of a woman in a red dress, believing she is haunting him for her death, although he still cannot remember what happened. Kiyoshi manages to make the presence of this ghost incredibly unnerving. It doesn’t matter if they appear at night time or in broad daylight he still has the ability to instil fear. Japanese horror treats ghosts very differently from Western horror; in a lot of American films ghosts need to be overcome but in Japanese ones the ghosts are frequently too powerful to simply beat. Kurosawa’s ghosts, as seen in Pulse, are often not overtly aggressive and serve as a reminder of some guilt or trauma the victim has.
With Retribution Kurosawa takes us out of the hectic and almost overbearing location of central Tokyo and moves us to the outskirts of the city which has a darkness underpinning it. References to the development being done in the area around Yoshioka are frequently made; Yoshoka and his girlfriend often converse about the development encroaching around his flat. Slowly throughout the film it becomes clear that this ghost haunting him is not the one he initially suspects. Binding together each of the people driven to murder, including the ever confused lead detective, is a ferry ride that was part of their daily commute. On this journey it went past an abandoned psychiatric hospital which housed a woman who was left behind. Each person on this ferry is now being haunted by the ghost of the woman who all of them noticed but did nothing to help; a chilling reminder of communal failures. Towards the end of the film, Yoshioka takes this journey once more, Kurosawa uses a breathtaking montage sequence to show after 15 years — just how much of this journey has turned into construction sites or landfills.
Running throughout each of these horror films is the concept of social responsibility and the connectivity of each human. Rarely is there a single antagonist that poses a threat to the central character(s) that can be overcome, or if there is that antagonist slowly turns into something more centralised. However, what we often have is an evil that lurks underneath society that influences groups of individuals to behave in irrational and sometimes dangerous ways. In comparison to many American thriller and horror films of the same time, such as Seven or The Silence of the Lambs, this is a fairly different approach. Most of the time in Western films evil is personified as a single entity that can be beaten, usually at some sort of sacrifice to the protagonist; in Kurosawa’s films even beating what appears to be the single evil entity, in the case of Cure, offers no catharsis and no resolution to the problem, because they are not the root cause.
These evils often take the shape of various forms across Kurosawa’s oeuvre. In Retribution for example it is born out of a national guilt for various social ills that have struck Tokyo in the years following WW2. Public housing is being neglected to the point where it is collapsing, eventually being destroyed and developed into landfill sites; the mentally ill are left to suffer as the buildings they inhabit slowly rot away; and the damage that constant redevelopment work is to the environment around us. This guilt manifests itself not as an attacker but merely as a reminder of that shame. Shame which drives the characters to lash out and eventually kill one another. In Cure the evil is something that is harboured in everyone but deeply repressed through a number of different processes. This evil isn’t something that can be attributed to a single entity or institution but more a deeper rot at the core of functioning society.
Throughout these films, and many more in his filmography Kiyoshi Kurosawa manages to craft incredibly terrifying genre films that are able to convey psychological or philosophical concerns without feeling didactic. The horror elements and emotional weight of the narrative feel incredibly natural even when the film is showing you ghosts or hypnotism, you never question the reality you are being presented with, instead you get absorbed in these worlds and engage in the characters he has created.
