Original title: Okaruto

Kôji Shiraishi has made quite a splash with his many and varied “found footage” or fake documentary horrors, the best known and most widely seen of which is Noroi (2005), better known in the English speaking world as Noroi: The Curse, though he’d been at it for a while before that with films and videos like The Exorcist’s Vengeful Curse (2001) and Really! Cursed Video: The Movie (2003). Subsequently, he made a mix of straight narrative films and found footage, one of the latter being the 2009 film Occult.

Like Noroi, it’s not your standard found footage film, instead taking the form of an assembly of footage seemingly shot by professionals investigating a horrific incident that took place in Myogasaki in 2005. A man named Ken Matsuki murders two young women in broad daylight (the attack was caught on videotape) and badly mutilates a man, Shohei Eno (Shôhei Uno), telling him that it’s his turn now. The seemingly motiveless crime was never solved as Matsuki leapt from a nearby cliff and his body was never found. Three years later, a documentary crew, led by director Koji Shiraishi (seemingly playing himself) who track down Eno and learn that his injuries have left him with scars on his back that seem to form the shape of an arcane and possibly occult symbol. Since the attack, Eno claims to have been having strange visions and experiencing what he calls “miracles” and has come to believe that Matsuki was instructing him to perform some sort of “ceremony.” Unemployed and homeless, Eno is allowed to live in the production offices while Shiraishi and his team investigate the marks on his back.

This leads them Kutoro Rock at the peak of Mount Ohiruyama, where Shiraishi had been bitten by several leeches a few years earlier, finding a strange stone with the petrogylph symbols from Eno’s back (which match a large birthmark on Matsuki’s chest) inscribed on it. A visit to horror film director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (the real-life director of Sweet Home (1989), Kyua/Cure (1997), Karisuma/Charisma (1999), Kōrei/Séance (2000), Kairo/Pulse (2001) et al here reimagined as an expert in the occult) reveals that Kutoro Rock was dedicated to a leech-like god known as Hiruko and Eno realises that the UFOs he’s been seeing are actually flying leeches. Shiraishi finally learns what Eno is up to – he’s planning a suicide bombing in a street near Shibuya Station, claiming that it will allow he and his victims access to Hiruko’s realm, which may not be paradise he seems to think it is…

Though there’s a great deal to enjoy here, particularly in the slow unfolding of the mystery, Occult doesn’t quite chill or impress the way that Noroi does. Like the earlier film, it leads you almost without you realising it into some very odd places, starting out as a seemingly straightforward investigation into an unimaginable atrocity and ending up in the bowels health itself. In that respect, the film works remarkably well, slowly taking us into a world of batshit crazy so stealthily that barely realise that we’ve apparently slipped out of our world and into an alternate world of cosmic horror where the supernatural is a commonplace. Again like Noroi, there’s a slow and steady accumulation of odd details and disturbing incidents that generate a clammy sense of dread without you really understanding why.

The performances, including from the director himself are naturalistic enough to sell the conceit rather well. Uno in particular is excellent as the damaged Eno who, one suspects, was a horrible, mentally unstable creep even before the attack. His mad plan is all the more disturbing for his calmness, his utter conviction that what he’s about to do and it’s the horrific effects it’s going to have on innocent bystanders (his explosion kills 108 people and maims many, many others) chillingly conveyed by Uno. It’s a terrific and deeply unsettling performance that works because of Uno’s stillness and restraint.

But… For a film like Occult to work, it depends on the contract of trust between filmmaker and audience being honoured. We need to buy into the world the film creates 100%, to be fully immersed in the fantasy that the director is creating, or we start to see through the conceit and it all falls apart. For the most part, Shiraishi keeps us on board well enough, but he simply didn’t have the resources to pull off the ambitious visual effects he needed to create his Lovecraftian horrors that drift through the streets of Tokyo. While it might sometimes be easy enough to overlook a few effects deficiencies, the cheap CGI used here yanks us out of the film and shatters the illusion. The ghostly, leech-like horror that float around the city are very poorly integrated into the rest of the film, looking more like video artefacts than the horrors they’re meant to be.

Worst of all are the effects seen in the film’s prologue, set 21 years after the explosion (meaning it must be set in the year 2029) after Shiraishi has been released from prison, sentenced for his complicity in Eno’s massacre. Just before Eno blew himself up, Shiraishi had asked hm to return to him the video camera he was carrying with him into whatever realm he was going to along with a ¥100 coin, both of which appear out of thin air in a restaurant. Had Shiraishi not succumbed to the temptation to show us what Eno captured on tape, leaving us with just the horrified reactions of Shiraishi and his producer as they watch it, the film would have ended on a chilling high. Instead, he “treats” us to a vision of the hell in which Eno finds himself that is embarrassingly amateurish, looking like something high school kids might have made with a home computer rather than the Lovecraftian nightmare he was hoping for.

It leaves a bad taste after a film that had mostly been engrossing and unsettling. One might want to give the film the benefit of the doubt and believe that the earlier CGI footage, the leeches caught on tape by Eno, are bad because Eno himself had faked them as part of his madness. But there’s just no excuse for the final few seconds which are simultaneously heart-breakingly disappointing and hilariously awful. Shiraishi continued to mine the found footage furrow in films like Karuto/Cult (2013) and Aru yasashiki satsujinsha no kiroku/A Record of Sweet Murderer (2014) and the television series Welcome to the Occult Forest (2022- ). He interspersed these with “normal” narrative films like Murder Workshop (2014), Jigoku Shôjo (2019) and the Ringu/Grudge crossover Sadako vs Kayako (2016).